Dekom Writes a Book

NEXT: Reinventing Media, Marketing and Entertainment 
– Available for Kindle at Amazon

THIS BOOK represents my journey to find answers and new directions to what I viewed as a massive, almost unfathomable aggregation of change as to how we communicate with and to each other, how we use media to sell, communicate, convince and entertain. Technological change. Socioeconomic change. The 20,000 ton gorilla in the room was and still is, to couch it crass commercial terms, marketing… how to create and transmit messages and entertainment that engage the target audience.

Executives at advertising agencies, heads of major studios, entrepreneurs seeking a market, politicians seeking votes, students learning their craft, and experts looking for new ways to embrace as many followers as possible are often scared to tell you that they don’t always know how to deal with all the pieces. They’re afraid to ask questions for fear of being exposed. Their questions and mandates are all floating in a sea of rising floods of messages and content, enabled by ubiquitous technologies and legions of empowered constituents who believe that they have a God-given right to feedback and tell the powers that be what they think. Negative, positive and occasionally irrelevant.

Perceptions vary, of course, with age and cultural experience. In the connected world, for example, what is a “generation” these days? Maybe 20 years is relevant for Baby Boomers; their shared commonality of experience may link this rather large cohort into a sufficiently homogenous grouping that may have some relevance to markets. But given the impact of technology, our younger generations have been exposed to increasingly hyper-accelerating rates of change. Is the new “generation,” to someone born today, the same traditional 20 year cohort? Or 10 years? Or 5 years? And if you are trying to reach across “generational lines,” don’t you have to recognize these differences and create different messages and approaches accordingly?

We bandy words like “brand” around without peeling away what the purveyor of that words really mean. Do they even know? Is it constant recognition or perhaps a quest to instill genuineness and consistency to rise and stay above the clutter? What if, I asked, I could create a basic and reasonably simple approach to understanding these changes? What if I could add some basic rules to the mix to allow a more effective way to communicate, to deal with the technology and the underlying social changes?

Well, I think you get the picture. Is your mobile device trying to draw your attention right now? Binge-viewing calling to you? It’s in your personal electronic media and almost every venue you enter. If you are indeed curious, wanting to know how to turn all this massive change to your advantage, may I recommend my new book?

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you want to know what some pretty powerful people are saying about my book, read below:

Peter Dekom provides simple solutions and practical information for anyone trying to effectively communicate in today's modern society.  His insights help us understand how technology has created a disconnected and polarized world.   Ron Meyer, President and Chief Operating Officer, Universal Studios.

Even with detailed tracking and complex metrics, you have to take active control of your own professional future. Just following your own children doesn’t always tell you what’s NEXT. For those in search of “out of the box” thinking, Peter Dekom’s book shatters the myth that the box even exists anymore. Dekom creates an easy-to-follow path that allows content creators and marketers to survive and thrive in the chaos of constant social and technological change. He summarizes and simplifies the seemingly elusive new rules of reaching audiences and consumers in appropriate ways with appropriate messages.  Mark Cuban, television personality, author, entrepreneur, owner of the National Basketball Association's Dallas Mavericks, Landmark Theatres, as well as Magnolia Pictures, and the chairman of the HDTV cable network AXS TV.

The media and entertainment industry is undergoing major and rapid changes. We frequently witness new technologies, political, cultural, and sociological trends. Peter Dekom clearly identifies and lucidly articulates these trends. By organizing fragmented phenomena into basic rules, he also presents insightful managerial implications for companies attempting to experiment, cope, and survive under such unstable environmental conditions.   Jehoshua Eliashberg, Sebastian S. Kresge Professor of Marketing and Professor of Operations and Information Management, The Wharton School.

An insightful examination of this seminal moment in the history of communications and marketing – but it's more than that, too.  It's a survival guide for anyone who has to motivate consumers and a welcome relief from the onslaught of information that merely identifies the problem.  Peter offers workable solutions for those of us in the trenches.     Jim Gallagher, Chief Marketing Office for DreamWorks Animation and former President of Marketing for The Walt Disney Company.

It has been said the true genius of creativity is the ability to relate that which has previously been unrelated. The great minds through time have shown us this ability: Newton, Gates, Einstein, Bezos, Jobs, Darwin, Zuckerberg etc. … This same ability is Dekom's real strength. Most of the trends he discusses are already part of our daily lives. But Dekom puts the pieces together and builds a framework of linkage and understanding that is both fresh and insightful. This is the real power of Next.    Peter Sealey, PhD, former Coca Cola Chief Marketing Officer, former President of Marketing and Distribution Columbia Pictures who has also served on the faculty of UC Berkeley Haas School, Stanford Business School and the Claremont Graduate University.

If you plan to create or market anything in the next decade, you need this book right now. Peter Dekom synthesizes big data and big insights into a roadmap for how to succeed at media and messaging, and shows you how to stay ahead of the next curve.   Adam Leipzig, CEO, Entertainment Media Partners; publisher, CulturalWeekly.com; former president, National Geographic Films.

And there is a wonderful foreword by former Walt Disney Studios Chairman, Richard Cook!