Rob Norman, Global Chief Digital Officer for GroupM, recently spoke at Industry Preview 2016 in January. He said, “If privacy and the policies that create an advantage for some are reexamined and unbundled the extended ecosystems of targeting, ad deployment and attribution are going to start to look like a Swiss cheese. They will be full of holes with bells on. Real context – and this is good for the publishers and the creators of content – I think will rise in value.”
Given that digital advertising on the wider web is the least trusted form of advertising and that increasing numbers of consumers are boycotting it altogether, Norman’s point is correct: context is key. For advertisers and publishers, delivering relevant advertising within an appropriate context is going to rise in value.
But, just as importantly, context is key to meeting consumer expectations. When a consumer’s data is collected and used only to enhance their experience within a single website or experience, they are much more likely to trust that site. Unfortunately, consumer trust is low today. As noted in TRUSTe’s 2016 Consumer Confidence Index, “74% (of consumers) have limited their online activity due to privacy concerns.”
In recent years, public policymakers have called on industry to give more controls to consumers over how their data is collected and used – in short, to respect context. President Obama’s Privacy Bill of Rights framework noted that “consumers have a right to expect that companies will collect, use, and disclose personal data in ways that are consistent with the context in which consumers provide the data.” To the extent that a consumer’s personal data will be used outside the context where it was collected or for reasons not disclosed at the time of collection, the President called on companies to provide transparency and choice to the consumer.
In 2012, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a report, entitled “Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change.” The FTC’s report noted that “whether a practice requires choice turns on the extent to which the practice is consistent with the context of the transaction or the consumer’s existing relationship with the business…”
This much is clear: consumers are not happy. As noted by TRUSTe, they are taking active steps to limit their online activity. And without transparency and meaningful controls, they are downloading ad blocking software in record numbers. Even advertisers are not happy because there is little transparency about where their ads are being shown and whether they are being shown to actual humans.
Our industry needs to do more to provide transparency and meaningful tools for consumers to express choice. By respecting context in this way, we can improve consumer trust in the digital ecosystem.
In kicking off the 2016 Digital Content Next members-only Summit, CEO Jason Kint set the tone for a year marked by customer-driven innovation and a trust-based digital content industry.
“I believe that our brands at DCN are in the best position to shape what is next for digital media. Why? What’s unique about our brands? Well, as you know: We are all content companies. To be a member of DCN, you have to be in the business of creating digital content. Importantly—very importantly—we’re also not tied to one specific revenue stream. We’re not just advertising. We have the ability to adapt, to evolve over time, to test out new models and flow with digital media…”
Watch Kint’s opening remarks from this private, members-only event held February 1-3, 2016 at the Mandarin Oriental in Miami Florida:
Without knowing you very well, I’d be willing to guess you split a majority of leisure time online between two activities: sifting through content and flirting with ordering something online. I know I do…
We’re constantly clicking in and out of content. Just about every search result that isn’t an ad points to an article containing the information we seek. The article itself is surrounded by even more links pointing to more content. Our social feeds are basically news feeds, at this point. The sites we visit out of habit usually include a few blogs. Somehow, at some point during the day, we end up on YouTube. And I haven’t even mentioned “Netflix and chill” or Spotify.
Then there’s Amazon. Should we just designate one tab that’s always open for Amazon so we can get literally whatever our heart desires at the click of a mouse?
We spend so much time doing both, brands are trying to figure out how to leverage one to drive the other (we sometimes refer to this practice as content marketing. Heard of it?). Well doing so first requires an understanding that browsing content and browsing products are very similarly behaviors.
When people are browsing—whether it’s a bookstore, online retail, or their Facebook feed—they’re subconsciously waiting to come across something that catches their attention. Something that makes them stop in their tracks for a second because it’s intriguing. Their curiosity is piqued.
And it turns out the same triggers appear across a range of experiences: the element of surprise and the element of familiarity.
Two sides of the same coin The element of surprise makes sense as a trigger. To be surprised is to be awakened out of our daily slumber by something we deem remarkable.
In the bookstore example, we might stop in our tracks purely because a book cover strikes us as remarkable. Since we didn’t know it existed before we saw it, we’re surprised, and then intrigued. For at least a few seconds, we want to know more.
In digital content, the remarkable often announces itself in a headline. Sometimes, it’s a fraction of a headline, like trending keywords on Twitter. It’s easy to make fun of the kinds of headlines we’re talking about, but then again, we all continue to engage with, laugh at, and share them with our friends.
In fact, the magnet that draws us to the sites that form our daily habits—the Facebooks, Twitters, Buzzfeeds, CNNs—is usually this expectation of surprise. We know we’re going to see different stories or items every time, we just don’t know what they’ll be. The cycle becomes familiar… and it’s one we’re quite happy to repeat.
It turns, out this is an incredibly natural intersection for commerce to enter into.
For what is eCommerce if not the art of piquing curiosity and then removing all barriers to exploration until the clicks turn into a sale?
Inducing curiosity One of the first jobs in eCommerce is to induce curiosity about the product for sale. And one of the best ways to do that is to eliminate any barriers to curiosity.
Those barriers would be things like a site that looks cluttered or disorganized and tends to overwhelm consumers. Or a site that looks 20 years old and turns people off as soon as they enter.
As the business owner, you ensure some basics: You make sure your site is welcoming and modern-looking. You have your products appear against a white background to really make the products pop off the page. You merchandize them in an orderly fashion on a grid. You don’t want them to appear cluttered, so you leave a decent amount of white space around each product. You make the navigation really simple but descriptive so people can browse in an informed way.
eCommerce shares all these principles in common with engaging content; you want it to be welcoming, you want it to look modern, you leave plenty of white space, and you use simple but descriptive navigation to keep people engaged when they’re ready for the next piece of information. That includes “recommended” items as well.
If you think about it, recommendations are really just a way to navigate to the next page in an informed way. In eCommerce, that finds expression in, “You just looked at this item, so you might be even more interested in this similar item you didn’t know I had.” And in the content world, that finds expression in, “Because you watched that on Netflix, you might want to watch this tonight.” The recommendation engine’s job is take what you’ve familiarized yourself with and turn it into the next surprise.
For that reason, just about every page of every eCommerce site should be equipped with this recommendation mechanism. It keeps people interested. It delivers surprise. And it becomes a familiar part of the consumer journey.
If a user lands on your blog, suggest a product relevance (even if there isn’t an obvious one). Point them to an even better blog post. Use your newsletter as a curated cross-section of both your content and your products. Repeatedly. Until it becomes a familiar surprise for your audience.
Given the opportunity, your customers may yet surprise with how they respond.
Brandon Carter is a Content Specialist at Outbrain (@brandedcarter @Outbrain). He began his career as a staff journalist for the Maine weekly ‘The Coastal Journal’ before moving to New York and joining the product licensing divisions of Peanuts Worldwide and Sesame Workshop.
We all know the narrative that older media brands are struggling to reinvent themselves for the digital age, while upstarts have the advantage of being “digital natives” with no legacy burden. But what about the older “digital native” brands such as AOL and Yahoo? Looks like they might end up having an even more difficult road ahead.
Take the recent quarterly and year-end earnings reports from the New York Times and Yahoo. While the Times saw strength in digital subscriptions and native advertising, Yahoo struggled to deal with massive layoffs and “digital magazines” that weren’t gaining momentum. While both are considering streamlining their organizations, Yahoo has to take much more drastic measures.
Digital growth at the Times At the Times, digital-only subscriptions grew 20% from the previous year profits were up nearly 50% from last year’s quarter. Print circulation, meanwhile, decreased by 6.9% for the daily and 4.4% for the Sunday edition, but circulation revenues were up 1.3% in the quarter due to an increase in delivery prices. When it comes to ad revenue, print decreased by 6.6% whereas digital increased by 10.6%. A growing strength, however, is mobile ads, which were up 74% in the quarter, making up 22% of all digital ad revenue (which itself is now 24% of all ad revenues).
CEO Mark Thompson said the Times’ T Brand Studio, which produces sponsored content, has become “a meaningful part of the business,” hinting at its importance in long-term strategic growth plans.
The results came the same day executive editor Dean Baquet sent an internal memo announcing an overhaul of the Times’ structure and strategy. “Does our system of powerful desks help us cover big stories that don’t easily have a home—like climate change and education—or does it sometimes get in the way? We deeply value the craft of editing, but in the digital era should we continue to edit every update of every story at the same level?”
The “desks” he’s referring to are the traditional Metro, National, International and other broadly named desks that help classify Times coverage—and thereby newsroom resources. Baquet revealed in the memo that he had asked David Leaonhardt, a recently named columnist and one of the founding editors of The Upshot, to help him examine the current newsroom structure and any necessary changes.
Yahoo’s retrenchment Meanwhile, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is feeling an even bigger burden of change, especially in the face of dwindling prospects nearly four years into the job. Yahoo’s loss in the quarter was $4.4 billion because of a write-down from investments that didn’t pay off. Without that charge, the company actually earned 13 cents a share. Compared to Google’s 31.9% profit margin in the fourth quarter, Yahoo’s profit margin was an embarrassing 2%. It’s now planning to close down five offices, and its board announced it was looking at “strategic alternatives” (in other words, a potential sale).
It doesn’t help that one way of streamlining costs—laying off 15% of Yahoo’s workforce—adds to a brain drain already taking place at the company. The New York Times reported in January that more than a third of the workforce has left in the last year, prompting Mayer to approve “hefty retention packages” to prevent people from taking job offers elsewhere. Yet most recently, entrepreneur Arjun Sethi, who helped Yahoo compete in the field of mobile chat apps, announced he was leaving.
Much of the criticism toward Yahoo is that its vision was poor from the start. “It’s very, ‘We’ll try this, we’ll try that, we’ll throw a bunch of money at that thing without a clear, coherent strategy around it,’” Jan Dawson, chief analyst at Jackdaw Research, told the Los Angles Times.
The problem with Yahoo is that its expectations are higher in the digital-native space, having to compete with the likes of Facebook, Google on the platform side and BuzzFeed and Vox on the content side. The New York Times has figured out that an older brand can succeed online with the right revenue mix: mobile ads, native ads, subscriptions and memberships. It’s not going to be easy, but they have certainly built up trust and credibility over the years.
While the ceiling is so much higher for ambitious digital natives, the bottom is so much lower when things go sour.
Ad blocking has forced the publishing industry to rethink its reliance on advertising, and several digital publishers have incorporated ecommerce and affiliate links as a way to diversify their revenue streams. Now, those same ecommerce links, previously considered immune to ad blockers, are the “latest unlikely casualty of ad blocking,” according to a recent article from Digiday.
While Purch’s ecommerce or facilitated ecommerce links haven’t been tangibly impacted, ad blocking – and this particular type – is forcing all publishers to rethink monetization strategy and user experience.
The Digiday article quotes Sean Blanchfield, CEO of PageFair, a startup that sells anti-ad blocking tech to publishers as stating, “There are no privacy or usability implications to e-commerce attribution; it is a simple practice that helps websites get paid for honest recommendations of products….it causes unnecessary financial damage to thousands of independent websites.”
There is a valid point here. The impetus behind ad blocking was to prevent disruption and irrelevant noise on a page so the user could focus on the content. Yet, unlike most ads, ecommerce links are often directly correlated to the content provided on the page – and in the best cases enhance the user’s experience. Ad blockers have gone too far with targeting these ecommerce links, but this doesn’t mean digital publishers should panic. It means they should pivot – diversifying even further and providing additional value to users.
Increase loyalty by improving the user experience Publishers should concentrate on building the lifetime value of a user (the total future potential) by exploring other ways to provide a better experience to keep them coming back. Creating valuable and relevant services, tools and content that serves the overall relationship is what will ultimately sustain the industry. Publishers who take a longer view by focusing on increasing the number of loyal users instead of increasing the number of page views and maximizing the yield of every interaction will not only end up winning against ad blockers; they will end up winning over users.
Some publishers are doing this in the most simplistic way – creating a highly-engaged and loyal audience by providing real value through highly specialized content. Focusing less on scale and more on quality can engage users for the long-term, while staying true to the sentiment behind “content is king.”
Another way to increase the lifetime value of a user is to design a loyalty program that recognizes and rewards the most engaged, frequent and long-term users, who often drive a large percentage of overall revenue. Some of the more experimental publishers may even offer an ad-free or ad-reduced experience to their most loyal users – or as an incentive to share their email address. This could persuade users to turn off ad blockers, especially as they become increasingly non-discriminative in discerning what’s true content and what’s not.
Engineer an ecosystem of services to regain control of audience interactions With ad blockers ultimately dictating how a user experiences a publisher’s site, we’re likely to see the industry test new ways to regain control of how their audiences are interacting with content. Publishers specializing in travel have also excelled at this. TripAdvisor, Kayak and Bookings.com offer reviews and advice to aid their users during the research phase and when the consumer is ready, they can book everything they need, all within the confines of a single site and in a way that is untouchable to ad blockers. This model is not only diverse, but also encourages loyalty by providing a truly “sticky” service to users.
Not all of this has to be built organically. Resourceful publishers will also look for complimentary technologies or services and integrate those with their sites – or their mobile apps. Mobile apps are also a great way to re-claim control over the user experience and how ecommerce links and ads are integrated. The best part? Ad blocking apps that block ads within mobile apps have been rejected by app stores which means publishers are likely to retain control of their mobile experiences for the foreseeable future.
The future of digital publishing Our peer group – the digital influencers coming up today – are likely to redefine the industry, and probably won’t even see ourselves as just “publishers” in the years to come as focus shifts to revenue augmentation through services and alternate models.
Unfortunately, it seems likely that 2016 will be an arms race between ad blockers and blockers of ad blockers. There will be no clear winner with one clear loser: the user. Users lose as ad blockers continue to take away the very control that attracted them to their tools in the first place. The important thing is to keep our focus on the customer relationship and move toward a future where a better user experience trumps short-term monetary gains.
Phil Barrett is a Digital Marketing and eCommerce Executive with experience managing cross-channel programs where he has helped companies and brands use technology and new media to drive measurable results across the marketing mix. He currently serves as Senior Vice President & GM at Purch, where he leads the Marketing & Shopper Services teams.
With audiences widely dispersed among mobile and social apps – and, soon, virtual reality and augmented reality experiences– publishers who want to thrive must both follow consumers where they want to go and meet them on their own terms.
These were a couple of the themes that emerged from the wide-ranging conversations at Digital Content Next’s annual members-only Summit 2016 in Miami. DCN members met to explore content and business models given that consumption patterns are constantly changing, many consumers are actively avoiding advertising, and digital intermediaries are extracting much of the value out of the publishing economy. Speakers and attendees talked about changing their relationship with programmatic ad marketplaces, seeking alternative sources of revenue from subscriptions and memberships, and aggressively pursuing revenue diversification.
In his opening remarks, DCN CEO Jason Kint noted that although the Interactive Advertising Bureau recently celebrated the milestone of $50 billion in revenue generated by online advertising, more than 50% of the revenue currently goes to two companies: Google and Facebook, with premium publishers collectively garnering about 15%.
“Most of the money doesn’t actually get into your pocket to pay for the professional content, the entertainment and journalism you all do,” Kint said. DCN’s mission is “to make sure the next $50 billion is different.”
Premium publishers need to build on the trust and reputation they enjoy, rather than fighting with consumers over their use of ad blockers, Kint said, pointing out that a blockers are a symptom of consumer dissatisfaction. Smart publishers need to look at the opportunity “in the growth of this audience that is looking for content on new terms.”
“It’s a symptom of a bad user experience – users taking action on their own,” agreed Justen Fox, senior product manager for revenue products at Vox Media. Consumers are weary of pop-up and pop-under ads, not to mention advertising that contains malware. He finds that the use of ad blockers is higher with social and referral traffic, undermining audience acquisition, and said it’s also higher with returning visitors to Vox’s websites. If publishers and advertisers fail to clean up their act, the problem will keep getting worse, he said.
“Focusing on the user experience is actually the long-term solution,” Fox said. However, no publisher can do it alone because consumer impressions are formed by the experience they get across all media sites.
Sarah Frank, executive producer of Now This News, said that killing their website and forgetting about SEO is the best decision they ever made. It gave them the mandate to create content experiences optimized for different social channels so that consumers have a great experience wherever they find Now This content.
Marketers take action Meanwhile, marketers seeking to distinguish themselves from the bad actors in digital media are increasingly creating their own content to build positive customer relationships—with or without the help of publishers.
(L-R) Dave Peck, Global Head of Influencer & Social Media Marketing, PayPal; Katrina Craigwell, Director, Global Content & Programming, GE; Christopher G. Laughlin, Client Services Director, SapientNitro; and Laura Henderson, Global Head of Content & Media Monetization, Mondelez International
“We’re trying to figure out, how we stop interrupting the content and become the content,” said Laura Henderson, global head of content and media monetization at Mondelez International.
Her group has gone as far as to decide the content it creates ought to be good enough to make money on its own merits. One of the products from this division of Kraft Foods, the Oreo Twist, Lick, Dunk mobile game, made back 2.5 times the money spent to produce it, with about 5 billion virtual Oreo cookies dunked, Henderson said.
Like publishers, marketers “feel the pain of ad blocking, of our content being skipped, blocked, avoided at all costs – which means we need to figure out a new way,” she said.
Katrina Craigwell, director of global content and programming at GE, leads a team dedicated to connecting with lovers of science and technology on any medium or platform where they can be found. These content creators compare themselves less with their traditional industrial competitors than with media sites that create engaging tech content, be it the SyFy Channel or the people at NASA who produced the “7 Minutes of Terror” Mars lander video.
Asked if she had any use for publishers now that GE can publish its own content, Craigwell said she looks for partners who know how to tell a great story or can help the firm figure out an approach to emerging formats, such as virtual reality.
Building brand strength Many of the discussions of how publishers adapted concerned how they preserve their brand value while adapting to new business and content delivery models. The Onion Chief Operating Officer Kurt Mueller said that is something the satire site has had to be careful about with its experiments in native advertising: content is sponsored by advertisers but produced by the editorial staff.
The challenge is readers expect a certain attitude from Onion content, “and if we don’t give it to them, it comes off really badly for both us and the brand. You’re just creating ads if it’s not authentic to what you are,” Mueller said.
Laura Evans, VP of audience development and data science at Scripps Networks Interactive pointed out that data offers an excellent way to understand customer preferences, which can be leveraged to create better experiences. The goal, said Evans, is to “turn a visitor into a brand loyalist.”
As Membership Economy author, Robbie Kellman Baxter put it, “you need to love your customer more than your product” in order to create a positive relationship that will last a lifetime. And, as DCN CEO Kint pointed out in his opening remarks, “No business has succeeded, long term, without giving its customers a great experience.”
David F. Carr is a writer, editor, web consultant, and student of digital business. He is a Forbes contributor, a former InformationWeek Editor-at-Large, and the author of Social Collaboration for Dummies.
Back in the 1990s in the early days of the World Wide Web, media companies created websites, sensing that distribution was changing, even if they didn’t completely understand it. At the time that meant creating content for print or broadcast and then after some period of time dumping it onto the website. Today, those delivery silos are gone and editorial and product work side by side in a symbiotic relationship, moving the content wherever it needs to be in whatever format makes most sense.
That sounds obvious enough, but in reality even the most successful digital media companies haven’t figured it all out. It’s hard to do when new delivery methods turn up all the time. That’s why organizations that have made a successful transition to digital like CNN, The Washington Post and the New York Times are constantly experimenting.
They understand that none of this is fixed in time, and whatever you think you know about digital delivery, it’s probably going to change.
Giving the user control Understanding that change is constant, media companies strive to deliver that content wherever the user happens to be. That could be a SnapChat story, SMS headline alert, sharing a story on Facebook or the new Facebook Instant, accessing content on the company’s mobile website or via a company app.
“My sense is that we’ve optimized operations so that news is the driver and then we distribute it to where and how people are consuming the news,” says Alex Wellen, chief product officer at CNN. The tech and editorial voice needs to meet consumers where they are, he explained.
Julia Beizer, who is director of product at The Washington Post says for her publication, it’s a marriage of technology and content including embedding 100 engineers in their building and bringing on new writers over the last couple of years who understand the cadence of online writing. After that, it’s a matter of developing those products and services alongside editorial to deliver content to multiple delivery channels.
Putting the content in context The Post must be doing something right. comScore reported that it had an all-time high of 76 million monthly digital users in December. Beizer says one of the reasons for that success is that they have been paying attention to what people want in their digital content, and it’s not always bite-sized chunks.
“One of the early misplaced assumptions around mobile was that mobile users are standing in line waiting for coffee. A lot of people are doing that, but a lot of people are on their couches at home too. Research shows upwards of 70 percent are at home,” she said. She adds that in that context the idea that people only want snackable content doesn’t hold true.
Then there’s the on-going battle of developing apps versus building a good mobile website. As with everything else, there is room for both and it depends on your goals — engagement or views.
Consider that in its study of apps versus mobile websites between June 2014 and June 2015, comScore found people used mobile websites twice as often as mobile apps. While both boasted impressive year over year growth, apps were growing at 21% year over year with the mobile web showing 42% growth.
The important thing to remember is that this isn’t about rigid choices: Each channel has its own purpose. Mobile web is about single engagements, while a consumer using a mobile app tends to be constantly engaged with the brand. Wellen points out that they see four times the engagement on mobile apps, but the mobile web has six times the audience of their apps, so you can’t choose one over the other.
What the app demonstrates is loyalty to your media brand. As a brand, you can learn what the consumer likes and there is an explicit relationship between the two that you don’t necessarily have on the mobile web, comScore’s VP for marketing and insights, Andrew Lipman explained.
The desktop lives on Yet even while we have all of these new digital delivery channels, the oldest one, the desktop, still lives, even as PC sales are plunging. The most recent IDC numbers for the 2015 fourth quarter show PC sales down over 10%, but Lipman says it’s a mistake to think of the various channels as a zero sum game. He points out that lots of people access content on their PCs at work or laptops wherever they happen to be (and those are still technically PCs).
“This is one of the biggest misconceptions I see out there. Often in the media, it gets framed as a zero sum game. Since the clear winner in recent term is mobile, then desktop must be the loser,” he said. In reality, they both have importance and it depends on what the audience needs to access your content at any given moment in any particular channel.
It’s clear that companies that have successful digital strategies are always looking for new ways to engage with the audience, even while continuing to develop the older ones. As Beizer points out, when she started at the Washington Post 40% of the people on mobile were accessing their content on a BlackBerry. That’s obviously changed and it’s constantly changed.
That keeps things interesting for folks working on digital products inside media companies. “It would be boring if we had it all figured out,” she said.
Ron Miller is a Freelance Technology Journalist and blogger. He is enterprise reporter at TechCrunch and Contributing Editor at EContent Magazine.
I am not a millennial. But, I can’t escape them as a marketer.
The lion’s share of my co-workers are millennials, and every brand I touch wants to figure out how to “engage millennials.” So, irrespective of the hundreds of articles, surveys, polls and white papers I’ve collected and read on how to engage with millennials, you can imagine my shock when I begrudgingly shook it off at the Taylor Swift concert this summer and unexpectedly found my “aha.”
I went into Taylor Swift’s concert kicking and screaming. I knew one song, and even that wasn’t on my playlist. Yet from the moment I walked through the turnstiles, Taylor offered up a truly engaging experience.
We talk a lot about driving fanaticism with our clients and how fanaticism is the ultimate form of engagement. But it can only happen when the right storytelling tactics are put into play to make the listener (aka your target consumer) want to continue the conversation.
What Taylor Swift taught me is that there are really three simple rules of engagement:
1. Make them ask, “What’s next?” – A glow-in-the-dark bracelet was slapped on my wrist when my ticket was scanned—ooh, mystery; I was intrigued! I took my seat and was surrounded by screaming fans (of all ages, surprisingly) that were talking about whom Taylor’s surprise guests would be that night. Boom—I was even more intrigued (turned out to be Nick Jonas and her “squad” of Super Models). Then the stadium went dark, the crowd erupted, and suddenly there were twinkly lights as far as the eye could see. It was magical. I quickly realized they were coming from the bracelets, and I couldn’t help it…I started cheering, too. I couldn’t wait to see what happened next. And that’s when it hit me—I was truly engaged.
How can this translate to your media property? Look at your programming calendar and figure out how you can create suspense around upcoming content, a series launch or new digital initiative. For example, if you plan to unveil a new content strategy this year, figure out a way to tease the theme and involve your audience via social conversations, tweets, use of hashtags, etc. In the past we’ve launched new season offerings using a “look book” strategy that hints at what is to come—sparking speculation and fan-driven conversation This tactic builds a groundswell of buzz and helps generate interest pre-launch.
2. Let go – While Taylor’s set may have been the same night after night across her world tour, you can tell from her Instagram (62 million followers strong) just how different each concert was. Crowd interaction, audience response and the volume of cheers led to how she revealed and brought her special guest stars to the stage. Surprise and delight layers fueled real-time social sharing; I saw fans posting feverishly to Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook in the moment. Taylor framed the narrative, but then let the story unfold in a participatory, two-way format. It was living proof that if you allow your target to contribute to the story versus just asking them to listen, you end up with a much richer, more generative story.
How can this translate to your media property? If your brand isn’t currently leveraging user-generated content, figure out ways to involve your audience through contests and rewards-based initiatives that are more than simply offering free product. Reward your audience with experiences, like access to upfronts or sneak previews, at which your brand sits in the center.
3. Be a part of their life, not just a brand –Taylor’s diatribes between sets were a bit much for this GenXer; however, I watched in amazement as she waxed philosophical about owning independence and self-validation. As many around me were crying and laughing or screaming, “I love you, Taylor!” I thought, “Wow, how can a brand harness this power?” Then I realized that she commanded this reaction because most of the audience felt like they knew Taylor on a personal level—that she was truly a part of their lives because of the media and her social footprint.
How can this translate to your media property? Craft your property narrative and then support that story with content and social posts that reinforce the role you play in your audience’s lifestyle. For example, in our work for Bugaboo strollers, all of our key messages ladder back to the emotional pull between a mother and wanting to do what is best for her baby. We tug at her heartstrings by positioning Bugaboo not just as a stroller, but as a baby’s first set of wheels.
Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought Taylor Swift could impact my thinking around engagement. Where I netted out is that it’s not something you can dictate or force. You can strategize and plan and put a smart offering in place that has all the makings to stir engagement. But real engagement happens where the head meets the heart.
A senior-level strategist with over 20 years of experience, Jarrod Walpert has overseen strategic communications, brand planning and creative ideation for some of today’s most influential brands including Kashi, Newcastle/Heineken, SodaStream, Honest Tea, Pottery Barn, 16 Handles and Black & Decker.
In addition to developing multichannel strategies that merge digital, PR, content and experiential programming, he helps brands develop their master narrative and build engaging marketing/comms plans.
The promise of the “smart TV” is that it will do much more than just provide a guide for channels—that it can personalize our experience, serve up the channels we want, connect us to the Internet, add in streaming options and more. And the more connected it becomes, the more chance for advertisers and publishers to target users with messages and content.
While the smart TV hype has outshined reality so far, the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Vegas brought some potential good news for smarter TVs.
The Korean electronics giant LG, for example, is adding more than 50 streaming channels to its latest generation of smart TVs. Switching from cable networks to streaming content from publishers such as BuzzFeed, Wired and the Wall Street Journal is now as easy as the click of a button. LG partnered with the startup Xumo to fuse Internet content into television’s traditional environment, and partnered with Watchmi, a German Internet video startup, to give 300 more international streaming channels to its new TVs.
Samsung also announced new features at CES, positioning its products at the center of the Internet of Things ecosystem. The ability for its smart TVs to recognize add-on boxes such as an Xbox is one such boon. It makes the life of a consumer a lot less complicated because it eliminates the need for any extra remote controls, as the main remote control can commandeer these other devices.
Streaming updates Sling TV, the live streaming service introduced at last year’s CES, announced this year that it’s planning to overhaul its app entirely. Its new app will allow consumers to easily identify their “must-see TV.” Viewers will also have the option to store their shows for up to three days in the cloud, and navigate recommendations provided by Sling on what to view next. And let’s not forget that streaming behemoth Netflix activated its service in more than 130 countries during a CES keynote address.
But beyond the hype at CES and the positive attributes of smart TV are some of its pitfalls. One big one is that for all the bells and whistles these TVs offer, few people take advantage of them. The market research company NPD estimated in an August report that “roughly a third of smart TVs in the U.S. weren’t actually connected to the Internet.” In comparison, the number of Americans using streaming devices such as Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV is climbing even faster than the number using smart TVs (and their functions), according to researchers at the Parks Associates.
And that’s because these different devices are solid competition for smart TVs. “If you’re a streaming media box (maker), you’ve got much more ability to push new features out into the market at an affordable price,” Barbara Kraus, Parks Associates’ director of research, told the Associated Press.
Overcoming ambivalence The influx of more apps on these devices could put a strain on the popularity of smart TVs if they don’t institute them as well. Ali Kani, general manager for Nvidia’s Shield Android TV device, said that while smart TVs satisfy the need to watch video, the future living room will be “revolutionized by apps.”
Underscoring this and the general ambivalence about smart TVs is the simple fact that new technology gets old pretty quickly as even newer technology emerges. If companies such as Samsung put new features only in its latest generation of products and don’t state whether older smart TVs will ever get this new technology, it leaves consumers hanging, and not in a good way.
This applies to the “so-called ultra high-definition 4K television” as well, according to the New York Times’ personal tech columnist Brian X. Chen. He argues that given its expense and the underwhelming digital enhancements meant to come with this kind of high-definition television, it’s not in the consumer’s best interest to buy. Topping that off is the dearth of quality programming average viewers would want to see, including arguably America’s most popular show, “Game of Thrones.”
“My advice: Wait at least another year or two before buying it,” Chen wrote.
Perhaps that’s a good piece of wisdom all prospective smart TV owners ought to take. Not to mention any publishers hoping to make a splash in the added streaming channels on smart TVs.
