iMedia's media strategies editor covers Reuter's half-day conference last week on digital media convergence in the modern media age.
As anyone reading this knows, media is no longer confined to the long-extant platforms that grew familiar to us in our youth: newspaper, magazines, radio, television and outdoor. Media, from the perspective of the advertising industry, has come to be known as anything that can carry an advertising message. But while stickers on bananas and urinal screens are still largely uncharted territories for marketers, their infringement upon the minds of marketers is concomitant with the demands these kinds of media place on the attentions of the masses; namely, not very much.
But in the realm of electronic media, technological advances and the broad and ready adoption of the communication devices they inspire by the masses has captured the attention of marketers and the imagination of media companies in some ways reminiscent of the advent of the commercial web; in other ways, even more so.
Last Thursday, Reuters, the world’s wire news service that stands at the front line of news alongside the AP, held a half-day conference on the 30th floor of their New York headquarters to cover the topic of digital media convergence in the modern media age.
The morning-long event was made up of three panelist sessions, each trying to get at a different angle of emerging media device convergence and hopefully provide some insight into the nascent practices and evolving challenges facing those working in the media landscape.
Session I: How Far Along Are We?
The first session of the day focused on publisher initiatives pertaining to emerging technologies that go beyond just the web: wireless, video on demand and iTV.
Moderating the panel was the OPA’s Michael Zimbalist.
Sitting on the panel were representatives of MSN, Weather Channel, ABC, and our hosts, Reuters.
All of the panelists felt that video online and, one step out, wireless video content, represent the next open playing field for media companies to involve themselves in.
There was a great deal of enthusiasm from this panel (and the two subsequent panels) for wireless as the next frontier for marketing. But Zimbalist asked a good question: Are consumers in a place where advertisers can expect to make a positive impact on behalf of their brands by using a mobile medium?
How far ahead of the consumer is the space? This is an important question to ask because the immediate fiscal viability of efforts put towards wireless platform advertising will be found in the answer. Just how much a company can invest in the possibilities of wireless platform advertising will be determined in no small part by the advertising (or, more likely at the outset, fee-for-usage) it can attract, which directly correlates with the size and quality of the audiences available.
Moritz Lowe of MSNBC thinks development of services should be concurrent with development of technology.
Cameron Clayton of Weather.com said that when it comes to wireless content, the question is “can consumers get what they want when they want it,” and the time, place and role of advertising in this environment will be built around that.
Do we know anything about the consumers who are engaging wireless content?
Before wireless can be a truly viable advertising-supported media platform, audiences have to be quantified and qualified.
According to the panelists, media companies that have begun deploying wireless content know some things about their audiences, such as number of users and the kinds of usage throughout the course of a day.
The consumer’s use of their mobile devices varies from time of day, and video is the new platform driving non-endemic wireless media usage (like text messaging before it).
The panelists indicated that carriers (and they were careful to speak neutrally about the matter), in addition to dictating the distribution of content, are keepers of most of the customer data that wireless media companies could use to merchandise their audiences to advertisers.
What we do know, according to Bernie Gershon of ABC.com, is that there are 20 million mobile phones in the hands of consumers that are capable of receiving video. Regardless of the granularity of the data we currently have at our disposal, this number is big enough to take notice of.
Gershon said that his organization sees news as the primary type of video content people consume over the web, and the same appears to be true for mobile.
Will they take to it?
Gershon suggests that you have already established a relationship with a consumer once you’ve got them paying incrementally, making it slightly more palpable to introduce other points of communication.
MSNBC's Lowe thinks that consumers will be receptive to advertising because of the personalization they can subject their experience to. Customers also expect their carrier to know where they are and so won’t feel dismayed by advertising targeted by, for instance, time-and-place.
Efforts toward wireless media development are becoming priorities. ABC.com currently allocates about 35 percent of its energies (staff, spending) towards broadband and mobile media. For The Weather Channel, about 30 percent of the company's energies are spent towards mobile and a web presence (what portion of this corporate attention goes to mobile alone remains, publicly, a mystery).
Of course, the biggest issues facing the wireless media platform are the same as they were at the dawn of the web: privacy and standardization. The difficulties with privacy are a matter of being cognizant of the issues and being sure they are considered during development and deployment rather than those concerning whether or not to protect it. Standardization is a different complication for much of the same reasons it was -- and continues to be -- for the internet: multiple operational platforms and a lack of common definition of terms.
Session II: Emerging Media
The focus of this panel was to address the question, where are the real opportunities today for advertisers using emerging media?
The panel was conducted by perennial event pundit and moderator Doug Weaver of the Upstream Group, a sales and marketing training and consultancy based in Vermont.
This panel consisted entirely of agency representation: Mitch Oscar of Carat, Jeff Minsky of OMD and Michael Bologna of Mediaedge:cia.
Given the early stages most emerging media platforms are found to be in, the opportunities are everywhere and nowhere.
Collaboration at this point is important. There are likely no standards developing in the near future because “you should date before you marry,” as Weaver put it. Many, many platforms are in the market, and standards for everything from metrics to rules of engagement will emerge through evolution, not revolution.
Bologna sees opportunities in the various forms television has taken on, placing them under the heading of “advanced TV.” Under this umbrella are iTV, video on demand and addressable advertising.
As usual, the old iTV chestnut of “you can be watching ‘Friends’ and click on David Schwimmer’s shirt to learn more about it and possibly buy it” was thrown out during the panel. Aside from Minsky’s comment that people might not be so interested in doing that during an episode some 10 years in syndication, no one asked whether or not consumers would actually do this. But Minsky was the only one to, without instigation, mention the consumer as being at the center of whatever it is that we do in this space.
According to Minsky, users will be more interested in content interaction than advertising interaction.
A concern raised by the panel was if what we are driving towards is TV-quality video meets web-like accountability, what does this mean for agencies responsible for vetting not only media opportunities but the outcomes of those opportunities taken?
Minsky raised the nightmare scenario that every campaign threatens to become like a DR campaign in this environment. [I say it all the time: every client becomes a DR advertiser after you show him the first online report.]
We aren’t exactly staring down the barrel of this gun, yet; but we are fixed in the cross-hairs. It is now very real that people can click through to get more information on products and services through television, mobile and other media platforms outside of the web space.
The question should be, though, will they? Of the data that is available now indicating that people do, just who makes up those audiences? Would the average American be willing to do this? Maybe the answer to the question doesn’t matter. With audiences being parsed into smaller and smaller segments, audiences can be addressed in whatever way seems best and then aggregated into a kind of loose, unwired network so as to give advertisers the reach they need to meet volumetric objectives.
Minsky says he sees that agencies are going to start bringing in more people to do data evaluation for all these media that now generate data.
[I wonder… from where is the money to hire those people going to come? With fees constantly going down, agencies aren’t going to be able to afford those people. Perhaps current functions will be replaced with automation and those allocations will shift to data miners.]
Minsky did continue dispensing sensible wisdom when he cautioned against the enthusiasms of those who look at foreign markets (such as England or Japan) and see new media platform adoption and subsequent advertiser success. Just because it works there doesn’t mean it will work here.
Session III: Seamless ad integration; making it work!
This session was ostensibly supposed to deal with some talk of practical application of the advertising model to these beyond-the-internet media. On the panel were representatives of two metrics companies and three media companies currently out there “making it work.”
Moderated by Bowen Dwelle, chairman of AdMonsters, the focus remained largely on the wireless delivery platform and what is or is not happening.
Joining him were Lynn Bolger of comScore; Carrie Himelfarb of Vindigo; Will Hodgman of M-Metrics, a company specializing in measurement of consumer consumption of mobile content and applications; Heidi Lehman of Third Screen Media; and Jeff Markus, CTO of 24/7 Real Media.
What’s real now is that you can get media content out to mobile devices. There’s no doubt about this any longer. The hurdle right now is the many formats currently in use.
Lehman of Third Screen Media, allegedly the largest mobile media network in North America, told the audience that her mobile media network can serve, deliver, track and optimize advertising throughout their network, currently consisting of 40 publishers with some 45 million impressions per month. There was a time when that many impressions served over a media property were enough to attract serious attention from media planners and buyers.
It seems to me, however, that the mobile media marketplace is still too new to be loud, attracting the kind of attention from marketers it might deserve.
Himelfarb of Vindigo was among the most sanguine of all the panelists about wireless platform marketing because Vindigo is sort of the “old man” of the industry when compared to other players in the mobile media space.
Vindigo has had a good deal of success merchandising its value proposition of its application to ‘on-the-go’ professionals and turning that audience over to advertisers when and where it makes sense. Vindigo is currently working on applications for mobile devices beyond just the PDA, which has been the company's bread-and-butter platform, and when the question of user acceptance was raised, Himelfarb pointed out that the bulk of Vindigo’s revenue derives from subscribers, and so the user experience is at the forefront of each decision made regarding advertising's place in that experience.
As far as adoption by marketers is concerned, Lehman made a good point that delivery of online content and advertising is so similar to the web that planning media against the platform will be familiar, making it not as difficult to introduce as the internet was.
There remain difficult technology issues for the online video content space to overcome before we see widespread usage.
Standards were again raised as being necessary for adoption. However, even if standards don’t set the practice but rather follow it, marketers are still going to need to have the questions of how many and how often answered when it comes to making media commitments to mobile.
Also, the space needs to have some economic measure to it because, unlike for other media, every engagement in mobile has a very real cost associated with it.
In Lehman’s view, as far as metrics are concerned, once a program is executed, it still comes down to clicks and downloads.