Video, mobile, social media, as advertising trends
There seems to be a consensus that there will be new winners in advertising revenue. Social media is beginning to get its share of the pie and it will likely increase. On the other hand, the fast evolution of smart phones since the arrival of the iPhone guarantees that mobiles will become a ubiquitous device and an excellent vehicle for advertisers. Finally, video, heralded for so many years, is starting to live up to its expectations.
If advertising gurus have it right, the wind seems to be blowing in the right direction for broadcasters because they can benefit from three trends. The first is video, where the strength of broadcasters is obvious. The second is mobile and there’s not much to say, since the medium is some time away from supporting streaming video. The third is social media. Broadcasters will have to work harder in this area and regardless, they are not likely to challenge Facebook. Still, they have the marketing power of their conventional channels. If used to promote good series, sports events or other appealing programs, broadcasters have the ability to assemble online content communities. In summary, broadcasters will need to keep these three key components of new media in mind if they wish to position themselves for the ad dollars other media players are fighting for.
Most newspapers were light years away from knowing anything about video, but in the last few years, they have adopted it and adapted to it. They have shown similar will to learn about mobiles and for some years now, their sites have been accessible on mobile phones. The list of examples to showcase how they are building communities around some types of content would be a long one (Nettby by the daily VG is half the size of Facebook in Norway). Broadcasters have been pushed later to the game, but they will need to move with haste to master the tricks of the trade.
Get ready for more technically intensive advertising
Keeping up with the fast evolution of advertising in video is an exciting task. Google has announced that it’s going to test a new formula to deliver skippable pre-roll ads with a high degree of acceptance from users and a very high CPM. “The model will be ‘Cost Per Engagement’, where advertisers would only pay for opt-in engaged views of the ads”. Once again, Google lifts the bar since few players have the know-how to build such a system. The automated process by which a platform actually acquires the insight to offer a certain ad to the most appropriate audience is a highly sophisticated one, which requires very high traffic and ultra intelligent analytical skills. Google satisfies both requirements. In the upcoming years, broadcasters will have to master these skills. While that may not seem possible now, the future will provide us with more analytical skills and technology, assuming companies have moved in that direction. You can ask the old Fast Search, now owned by Microsoft, how many editors have become experts at utilizing something formerly so foreign to them.
Database
A database is a collection of logically related records consolidated into a common container that provides data for one or multiple uses. Information can be retrieved, added to, updated or removed in an automatic fashion. For a long time, editors continued using basic text or even structured text in dealing with the storage of information, but soon databases proved to be much more flexible. Their main advantage is fast and efficient data retrieval while relational databases have the further advantage of allowing administrators to specify how different sets of data relate to each other.
All content can be stored automatically and retrieved for any established or new purpose. The possibilities for database content are endless, as opposed to content stored in the traditional way. Acquired video can be presented with or without comments or associated with any other layer. It can be personalized according to the needs of each user. Database elements can be combined to produce new content, enlarging inventory of pages.
Sophisticated data base management is becoming a necessity for broadcasters and you do not have to have the expertise of Google to do it. The challenge is not only about managing and creating new content from existing data, but also about squeezing all the possible information about our users as it regards their Internet usage and ad consumption. As in the example of Google’s skippable ads that I mentioned before, advertising will become highly sophisticated.
New media are not about technology but about reaching the consumer. That art of the communications equation has not changed, but the technological part has become much more important. (End of Part 3)
You are free to use this article in your publication as long as you credit the author Fernando Samaniego
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