The Power of "Time Shifted Events"

At Ignition Garage (www.ignitiongarage.com) we have the pleasure of working on new ideas every day. Some of them are incubated in our minds and some of them come from our clients, that we get the honor of helping to bring to the light of day (and market).

Time Shifted Events are a powerful model for the future. In the era of shrinking budgets across every spectrum of life (personal and work), there is the need to harness the increase of information ingestion while tailoring to the need of real-time connection for a fraction of what it takes to pull all the participants into one place, at one time. Enter the concept of time shifting events.

What fundamentally we are doing is calling out the content, be it real-time presentations, secondary announcements, or human-augmented media shouts and enabling audiences to participate with the subject matter experts (SMEs), ideally the author of the aforementioned content. The landscape of the marketplace has tectonically moved - where the business models that worked before are in tremendous jeopardy and industries are fighting for survival (publishing, music, network broadcast). The evolution of these industries is fast moving and there will be deaths along with new births (with new models) that create and convey the same or greater value, at a blistering pace.

Time shifted events respects the human in this blitz of value transfer. It will be to everyone's benefit that the SMEs are there, approachable, and interacting with them - even if the information is not presented for the first time. Indeed, it is a powerful augmenter to something as tried and true as a book - when the author is able to interact across mediums (print, web, media, slide show, story) again, again, and again. It is not about the teller of the story, it is about the hearer.

Ironically enough, while this is happening at lightening speed in social media, it is putting the content creators in a pickle. How do they promote themselves and keep up with the expectations of realtime communication? How many times can an author respond with direct messages (DMs) or replies (@replies) in Twitter, in a 1 to 1000 manner? When the content creator quickly gets to the chaos threshold, they will grab for anything to keep up the appearance and regain some sanity - which often results in outsourcing their authenticity. When the fans get word of this, beware the backlash. The expectations have created levers of power that are enormous billy clubs, wielded by potential mobs.

Time shifting events can act as the emotional shock absorber for the potential billy-club masses. The artist must manage their time, voice, and interaction with their adoring fans. They can do this by being live, while "on" camera, even if they are in their jammies via broadband web communication. It is still authentic, personal, and terribly satisfying.

The era of the enormous, mega-event for product promotion is over. The caveats to this are the avenues of successful entertainment (hearken to U2's 360 tour for financial numbers to prove this assertion). However, for an original content creator to build the audience that they need - time shifting their events can be one of the best tools in their promotional toolkit. And one day, they will be able to create their own spaceship and cart it around to venues around the world. Heck, maybe they will fly theirs.