Changes in content consumption: how advertisers can cut through the noise
With the emergence of digital channels such as Vimeo, Netflix, YouTube and Snapchat to name but a few, traditional media and advertising streams are sharing their space with a multitude of ways to consume content.
Consumers have more choice than ever before and by 2017, consumer spending on digital content will reach $180 billion, up 29% in two years, and that spending shows no signs of slowing. The industry must learn how to navigate all channels and use them to their advantage.
Historically, the aim of the advertiser has always been to reach the right people, at the right time with the relevant content and that principle still stands - only now the pool has widened. No longer can we filter our audiences solely by age, demographic and what they last viewed online, advertisers must look beyond these categories and adapt their campaigns and content accordingly.
A changing landscape
Today, there is a wealth of information available to the media and entertainment industry, generated by multiple devices, services, apps, social media, published and broadcast content, audience demographics and much more.
In turn this is mirrored by an audience, who due to the overwhelming choices available to them, have become more selective about where they view their content – to the point where they expect a personalised experience. Regardless of what side of the television (or mobile) screen you are on, there is a consistent need to filter. Viewers want to consume topics personally of interest to them via their preferred channels. Meanwhile, the broadcaster or advertising company needs to gather and segment this data to enable them to make informed, intelligent decisions about their audience.
Recent high-profile sporting events such as Rio 2016 have highlighted just this and how viewers’ behaviours are shifting. Rio 2016 generated 218,000 hours of digital coverage, nearly double the TV coverage for the same year and 2.5 times more than London 2012. Fans used new digital channels such as the Olympic Video Player, streaming 9 million hours of content. Online users streamed 1.86 billion minutes of NBC’s Rio 2016 coverage, topping the combined number for London and Sochi, Russia. Simultaneously, NBC reported a 17% drop in linear viewing for the first 10 nights of the event, proving that people are moving away from the traditional means of viewing on the television.
Turning data into insights and new opportunities
Standing out in a saturated viewing space is a challenge with the constantly-changing media consumption patterns of consumers. The digital viewing space alone has become congested, with specialist over-the-top (OTT) video on demand and larger global internet companies, such as Snapchat and Google, emerging as big players and a threat to traditional media companies.
Why? These digital channels are exploiting the data available to them and using it to tap into spaces that have yet to be claimed by the traditional broadcaster. Viewing habits will continue to evolve as new options become available to consumers. It is the media agency’s role now to not only adapt, but also to predict future trends, in order to stay ahead of competition.
By fully embracing technology in media and telecommunications as well as other industries, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of the needs and interests of their target market and propose new solutions to meet those demands.
It is imperative that the media and advertising industry starts to embrace the deployment of cognitive technology to address the avalanche of data available and to convert this into valuable insight. Through a combined offering of self-learning, pattern recognition, data mining and natural language processing, cognitive computing offers a selection of intelligent options and can mimic the way we would analyse these options to serve up the best possible business case to action.
A combination of external data sources such as social media, weather, and local event data, can provide organisations with a well-defined audience and deeply personalised customer insight. For instance, Campbell Soup Company and The Weather Company, an IBM Business, are analysing external sources such as location and the weather with a user’s personal taste to create a series of recommended recipes. These are then placed as ads on The Weather Company. By using cognitive computing brands are able to get closer to the consumer.
As a new generation of technology savvy consumers are overcome with choice of what, when and where they watch content, it is becoming increasingly important for advertisers to offer sophisticated, tailored experiences, tweaked for each platform. Regardless of whether we are trying to reach audiences on social media, Vine, Vimeo or YouTube, the common thread throughout should be personalisation to encourage engagement.
Doug Clark is cloud video solutions leader at IBM