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DNA09: 'Facilitate' and forget about advertising and publishing divides, says advertising expert

It's time to break down the traditional divisions between publishing and advertising territories, new media consultant Jonathan MacDonald said yesterday at the Digital News Affairs 2009 conference.

"Rethink your business model - create an agnostic layer of aggregate inventory between partners in your space and become a facilitator for advertisers," MacDonald said during a panel looking at how to make advertising models work.

MacDonald, who is senior consultant to the CEO and chairman at advertising agency Ogilvy, and has recently launched a 'communications movement' at EverySingleOneofUs.com, told Journalism.co.uk that 'facilitation' is about stepping away from the 'insular control freak mentality' that just a 'privileged few' have the means to publicise their ideas.

"Create a set of facilitation tools that can be aggregated into one place, or distributed via feeds and act as that faciliator. Whether the newspapers know it yet or not, I would place my career on the fact that that is the future," he advised publications.

"Advertisers need to be facilitators as well as broadcasters. We [the media] should surrender control to the populus."

Break down concepts of publishing space, he added, and embrace the community: "Things that are useful to people are useful; things that are entertaining to people, are entertaining; things that that are fun, are fun."

Threadless.com was one good example, he said, where consumers are also part of the production process. Users design their own T-shirts, as part of the 'community-based' company's call for designs.

Similarly, the much-talked about Skittles campaign, which featured Twitter conversation about the brand on its homepage earlier this week, was another successful example of discarding entrenched publishing and advertising protocol, MacDonald said.

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advertising | events | dna09 | digital news affairs | dna2009 | jonathan macdonald | ogilvy |

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