Highly recommend "Facebook: A New Creative Canvas", a 20 minute presentation by one of Facebook's senior brand and product execs. Great, broad overview of how brands should be using Facebook as well as some obviously self-serving, but compelling visions of how a future social-media infused digital media landscape will look.
The main strategy outlined here coincides with our most successful Facebook campaigns at Targeted Social: Use many lightweight interactions over time to build relationships, and then throw the party.
Are the newspapers that have been able to hang in there, now cutting back on the number of days they print and rely more and more on digital distribution, losing their power as community watch-dogs and influence sources?
I certainly feel there is much more power in the print version of The New York Times that lands at my door every morning at 6 am, the authoritative first news of the day, then the version I read on my iPad or Google Reader, packed in with dozens of other news sources.
Certainly the advertising is more powerful. Is there anything more impactful than a full page ad running the length of my arms to thighs while I sip my morning coffee?
But I will soon be moving out of the demo that advertisers covet most.
TV is in the midst of a truly golden age, perhaps even supplanting
the movie industry as the showcase for our best and most innovative
filmed entertainment. There are literally dozen of shows now on the
air that are not just buzz worthy, addictive entertainment, but truly
artistic expressions of some of our country's most creative and
innovative thinkers. And while our technology innovation gets all the
press, we sure know how to create great entertainment that is gobbled up
around the world as voraciously as our iPhones and Facebook apps.
HBO
built its reputation on introducing this stuff to TV audiences, but now
there are dozen's of channels with a water cooler hit or two in their
line up. At a dinner party last month, just a few weeks before the
Academy Awards, the conversation steered to TV shows. Seemed everyone
had a different show or two to rave about, and the list was broad and
varied, as was the networks that carried them, from the major
broadcasters, to large and niche cable networks.
The big
question is how can all these networks sustain themselves on just one or
two hits each, especially as more and more of the viewing occurs in
DVR, online and tablet environments, where ad monetization models are
still being established.
As this year winds down it appears two of the media sectors I work in - digital video distribution and social - are poised for another year of enormous growth as they further define their business models and disrupt traditional media (television) and maturing digital media (search and display) more and more profoundly.
Watching our teen's media habits is illustrative of our near and long term media media future. Half or more of my 13-year-old's time online is spent on Facebook and other than live airings of Glee on the family television, all of her video consumption is online, split evenly between Netflix, Hulu and YouTube on the Family iMac or iPad.
But it's the smart phone (which of course is already a major hub of social media and fast becoming an important video distribution channel) that I think will be seen as the most disruptive force in another year of major media disruption.
Making grand predictions from small samples of personal experience is never a good thing, and a bad habit of mine, but a recent business trip to Washington DC showed me how the deep, omnipresent connection to and dependence on our smart phone is only getting more extreme.
For the first time I paid a taxi fare using Square, a mobile payment platform created by one of the founders of Twitter. Here is my driver swiping my credit car through the small Square module plugged into the top of his iPhone.
After processing the payment through the Square app, a receipt was sent to my phone via a text message instantaneously streamlining a ridiculously clunky payment process, saving the driver and me valuable time, and allowing the driver to cut his credit card payments in half. (As he told me, the taxi company exercises a 4-5% fee for credit card transactions, while Square charges only 2 1/2%.
In between meetings, I stopped at Starbucks where 3 customers in front of me paid using the Starbucks mobile payment app - a process as simple as driving through a toll using Easy Pass. Less than 6 months ago a friend seemed to be flexing his early adopter muscles when he paid for our Lattes using this app and now it has moved well into the next stage of consumer adoption.
In a recent column in the Times, Nick Bilton predicts that our Smart phones soon will be attached to our bodies in some form.
The smart phone is going to be the hub for our information sharing and gathering. Think of it as a force field that will engulf us wherever we are, transmitting power and Internet access to sensors and screens that are tacked to our clothing.
It beckons a new field called "wearable computing" that execs at Google, Apple and perhaps the next great tech company are studying, ensuring that our current devices look as relevant as an 8-Track cassette player in a few years.
Once a week or so, it's family movie night in our house. It's a great time for my wife and I to share with our three kids (ages 8-12) some of our favorite PG-rated movies. Already spoiled by the on demand availability of almost every piece of content, we don't pick a movie until right before show time, tossing around titles until we reach a consensus, assuming it will be available. Last week we decided on the critically panned box office hit, Crocodile Dundee.
Surprisingly, the movie wasn't available on any of TW Cable's VOD movie channels or on Netflix, which we stream through our Wii game console. But it was available on Amazon's streaming video service for $1.99, which we accessed through a rarely-used Google TV Logitech box we purchased last year. (Not sure what role over-the-top boxes from Google, Roku, Boxee and others will play in the future when every new TV comes with an embedded Internet connection and comprehensive programming platform, and Microsoft aggressively turns their 30 million household strong Xbox platform into a full-on interactive TV offering. )
And why Amazon is not available on the Wii is just another mystery in the highly confusing world of entertainment distribution.
So yes, you can watch anything you want anytime you want, it just takes some work. We used three different devices and services before we found what we were looking for.
Once the movie started, our smart phones and iPads were were pulled into action as we searched for answers to questions like: who is Linda Koslowski (Paul Hogan's co-star), what is Paul Hogan doing these days, is that bar he stumbles into on Avenue B and 6th still there, how badly did The NY Times movie reviewer shred this movie. One of us shared this classic scene found on YouTube with our friends on Facebook as we watched it.
All in all, a very different family movie night from the house I grew up in 40 years ago.
While it seems content owners are in a great position to capitalize on the explosion of distribution options, managing the logistics and economics of that distribution, along with identifying effective promotional tools for pre, live and post viewing, will be a significant challenge.
For example, most content (not just the big budget TV shows) should have a customize companion mobile app that engages viewers with relevant information, triggers social networking, promotes additional viewing options and, where appropriate, incorporates sponsors. Tool kits that enable content owners to create these cost efficiently will come to the market shortly, perhaps offered by single source vendors that offer content and rights management, distribution, and promotional services.
And finally, a big lingering question: Will it ultimately be a zero-sum-gain for content owners as all these choices end up diluting the market, making it difficult for anyone to make any money from anything other than marquee live events.
For the second time in less than a year I left my Kindle in the seat sleeve of an airplane - it's slim and weightless mass making is easy to misplace amidst the airsickness bag, shopping catalogs and previous passenger's trash.
Although this was a relatively inexpensive mistakes to make (more expensive than the 10 umbrellas and less expensive than the two phones lost during the same period), I couldn't bear to buy a third one at full price, opting for a new version priced at $119 ($25 less than the base model) that includes ads and special offers on the home page.
Even though I make my living in the advertising and media business, and have always been quite liberal in my views on when and where ad messages should appear (my own family and most of the tenants in my co-op stopped speaking to me when I proposed hanging a 10-story billboard on the back of the building to raise revenue), there have always been a few places even I deemed sacrosanct, and books were one of them.
But Amazon is one of the most successful and innovative companies in the world, rivaling even Apple in its repeated ability to actually mold consumer behavior around emerging new technologies. The move for me to Amazon's e-reader from paper books last year was swift. Just a few months before it became my primary reading source I was pretty adamant that I was a "real book in my hand" person. But the convenience of accessing any book and downloading it in seconds was just too compelling. All part of the steady march towards being able to consume any piece of media anywhere, at any time - with advertisers breathlessly trying to keep up.
Amazon's move to provide an "ad supported" discount represents just one small innovative move in what is becoming an epic transformation of the advertising business, well masked by the continued vibrancy of the 50-year-old, unchanged TV advertising marketplace. Along with the power consumers are gaining over what they see and when, they are being given more choices of what ads they see (if any). In environments where ad choice is not an option (TV in particular), advertisers are insisting on tools and platforms that provide more finely tuned targeting and accountable ROI.
It all leads to a much more mutually beneficial and comfortable relationship between consumers and advertisers. (Provided media companies and advertisers play above boards and squeaky clean with privacy protocol.) I can listen to Pandora for free with ads or pay a monthly subscription and not see/hear any; and when I am exposed to ads, they will be relevant, based on my location and demo data gleaned from my listening patterns.
I can watch 30 Rock on TV with a full ad load, on Hulu with a smaller, more targeted load, or buy an entire season with no ads for $33.99.
I will see mini-van commercials in "The Bourne Supremacy" on TBS and my swinging neighbor will see ads for sports cars at the same time in the same movie.
And coming shortly, which is sure to cause quite a stir, ads in the actual books on the Kindle and other e-readers. I'm sure they will be discreetly integrated into the reading experience, with an appealing discount attached.
Highly recommend "Facebook: A New Creative Canvas", a 20 minute presentation by one of Facebook's senior brand and product execs. Great, broad overview of how brands should be using Facebook as well as some obviously self-serving, but compelling visions of how a future social-media infused digital media landscape will look.
