With a dizzying display of daily details about new channels and formats for video coming from broadcasters, movie studios, hardware providers and distribution channels, it may be quite useful to heed the advise that a highly regarded Madison Ave. media strategist has offered to advertisers: “They must get used to being in a permanent state of discomfort.” This can be applied equally to the traditional media companies.
Rishad Tobaccowala is the “chief innovation officer” for ad agency Starcom MediaVest Group. As a media strategist, his role is to steer advertisers to the most appropriate media for their offerings. With a successful track record of spotting trends, his advice is acted on by the biggest of big advertisers. And from that fixed pot of advertising dollars, he and colleagues at other agencies are steering more of the booty away from traditional media.
"Blogs and podcasting have gone from 'What are those?' to mainstream in less than two years. Rupert Murdoch paid $580 million to acquire a social-networking business and Google's market cap is higher than Viacom's," he says. "So where is the steady state?"
Such “accepted wisdom” as meeting the challenge by moving advertising to product placement meets with his scorn. It’s old wine in new bottles. What is he telling clients? In short, to understand how consumers are increasingly using the media, particularly video. The undeniable direction is to greater user control of both when and where we consume video. This has always been a characteristic of print: read it at your own pace, at the time you want and where you want. Television has been supplier controlled: we had to watch it at a fixed location and at the time we were told. Turn it on four minutes after the hour and those four minutes of programming were lost in the ether.
The VCR was born to help with the timing part, but quickly become primarily a playback of recorded entertainment. Not a bad start, but just a start. Tobaccowala predicts that 30% of U.S. homes will have DVRs in less than two years. Pair this with the increased availability the cable folks are providing us with on-demand content, the ability to search for video on Google or Yahoo, download it over ever wider broadband links, and zip it to the living room TV or the iPod, and traditional TV schedules will be largely marginalized.
Tobaccowala isn’t ready to write off traditional media, which he expects will continue to be plenty important. But they will have to provide their content in a greater variety of forms and help advertisers target consumers more preciselythan the usual demographic slices. "We are hungry for information and will value those who do a superior job of editing the ocean of material there is," he says.
The big bucks flowing to context-sensitive text ads, banners and interstitials do not happen in a vacuum. It requires the push of influential strategists such as Tobaccowala to convince the big advertisers to divert their budgets there. From that point the old saw I’ve repeated for decades from 19th century merchant John Wanamaker disappears. Speaking of his advertising budget, Wanamaker observed that “Half my advertising dollars are wasted. I just don’t know which half.” In the new media world any wasted dollars are immediately flagged and converted to the half that works. The legacy media buys are just not going to be efficient much longer.
No comments:
Post a Comment