Some time ago I met a kindred spirit (i.e. a techie) at a street party in my neighbourhood. It turned out my neighbour, Kit, works on the media team at Accenture – a multinational management consulting and tech services company. Being a tech director at Cohaesus myself, we found we had plenty in common and hit it off right away.

This was how I was introduced to Accenture’s Media Hub, and was invited to give a talk to them (a while ago now) about the part crowdsourcing has to play in today’s media evolution. Off the back of this, Accenture asked me to join their “Pulse of Media” project as one of the practitioners.

The initiative was set up to explore the state of media at this exciting (and, for some, frightening) time of seemingly perpetual flux, with a view to helping companies “find – and keep – their place in the evolving ecology”. Also, to find out what new forms of creativity are needed to power multi-platform digital experiences.

Accenture insiders and outsiders have been asked to give their views about the shape of things to come; some of the external interviewees include Chloe Sladden, director of media partnerships for Twitter; Richard Halton, CEO of YouView, and Georg Petschnigg, Co-Founder & CEO FiftyThree, Inc.

I was summoned forth to give my tuppence worth, and the questions they asked me addressed the subject of changing media consumption – specifically relating to connected devices, multi-screen consumption and the part crowdsourcing has to play in the development of media.

The interviews are currently being edited and haven’t all gone live yet. I talked a bit about the disruption to existing media, and the future of the media industry “prosumer” – and about the increasing scope and quality of some user-generated content. One of the surprises in recent years has been how mainstream some of these new business models and technologies are becoming, like the funding platform Kickstarter, for example.

The Accenture-backed research report from the project is already available to download, offering a decisive summary: that “consumers … are in charge and at the center of everything”. Content was declared king in the wake of Google’s rise to power, and Accenture’s report states that the consumer is now recognized as the king of content. The report goes on to discuss the changing digital experience, and the emergence of new business models.

Accenture’s accompanying consumer survey also visualises some of the data around consumers’ digital habits, and handily summarises the term “prosumer” with the following definition:

“An amateur creator of content who produces content of a standard suitable for professional use.”

There’s a real buzz around the project right now, and you can follow the discussion surrounding it by searching the #pulseofmedia hashtag on Twitter. To sate your anticipation for the forthcoming interviews, there’s a brief clip already online where I discuss the restrictive tendency of companies’ use of branded apps, and the need to engage consumers (and, indeed, prosumers!) on channels that already exist:

Author: Matt Meckes