BANFF – Telling trends from fads is too often a mugs game. A peek at Amazon suggests that a book on trends seems to be written every 15 minutes and at times, here in Banff, it was frequently difficult to parse true trends from professional aspiration or wishful thinking.
But we did get some glimpses.
Canadians have over 600 television services to choose from, and one in four of us is a four screen consumer (TV, tablet, PC, phone) and the emerging bias to enhanced pick-and-pay was viewed by many as heralding more investment in programming to survive in a world of marketing and branding determinism. (In a pick-and-pay world, viewers must have a reason to pick, and pay.)
According to folks like Colette Watson, VP Rogers Media Television, each Canadian network will now need three or four tent pole programs to fulfill its brand promise. Plus, everyone is predicting the culling and failure of weaker TV services. Indeed, both Bell Media and Shaw Media anticipate that three of their channels may topple and Rogers is looking at one as a minimum.
CTV will be out partner shopping for the likes of Mark Burnett and placing unedited video of such things as "The Great Race" on CraveTV. What most Canadian TV execs see as a trend is that shows will now need at least one million viewers, or be declared failures.
Christine Shipton, SVP and chief creative officer at Shaw, sees much of today's trends as having their genesis three years ago, when Canadian Programming Expenditure (CPE) rules changed. Shipton adds that without genre protection, all channel brands will soon require big hits to survive.
Citytv will be driving hard at more event programming, and building on their relationship with Vice as an online brand — with a new Vice channel to be launched next year.
The CBC, reports Jennifer Dettman, Executive Director, has already been pulling back from infrastructure & bricks and mortar to pump more cash into content — Book of Negros being her case in point.
What concerns me with this kind on "trend analysis" is that it isn't actually about trends.
Too often what passes for trends is really thinking that locks us into a linear approach to progress… and it often stifles innovation.
The one modest exception at Banff appears to be the CBC. Dettman can't afford to perpetuate an extension of the same old thing and hope the future pans out, so the Corp is launching a neat search for the next big format, a kind of format incubator they announced in Banff, and hope to be in pilot mode three years hence.
This, along with new CBC arts branding across their digital channels is at least different.
Other structural "trends" we observed: Conventional 30 second advertising spots have been declining for years (wicked PVR!) and that will accelerate. These will increasingly be replaced by advertisers being part of content development, and marketing product in lifestyle and attribute terms — much as Red Bull does now with its own studio and branded programming.
"The CRTC’s hypothesis – that less is more and therefore we have a better shot at global content treasure by making fewer, better, shows – still has some explaining to do."
To complement this, ad agencies are trending to offer production budgets and financing for content that works for clients.
Of course all of this begs another question regarding trends: If ad revenue is down, if pick and pay means culling, if BDUs run the system and make their money off distribution (roughly 40% of their EBITDA), if carriage drives the business not content, yet the CRTC predicts a new world of bigger indie production budgets in the $3 to 4 million per episode range – how exactly does that future come together?
The CRTC’s hypothesis – that less is more and therefore we have a better shot at global content treasure by making fewer, better, shows – still has some explaining to do.
One standard may be that BDUs pay 5% into the CMF, so BDU success fuels production and rights creation for programming across devices that follow the consumer. But that will be less of a trend and more of a smokescreen if independent producers are denied those intellectual property rights.
Again, we're still in the zone of "trends" that don't really indicate patterns in information that help us media types predict future events with any certainty or anticipate true change.
Nobody at Banff told me that Lego was going to harness 3-D printing and allow downloading of their little blocks!
What we can say, thanks to researchers like Catalina Briceno, Director of Industry and Market Trends at the CMF, is that the era upon us is one of two worlds, the big vs. the agile.
We will have more choices, but those choices will face shorter attention spans. Yes, there will be lower cost to entry but we will experience a new acceleration of ownership concentration.
The future is paradox.
Perhaps television will follow the model of gaming, where giants have emerged and smaller players (game creators in the $3 to 4 million range) have had to create indie consortia to survive.
And what about those indulgent, indulged, millennials? Those 16 to 34 year olds who have helped radio listenership free fall by 31% between 2000-2012.
Nearly 60% of them now get their news exclusively online. These kids don't see the "webiverse" as technology, they see it as normal and organic: It's not technology if it was there when you were born!
For better or worse, there are now more subscribers to the Internet than to cable in North America and that same Internet is now populated with more multinational corporations than ever – along with a globalization of tastes and a minimization of cultural distinctiveness.
Trends are there for sure, but we need more rigour around trend analysis in our business, in my view.
Trends are distinct from novelties if they are useful, have broad application, and mesh with other trends. But we also need to ask — useful to who?
Or as Dr. Seuss once said, "My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends.”
