Rio 2016. The fireworks from Maracana Stadium kept awake the whole planet. It was a great start for the Olympic Games.

Facebook saw 52 million users generate 109 million interactions. Plus, 21 million Instagram members recorded 51 million posts, likes and comments. And those incredible numbers are just from the opening ceremony [RIO2016.com].

• if Twitter was in great shape during London 2012 (150+ million tweets), Facebook was the main platform for the summer Olympics from Brazil

“Every post in social media is a Publisher post”

Each and every fan of the Games was somehow targeted: by the publishers on one hand and by the marketers on the other hand. It’s a great event and nobody can’t afford to miss this opportunity: to sell a story or a product.

“We have been in a rush to build scale over the last few years in digital industry. That came with a number of issues. First of all, we are diminishing everything we know that’s valuable for the audience, we are losing our touch with consumers“, thinks Alan Soon/ CEO @ The Splice Newsroom.

Asia’s leading expert on newsroom operations, digital transformation and the business of media, Alan believes that “we’ve got publishers coming out from everywhere“.

And that’s a major problem considering the fact that nobody has time to read the amount of information available in media or in social media today.

Choose value over volume

In his ICEEfest presentation, Alan talked about how the media business model works these days:

• create as much content as possible
• sell as many ads as possible

“Everybody is talking about how great the target capabilities are: so, why are we so obsessed about the reach?” asked Alan, insisting that the value of your audience is way more important than the volume.

And yes, it shouldn’t be about “mass” media, it should be about “personalized” media. You can’t change the habits of many people these days but you can start to produce only the content is relevant to your audience.

Back in Rio

Remember all those super active users at the opening ceremony on social media? Ok, then stop calling them users: “start thinking of users as humans. Understand the people behind the numbers“.

When it comes to big events like that, all those opportunities for the publishers don’t mean a thing if they can’t:

• produce great content cheaply, at scale
• sell ads against all that content, at scale
• build a habit in their users

“We think that if we create a good story and if we put it on the front page, people are going to read it. In the newsrooms we chase after big numbers but we don’t understand them“, said Alan, closing his speech.

This is Alan’s complete presentation at ICEEfest:

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For other great keynotes from ICEEfest ’16, please check out the ICEE Academy.