1. Executive summary
The eight Business Round Table (BRT) of the ACTeN project was held in The Netherlands, in the catacombs of the monumental Olympic Stadium, built in 1927 for the 1928 Games. The catacombs have been remodelled for meeting rooms.
On June 26, 2003, Electronic Media Reporting was in charge of organising a BRT on the theme of Multimedia Production Companies after the Hype. The BRT was embedded in the annual event schedule of the OPPO-MMBO, a trade organisation for companies active in the graphic and multimedia sectors.
The organisation and the public relations for the meeting were handled by the OPPO-MMBO secretariat. The event was announced on the OPPO-MMBO website. The secretariat of OPPO_MMBO sent out 200 invitations by mail and 200 invitations by e-mail. Also the ANMA and IPAN multimedia organisations kindly forwarded the invitation to their members.
The format of the BRT was set by Electronic Media Reporting. The BRT would be a forum discussion led by Jak Boumans of Electronic Media Reporting. The discussion panel was intended to consist of representatives of multimedia production companies and representatives of their clients. Eventually two companies showed up with their clients. Two other company representatives were invited. Multimedia production companies Evident and ZappWerk brought respectively AKZO Nobel and the Digital University. Talmon Communications and Framfab were invited, although they were unable to bring a client along. The forum was conducted in two rounds of interviews, each lasting 50 minutes.
The theme was selected by Electronic Media Reporting on the basis of a summary of a Finnish industry survey. As The Netherlands and Finland are close in many respects, among others, the advancement in multimedia, the meeting would be used to sound out the mood in The Netherlands.
The panel was composed of managing directors of Internet service bureaus and clients:
- Mr Herbert Pesch, Managing director, Evident
- Mr Bas Koopman, Project manager, Akzo Nobel, Client of Evident
- Mr Hans Bol, Senior Consultant, Framfab
- Mr Ab Talmon, Managing director/owner Talmon Communicatie,
- Mr Martijn Arts, Managing director, ZappWerk
- Mr Fred Kresin, Project manager, Digitale Universiteit, Client of ZappWerk.
Forum chairman was Jak Boumans.
The discussion went along set questions, which were put on PowerPoint slides and projected during the discussion.
In the BRT the following subjects were treated:
- Relation between assigner and contractor
- Who educates who
- Development of the concept
- What is recorded on paper
- How is the acceptance test organised
- What is the certainty with regard to the deadline
- How much work is subcontracted
- Experience with the government
- Experience with European Commission Projects
- VAT of 19 pct. on CD-ROM
- Does winning awards help the business
From the discussion it became clear that:
- Most of the companies represented had taken a step back in the last years;
- Clients have become more educated;
- Companies have decreased their research efforts and new technology developments
- Companies work more efficiently;
- Companies concentrate on their strengths and subcontract non-core assignments
- Companies that had ploughed back the earned money into their company were still around.
- Companies do not look to the government for help.
- Scepsis about involvement in European Commission projects
- VAT rules should be changed with regard to CD-ROM and blank media for producers
- Winning awards is an assurance for the clients and an asset for marketing, but not a revenue generator.
