I’m heading off to IBC 2009 in Amsterdam early Friday am and looking forward to seeing what the latest offerings are in media technology, specifically content management, creation and delivery.  One of the keynote speakers is Saul Berman from IBM who will be tackling the question challenging many media owners right now… how to make money out of the new business models being enabled by digital developments.

The following is a section lifted from his pre-speech build-up:

The distinctions between advertising and marketing have blurred, as new forms of communication combine the ROI-characteristics of direct marketing with the brand characteristics of traditional advertising. Advertising supported revenue models have had mixed and unexpected results, while advanced advertising is still waiting for the right technology to be deployed.

With digital consumers increasingly in control of their media experience and advertisers shifting their spending to more interactive, measurable formats, companies must move beyond traditional advertising to combine granularity of targeting and measurement with cross-platform integration. The one-size-fits-all pricing models no longer hold in what is an increasingly segmented market.

Everybody talks about the music industry being severely impacted by the rapid changes to its revenue structure. But if you look at the broader value chain, it’s not that value was lost from the industry, more that value was gained by different people – and, importantly, not by traditional music companies.

Long before the dawn of the new media age, the Stones – like many others – couldn’t possibly have envisaged the seismic power shift in favour of the individual. And as the music industry has since shown, the right business model for digital media won’t necessarily come through the traditional channels. “The value,” as Berman concludes, “may come from a different area entirely”.

It will be interesting to experience first-hand how these different areas are about to be opened up by the world’s leading media technology companies…