TORONTO – As the new generation of multimedia consumers demands increasingly faster and broader access to interactive content, the creators and distributors of that content are struggling to keep up.
At the same time, marketers are wrestling with how to capitalize on branding opportunities presented by the myriad content delivery channels now available to consumers.
“The consumer has taken control,” said Brent Lowe-Bernie, president of comScore Media Metrix Canada, speaking at last week’s Interactive Content Exchange 2007 (ICE 07) conference held in Toronto.
“Consumers are totally platform agnostic – they don’t care, they will consume the content available,” Lowe-Bernie said.
In many ways, this is turning the whole marketing industry upside down, he said. “What has changed in the last three years is there are more ways for consumers to be exposed to a brand message, and there are more ways for media to come at them – and more noise, if you want.”
Giving a quick snapshot of Internet user trends in Canada in the past year, Lowe-Bernie said time spent online by users consuming multimedia content specifically, grew a staggering 469% — that represents an increase of 80 minutes on average per unique visitor, when comparing the month of January 2007 to January 2006. The popularity of sites such as YouTube.com, Peekvid.com, MTV.ca, Têtesàclaque.tv and Shockwave.com accounted for the jump in multimedia consumption in Canada, he said.
However, in terms of raw minute growth, the Internet activity that actually had the largest increase was time spent interacting in online communities, Lowe-Bernie said. Internet users on average spent 120 minutes more time in online communities in January 2007 than they did in January 2006, which represents an increase of 128%.
Entertainment, games and gaming information rounded out the top five categories that saw the biggest growth in terms of time spent online by Canadians.
While this research helps to pinpoint activity areas where engaged consumers can be found, Lowe-Bernie cautioned against focusing on Internet usage trends to the exclusion of other channels where users will consume multimedia content.
“The minute you start thinking there’s a silver bullet in marketing for any particular target group, I think you’re on the road to failure,” Lowe-Bernie said in an interview.
“Consumers will move across all different sets of platforms,” he said. “You have to have integration across all the platforms that are relevant to your customers, and they’re going to change depending on the brand.”
For Veronica Holmes, senior director of broadband innovation and strategy for Bell Sympatico/MSN, one of the biggest challenges is determining if her organization is doing a good job at meeting customers’ needs. Video streaming has been a big growth area in terms of customer bandwidth usage in the last year, and Sympatico/MSN is currently wrestling with understanding all of the implications associated with that, she said. In addition, the interactive nature of online activities creates a new user experience and opens up new business challenges and opportunities, she said.
Telus has been re-inventing its telephone, wireless and Internet business to leverage IP technology, creating a multiplatform company that now thinks of itself as being in the channels business, said Michael Hennessy, vice-president of wireless, broadband and content policy for Telus.
“What is a channel? It’s a connection, it’s a way for people to communicate,” Hennessy said. “If you look at a territory of, say, five million customers, we really have that multiplied exponentially, because all of those networks (telephone, wireless, Internet) are connection points, so we have over 10 or 15 million connection points.”
“There’s too much content – it’s growing all the time,” Hennessy said. “Our role is to aggregate as much content in as many different ways over as many different platforms as possible, so that things like rights are handled, that we can create boxes for people that need to monetize the content, that we can deliver connections to the advertisers. That’s what our business is.”
Canadian category two digital TV channel BiteTV has also taken a multiplatform approach to distributing its interactive content. In addition to its linear TV channel, BiteTV lets mobile customers watch its regular TV schedule and short video-on-demand clips through agreements with Telus and Amp’d Mobile. BiteTV has also signed a deal with Joost, the peer-to-peer IPTV platform expected to formally launch this summer.
“We really don’t care where you watch our content and watch our channel, as long as we’re involved in that value chain somewhere along the way,” said Jeffrey Elliott, BiteTV’s president and CEO.
Currently, traditional TV distribution of BiteTV’s programming accounts for about 65% to 70% of the broadcaster’s revenues, Elliott said. However, he said he expects revenues from alternative delivery channels, such as wireless and IPTV, will exceed the company’s traditional TV distribution revenues in about 18 months or so.
Lowe-Bernie from comScore Media Metrix Canada said one challenge now faced by the Canadian media industry is that of “repatriating eyeballs” that have gone to popular U.S. Internet sites in recent months.
“Repatriating them back here is not an easy challenge once they start to build brand affinity with the YouTubes, the Facebooks, the Myspaces, the U.S. brands. It’s not impossible, but it’s not easy. It obviously takes a good product, good content, but it’s also going to take marketing dollars to make people aware of it,” he said.
Lowe-Bernie said his company’s role is to help its clients build the right kind of product or service to create a following, and therefore build a business model that is going to be sustainable.
“I think what you’re already starting to see is Canadian broadcasters, Canadian media players, are going to leverage their existing brands and their existing viewership into traffic for those brands,” he said.
“Whether they have a cooking show, or a gardening show, or a home renovation show – those are areas where there are communities of people that are interested in that kind of thing. They naturally lend themselves to extending the brand experience in the offline media world to build a community online on that very subject.”
Hennessy had a similar perspective.
“For a while, digital TV and everything kind of fragmented audiences, and now the technology is bringing people together in communities of interest,” the Telus executive said. “The networks have suddenly picked up on that and realized they can use cellular technology to promote their programming, and start to bring back audiences that they’ve lost and create new advertising opportunities.
“As fast as people are creating communities in the YouTube generation, corporations are starting to learn how to handle that technology to bring them back into the stable. So I think at the end of the day, the broadcasters and a lot of traditional media companies are going to win in this game.”
Linda Stuart is a Toronto-based freelance writer.
