Spencer Reiss on the 2010 Monaco Media Forum's Mobilization Theme

Interviewer: So, tell us about the conference. There’s a million conference
about a million but this --

Male: There’s only one -- there’s only one that has Prince Albert, His
Serene Highness as its host in the lovely principality of Monaco in
November and they say 300 days a year of sunshine in Monaco. I
thought it was a lie. We’ve been doing it for five years now. We’ve
never had any rain and where is the would for me to know, so we
hope.

Interviewer: So tell us what’s in store? What are the topics?

Male: Oh well, mobile we decided to use mobilization as our topic not
mobile because I thought mobile tends to imply kind of handsets to
a lot of people and we wanted to use mobilization which means not
just handsets but also pads and tablets and not just the hard world,
just mobile but apps themselves flying in here, that kind of
metaphor flying around in a way that classic desktops stuff dozen
is fixed.

We wanted to get everyone’s head out of the idea that everything is
fixed. We’re now in a very mobilized world and since we’re in
Monaco, where one of the official languages is French. We came
up with, I don’t know, how many people remember the Marseilles,
the famous marching song of the French Revolution Aux Apps,
Netoyens! is our theme this year. So, instead of Arms instead of To
Arms, we’re going To Apps so we’re going to Apps this year in
Monaco.

James Murdock will be coming back as one of our coaches. We
had him about three years ago. Everybody knows he is a rising star
at a company that has some connection with his name and he’s
chairman of news corps for Europe, Asia, basically anything
outside the U.S.

Another fan big name Erin Milner from Digital Sky Technologies,
a Russian based fund that owns big chunks of Facebook, Group on
and Zynga and we’re going to -- the title of his talk is Social
Capital because he’s really committed.

He’s got $2 billion that he wants to put into social -- exclusively
social media. He’s willing to pay obviously very top dollar not
interested in real stage. He wants running big companies and he’s
going to be interviewed by Michael Wolf, who -- there are two
Michael Wolfs in the world. We actually have both of them.

We have a matched set of Michael J. Wolf who used to be in MTV
now activate and working with -- on some interesting projects.
And then, we have Michael the other Wolf of Vanity Fair who’s
going to be interviewing Uri.

Interviewer: Is he going to interview James Murdock?

Male: No, he’s not going to interview James Murdock. He’s needed --
Raf Andy’s making his biography of Rupert Murdock that Michael
wrote a couple of years ago which got quite a bit of attention. No,
he’s going to interview Uri Milner and Michael is now been in the
headlines himself because he just took over Ad Week or the whole
Ad Week group, Media Week, Brand Week, Ad Week as editorial
director which shocked a lot of people.

And, I'm sure a lot of people in the ad world are, I wouldn’t say
terrified, but a little worried about what Michael might do in their
otherwise peaceful corner of the world so that should be a fun
thing.

We’ve got Google and Microsoft back as big sponsors which is
great. We’ve got Orange, France Telcom back because it’s a nice,
big mobile carrier so they were very happy with our choice of
theme. We’ve also got a nice great new sponsor this year which is
Ericson and we love them because they’re kind of the Switzerland
of mobile.

They build everybody’s networks for them whatever you --
whether you're a Verizon or AT&T or wherever you are, you got
Ericson gear running. And, in fact I even gave them, I said, “We
need more Ericson please because all of us suffering with iPhones
and over those. Please pay more money to Ericson. Get more base
stations out there, get more staff so we can have real mobile
reception.

Anyway, Hanz, the CEO of Vesper is going to do an opening key
note actually that just lays out. We said, “Look, just take 20
minutes and show us where the mobile infrastructure world is
going over the next five years. We got very lucky with Microsoft
because Windows 7 phone has just debuted. In fact, we’ll actually
have.

Most people have not yet laid hands on what this is since we’re
going to have a bunch of them at Monaco so we got really good
timing with that. As you probably remember, Eric Schmith, a few
months ago, said that, “Watch word for Google. Going forward is
mobile first.”

So, again, we’re going to be pressing the Google guys what’s
going on with mobile or will it replace Facebook. We’re really
trying to kind of keep the -- keep our eye on that ball so that’s
Monaco. And, I've talked to --

Interviewer: Now, that video, what’s going on with online video?

Male: Online video, we got like all these superstars. We’ve got Andy
Plesser form Beet TV who’s going to be running at Channel
Busters and Jim Lauderbach. I'm doing the set of my head now.
Jim Lauderbach, Ron and Ergo from 5min, a whole bunch of
people then we got another whole one.

We’re going to go on another slightly different direction and we
called it Tablet TV. And, they’re going to look at these questions.
There has always been in TV -- this question, lean forward, lean
back. So, we have this question, What is a tablet? It is a kind of
between because you kind of can lean back but you're in it.

And so, there’s this fun question of whether TV is going to mutate
as more and more people watch TV on a handled thing. So, we’ve
got David Gale from MTV and In the Club but just a bunch of
different people.

The great thing about Monaco is we have transatlantic. We’re
almost perfectly 50/50 with Europeans and Americans we try in all
our panels to kind of mix it up. We’ve also got lots of our special
sauce really is that we’re not a silo thing so we have digital people.
We have analog people. We have print people. We have content
people, distribution, technology, marketing, finance, you name it,
VCs, PEs, investment bankers and the whole nine yards. So, when
we put these panels together, we try to, okay, right we’re going to
do a TV panel.

Let's get an ad guy in them because obviously all of these guys you
can talk about TV in the abstract all day long but by the way,
unless somebody sponsoring, it is going to last forever. So, let's get
a TV guy and -- so we’re at all levels in this program. We always
try to inject that little lens. So, that’s kind of our special sauce.
We’re not a marketing event. We’re not a TV event. We’re both.

Interviewer: Great! Fantastic program.

Male: It’s fun, its’ fun breeding cats.

Interviewer: Yeah and thank you for taking your time out.

Male: My pleasure. We’ll see you in Monte Carlo.