Convergence Conversation

Today I attended a conference in my grubby track pants and my tattered fleece jacket. In short, my early morning attire, long before I'm presentable for any kind of social interaction. In the state where, zombie like, I can spend hours on mornings when I work at home. 

Only today, the Future Of TV Advertising conference was taking place in London and the organizers were nice enough to put the live video stream online and also, run an active discussion on twitter (#ftva). Not only was I able to listen and contribute via twitter, but I was even able to get a question or two into the panel via the moderator, and via twitter & mail as well. 

You can see the website here as I understand the organizers plan to make the content available to view later as well.

The conference was supported by Ericsson/Tandberg and Seachange/Mirada. NDS, Arris, OpenTV, PacketVision, RGB Networks and Kinura were also on the list of sponsors. 

But back to the subject matter, the conference was appropriately themed around the debate over what exactly the future of Television Advertising was looking like. As expected, I found two sets of people - the "status-quo"ists who will point to the present and suggest that TV Advertising is not going anywhere; and the "futurists" who believe that in big and small ways, disruptive change is just around the corner or in fact among us. 

The truth invariably lies between these two extremes but in this one, I'm with the futurists. 

Nigel Walley, of Decipher made a very eloquent presentation where he rightly argued that technologists tend to forget about the lay user in their excitement with the new tech-toys. But while I agreed with a lot of what he said, there was one major point of disconnect. Nigel, like many others I know, pointed to his personal (and family) experience to suggest that things aren't changing at all, in TV. That people still want much the same things. 

This point was also made differently - kids are doing the same things with different toys. Earlier they would listen to radio and play LPs, now they punch buttons on game consoles and talk to friends on facebook. 

Both these points are valid if you boil this down to basic human behaviour. But the commercialization of the same behaviour takes you down very different paths. 

For one, the total advertising market is eroding. This may not be supported by absolute numbers if you take year-on-year spends - but that will include inflation, market corrections and many other sub-trends. Brands are experimenting with alternative models, direct to consumer initiatives and Google continues to attract growing spends.

It is definitely a reality that brands and brand managers are questioning their TV ad spends. They have not yet made up their minds, but their numbers are shifting every year. Is the trickle about to turn into a flood? I suggest there are 3 critical milestones to look out for: 

a.    Bandwidth. The most obvious correlation can be drawn between industry disruption and bandwidth. Print Newspapers were impacted in the first flush of the internet. The music industry was turned on its head once always on broadband became a reality. Do you see the trend here? The point where 20 meg to the home becomes a reality - which, depending on who you believe, could be 12 - 36 months away - the same disruption that affected the labels will impact TV

b.    Micropayments. The double twist in the music industry tells us something about micro-payments - there's enough of a market for micro-transactions, if you can unbundle and price appropriately. And it took Apple and iTunes to rebuild this market after it was ravaged by the P2P sites. Traditional TV sets don't have micro-payment systems enabled, but future ones surely will. 

c.    Access - most content is still very compartmentalised in its availability. What you get from iPlayer, you can't store on the hard drive, what you can store on the drive, you can't always take to any other device, and of course, what happens on Apple stays on Apple.

Continued on the ThinkPLANK BLog