photo by thornj I’ve just returned from MIPTV the AV and digital content market held each year in Cannes. It’s a vast event – over 13,000 delegates attend – and the buzz of trade inside the Palais des Festivals is matched, if not outstripped, by that of the deals being struck and contacts made in the many coffee shops, bars and hotels along the Croisette. While there to build on Cogapp’s links with TV indies and broadcasters - and to explore the creative opportunities of convergence and multi-platform - I made sure I found the time to attend a number of conferences. The MIPTV programme gives a useful insight into what are currently felt by the industry to be some of its most pressing challenges and opportunities – and so I’d thought I’d pick up on and summarise a few themes that kept cropping up: the growth of online video, monetisation and how to measure engagement. Or, media, money and metrics…

It was generally accepted that user appetite for online video is unabated and, unsurprisingly, the web TV market is also experiencing exponential growth. Recent additions such as NBC and News Corp backed Hulu are getting in on the online video act to compete with early trailblazers such as Joost, Babelgum, Brightcove and Veoh. Such moves seem to signify broadcasters’ realisations that, as people will find a way to consume the content they want legally or otherwise, they’d be better off positioning themselves as active enablers rather than ignoring it all in the hope it goes away. More than this, as Eric Huggers, Group Controller BBC Future Media and Technology, pointed out in his talk ‘Broadcasting in the Digital Age: Simplicity and Convergence’, broadcasters are very well-positioned for staking a claim in a digital space where the possession of, and expertise and investment in, distinctive content will mean standing out from the aggregators of other people’s content. In addition, it ensures the ownership of potentially lucrative rights. Huggers went on to note that broadcasters’ thinking needs to keep up with the shifts away from traditional models of distribution– with the ‘audience’ of old now actively playing with and sharing content. Brightcove’s Jeremy Allaire talked, in his keynote ‘Beyond Aggregation: Unlocking the Value of Online Video’ in terms of ‘audience networks’ and developing as many touch-points with users as possible (a similar approach to that taken by Cogapp on our ICONS public engagement campaign). Allaire proposed that taking a ‘hub and spoke approach’ to distribution, with destination sites functioning as the hub from which the blogs, portals, social networks ‘spokes’ radiate, allows for greater connection between content and community. Fresh from securing the sale of social networking site, Bebo to AOL for a cool US$850mill its President, Joanna Shields, talked more specifically about how social networks now function as platforms for distribution and of the importance of media companies placing content where users are congregating. Their ‘Open Media’ service supports this by enabling media producers to embed their content– and advertising- into the Bebo environment. Users can take this content and share it virally, or embed it in their own profiles, in so doing creating fan communities around it. The view taken by Bebo is that users are engaged by interesting, rich content that they can respond to creatively – which adds to the Bebo site’s stickiness - and the media partners/brands win by forging connections with users, and also keeping the associated revenue. According to the Internet Advertising Bureau, general online ad spend continues to grow at a rate of 38% year on year, topping £2.8bn in 2007. Research by Forrester (2007) has suggested that online video advertising spend will surge to US$7.1 billion by 2012. Whilst there may have been consensus around the strength of demand for online video and the shift towards online ad spend, how to tie the two together in a meaningful way that won’t prove a turn-off, or rather a click-away, to savvy users was more hotly contested. Along with banner ads, pre-rolls and overlays, a number of other approaches were discussed. Blinkx’s video search engine software enables the packaging of video content with highly targeted contextual advertising. Bebo’s latest Interactive Soap, Sophia’s Diary, uses a combination of pre-rolls and creative brand integration into the production itself. Another approach still was exemplified by YouTube Insight, the analytics tool allowing contributors to find out who’s watching their uploaded videos, when, where and how they found them, thereby enabling them to schedule their own user-generated video. It also offers valuable info for advertisers. As reported by Future Media, C21 at MIPTV, the hope must be that these insights will help to create a more workable and lucrative ad model for YouTube (April 2008).

Of course, the question of how and where to invest to generate the maximum value – for users and for businesses - tends to be accompanied by the question of how to measure that value? In a panel on ‘The New Rules of Engagement for the Digital Consumer’ Henrique de Castro of Google/YouTube UK described how Google are looking into creating online consumer panels and focus groups as part of a blended approach to tracking the impact of a brand’s message beyond clicks. David Brennan of television marketing body, Thinkbox added that until now, metrics of value have been in silos - television, press, net, etc - but the increasing prevalence of 360/multi-platform projects calls for cross-platform metrics that look at the manner of consumption (and participation) in the round. Both these cases, and the many others referred to above and at MIPTV generally, point to a growing recognition of the fundamental importance of user ‘engagement’, something we are well aware of and have discussed in terms of Cogapp’s own approach in previous posts on this blog (here, here and here). They also highlight the complexities of ‘engagement metrics’. For as the web continues to be enriched with short and long form media content, distribution and revenue models are further shaken up, mass participation multi-platform formats become increasingly mainstream, and users go on desiring to be critics, distributors, players, fans, viewers and producers, the need to develop new value systems becomes ever more urgent.