media landscaping

The Future of Television Advertising

A panel at the Future TV conference in New York discussed what TV advertising will look like in the future and it sounds strangely familiar to the world of internet display advertising today.  As technology evolves to allow targeting down to the household level.

By aggregating the disparate local cable advertising in ways that deliver meaningful sub-segments of viewers, Steib [Mike Steib, director of Google TV Ads] said Google TV ads program is able to create audience mixes that likely would have higher advertising value than their remnant avails currently have on their own, and which theoretically could compete in value with some of the TV industry's most premium network TV inventory.

"There's all these opportunities to drive sell out," he said, "much, much closer to 100% and to take the CPMs up significantly when you start matching the right advertising with the right audiences."

Joan Gillman, president-media sales at Time Warner Cable, and Barry Frey, senior vice president-advanced platform sales at Cablevision, concurred with Steib's vision, though they didn't necessarily think it would be the exclusive province of Google.

"We can give the data, that measurement is there, but the actual customer data is at the operator level," Gillman said, portraying a vision for aggregated TV advertising networks that are not unlike the kind that are becoming increasingly popular in the online world, which are based more on the behavioral targeting of consumers than traditional demographic targets.

The initial vision for this is aggregation of "long tail" content across multiple channels and selling them static as one package, which is nothing like dynamic behavioral targeting at all.   Its a start but is still very far away.

Real TV behavioral targeting would be serving ads to viewers based on what they have watched in the past...not the content they are watching now.  The cable-box would need to have a memory and be able to transmit viewing data back to the ad providers, who then send an ad customized to the viewership of that TV.

The MediaPost article about this panel, Future Of TV Ad Market: A Lot Like Online's -- Ad Networks, Behavioral Targeting, Etc. is interesting but left me wanting more.  TV still has a long way to go to catch up to the efficiency of online advertising.

Aggregating in a Disaggregated World

I wrote in the past about Bud.TV and the problems it will have attracting sustainable audiences.  According to a new article in Ad Age:

Anheuser-Busch Cos. CEO August Busch IV today said the No. 1 brewer expects its pioneering online television network to "fade" during the second half of the year.

A-B spent $30-40 Million on a site that they will just let fade away.  Smart decision, because aggregating in a world of disaggregated content is just a bad idea.  It will always be an uphill battle to attract an audience.  With open distribution systems like YouTube, Joost etc. there is no need to hold content hostage on your own little "island".  There are millions of people gathered in existing video portals who would love to watch, recommend and share your videos...so why spent ad $ to draw them out of that environment?

Bud.TV is a great case study on how not to run a branded content strategy.  Hopefully, they will adjust their mindset and extend their content out on the web.   

Dave Beaupre has said for years,

Bring the content to the people, not the people to the content.

Wise words that could have saved A-B a lot of money...

AOL Becomes a TV Network

On Tuesday, AOL performed a TV Network-like Upfront presentation that officially launches them into the world of broadcasting.  They will be creating some new shows that will be unlike anything we have ever experienced.  Not sure if they will be good...but they will be different.

Many of the programs skirt the line between interactive gaming and nonscripted programming; they can be categorized as either reality television with consumer participation or an online game with video components. (Via Variety)

One of the most ambitious TV-style programs is "iLand," an online community in which players compete for dominance of a group.

Series, which is produced by Endemol USA and set to air in the second quarter of 2008, will eventually spill into the real world as contestants move to an island and try to assert power there; those competitions, hosted by thesp Brooke Burns, will be broadcast online.

Sounds like an "Un-Survivor"...very cool.

Now that devices like Apple's iTV are bringing web video into the living room easily, the TV landscape is becoming very foggy and AOL is clearly setting themselves up to take the early lead in this race.

CBS and Video Syndication

I have been critical of CBS's Innertube Project in the past, but they just took a huge leap ahead of the pack with the announcement that they will allow their content, with ads, to be syndicated out to at least 10 other websites.  I see this as the first step toward the complete democratization of media and is one of the biggest signs of the changing media landscape since ABC first offered full episodes on abc.com.

They will be offering full episodes and clips to sites like AOL and Comcast and through more specialized outlets like NetVibes and Joost.  I don't think it will be much longer before they will offer up completely unrestricted embedding of these files into blogposts.  If the ad travels with it and all of the proper protections they want are in place, why wouldn't they allow this?  Not sure why it has taken them so long.

What better way to get buzz about your programming than by allowing people to take selected clips of a show and discuss them in their blogs? 

Be on the look out for a similar announcement from ABC soon, as I am sure they have considered this.  NBC will be the last to act...I think they are still trying to pull down the "Chronicles of Narnia" clip from YouTube.

Via MediaBistro Daily News Feed

The Future of Skipping Commercials

Forget about fast-forwarding through commercials with your Tivo or other DVR device.  Why not install some software that automatically skips them for you?  Just as pop-up blockers have swept across computers world-wide, looks like we may see the same options open up for TV commercials.

FutureLab reports on a product called Comskip that will automatically detect and skip commercials in recorded content.  As more and more people watch and record TV through Media Centers, this type of application will become more and more prevalent. 

That being said, on-line ad blockers have existed for years now (designed to block all ad content on a website, not just pop-ups) and they don't seem to have a lot of widespread usage.  We will have to wait and see if the TV ad blockers will gain traction in the marketplace.  I am sure the TV execs (and their attorneys) are already watching this very closely.

The Data is Wrong!!!

What do you do when research comes out which proves your business model doesn't work anymore?  You stand up and shout "This data is wrong!"  Seriously, what else would you do?

It looks like the Cable Industry is starting to rebel against the commercial rating system that is due to come out soon.  According to AdAge, NBC Universal will not participate at all and the CAB (Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau) is urging others to do the same.  All because, as they say it, "This data is wrong!" 

For years the ad industry has spent billions on TV based on research lumped into 15 minute blocks.  If someone watched an instant of TV in that block, then viewership counted for the whole block.  The new Commercial Rating System from Nielsen breaks down viewership by the minute, which will reveal the REAL data...how many viewers actually stick around for the commercials. 

The Ad Age coverage of this has not gone very deep to explain what the  supposed flaws are in the Nielsen Measurement, so here and here and here are some good sources for more in depth information/opinion.

Coal Companies Can't Give You Diamonds

This is a great article in todays Post.  Pearlstein exposes the agency community's premise that all business problems can be solved by a 30 second spot.

"If you go to a coal company looking for an energy supply, you'll get coal as the recommended solution. It's the same with most advertising agencies, which rarely meet a marketing problem that cannot be solved or a sales goal that cannot be met by a TV and radio campaign supported by direct marketing, some pop-up ads on Web sites and a bit of public relations."

So true.  "I know that X solution would drive better results, but we will make much more commission if we do it this other way."  How often is that said behind closed doors at traditional agencies?  OFTEN.

Here is the right attitude:

"[The creative solutiuon] starts by analyzing how consumers live and get information and works backward to create messages most appropriate for those channels."

The landscape is changing:

"...the power has shifted from marketer to consumer. Thanks to the Internet and TiVo, digital radio and video-on-demand, consumers decide what information and entertainment they want. Rather than simply pushing messages on consumers, the trick is to get consumers to pull them."

Turn advertising into content...make it fun...make consumers want to watch it and forward it to friends.  In the on-demand, consumer controlled media world that is growing before our very eyes, this will be required for success.

"In simple terms, we charge premium prices now for commodity services and then give away the creative stuff, which is where the value-added is," explained David Jones, the young, cosmopolitan chief executive of Euro RSCG Worldwide. "We need to figure out a way to drive down the price for the commodity parts and get paid for our ideas."

None of this is new for most of you reading this, but it is nice to see this idea spreading.  The more air-time the flawed agency model gets, the sooner it will be over-turned. 

CNN embraces citizen journalism

WSJ reports on a new feature on CNN.com called Exchange.  It is a platform, powered by blip.tv, that allows readers to submit videos, photos, or text about breaking news.  They are going to vet every piece of content before putting it up and give it the same editorial review that they do for their own content.  Greg Tyree aggregates more of the coverage here.

Mobile phones with cameras and video recorders are changing the face of news reporting.  CNN is attempting to be the place you think of when you capture an event and I applaude there efforts. 

87% recall of Online Video ads?

I have been following ABC's online experiments pretty closely.  Most of you know, but they took many of their top shows and put them online the day following the broadcast (link).   I remember reading (but didn't save it) that it expanded the overall viewership of the shows and the online viewing did not take away from the TV viewing. 

Now, AdAge reports that the online ads, which were non-skippable and ran several times through out the show, experienced a recall of 87%.  That is huge, considering they report an average TV recall of 24%.

Lets review.  Increased viewership that doesn't affect the TV ratings.  87% recall of the ads.

I predict we will see much more of this in the fall...from all of the networks.

TV is changing...

Steve Hall writes about a panel at Ad-Tech that provided some very interesting insights into TV and how consumers use of it is changing.  It is pretty technical, but worth a read if you are a media geek like me.

The highlight for me is this part near the end:

He also told the audience to, when in a Starbucks, dial 510-653-6473 and hold the phone up to the music. It's the Grace Notes services that provides song information. He says there's no reason this or similar technology couldn't be harnessed to provide a channel to offer people more information on ads of any kind.

I am definitely going to try this and will report back soon.