BANFF – There are two conferences here – and I suspect Marshall McLuhan would be giddy at the contrast.
(For those who don’t know, McLuhan is the pointy head Canadian who claimed advertising was worthy of academic and prescient study as an indicator of future societal and cultural behaviour.)
One conference here at the Banff World Media Festival would still be recognizable to attendees of the Pat Ferns' era Banff TV Festival (CEO of the gathering from 1995-2004). It seems modern only in its resentment that online video ad spending in Canada will outpace every other ad platform including TV for the foreseeable future.
The other conference is from the land of Oz.
Canadian broadcasters are still lamenting modest growth in ad revenue and bitching that hackers in the basement can't be allowed to call the TV shots as happened to the music world.
Yes, there are some fun and encouraging stories: all CTV's Canadian content is coming back; Corus sees domestic content as "strategic" and wants to see less "same old" but bigger swings and bigger chances taken with Cancon and it has a nifty new series "The Audience" that takes a riff on crowd-sourcing (e.g. unscripted actors pretend to be the parents on a come-meet-my-parents-weekend but Mom and Dad are devil worshippers and the crowd problem-solves) and; bless their bureaucracy, the CBC is looking for more drama with location as a main character as per "Republic of Doyle".
Oh yes, and then there's Oz, aka NextMedia, the conference going on down the hall. These folks make the TV conference look like Sleepy Hollow.
For these millennials, crowd-sourcing and user-generation are both old news. They live in a Canada where 92% of us over 14 years of age watched video online last year, a "higher percentage than anywhere in the world except Argentina" (says eMarketer) and that's a good thing!
But being pumped on the future is not without stretch marks and even the top media and creative agencies have Advil worries. Franke Rodriguez, for example, president of Anomaly Canada, is all about simply connecting good stories to brands.
Brands are looking for stickiness with consumers and viewers, and he wants to get those users to download his client's brands or go to the brand website.
Ten years ago the media or creative services remit was: spend the entire ad budget and move on, while today it's all about investing scarce monetary resources and the return on investment; with ideas as the only differentiating asset left.
Back in the TV conference everyone is meeting and strategizing and planning more meetings – and nobody seems to notice that of the top 100 videos on YouTube, none are from conventional television.
But here in Oz, the digital ecology morphs so quickly there's no time for meetings let alone strategy; and TV is a word being erased by "Torrent" and "OTT". Moreover in Oz it's your smarts and not the regulator that counts.
Globally, says Fred Forster, CEO of Omnicom, there's a race to the bottom with lower cost spends and less regional marketing messages being developed. New York, London, Tokyo, LA (where the ad buying decisions are made), all seem to think that a global approach hits audience targets cheaply and they bless "the rise of the machines" (hello, Big Data) to help them do it.
And those metro-suits might be right. Marketing Magazine recently reviewed the top 100 brands in Canada and found Canadian Tire was the top Canuck at 5th followed by Shoppers Drug Mart at 8th. The rest of the top ten were Yankee brands.
So what does all this mean? Will future work just be versioning of U.S. campaigns?
It seems to me that Oz and the TV folk need to get intensely intimate. Just look at that global brand Budweiser and their insightfully Canadian hockey approach to our market, complete with the red goal light! (Incidentally, Bud’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch InBev, also owns Canadian brand Labatt Breweries)
Canada is the perfect petri dish for broadcasters and onliners to cluster and curb the mechanical and overly tested and testy global approach… and with domestic content and commercial success fitting glove in hand. Television is no longer a scarce resource as it once was, and that dictates a certain economic reality of supply and demand.
The Oz types apparently understand how to work this multitude of new streams and platforms while the TV model of content interrupted by brand ads is going, going, gone. While that ebbs, the Oz mob is figuring out binge consumption of programs and OTT content without commercial interruption; and they're making an increasingly good living doing so.
Conventional broadcasters are still dealing with 25-54 year old metrics of success, and old-think BBM data gathering; while Annette Warring, president of Aegis Media, the global media and digital communications specialist company, is doing real-time archeology on consumer/viewer identities with much more granular outcomes.
Unless these two conferences get steamy with each other (washrooms here are exactly half-way down the hall) broadcasters will at best limp along.
Just take a peek at what Apple and Google have in-hand as they excitedly build-out from data to devices.
Hey, maybe Banff is just the right McLuhan-esque lubricant.
Former ZoomerMedia TV president and CEO Bill Roberts is covering the Banff World Media Festival as a reporter/commentator for Cartt.ca.
