It is fair to say, both anecdotally and empirically, that ‘content’, content marketing, call it what you will, is now firmly on the agenda of any self respecting modern marketer; whether their ambition is to do some, do more, do it better or do epic. That said, it seems it is only recently, as the medium is maturing, that we are beginning to see its potentially awesome (and I use that word advisedly) power.

I have been thinking about this for some time, but it was just last week that an article about Lego closed the loop for me.

The story begins with Lego too, as this is when I woke up to the power of content to create proper, real world change. In this instance Lego was on the receiving end of some powerful content from Greenpeace that cleverly parodied the signature song from Lego’s awesome movie to tell its own story. The portentous film plays out the tragic consequences of oil pollution on the Arctic and effectively points the finger of blame at Shell, with whom Lego had had a partnership for 50 odd years. The content was powerful enough to challenge long held brand perceptions, threaten brand love, create action, inciting people to sign Greenpeace’s online petition to end the partnership, and ultimately put another brick in their wall to block climate change. Not bad for a little two minute film.

This reminded me of the first time brands started to get a bit twitchy about ’empowered consumers’. It seems crazy now to think that not so long ago this was a new phenomenon, enabled by the internet and amplified when people started talking and listening to each other online more than brands’ own carefully constructed propaganda. I remember the poster child of this new era was the Kryptonite bike lock ‘scandal’ (OK, within the non life threatening domain of brands and marketing). A member of the previously powerless species called ‘consumers’ had noticed that his top-of-the-range lock could very quickly and simply be decommissioned using a Bic biro. He shared his trick on an online forum and it went viral (you were allowed to say that in the early noughties) – mortally wounding Kryptonite.

We’re all quite blasé about consumer power today and big brands have been built off this very thing. But what are the limits of this power? I was thumbing, OK scrolling, through Debrett’s ‘500 Influencers 2015’ the other day, which sets out to list ‘people of influence and achievement in British society’ and includes the likes of the Prime Minister David Cameron, Dame Hilary Mantel, Sir Richard Branson, oh and Zoe Sugg and Alfie Deyes. Who the, what the!? Yes. And they’ll be queuing up for their CBEs before the next decade is out mark my words!

Vloggers have their own personal (and lucrative) agenda, and all power to them, but others are using the power of content for an altogether greater good. Not just generally saving the planet as Greenpeace intends to, but saving actual lives, of people you may know or even your own. Two recent online films for Meningitis Now and Cancer Research UK call you to take control of your own health by simply checking your breasts or being aware of the signs of Meningitis. #FastestHour uses a pretty harrowing true story to educate people of the signs and symptoms of Meningitis, the knowledge of which could save your life. It is a simple but hugely powerful piece and I challenge you to watch it and not immediately go to their website and feverishly take in all the information available to you.

But it was the news last week that Lego has become the world’s most powerful brand, according the annual Brand Finance rankings, that really completed the story for me. “A lot of that [Lego’s rise to being most powerful brand] has been down to the success of The Lego Movie” according to the Brand Finance experts. Here was a brand that not long ago had been under siege thanks to clever use of content by Greenpeace and was now top of the world thanks to a piece of their very own, albeit rather epic, content.

So if content can save lives, save the planet and put a girl from a bedroom in Brighton on a list next to the Prime Minister, imagine what it could do for you.

Kath Hipwell, Head of Content Strategy.

The post The power of content appeared first on Broadcast and Media.

This week, more than 100,000 people from over 160 countries around the world will descend on Las Vegas for the annual NAB Show. The great and the good of the broadcast industry will get together to show off the latest technologies and innovation and debate hot topics affecting our ever-evolving industry both now and into the future.

Expect to hear much discussion around the potential of virtual reality, 4K, HDR, OTT… and of course, that key component, content.

Now just last week I attended the Financial Times’s 2016 Digital Media conference. I was there to hear the breadth of conversations and interviews which took place amongst these media gurus. During the event, the audience was asked to post questions which would be answered by the interviewers, and one very frank participant wrote back, “Is anyone bored of the word ‘content’ yet?!”

Understandably, there were a lot of conversations on how content is continuing to evolve (e.g. virtual/augmented reality), where, how much and via which platform. However the main underlying objective of every broadcaster and media provider, was well summarised by Evan Burns (CEO of Odyssey) who spoke about the importance of ensuring relevance, engagement and personalisation.

But what actually can be realised through personalisation within the media and broadcasting industry? How can technology, content and data make it happen?

Let’s have a look at three key areas where personalisation could make a difference.

Content recommendations

According to Ericsson’s ConsumerLab study, respondents reported that recommendations are still not as smart as they’d like them to be.  But why is that the case?  Audiences receive suggestions based on algorithms which, at a basic level, examine their current viewing behaviour.  Sophistication can only occur when engagement with the end audience happens.  Thus the viewer must have a real opportunity to inform their platform on what they do and don’t like.  The TV platform can then feed this information into their systems and produce something meaningful for the end consumer – be it dependent on mood, circumstance or even the weather.

Targeted advertising

Whilst there are not many consumers who will admit to be lovers of adverts, the ability to be able to serve content to the masses using a freemium model often relies on advertisers being able to serve up scripted and glossy ads, which they believe are served to you at the most appropriate time.  The monetization of advertising however will – and needs to- continue to evolve.  This brings us back to the issue of relevance.  Would you rather watch a holiday program and have the ability to book a table in the restaurant that you just saw in the program or be shown ads from travel agents in the traditional way?   The technology and data to personalize what is shown to you is now available to make the first option a reality. So watch this space.

Search

Similar to recommendations, search is another area which some TV platforms often get wrong.  To personalise a search, a consumer needs the tools, technology and dataset which can help them discover what it is they are looking for.  Taking lessons from the biggest search engine in the world – Google – semantics are now key to any intelligent platform.  Fundamental is the use of the metadata to understand the context and intent behind the search and hence feed a more enriched and relevant result.

Whilst personalisation seems like a ‘nice to have’, it is now time for the industry to start making personalisation a priority and a reality for consumers, the world over.  A statistic which caught my eye yesterday states that by 2019, it will take an individual over five million years to watch the amount of (video) content that will be streamed every single month (Cisco Visual Networking Index, Forecast and Methodology 2014-2015).  Hence more and more of that lovely word ‘content’ is going to be made available.  The industry must now provide the tools and data to help us, the viewer, to discover what we want and cut through the clutter!

At this year’s NAB, I expect that this topic will continue to be one of the top key themes for the industry as a whole.  For Ericsson, this is no different.  Our CTO, Steve Plunkett, will be presenting a keynote speech on whether data science can personalise the media industry; definitely something to watch out for, if you’re attending this year’s event.

Jennifer Walker, Product Marketing Manager, Content Discovery and Access Services

The post “Is anyone bored with the word ‘content’ yet!?” appeared first on Broadcast and Media.

The 49^th IBC closed in Amsterdam last week, with record numbers of attendees (almost 56,000) coming together to discuss the challenges and opportunities that face an industry in transition. The key themes were as expected – technology evolution towards a more IT/IP/Cloud model, a ramping up of UHD activity on the back of HDR and WCG developments, an early look at immersive experiences such as AR/VR and the growth of data-driven decision making in areas such as targeted advertising, personalisation and more.

The Next Generation Broadcast Tech Stack

Much has already been discussed at previous IBC events on the emergence, acceptance and adoption of the technologies that already power most other industries – software based components running on virtualised and cloud-centric infrastructure connected over IP networks. Last year at IBC we saw initial product demonstrations that supported this model and this year they have evolved in both maturity and form.

Microservices, often built on container based architectures, are the current state of the art in software based systems and many vendors at the show described how their products are being re-purposed in this form to provide greater deployment flexibility and, crucially, more rapid development. This is an important step forward, but should not be trivialised in terms of the organisational as well as technical challenges it presents to businesses. The promise is that in the future, broadcast solutions will be dynamically composed using these smaller distributed components into systems tailored to individual service needs. We are doing a great deal of work on this model at Ericsson and it is great to see broader industry traction gaining hold.

UHD

UHD was of course widely discussed and represented amongst both vendors and attendees. The addition of HDR and WCG to 4K (and even without 4K) under the UHD banner is driving many initiatives at the product, content and channel level. It looks like 2017 will be the year that existing UHD trailblazers, such as BT Sport, will be joined by other content providers looking to engage audiences with better quality pixels.

Immersive Experiences

There was probably a larger gathering of VR and AR headsets at IBC than most other events to date. It is still too early to predict how significant an impact these technologies will have on TV viewing but the potential is undeniably exciting and we now need to see how the creative community can embrace these new tools to enhance storytelling and content immersion. By next year’s IBC we may get a better feel (assuming you have the haptic gloves on) of whether this is another 3DTV or something much bigger.

Data Driven Broadcasting

The final theme that was well represented was the whole area of how (much) more data is going to enable better decision making across the industry. From commercial and creative decisions being more informed by data, to audience facing targeting of ads and content personalisation, we might be seeing the Moneyball effect impacting broadcasting going forward. Bring on the quants.

Next year IBC will turn 50 and based on this year’s event, it is aging pretty well.

Steve Plunkett, Chief Technology Officer

The post IBC 2016 – it’s a wrap! appeared first on Broadcast and Media.

We, at Ericsson, have talked a lot about the change mobile connectivity brings to developing markets in Africa and Asia. It has led to economic growth, sparked innovations, brought people together and made life easier for millions. We often refer to it as a major technology leap – more and more people have access to the internet for the first time on mobile devices, not over fixed connection on a desktop PC.

As we discuss how mobile internet usage impacts education, transport and healthcare in developing markets we have yet to observe the change of how TV and video content is being consumed. An increasing number of people will access TV (or any other video content) primarily on mobile devices on the go, thus jumping past the traditional consumption of linear television on big screens at home. According to the latest Ericsson ConsumerLab TV & Media report, 69% of consumers in South Africa prefer to have control over what to watch instead of following a schedule and 19% consider the mobile screen more important than the fixed big TV screen. The numbers are even higher, when looking at millennial viewers in particular – 72% and 24% respectively. This signifies that TV and media consumption will become more and more mobile and on-demand centric. And it is not only viewers’ opinions that point in that direction – TV viewing habits have changed as well – consumers in South Africa spend 12.6 hours weekly watching TV and video on mobile devices (phones and tablets) compared to 14.5 hours on big TV screens.

All this means that there will be implications not only for content delivery technology but also on how and what forms of content will be consumed. ‘Content leap’ might be the suitable term for this change – African consumers are leapfrogging not only past fixed telephone lines to mobile calls, but also past linear TV to streaming video on mobile devices. Consumers want to be in control and connect to video entertainment on their own terms.

So what does this mean in terms of technology, content consumption and monetisation change?

In terms of technology, growing mobile video viewing will put pressure on network capacity for mobile operators and until there is enough bandwidth and coverage for good quality video streaming, offline viewing and scheduled download on mobile devices will become the prevalent way of consuming video. These solutions are suitable for on-demand viewing but we are yet to see what technology will emerge to handle live content for viewers on the go.

Content consumption will also depend on the ease of finding content to watch – 46% of consumers in South Africa experience a challenge of finding anything to watch on traditional broadcast TV, on a daily basis and searching for content represents 27% of the time spent on VOD. These are astonishing numbers that point into the next innovation that can be expected – an efficient and effortless way to get content recommendations on your mobile devices considering past behaviour and preferences.

Video monetisation models will be another area to keep an eye on as content consumption will be impacted by the cost of mobile data. Currently, viewers limit their TV and video consumption on mobile devices, because they fear that their data packages will run out. The possibility of having unlimited data for TV and video consumption is something 56% of consumers in South Africa are interested in. So packaging mobile data with TV and video data allowance or finding new ways to charge for video consumption might be some ways to tap into video revenues.

As with many other industries, the shift to mobile is transforming TV too. But as with other industries, the transformation in Africa and Asia will be more profound in order to solve unique challenges and bring the right content to the right audiences whenever and wherever they want it.

Stan Dimitrov, Product Marketing Manager, Online Video Services and Sports Graphics

The post The Content Leap – OTT in Emerging Markets appeared first on Broadcast and Media.

In the first part of this two-part series we looked at the evolution of 5G and its commercial future. The need for 5G has been underlined by the driving force and increasing dominance of mobile video traffic, which is forecast to grow by around 50 percent annually through to 2022, when it will account for nearly three quarters of all mobile data traffic. One of the drivers of this traffic has been the increased use of embedded video in social media and web pages. The growth can be partly attributed to the emergence of larger device screens, higher resolutions and new platforms supporting live streaming. New applications are also helping to shift relative volumes of varying types of traffic, although each device size accounts for different forms of viewing.

According to the Ericsson Mobility Report, tablets are associated with a higher share of video traffic when compared to smartphones. While tablets and smartphones are used equally for short video content, tablets are used more for watching longer video content. The share of video traffic is now approaching 60 percent on tablets. In terms of video traffic as a whole, YouTube continues to dominate in most mobile networks, accounting for between 40-70 percent of total video traffic for almost all measured networks, regardless of device type.

User Generated Content (UGC) helps to drive surge in live video streaming apps

Consumers are increasingly embracing live video streaming apps to interact with friends, family and their followers. TV and video content has always had an intrinsically social element to it, enabling viewers to come together and communally watch their favorite programs. However, whereas once the focal point involved the main TV screen, consumers, and millennials in particular, are now migrating their communal viewing habits online, both with traditional content and UGC.

Live streaming has been popular in South Korea for some time, with the likes of AfreecaTV, one of the country’s most popular apps, offering free broadcast live video to consumers in addition to re-transmitted TV channels and user generated content (UGC) hosted by broadcast jockeys. In the US, however, the growth in popularity of apps such as Periscope and Babuser has caused a surge in millennial and video-centric smartphone users accessing this content. In addition, the inclusion of live streaming capabilities in social media apps, such as Facebook and Twitter, is helping to drive the availability and rise in popularity of UGC, as well as professionally made live video content. As a result, the Ericsson Mobility Report shows that the proportion of smartphone users in the US using live streaming apps is likely to triple in the coming year, and double in South Korea.

The report also found:

– While live streaming has been a success in South Korea, the global market is fragmented due to different content preferences and trends. One of the reasons for the slow uptake of live streaming in markets beyond South Korea is the number of people and brands creating live videos still represent a small fraction of those who are watching.

– Around one in five US smartphone users expresses an interest in live video broadcast, but there are twice as many smartphone users in high growth markets like India, Indonesia, Brazil and Oman who are interested in such apps. This indicates that over the next 12 months, there will be a bigger appetite for live video streaming beyond the US.

Creating a high quality video experience for mobile

Today’s consumers are interested in a content offering that suits their own needs, across all the devices they own. Yet just as importantly, the user experience must be consistent and delivered in the highest possible quality, overcoming common video streaming issues such as delays in loading and re-buffering. Roughly one in every five global smartphone users we surveyed reported video streaming issues on a daily basis.

In terms of network performance on the go, 22 percent of smartphone users reported video streaming issues while outdoors, irrespective of whether they were watching on-demand video streaming apps or live streaming apps. In addition, 24 percent face the same issue while using these apps over mobile broadband while at home.

The importance of improving the video streaming experience is clear. The delivery of increased connectivity, enhanced network efficiency and wider mobility will ultimately determine whether media players can respond to the consumer demand for seamless, streamed video content on the road to 2022 and with it, the realization of the Networked Society.

Read more about the increasing dominance of 5G in the first part of our two part blog series. You can find the full Ericsson Mobility Report here.

Gordon Castle, VP, Head of Strategy Development Media, IoT and Applications, Group Function Strategy and Technology

The post The Road to 5G – Part 2 appeared first on Broadcast and Media.

In the digital age, content providers have been forced to adapt to the increasingly on-the-go lifestyles of consumers. This industry shift is demonstrated by the rise of Over-The-Top (OTT) and Subscription Video On Demand (SVOD) services. As the density of online content increases, consumers are consequently overloaded with choice, and as a result of that they are struggling to find appealing content with ease.

In the 2016 Ericsson ConsumerLab TV and Media Report, it was revealed that the average person will spend 1.3 years of their life perusing the on-screen electronic program guide (EPG) in an effort to locate TV and entertainment content. The same report also found that Video on Demand (VOD) consumers spend a “frustrating” 45 percent more time searching for programming, in comparison to their linear TV viewing counterparts. In tandem, 57% of consumers in this study say content discovery is critical when choosing a pay-TV service. 49% also say the mobility factor is important.

From these findings, it’s clear that not only is a better content discovery process needed across the board, the ability to find and access content across the multitude of mobile devices is key.

In the first of this two-part blog series, we will explore the methods that content providers can use to help consumers find the content they want, whenever they want it and on any device.

Enter universal search; a foundation for unifying content together from multiple, linear, and over the top (OTT) services.

Viewers’ frustrations are partly attributed to the inconvenience of switching between SVOD apps, such as Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube, to find content. In contrast, universal search provides a single point of entry.  The ability to quickly search across all available television content – live linear, OTT and VOD – paired with the ability to do that on any device, enables viewers to find suitable programming from many services in a single instance. But what if you only wanted to see services you were subscribed to? Theoretically, universal search should allow viewers to personalize content searches, which would then enable the option to see user-subscribed services only.

Universal search should also cut content search times significantly. But how could such a service be feasibly adjusted for mainstream suitability? From our perspective, this could include a time window, SD or HD quality, and pricing. Whether or not the content is free (which it could be on one service but not another), or has a price fixed to it, is certainly pertinent to the viewer.

The major dilemma for universal search platforms is the need to convince SVOD providers and content owners to become involved in such a vast project. Those who are adapting by developing OTT services (such as HBO, Sky, and CBS) will have to make some critical decisions – like whether or not they will open up their private data library to a universal search platform. Agreeing to be a part of a universal search platform could potentially lead to increased viewership and additional exposure. Otherwise, failure to leverage a historic opportunity like this might result in simply fading away. We must ask ourselves, is it worth the risk to keep the searchable content under lock and key, when a larger share of viewers could lead to great revenue streams and greater investment in content.

With this in mind, what exactly is available (and possible) in terms of universal search today?

There is actually a lot that we can do with unified content already. For example, a consumer can search for a program and instantly obtain where that program can be found across every platform be that live or on demand. If they look for the 2008 movie “Iron Man” on AT&T U-Verse, the exact time, date and channel should be displayed (e.g. 8 p.m., December 19 on STARZ). Additionally, potential streaming locations for “Iron Man” (Amazon Prime, Hulu, Netflix, AT&T VOD, etc.), with availability and pricing, can also be shown. And with a simple click-through, the content is then easily accessible.

In the second part of this blog, we’ll look at some the limitations associated with universal search, and they can be resolved.

Olcay Buyan, Technical Product Management, Content Discovery

The post Universal Search: The Future of Content Discovery – Part 1 appeared first on Broadcast and Media.

The common media wisdom “content is king” to attract a large audience has shifted to “audience is king”: content is crafted to address a specific target audience. Data and viewership analytics have accelerated this trend as they have become part of the creative process. Netflix regularly explains how its massive amount of viewership data allows them to create specific content narratives that satisfy each specific audience segment.

In advertising, “audience is king” is even more true. From the traditional “one to many” broadcast approach of traditional TV advertising, brands and advertisers want to move to “one to one” conversations with targeted audiences and measure the direct impact of these engagements. They are now looking at the best way to engage their target audience across a wide variety of platforms and types of media. The advertiser may not know or care who is distributing the ad. Instead, they care whom their ad is reaching. They are looking for people with a certain purchase intent, income segment, location, age or other factors, and not necessarily for people who watch specific shows.

While TV programmers retain a large audience and broad access, they have limited knowledge of their viewership on an individual basis. They cannot compete with the Internet giants who have gathered large amounts of individual data allowing them to better satisfy their potential buying appetite. Furthermore, the traditional way of monetizing TV advertising based on TV ratings is being challenged by more sophisticated online metrics which are tracking purchase intent and conversions.

The competition between the different advertising models has an impact on how advertising is being sold, how it is being displayed, how it is measured. This evolution will require important changes in the TV space. Will this be a doomsday for TV advertising or the advent of a new El Dorado?

TV advertising doomsday coming?

All recent reports point that online advertising will surpass TV advertising before 2020. Most of the advertising spending growth today is on social and mobile platforms. TV advertising spending, while remaining high, is staying flat.

TV is more constrained by regulations and technology (tracking the content viewership across all types of platforms and consumption models is still hard to achieve) and still relies on an established ecosystem of intermediaries and partners. Any change or adaptation is slow to put in place, as agreements, regulations, and technology need to be updated across the board.

On the other hand, all the major digital players are not subject to the same type of regulation. They have a complete end-to-end platform: they can gather data from all sides, and they can evolve faster, allowing them to monetize their audience more efficiently.

Will this mean the decline of TV advertising? Not so fast…

Targeted TV advertising: a new El Dorado?

TV remains one of the premium avenues for brand and advertisers. It has a massive reach and associates brands with events, atmosphere, cultures, which amplifies their message. Advertising opportunities remain scarce on TV, and therefore are highly valuable.

Meanwhile, new technologies are enabling targeted advertising to be displayed to various audience segments during the same time slots. As the same space can be used by multiple advertisers going after different segments of audience, the cost of the TV campaign is split among them.

By targeting a smaller and better qualified audience, the initial entry cost for TV advertising is lowered and can give access to a wider range of brands who would normally not spend their marketing budget on TV ads.

If TV could offer the audience reach and attractiveness it has today with acute audience data and targeting that’s available online, it would be in a thriving position.

Mining the TV data

In this quest for better data to increase advertising value, TV programmers will not succeed alone. They need the partnership of distributors who own the TV subscriber information, have the technical ability to distribute targeted content on their TV platforms and can derive a lot of viewership information from their network.

New relationships between programmers, advertisers, and distributors need to be forged in order to take advantage of this opportunity. This would give them immense benefits:

• for the advertisers: focus on a smaller qualified audience segment, the ability to tailor campaigns and tap into new brands that would normally not spend budget on TV advertising
• for the programmers: get to know precisely their audiences, create new ad inventory, enhance the advertising value, and gain new revenues
• for the distributors: gain new revenues from their subscriber knowledge and their ability to distribute targeted content

Like the early days of the gold rush, this new landscape is pretty much Advertising Far West:

• regulations and agreements vary country per country
• business agreements are yet to be formed
• standards are not established
• content and Adtech company acquisitions are the trend
• ecosystems are still very fragmented

This is the beginning of a journey for programmers and distributors: our mission is to help you go through this transformation and harness the opportunity ahead.

At NAB, we are showing how Ericsson is transforming television, and notably, how TV analytics and dynamic ad replacement can provide a positive business outcome. Come join us at NAB Show in booth #SU720 to talk about this new opportunity!

Boris Felts, Head of Video Advertising, Media Solutions

The post TV advertising: the new El Dorado? appeared first on Broadcast and Media.

Back in March I shared 9 lessons for brands outside the media sector from the PromaxBDA Europe event. (PromaxBDA is the global community of marketers and creative people working in entertainment). Well, last month, the roadshow moved to Los Angeles and over 3,000 delegates from across the globe gathered at PromaxBDA’s annual North America conference. We were there to learn from the finest talent from Hollywood, Burbank and beyond, and there was much more to inspire marketers who wouldn’t define their brands, first and foremost, with the word “entertainment”.

Here are 7 more thoughts that stood out across the three days of conference sessions, panels and workshops.

1) Understand your North Star and make it work for you

Senior marketers on a panel discussion featuring four diverse TV-centric brands – Hallmark Channel, Nickelodeon, Food Network and Syfy – were united in demonstrating how they stayed true to their core brand propositions and “doubled down” on them.

Susanne McAvoy, EVP Marketing from Hallmark, showed how she and her team had identified that their brand’s “North Star”, emotional storytelling, was at its most potent during the run-up to Christmas, and how creatively they had worked with diverse partners to reinforce their proposition with viewers. Examples ranged from a virtual reality rollercoaster at a Six Flags theme park to a Countdown to Christmas takeover at New York’s South St Seaport, and from a new Guinness World Record for illuminated Christmas trees to a float in the Macy’s Christmas Parade featuring a 90 year old Tony Bennett crooning with Miss Piggy. These entertaining brand partnerships reinforced Hallmark as The Heart of TV at a time of year when this claim was most in tune with how people were feeling, in a way that traditional advertising or on-air promotion would have struggled to do.

2) Adopt a viral mindset

Next, a contrarian view from James Percelay of the viral marketing agency Thinkmodo: ask first how you can be entertaining and only then attach the message. A contrarian view because decades of conventional marketing wisdom says that the place to start should be rigorous market and consumer analysis followed by insightful strategic planning leading to a clear brief before creative development starts. Percelay challenged us to think differently. The content has to be entertaining first and, he asserted, its success in gaining media coverage (with no media buy) is likely to be in inverse proportion to the number of product points crammed in (ideally none at all).

Proof that this approach can work came in the form of several case studies that garnered acres of news coverage and millions of views across the globe. A stunt to promote the movie Devil’s Due unleashed a robotic “Devil Baby” on the streets of New York, a campaign to promote Verizon’s smart driving app, Hum, saw a Jeep transformed into a vehicle that would lift 9 feet in the air to drive over cars in a traffic jam, and Thinkmodo even built a “golf hovercraft” for Bubba Watson to promote his association with Oakley. This is a very different form of marketing but think about how you could apply it to your brand.

3) Make your content relatable

A related (no pun intended) point from the team at NBC’s iconic late night comedy show Saturday Night Live. Echoing James Percelay’s thinking, they claimed that brand integrations with the highest levels of impact come from entertaining content based on human truths, citing the content they created across six seasons for Subaru’s integration with comedy sketch show Portlandia, starring SNL cast member Fred Armisen. A great example is No You Go in which the two central characters send up the sometimes over-friendly nature of Pacific Northwesterners as their cars meet at an intersection. Reflecting truths about both the Portland setting of the show and the Subaru brand enabled the SNL creative and production team at Broadway Video to build for Subaru “a personality I like”, which for them is the key to branded content success.

4) If you’re tackling a social issue, be authentic

Not surprisingly there was quite a bit of discussion in LA about “Kendallgate” – Pepsi’s well-intended but ultimately disastrous use of Kendall Jenner in a TV spot aimed at linking the brand with social justice protests. Pepsi found sympathy on a panel discussion about the rise of in-house creative studios, featuring representatives from Marriott Hotels and yogurt brand Chobani, since the Kendall Jenner spot was the work of Pepsi’s own much-heralded content studio Creators League. However, the consensus was that the mistake was not that they were brave enough to tackle a social issue but that they made the product the solution. As the Planner Martin Weigel argues in a recent blog post, if a business wants us to believe it’s driven by a world-changing purpose we need to look beyond its advertising for evidence.

5) Foster creative conflict but don’t make it personal

Talking of in-house creative units, what can the very best teams in the US entertainment industry, measured by recent award-winning success – FX Networks, CNN and National Geographic – teach the rest of us about how to make it work?

In a lively panel discussion, there was loud agreement that the best creative groups have cultures in which argument and debate are encouraged, but only if directed at creative ideas and concepts, not people. Stephanie Gibbons, head of marketing at FX Networks, mentioned a Harvard Business Review article about the creative process (I think it must have been this one) and one of the key points was that creative teams need to work in a safe space in which disagreement and criticism are OK so long as the shared goal is to make the creative work as good as possible. It’s not surprising, then, that FX Networks won North America’s Marketing Team of the Year award for the 7th year running, thanks to outstanding work including the chilling launch campaign for American Horror Story season 6.

(Incidentally, Charlie Mawer and I write a lot more about the excellence of FX Networks in our book The TV Brand Builders – How to Win Audiences and Influence Viewers).

6) Get more women behind the camera

Diversity was a major thread of this year’s conference and Dr Stacy Smith from USC presented a convincing case not just for the scandalous underrepresentation of female directors in Hollywood but for the creative advantages they can bring. (You can find Dr Smith’s TED talk on this subject here). When women are behind the camera, the USC study demonstrated, more girls or women end up being depicted on screen (including more over the age of 40), more stories featuring women are told, more racial/ethnic groups are represented and more women are hired in key production roles. This feels important for all brands and their agencies, not just those in the entertainment sector. As an agency with over half of our creative and production teams represented by women, at Red Bee we feel we’re on the right track at least.

7) Never underestimate the power of emotion

Finally, another key point from the panel discussion featuring the three best in-house teams in US TV, this time from CNN’s VP Creative Marketing Whit Friese. It was notable that he referred instinctively to CNN as an “entertainment” brand (which emphasizes the fact that the descriptor can apply to all content brands competing for audiences) and underlined the importance of emotion in connecting with people, even for a news outlet. As evidence of that, CNN’s multi-awarded image spot Why We Go was just one of several powerful campaigns that led to CNN being named Global Marketing Team of the Year. Coming in a week in which we were reminded by the brilliant researchers at System1 of the power of emotion in shaping our decisions about who to vote for, with devastating impact on the outcome of the UK General Election, it was a timely reminder that if a piece of content doesn’t stir the emotions in some way it’s unlikely to have a positive impact, whether in the entertainment sector or beyond.

Our core belief at Red Bee is that brands that entertain have a competitive edge and the PromaxBDA conference in LA provided yet more inspiration for non-media brands from the masters of entertainment marketing.

Andy Bryant, Managing Director, Red Bee

The post 7 more things non-media brands can learn from entertainment marketing appeared first on Broadcast and Media.

During the week, I was sent a comical video to watch which depicted zombie-like humans in various scenarios being guided through their daily life by ‘hired help’, as they were too busy to look up from their phones!

Whilst this video was amusing, it reminded me of the significance that smartphones and tablet devices have had on society, and the staggering volume of content now viewed on the go. This was confirmed by Ericsson in their most recent annual Ericsson ConsumerLab TV and Media report, 2017 – published yesterday – which shows that approximately 70% of consumers now watch videos on a smartphone, double the amount from 2012. The report also predicts that by 2020 – in just three years’ time – 50% of all TV and video viewing will take place on a mobile screen (tablets, smartphones and laptops), with the smartphone alone accounting for almost one quarter (that’s an increase of nearly 160% since 2010!).

Our ‘connected’ lives are evolving and our expectations for technology are higher than ever before. Therefore, the industry must respond. Our desire to view content on the go is no great surprise in the fast pace, ‘always on’ world that we currently live in. However, being satisfied with the content we have available to watch, how we find it and access to a truly immersive and personalised experience still seems to be lagging behind.

The array of content on offer is not the topic of dispute here.  What consumers want is the ability to access content on any device, no matter where they are, and for the technology to intelligently understand what they want and personalise their experience.  So why is it that one in eight of us worry that we’ll get lost in the vast amount of available content? And why are we still spending almost 1 hour per day looking for content – a 13 percent increase since last year? (Ericsson ConsumerLab TV and Media Report, 2017).

Fundamental to effective content discovery is enriched metadata.  This is the fuel which powers the content ecosystem. Imagine a world without detailed synopses, film or programme information, cast or crew details, images or trailers. The ability to source, format and deliver deep, broad and rich datasets are necessary to find and personalise the content which audiences are searching for.

At the Leaders in Sport conference, last week, Jamie Hindhaugh, BT Sport’s COO, gave the audience some insight into how BT Sport is transforming viewers’ experiences, but reminded the industry gurus that personalisation can only be enabled through true IP-based delivery. For Pay TV operators, moving to an IPTV/cloud environment makes true multi-screen, TV anywhere easier, whilst also helping them to compete against the OTT players who have historically provided consumers with more intuitive interfaces and therefore potentially more engaging user experiences.

The objective for the industry is to personalize the content discovery journey through the delivery of rich, detailed data provided in the right format to any screen; and this can be realized through cloud based technology.

There are two clear benefits for the industry in getting this right: customers who stay (reduction in churn) and monetization opportunities which boost profits. But this can only be achieved by collecting data about consumers’ behaviour and using that information to deliver targeted content and personalized promotions.

For the consumer, personalization must be coupled with advanced search capabilities. With the average number of used on-demand services having increased from 1.6 in 2013 to 3.8 per person in 2017 (Ericsson ConsumerLab TV and Media Report, 2017), it is now imperative that smart APIs are deployed and collate the results that consumers demand. Current content discovery capabilities are failing to cope with consumers’ demands and use of multiple video services and devices. This could explain why our ConsumerLab report discovered that 70% of consumers now want ‘universal’ search capabilities across all TV and video. This, coupled with intelligent recommendation algorithms, is just a small list which the industry needs to continue to work on. Now is the time for change.

In response to this need for change, we, at Ericsson, launched our content discovery ecosystem earlier this year. Our aim is to bring an extensive universe of high quality, rich TV and movie data sources together with a range of applications and technologies that can help to connect the dots and bring the data to life. We recognise that we can’t do this alone so we’ve enlisted the help of a number of partners who have joined our ecosystem – the likes of IMDb, Guidebox, IVA and XroadMedia to name just a few. Because we believe that collaboration will be key to the industry’s success in solving the content discovery challenge.

There’s no doubt that the “paradox of choice” remains a hurdle for many consumers, especially in an ever-growing universe of content anytime and anywhere. Therefore, it remains the industry’s task to help consumers to overcome this hurdle and in doing so, unlock new and very real opportunities to maximise valuable content rights and grow revenue.

Jennifer Walker, Product Marketing Manager

The post The battle between content and discovery continues appeared first on Broadcast and Media.

The UK has long been considered the media capital of Europe. Over half of the 2,200 broadcasting licences granted across the European Union are by Ofcom in the UK.

American tech and media companies, including Facebook and Google, have sizeable offices in London and it’s an English speaking base for US firms wanting to do business in Europe.

Media Brexit

Already, since the announcement in June 2016 that the UK would leave the EU, we have seen market volatility and a drop in the value of the pound. This has hit UK broadcasters’ advertising income and increased the cost of content imports. It has also brought rising costs for international broadcasters based in the UK through exchange rate losses.

The news on 8 December 2017 that the UK and the EU had agreement on the major points around payment, citizens’ rights and the border in Ireland means that they can start to work on the detailed nature of their relationship. This will cover areas including defence, immigration, human rights as well as trade and labour. This will come into effect after the expected date the UK will leave the EU in March 2019.

Brexit won’t upend the sector completely. It’s likely that the EU and the UK will work out an agreement to maintain trade and labour ties. But the lack of clarity about the nature of the transition – whether it is a ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ Brexit – threatens all those companies that have reliance on Europe in some form. Whilst there are no firm definitions in place, a hard Brexit will likely see the UK give up full access to the single market and full access to the European Union Customs Union (EUCU) along with the EU. A soft Brexit would keep unfettered access to the European single market.

The distinction is as pertinent for companies planning to set up in London so that they can do business across the EU as those that have been based here for years. For all these companies, as across all sectors, lack of certainty is no safeguard to a good outcome and they are planning accordingly.

There are 5 core issues:

Country of Origin principle

The EU’s ‘country of origin’ principle allows media companies operating across the EU to be regulated in just one member state. This means that broadcasters can transmit across the entire EU, provided they comply with the rules of their host country. Ofcom licenses all 1200 UK based channels to operate in this way. But if the UK falls out of the EU, will these channels have to move their operations to a country that falls within the EU?

Several major UK-based broadcasters have stressed the importance of this issue. Some are having to consider the disruption of relocation. Others are committed to remaining in the UK, but worry about their ability to reach EU audiences unhindered. Many are making contingency plans which could be activated as early as this year. Others have put plans for new investment in the UK on hold.

Skills

Media companies across Europe have international, highly skilled people, many from overseas. Estimates suggest up to 40% of people working in the UK’s creative industries may be EU nationals with no UK citizenship. Their work is seen by audiences from Amsterdam to Zagreb.

All employees, of course, need certainty. The UK Government has made the status of EU workers a priority in its negotiations. We hope that progress there will provide clarity to staff across industries, and to the companies who rely on them.

Data

Today, digital information travels freely within the European Economic Area governed by shared standards of privacy and protection. Personal data cannot leave the European Economic Area unless it is to an accredited receiving country – of which there are currently 12 outside the EU.

Media companies need certainty that the UK will retain this status as without that assurance, pan-European operators will face practical and commercial disruption. This could mean potentially negotiating separate data agreements with their European partners, or moving their data centres.

Major broadcasters rely on cross-border data to distribute their content and this issue may be a bigger issue than the Country of Origin principle.

Production, content, distribution and rights

Leaving the EU could impact the UK industry by limiting access to finance and markets. The European Regional Development Fund and the Creative Media Fund, invested approximately $180 million in UK co-productions between 2007 and 2015. UK producers are asking how this will be replaced. Similarly, the UK is currently part of a system of quotas which means that all countries have to buy a certain volume of content from EU suppliers. If the UK is no longer included in these quotas, this could reduce the value of UK productions across Europe.

Regulation

The UK’s dominant position in the European media landscape means that it is able to influence regulation across Europe. As an outsider, the UK will lose that right of influence but will continue to be bound to EU regulations, particularly around intellectual property and copyright, and the Digital Single Market (DSM). Similarly, the European Commission may no longer have a role in the development of the UK’s legal frameworks.

Red Bee Media: Your Brexit contingency

Broadcasters and producers with a mature base in the UK will not want to needlessly move if these issues are resolved in the course of the Brexit negotiations. Similarly, these companies will need some level of contingency in case the outcomes are not favourable to their needs. For all these issues, companies need to plan their business continuity.

Red Bee Media is a global company with 6 hubs across Europe in the UK, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland and Spain, with additional hubs in Abu Dhabi, Australia and the US.

As a truly global organisation we are able to take the stress out of the situation by flexing our resources and infrastructure to respond to the market as circumstances unfold. Thus we are able to locate services in the most favourable market, with representatives in your local area.  This includes our data centres which are flexible across our global network and data can be relocated as needed.  And finally our people are global, already working across Europe as demand dictates.  In summary, we are well placed to provide continuity, conviction in delivery and support during any future transition.

Claire Harvey, Key Account Manager UK, Red Bee Media

The post The Media Industry: Deliberating Brexit appeared first on Broadcast and Media.