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| Welcome to my page.
I work at Liberty Media, the media holding company founded by John Malone, where I oversee most of our digital media initiatives, companies, and investments. I feel privileged to serve Liberty and one of the most brilliant businessmen of our time.
My involvement with the internet and digital media began in the early 90's. I have witnessed or been involved with a few successes and many failures, which has given me a perspective that I enjoy sharing and discussing.
I will publish content on this site whenever I have something to contribute about digital businesses or issues related to forces at work on the internet and web, particularly as they relate to the media industry.
If you have any comments, please send me an email at michael@libertymedia.com.
Thank you,
Michael
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| Thoughts about digital media |
COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGES FOR INTERNET COMPANIES
Everyone agrees that competitive advantages matter to protect investment returns. Why is it then that so many investors fund companies that don’t have any? For one, many people hold a sloppy and mistaken understanding of what are competitive advantages in the first place. But in addition, the internet as an industry without barriers to entry, tremendous transparency and almost perfect competition, forces us to update our conventional view of competitive advantages. This article offers a point of view about how to do that for internet companies by highlighting factors that determine success in information-based industries such as network effects and social influences.
Click here to read the full article.
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THE CHANGING VALUE OF CONTENT
The creative destruction at work in the media industry today is without precedent. Changes in consumer media consumption, enabled by digital technologies, have wrecked havoc in industries as varied as music, newspapers, magazines, and many are asking whether TV content and movies are next. Incumbent management teams have largely been incapable to respond adequately to these changes, destroying billions of dollars in wealth. There are many reasons, but one in particular is a failure to challenge mental models about the value of content, namely the belief that what used to be valuable in the past will remain so in the future, and vice versa. This article argues that narrative TV content may have less value in a multi-platform environment than most people anticipate, that conventional ways of thinking about content (i.e., by genres like sports, comedy, reality) may not be able to explain the shifting value of existing content types and emergence of new content types, and that reach-based TV content aggregation models may be aggressively challenged by vertical online advertising networks.
Please read the full article here
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MARKETING IN A POST-TIVO WORLD
This is an op-ed article I wrote for the McKinsey Quarterly in 2002, which basically summarizes my view that the changing media landscape is radically reshaping the way advertisers interact with consumers. Investors should care about this change since it compromises the advertising-based revenue model of most media businesses. I believe traditional marketing practices and allocation models have fallen behind changes in consumer behaviors. To adapt to the new interactive media environment, media companies, consumer product manufacturers, and consumer service providers (e.g., retailers) have to break away from the traditional mass advertising-era mindset and think about consumer interactions holistically, to refocus managerial activity on reducing search costs between buyers and sellers.
Click here to read full article.
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IS THE WEB "KILLING" THE CATALOG BUSINESS?
Lillian Vernon, Sharper Image, and Red Envelope filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in early 2008. At the same time, Bloomingdale’s closed its catalog business. Were those isolated incidents, or is there a common pattern behind their failures, perhaps the impact of the web? It would be hard to deny the impact of the internet on the catalog industry, or the parallels with the magazine publishing business. The analogy with the magazine industry may help explains how the web’s impact need not be uniformly negative on all catalogs, and could be negligible and even positive in certain cases.
Click here to read the full article
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BUILDING DIGITAL BRANDS
Building Digital Brands was written in 2000 and, at a time when the most idiotic dot.com business plans were getting funded, attempted to provide a framework for designing a successful internet business. I believe a lot of it is still relevant today. The primary insight is that digital businesses need to be defined from the perspective of the user, not the service provider/producer. The core of the digital business should be a consumer promise, and the article provides a Maslow-type taxonomy (wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Maslow) for what are generic consumer promises, namely convenience, achievement, fun and adventure, self-expression and recognition, belonging. It further argues that business builders need to align the promises they make to consumers, the web technologies necessary to deliver these promises online, and an economic model required to turn a profit. These three elements – the promise, the technologies, and the economic model – together form the inseparable components of a successful internet business.
Click here to read the full article
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DON'T TAX THE INTERNET - YET (Wall Street Journal)
I believe deeply that bureaucracy stifles innovation. As I articulated in this Wall Street Journal op-ed published in 1998, it would be both futile and dangerous to tax the internet too soon. “What the tax enthusiasts don’t understand is that by the time their bureaucrats print the tax code, the mercurial internet will have made it irrelevant. At this stage of the internet’s development, governments should be focusing on building an infrastructure that will help the Net grow”. I still feel that way 10 years after the article was published.
Please read the full article here.
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| LIBERTY NETLEADERS FORUM
In 2006, a group of Internet industry leaders and I created the NetLeaders Forum because we wanted a networking event dedicated exclusively to founders and entrepreneurs who have built established internet businesses. Once a year, we bring together 150 of the industry most accomplished business builders for a day of wide-ranging discussions about digital media issues. I am very proud of Liberty’s association with this event.
For more information, please visit www.LibertyNetLeaders.com.
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NOTES & NOTABLES
LeadsCon Conference, March 2009 (http://www.leadscon.com/leadscon-las-vegas-2009/speakers.html)
Silicon Alley Insider, January 2009 Dealmakers: In 2009, We'll Buy Cheap Or Not At All (http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/1/dealmakers-in-2009-well-buy-cheap-with-earnouts-but-wed-rather-partner)
Global eCommerce Summit, October 2008 (www.e-commercesummit.com/michael_zeisser.asp)
Merrill Lunch US Media Conference, June 2008, (www.alacrastore.com/storecontent/ccbn/T1867069)
Casual Connect, February 2008 (www.casualconnect.org/content/Amsterdam/ZeisserTeBrakeAms10-08.html)
Citigroup 17th Annual Entertainment, Media and Telecommunications Conference, January 2007 (ir.libertymedia.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=61138&p=irol-EventDetails&EventId=1437233)
Casual Gaming Association, June 2006 (www.casualconnect.org/content/visionary/MichaelZeisser-6-06.html)
Online Publishers Association, September 2003
Procter & Gamble Future of Advertising Stakeholders (FAST) Summit, August 1998 (www.o-a.com/archive/1998/August/0077.html)
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