When the fragmentation apocalypse was first predicted it was always assumed to be ‘a bad thing’. The ability to reach millions of people simultaneously would be severely curtailed and the power of media channels to influence mass culture was considered to be over.

Nowhere was this more the case than for television. The explosion of channels since the beginning of the multichannel revolution in the early 1990s was the most compelling example of fragmentation, and the consistent fall in the headline ratings figures for the main channels and programmes had been seized on by many digitalistas as the beginning of the end for broadcast television. The fact that their predictions were far wide of the mark can perhaps be explained by the fact that they could only see the downside of fragmentation, whereas (as in many other cases of digital wishful thinking) the unforeseen benefits have become far greater than we could have possibly expected.

Two recent events have given me food for thought, especially in terms of how media channels can use fragmentation to attract viewing from traditionally hard to reach light viewing groups who would normally claim to watch very little ‘traditional’ TV.

The first of these occurred when I had the good fortune to be interviewed by Robert Elms on Radio London about my recently-published book on the future of television[1]. Robert was sceptical of TV’s future, concerned that TV’s ‘golden age’ was well and truly over. He claimed that there weren’t the same array  ‘stand-out’ programmes that you knew the whole nation would be watching and that he often struggled to find something to watch. He then let slip that he had been glued to Eurosport for the previous couple of weeks, watching the slow but dramatic progress of the Giro D’Italia. He had not even considered that to be TV viewing, but the benefits of fragmentation had meant a very light viewer had spent many hours watching TV to follow a passionate interest. How often would somebody like Robert Elms have spent hours and hours in front of a TV set in the pre-fragmentation days?

On the same day I gave that interview, I received an email about the Broadcast Digital Awards for 2013. Among the usual contenders for best specialist channel, in this case BBC Four, History Channel and Discovery sits one of the more niche broadcasters; Horse & Country Television.

Now, as one who assumes point-to-point is something to do with my fingers, I must admit that this channel had largely passed me by. But it has certainly contributed to the fragmentation process; a quarterly audience not far shy of 1 million viewers, with a core audience that is overwhelmingly female (92%), and/or horse lovers (96% ride and 71% own a horse!)

Like Robert Elms – actually very unlike him, which I guess is my point – this particular audience has a passion which fragmentation-era broadcast TV can now satisfy; which has quietly resulted in significantly increased hours of viewing from the most unlikely audiences. It may be the King of 80s Cool or the Barbour’s & Badminton set, but either way, fragmentation – for so long considered a bad word – may actually be bringing in the kinds of audiences who would normally say in research surveys “oh, I never watch the television set”!

I cannot quite bear to turn mine out, they remind me of good times.

And my drawer is full of Nokia phones, as from the first phone I bought, up until my iPhone, Nokia was the only brand of phone I chose to buy.

I was reminded of my love for Nokia during a talk by a visiting speaker, Mark Selby, a Nokia alumni.  One of the best things about working at Ipsos MORI is the round of visiting speakers that come in and talk to us, a programme instigated a few years ago by Ben Page, our CEO and fortunately for us, one of the best connected people in our industry.  Mark spoke very engagingly about his experiences and how to build brands, loyalty and longevity.

The pace of product innovation and globalisation of the modern world, no doubt all contribute to the decreasing lifespan of many top companies.  Analysis of the average lifespan of a company listed in the S&P 500 index of US leading companies, by Professor Richard Foster from Yale University, found this to have decreased by more than 50 years from, on average 67 yrs in the 1920s to 15 yrs in 2012.

Research on the UK FTSE of 100 leading companies, conducted by Rita McGrath, found that the average age of the FTSE 100 in 1984 was 99.1 years.

And in 2012?  Well it was quoted as 98.4.

So what can we learn from this?

At our Influential Brands event last week, we were very fortunate to have a speaker from an over 160 year old British High Street institution – Boots the Chemist.   Head of Customer Insight at Boots, Martin Squires, spoke very engagingly about the importance of listening to customers, and understanding what they need and why they need it .  A message that resonated with the many researchers in the room.

Engaging with customers is critical to brand success.  But Martin also spoke at length about how important trust and responsibility also were for Boots.

Our Influential Brands survey also looks at these core metrics, it measures brands across 5 pillars: Leading Edge, Corporate Citizenship, Trust, Presence and Engagement.

We were also very fortunate to have speak Richard Bates, European Head of Insight, from Samsung.  As an Official Worldwide Partner of the London 2012 Olympic Games, including sponsorship of Olympic torch relay and the Paralympics, Samsung arguably gave the rest of the world a lesson in how to demonstrate corporate citizenship, whilst building trust, presence and engagement.

Richard included a great quote from Starbucks CEO,  

“Mass advertising can help build brands, but authenticity is what makes them last. If people believe they share values with a company, they will stay loyal to the brand.”
― Howard Schultz

So trust, authenticity and longevity arguably all go hand in hand.  But no doubt the challenge for brands in the next 25 years is the sheer pace of product innovation, and the ability to remain a Leading Edge brand which can evolve, adapt and innovate.  No mean feat.

The top brand in our UK study was Google.  And judging by the content of Larry Page’s keynote address last week, focusing on innovation and encouraging companies to do “a little more that’s outside of their comfort zone”, I wouldn’t bet against them retaining that that top spot for many years to come.

Louise Brice is a Research Director at Ipsos ASI 

I could not tell what people were reading – that’s the thing about digital devices I guess - but  e-books would be an obvious choice.  I also suspect that newspapers and magazines would have got a look-in too.  Nearly one in five adults (18%) has read a newspaper or magazine via a tablet, e-reader or app in the last 12 months.  This equates to 9.1m British adults now consuming publisher mobile content and represents a year-on-year rise of 57%.  This is an important rising trend, as more and more publishers around the world transfer their business models from print to digital.

Some passengers had picked up their free printed copy of a newspaper from one of the bins just before boarding the aircraft.  It would seem a logical progression for those publishers to let you also download a free copy of the day’s edition on to your mobile devices at the departure gate.  A quick flash of your boarding pass on the mobile screen to the ground crew and you can get back to reading straightaway as you get comfortable in your seat on the plane.  Then, of course, you have to turn off the device as the aircraft taxis for take-off.

Now, where did I put that paperback novel?

John Carroll is a Senior Director in Ipsos MediaCT  (@MediaCarroll)

It has been reported that Google have described All Access as “Radio without rules”.

Being an inquisitive sort, I visited the Google Official Blog to try to find out why they felt able to make this claim. The only reference to radio I found was within a description of the service: “You can create a radio station from any song or artist you love…” – which suggests that listening to radio is the equivalent of listening to a playlist on iTunes or, in old money, sticking an album on the turntable.

Given that I work in radio and I’m proud of its uniqueness, I feel I have a right to be defensive when other media infer that they possess the same qualities purely because their offering is based around audio. This sort of lazy thinking – particularly common in the tech world – demonstrates a lack of understanding about what radio is and how it works for listeners.

So please allow me to clarify: Google’s All Access – like Pandora, Spotify, or any other streamed music service – is NOT radio, and it never will be.

Now I’m sure this is all just a simple misunderstanding, so to help tech companies developing similar services in the future, here’s my simple five point checklist to see if you qualify to use the term ‘radio’:

1. Is your service a real-time linear stream of content edited by professionals?
2. Do you serve content other than just music (e.g. travel, traffic, weather)?
3. Are the different content elements linked by a human presenter?
4. Do your listeners ever get to hear from other listeners within the content stream?
5. Can the listener access all of this content with a single flick of a switch?

If you answered yes to the majority of these – well, congratulations on being a radio content provider. From a commercial perspective, you also have the added advantage over streamed music services that your audience is more receptive to commercial messages as a natural component of the real-time linear flow.

If you answered ‘no’ to three or more of these, then I’m afraid you’re just a plain old streamed music service – so please don’t pretend to be anything else!

Disclaimer: this check list is based purely on my personal experience and doesn’t pretend to be comprehensive – if there are any other points you’d like to add I’d love to hear them. Similarly, if you think I’m being unfair on streamed services, please let me know why.

TV trading has largely been impervious to the advances of digital technology that has provided not only significant efficiencies for both sellers and buyers of media, but has also increasingly unlocked detailed audience insight and ROI analysis.
But there are also significant opportunities for more programmatic buying, as more and more viewing switches to tablets and other devices. At the same time set top boxes from the likes of YouView, Virgin and Sky are also now connected to the internet, opening up the potential for greater targeting in linear broadcasting, as well as video on demand.
Ultimately the recognition now dawning in the US that traditional trading as we have come to know it has changed, will also arrive in the UK.
The means of broadcast and distribution is changing, the means of access to programming has changed, so perhaps it’s also time to think about changing the way we trade.
By understanding programmatic buying now, broadcasters can ensure that their great programming continues to attract the investment from big advertisers that it needs.

They are choosing how they want to and that provides media suppliers with a new challenge. How do you keep up with changing consumer needs, wants and behaviour?

The starting point obviously has to be consumer insight.  And with habits changing so fast it is important to keep track of these on an ongoing basis.  Questions abound such as: With Ofcom data last year showing that nearly 25 million of us use catch up TV, how much live TV do people actually watch? And with 75-85% of people using other devices while they watch TV (depending on which survey you read), how much are they being engaged by advertisers?

That’s why a couple of months ago we decided to conduct research into our own audience of active gym-goers. Using VOX POPs at a number of the health clubs across the country that use our screens, we embarked on a fact finding mission to establish their TV viewing habits, both at home and away from home, and how much this impacts on their exposure to, and engagement with, advertising.

The results were not unexpected but there’s something about VOX POPs – watching our ‘customers’ tell me directly about how they consume TV before they headed off to the treadmill – that makes the research more real, somehow.  What these interviews confirmed to me is that it has become harder to reach consumers than ever through traditional routes.

Over and over again they told me they watch “one or two hours of TV a day, but most of that recorded”.  They talked about being busier at work than ever, and so being more demanding about TV in the limited time they get to watch it.  While traditionally the advertisers have been in control, the consumer is now firmly in control of how they want to receive branded communications.

What’s more, the locations where media is consumed have also evolved.  TV viewing is no longer constrained to the lounge as consumers spend so little time there nowadays, compared to the 80s or even 10 years ago.  They are more engaged in alternative places such as the gym, in bars and clubs – not to mention, of course, taking part in the unstoppable trend of watching TV on mobile devices.  All of which provides a headache for media planners.  Not only do they need to establish new ways of reaching their fast evolving audience, but they need to ensure that they are serving the ads in a way which ensures their engagement.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that live TV is over and no one cares about it anymore.  It will always play a vital role in the lives of consumers and brands alike.  Take me for instance.  It takes something major to get in the way of me watching Eastenders as they appear – and those episodes that are filmed live simply have to be watched in that way.  And for mass market brands you are still likely to reach 80% of your audience through commercial TV.

However, what the research confirmed for me is that, for the other 20%, it’s worth looking at the other digital media opportunities out there.  Comments such as “Focusing on the TV while you’re working out, your attention is higher” and “You’re working out so you can’t switch, so you’re more exposed to advertising” show that gym TV can provide a valuable route to this target audience.  Equally, targeted advertising on hotel TV can provide an opportunity to reach businessmen in a relaxed, engaged environment that has been proven to make them more receptive to advertising. If there’s an audience out there, it seems there’s a way to find them.

So, the positive thing from all this for media planners is that the technology explosion is also creating a media explosion – with new, exciting ways of reaching, and engaging with, specific target audiences being launched on a seemingly daily basis.  Whilst this adds a layer of complexity, as long as media planning evolves as fast as viewing habits, the opportunities for advertisers to connect with consumers are making for exciting times in the media world.

Check out the VOX POP on our Vimeo page.

Sophie Burke, Head of Marketing at gym TV company Zoom Media

The challenge for advertisers is how to understand the total video market and optimize according across and within key platforms. Simply moving spend from traditional TV to iVideo doesn’t resolve the problem because advertisers and their agencies want common metrics that allow them to manage distribution of messages around the same content.

Right now, digital metrics and data capture cannot be replicated in TV, so we need to build new tools, centred around our ability to assess the reach we deliver.

With fragmented and very diverse data environments by country, we need a framework that allows us to create solutions that work regardless of market and regardless of data complexity.

At a strategic planning level the challenge is not that complex. Valid recommendations in terms of overall budget allocation by platform can be generated using traditional approaches such as probability modelling – traditionally used for evaluating total multi-media campaign reach.
Where it gets really complicated is at the “tactical” level, determining budget allocation within platforms by “vendor” or “daypart”, akin to what traditional TV optimisation systems currently deliver.

To make this work, we need a single-source data set, or a “pseudo single-source” based upon vast amounts of “fused” data.

Media technology and advertiser demands are moving too fast to rely upon “joint-industry committees” to define this new currency and share the financial burden amongst all players.

The short-term solution will probably be “data alliances” between online and offline publishers, trading platforms, data suppliers, research institutes and agencies. A number of video currencies will co-exist in the near future but ultimately, it is likely a dominant currency (or only a few dominant currencies) will emerge.

Early contenders include Nielsen’s OCR (online campaign ratings) and XCR combined TV and Online ratings, which can provide post-campaign data but not an overall market rating by vendor to allow the media purchasing to be optimised.

comScore is also investing heavily in this area while Google is currently building single source panels in Germany, Netherlands and the UK.

Progressive broadcasters are also developing targeting and ad substitution products for addressable advertising and such solutions include Sky’s adsmart product in the UK. Unfortunately, while this provides some assistance, it also adds a further layer of complexity as Sky will be able to allocate inventory on a one to one basis using proprietary data.

The development process will continue. It’s crucial for media agencies to invest in the development of optimisation tools in order to deliver added value for advertisers.

Well I’m starting to worry that the video industry is guilty of trying to “breed faster horses”, by chasing proof that video offers incremental reach versus broadcast television.

I was talking to an industry peer recently when the conversation turned to incremental reach studies, and how, a few years ago, they were a popular sales tool as video campaigns looked to pinch some TV spend.  More often than not, advertisers took TV copy and re-purposed it for video, forcing agencies down this path. But to still be pushing incremental reach as a genuine reason for layering video spend on top of TV, tells me that the industry is failing to acknowledge the opportunities that video campaigns can offer brands.

A recent Tremor Video and IAB study illustrated minimal incremental reach in the UK, and even in the US, where cord-cutting is growing and the Video channel options are significant, there has never been an incremental reach study that garnered higher than 4%. So can we please put incremental reach to bed now?!

Personally I believe it’s time that the Video on Demand industry started to focus on its own abilities above and beyond other media channels. For starters brands can get creative with video advertising and engage with their audience using interactive formats. Digital video can also be frequency capped via IP ensuring consumers are not served the same advert time and time again – as multiple screens become commonplace this feature will be ever more valuable. Multiple creatives can be delivered via IP as well, so brands can tell a story using different ad copy for example. You can even deliver digital video via a postcode if you wanted to. And all these benefits come with a backend function which has a detailed suite of reporting and analytic functions – not something that can be matched by all media.

While we can’t ignore reach, frequency and linear TV metrics as they dominate the planning schedule, other mediums such as radio have always worked well alongside TV – so why can’t video? I think it’s time we start building in the video opportunities on top of the standard audience demographic and help video to re-define some of its capabilities versus other mediums.

One very relevant example of such factors working in combination to change the industry relates to the abundant opportunity that was once available through the search marketing keyword discovery process.  Today this opportunity has been all but totally replaced by the online display ad inventory discovery process and the top of funnel optimisation that it drives.

Yesterday’s Marketplace

As greater numbers of consumers started using the Internet to buy products, marketers were able to use their analytics systems to identify how consumers were searching for products. Some research into the URLs and the queries that lead to conversions became known as keyword discovery. It was un-tapped demand announcing itself through hand-typed queries called keywords, with the nature of those keywords pointing to related keywords that represented potentially similar demand. And with paid search, marketers no longer needed to wait to build SEO content – they could write an ad, buy a keyword and begin generating immediate sales.

Branded keywords were targeted first, followed by non-branded keywords such as product and category keywords, which were eventually followed by the famed long-tail keywords. Marketers worked to learn which pockets of demand they could cultivate at what price. A host of new technologies arose to support the marketer: keyword discovery tools, keyword imputation tools, rank measurement tools and bid management tools.

Meanwhile, display advertising was viewed as a much less productive channel – competing for any budget that might potentially move out of less measurable channels like TV. A few rare digital marketers were able to make display work, but only if consumers would click an ad and convert. Otherwise, the value of display ads in stimulating subsequent actions via other channels (clicking on a search ad, for example) could not be measured.

Today’s Marketplace

If you’re a search marketer today, you’re paying a premium for your branded keywords just to prevent competitors and affiliates from harvesting demand that’s rightfully yours.  And everyone from your competitors, affiliates and neighbours compete on your non-branded keywords – making many of them unprofitably expensive. So the search marketing playing field of today has been levelled.

At the same time, technology has caught up with the demands that online display advertising (and the mountains of data it produces) has created. Huge log files can now easily be manipulated. Computers can rip through terabytes of data, and tech savvy marketers and business savvy technologists have tools to effectively perform display measurement and – more specifically – ad impression measurement. And marketing attribution management has matured. A consumer’s digital experience can be accurately analysed and credit can be assigned to the tactics (including display) that contribute to the eventual conversion.  This enables the optimisation of future display spend that had been previously under-valued by traditional measurement methodologies.

Through the use of marketing attribution, digital marketers can now test a display inventory source by making a small buy, measuring its success in downstream conversions via whatever channel records the conversion and then deciding to grow or shrink media buys. Just like the last decade, when some keywords worked and some didn’t, marketers are discovering that some inventory sources work and some don’t. And for those that do work, intuition can point them to similar inventory sources that represent potentially similar demand. Attribution technology is illuminating these winning sources – much like a simple conversion tracking system once did for search. New technology is also exploding – bid management tools and DSPs are in various stages of absorbing attributed conversion tracking into their bidding systems, and almost any system that accepted a search conversion feed is now retooling to accept an attributed conversion feed.

The rush to capture demand has moved to the upper part of the conversion funnel – where that demand is generated by display. Those same savvy marketers are now pumping their media buys through an attribution system, figuring out which inventory sources work and which don’t – and reallocating their investments accordingly.

Adit Abhyankar is the Executive Director of Visual IQ.

Surely what we mean is the decline of paper as newsbrands are thriving on multiple platforms – and by focusing on just the decline of the printed product, these discussions miss the whole picture. In other words these days we should be asking ourselves: “Paper (Print) or Screen – who cares?”

The answer to this should be no one, but then it really does depend on who you ask. Everyone will have their own view but when I say ‘who’ I mean the four most interested parties – consumers, media owners, clients and agencies – the four pillars if you like.  And what would each of these pillars answer if we gathered them around a table?  Well I believe it would go a little like this…

In the world of newsbrands, we have seen some of the most exciting innovations over the last few years as newspapers have embraced digital creating some of the most viewed websites, launching some of the best apps and embracing mobile. So surely newsbrands don’t care – and as content platforms I don’t think they do – but whilst we continue to have so many questions around monetisation, formats and audience I believe that the “no we don’t care” becomes a little more hesitant.

Similarly for agencies, the initial reaction will be “no it doesn’t matter” but this will be followed fairly quickly by: “As long as we know who the audience is, how much time are they spending with each platform, what is their journey, where do platforms fit in the media eco system”. And the list will continue because until we have a universal understanding of consumer engagement across platforms, it will still matter which leaves us judging each platform in isolation and criminally under valuing the reach and influence of the audience.

For clients and their brands the answer again I believe will be that a platform per say isn’t a barrier and that it shouldn’t matter. But they too need more clarity and understanding of the audience, an understanding of their behaviours and what creativity works for each platform followed by a simple way to create and supply ads that don’t cost more than the media.

Around our hypothetical round table so far we have three “it shouldn’t, buts”, so what would the consumer say? Consumers I believe are the only ones that truly don’t care. The importance for them is being able to access the content that newsbrands produce in a way that they want and when they want it and this can be across many or singular platforms in any given day or week.

Consumers are at home with paper, web, app and mobile and they move between them without a thought, using the platform that works best for them at that moment.

The consumer is rapidly moving ahead of us and we need to catch up soon to grasp the challenge and develop a new language, to be prepared to adapt and evolve measurement and to look at new ways to monetise engagement across all newsbrands’ platforms. To do anything less would be a terrible waste of a growing audience that are truly engaged with newsbrands and their content.

We will get the answers to the questions I have proposed here from some real ‘pillars’ at our Newsworks conference Shift 2013 tomorrow (Tuesday 16 April) where we have the panel discussion “Print or Screen – Who Cares?” As well as myself, the panel boasts a newsbrand, an agency, and some of our clients which leaves me taking on the role of consumer. But then shouldn’t we all remember that’s what we are first and foremost…