I was fortunate enough this past Tuesday to survive my trip through the Big Dig tunnel in order to attend the One to One Interactive | MITX latest panel in its Digital Marketing Series: The Future of Television. I’m personally not a huge TV watcher but I was more than mildly curious to see what people's points of view were around where TV is going. Lots of open questions out there that range from the viability of a number of business models (think NBC vs YOUTUBE) to the future of the 30 second spot. Apparently I’m not in the minority here in my curiousity as the event was packed and chairs were hoisted in up to the last minute.
The session started with Peter Kim from Forrester Research discussing his POV on trends in the industry. I had 2 takeaways from his time on the mat. First, and this was echoed throughout the presentation, when we’re talking about the future of television, we’re no longer talking about long lead times here. The adoption of the DVR and the pace at which folks are realizing that the old model is dead are drastically accelerating the speed at which the future of TV is evolving. The reaction time of agencies is going to need to be measured in months, not years. My second takeaway stemmed from his example of how a recent campaign for “Lost” used the online space to draw viewers off of their couches and into the series by getting them to link to a fictitious company’s website. The description of the tactics they used and how the audience was engaged clearly drove home the point of how the online channel can be used to engage viewers and blur the line between watching and participating.
With the intros aside, the panel discussion started. David Weinberger, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, was a good moderator and gave the panel plenty of topics for discussion and enough latitude to allow the various points of view to emerge. His initial question, “Will the 30 second spot die?” basically triggered a lengthy discussion on which business model would emerge as the winner. I thought one particularly interesting discussion was whether people would rather follow a subscription model or whether they would rather view commercials in order to get “free” content. No clear winner emerged and I landed on the conclusion that ultimately both models would likely survive in parallel. After all, forget how it happened, but NBC gave me Seinfeld…..I’m prepared to put up with a lot of Preparation H commercials for that kind of entertainment. Having said that, I love watching the Tour de France, but since its not really America’s sport, I need a smaller player like OLN to make that accessible to me. I’d gladly pay to have that content delivered, as would, I think, the other 17 people in America who watch professional cycling. The one comment I think everyone agreed with is that for the folks pursuing the advertising model, their challenge is going to be to continue to create more relevant advertising, especially as channels become more and more niche plays (as Adam Berrey from Brightcove noted, think millions of shows, not hundreds).
One series of discussions I had not expected out of this was from the content producers in the room. There was a lot of concerns expressed about how smaller producers would be able to get the budgets to develop quality programming for these smaller niche audiences. I’d never really thought much about the role of the networks as content providers (again, not a big TV watcher) but if the 30 second slot is indeed dying, it does raise interesting questions about how to fund the production of some of the more expensive programs running on the networks right now. I’ll definitely echo the sentiments of one of the audience members, I don’t see niche programming avenues take off unless they can quickly begin to hit some degree of quality in their production. How this chicken and the egg scenario plays out will be anybodies business but I think there will be enough niche content providers who think they have a valuable enough audience to commit production resources and gamble on marketers following, regardless of the platform.
Finally, I thought Adam did a nice job of summarizing how all these potential changes affect marketers today. His take basically centered on 2 elements; first, DVRs and other elements will dramatically increase users control over their own consumption……be relevant or be gone. Second, he believes the audience’s relationship with the story will change dramatically. He postulates viewers will begin to become more involved with the stories through the online medium (i.e. think of Forrester’s “Lost” example of multi-platform storytelling). Whether I agree of not, I think the possibilities as he presented them were very compelling. I see recently where MTV is launching a channel where folks will send in videos to compliment the "real" music video being played. Having said that, I couldn’t help but laugh with the other 40 something in the room who noted that basically, by the time he’s done with work, dinner, putting the kids to bed, etc. he didn’t want to interact with anybody and especially not his TV, he just wanted some mindless entertainment (how else could one explain the success of shows like American Garage). OK, maybe the interactivity piece just isn’t for my generation (cue the Who soundtrack.....).
All in all, the event was pretty fast paced but provided a good insight into how some of the immediate players see the space and are positioning themselves respectively. I would be remiss in not throwing out a LOL to Simon, the Verizon FIOS panelist/representative who volunteered to answer a question regarding net neutrality. He contributed tremendously to the panel, but his response on this question sounded so much like the disclaimer in a car ad commercial that it drew the loudest laughs of the day. My only regret of the morning was that more time wasn’t spent on the A2M2 “anywhere measurement” concept Forrester introduced in the beginning of the conversation. Given the success and interest in this event, however, I’m sure they’ll be another chance to revisit this again soon.
Bill Haeck-Chief Services Officer, OTOi
Accessible Search
Asi Sharabi, of 
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