The greener cities are good for that sort of empathetic connection, that’s why being in a city is good – you are talking to people, that we are not individualised, we are not boxed off. If we want to develop that sense of empathy in our society, let’s see if we massively invest in public transport and have most people on the bus, on a bike or walking making those sort of social connections, I think it creates the environment that creates the social cohesion that allows for an enterprising culture, particularly in these new digital technologies to take off. These are social issues, not environmental issues, though there are huge environmental gains as we have to make our retreat quickest, but it is also social. Half the country, half the city doesn’t have the money for the big fancy car. They will benefit from having the big fancy Luas and they are also going to have a certain cohesive atmosphere, a certain sense of the city that is going to come out of that. And that is, I suppose a very broad, some people might say aspirational sense, but it is important because its connecting that environment issue with the social issue which affects your enterprise. It is also more clever in enterprise terms because by just keeping to go the way we are going, we will go down a blind alley of dependence on fossil fuels that is not going to be clever in enterprise terms. But the social aspect is important.
You might ask, what in God’s name has that got to do with what I am here to talk about which is broadcasting and advertising and that world, well it’s connected. Because surely advertising and marketing as I was taught it by Tony Cunningham and others a long time ago in UCD, marketing is surely just connecting empathy and enterprise. Fifty years ago maybe you could sell something by advertising that my brand is better than your brand and that’s it. But that doesn’t work now, markets are too sophisticated, people are too aware of what marketing is and how it and advertising works. Surely now successful marketing is based on an empathetic sense of where people want to go, of what they want to do. Marketing works when you are fulfilling people’s aspirations, the aspiration of what they think will make them feel good. My sense is then that this broad picture is actually important in terms of where people want to go. We were talking about Google earlier, an interesting example, what they do and what they don’t allow in their advertising sphere, which as I see it, could be wrong. It is a very important new time in the advertising world and their world view does fit in with what they are actually doing. Just as if you go down to their offices in Dublin, which is a trip I really enjoyed, - and I am just picking one company as an example, but it is an interesting one – 2,000 people now working down in Barrow Street. How many car parking spaces do they have? 20. And when I was there, it was half empty. And I think that’s maybe a sign of where things are going. Where the global economy is going, it’s going in the Google direction. I will give you another example, one of the leading food companies, the leading food company in the country came into me a couple of months ago – the business world is completely changed in the last three months. They were going to their UK main suppliers, our biggest customer, Tesco, Asda, M & S, and they were actually saying, first question they were asking them was ‘what is your carbon footprint’? Because those businesses are making the empathetic connection between their enterprise and the general sense that we are going to tackle climate change and stitching it into their business plan. As Marks and Spencers said, there is no plan B.
The interesting thing in the digital area then is that broadcasting, advertising and communications are central to this change. There is an interesting thing happening there as I see it, its being talked about for a long time but its actually starting to happen now, where we are seeing integration between the computer industry, the broadcasting industry and the telecommunications industry. We are going to see telecoms people apply for, I would imagine, for some of the digital transmission systems that we are going to have going forward. They are thinking, we can provide the pipe that provides the connectivity, that this new digital world is going to be based on but why wouldn’t we also be involved in selling some of the services, so you are going to see probably a merging there. You are going to see the computer world, probably more quickly because the computer world tends to be flexible, fast changing, tends to come from those very societies that accept change more quickly because they are empathetic open places – the likes of Silicon Valley, the likes of Dublin. We are going to see the computer world increasing the blurring between that and the broadcasting world and indeed the communications world. I see it already. We were talking earlier on about the 15 year old going home and not necessarily turning on the television, but turning on the computer and watching YouTube. I am doing that. I don’t know about anybody else, but I am watching the American Presidential election on YouTube. I’m not watching it on RTE or TV3. So there is already a very fast changing world there. The one thing we need in that is a policy maker, or as someone described me yesterday at a meeting, as orgware. You have software, hardware and now orgware – organisational policy makers. I wasn’t too sure if it was a good word or a bad word! As someone who is involved in the policy, one thing seems clear, that content is going to be crucial. Whoever has the content in this new digital environment is going to hold onto the viewers and listeners. That the multitude of platforms now that people can access to get their entertainment, to get their news, to get their cultural connection is going to be dazzling and difficult for people I would imagine in this room – advertisers who want to know how do you make your empathetic connection with your customers. It seems to me that whichever broadcasters have content are going to survive and succeed. In that context then, we develop our broadcasting bill, we develop our digital terrestrial television service. Looking to have both public sector and commercial sector working in a very similar agenda, on a very similar basis, that they have a public service remit. They have now a valuable commodity in this new digital technology, spectrum is valuable – gives you huge flexibility in how you develop these digital technologies – both commercial and public operators have been given a very valuable asset in terms of access to such spectrum to be able to broadcast. I think they both have a commitment to serve the public in that regard – high quality programming with looking for the truth, not always looking for the headline, but looking for the truth behind it and sometimes the truth is not as exciting or is not as interesting but it actually serves the public better and that’s your perspective. To do that, you need to put resources in to people, into you newsroom. You need to free up people who are creative because content only comes from creative people who are given a bit of freedom. With checks and balances that a broadcaster has to be there making sure that you are not libelling someone.