There they were: the Hollywood super agent, the head of a huge advertising group, the chairperson of a 175-year-old media empire and the son of one of the world’s most powerful media moguls, all talking about the future of the media industry. It was left to a 35-year-old local politician — the youngest among them — to suggest that none of the others would be on such a panel in five years’ time.
It wasn’t just the arrogance of youth voiced by Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak, the man charged with making the oil-rich state of Abu Dhabi central to the world’s media. James Murdoch is only a few years older, after all. Khaldoon was largely making a geographical point when he said the panel of 2015 would be filled by “a guy from India, a lady from China, a couple from Korea”.
This was also a sales pitch — Abu Dhabi is so keen to be the axis between East and West that it named its TV company after its geographic co-ordinates — and Khaldoon has the confidence of wealth. Abu Dhabi, where he is a sort of chief operating officer, has one of the world’s biggest cash reserves, with a sovereign wealth fund of $627-billion (about R4,6-trillion), and one of the highest GDPs per capita.
He was the honeypot around which they all buzzed after the high-level session at the Abu Dhabi media summit.
Rupert Murdoch, celebrating his 79th birthday in a country where more than half the population is under 20, argued for the value of content — that of News Corporation, preferably — against the “digital dazzle” of the internet.
It was Google (who else?) that dazzled with digital statistics. Eric Schmidt told us that about a billion people would be coming online for the first time in the next three years (no prizes for guessing what part of the world would see the strongest growth), and that the web-adoption rate on mobiles is eight times faster than it was for PCs.
The world is changing faster than it has before because of technological and demographic shifts. Google’s engineers, he said, now start projects by developing mobile applications rather than PC ones. This is as good a backing as any for his prediction that location-based targeted ads and services could change the face of communications.
Amid this onslaught of statistics and growth projections, there was a real sense of generational change in the desert — the young Murdoch, with his Asian experience and global background, looked at ease chatting with the young Khaldoon — but what does it truly mean?
For a start, a greater sense of collaboration in an industry defined by bitter competition. It was there in Rupert Murdoch’s use of My Name Is Khan — a multinational movie — as an example of the fact that “geographical borders are largely irrelevant” today if a story is worth telling.
We only have to look at Google’s collaboration in China to realise how difficult this new era could be to negotiate. Abu Dhabi has money and fast growth rates, but it is a society built without labour laws or indeed much in the way of press freedom. Yes, it has appointed some impressive media executives from the West, but they operate in a constrained world, albeit one they are keen to emphasise is increasingly globalised.
One of the bravest things the older Murdoch did was to include two paragraphs on ending press censorship in a speech designed to say “come and buy my stuff” to the Emiratis. His belief that “markets that distort their media end up promoting the very panic and distrust that they had hoped to control” went largely Âunreported by the state-backed National newspaper.
The speed of globalisation in the past few years has reflected, and been driven by, the speed of internet adoption.
That will mean cultural challenges as well as financial ones. And we don’t have long to face up to them. —