Blog

TV content growth brings urgency to IP protection

Valerie | 08 Oct 2009, 21:43

While the global recession is hitting the TV industry hard, the format business appears to be faring well, with new research unveiled by FRAPA  (Format Recognition and Protection Assn)  at the MIPCOM event in Cannes revealing that the volume of production on the back of traded formats has exploded into a €9.3bn industry from 2006-2008.

In total, 445 global original formats were exported from 2006 to 2008, with British formats accounting for 146 of these. The survey of the world’s 14 biggest format exporting countries identified the U.S., Denmark, Norway and Sweden as the biggest format exporters after the UK, driven by such formats as “Big Brother,“ “Hole in the Wall” and “Got Talent.“

Against a broader backdrop of significant structural changes, as the TV industry grapples with the challenge of convincing consumers to pay for new services, content production is expected to stay relatively stable. The US, currently ranked as the leading content producing nation today will retain this position over the next five years despite strong growth from UK and India, according to a separate international content trend survey by Global Media Consult.

As IPTV and internet-enabled devices start challenging the dominance of the traditional broadcast business model, an opportunity will be available for all players that are ready to act flexibly, creatively and to anticipate – and respond – to consumer demand. And the need for intellectual property protection will become all the clearer and greater.

UK online ad spend overtakes TV for the first time

Valerie | 02 Oct 2009, 17:46

The latest figures published by media agency Carat indicates that the UK ad market is not expected to recover until 2010.

Carat has significantly revised its March forecasts, which predicted a 7.1 per cent drop for the UK and a 5.8 per cent fall globally. The new forecast now predicts a decline of almost 12%. TV advertising will fall by 12% this year; radio by 12.6%; outdoor by 12.2%; and the newspaper and magazine sectors by 20% and 16% respectively.

This follows the news this week that the UK has become the first major economy where advertisers spend more on internet advertising than on television advertising, with a record £1.75bn online spend in the first six months of the year.

Whilst this may mark a milestone for the “embattled TV industry” as the leading ad medium in the UK for almost half a century, critics have pointed out that it is inaccurate to collate all the figures as if it is one single medium.

Despite the gloomy picture for the UK, Carat said it expects growth of 1% in 2010, driven by more stable conditions in the West and a recovery in developing markets, particularly China.  France, Canada and the U.K. Russia, and Japan were also cited as countries that will see a return to growth in advertising expenditure next year.

As the Wall Street Journal indicates, opinions vary among advertising executives as to when and to what extent growth will return to the advertising industry.

As E-consultancy notes, these are interesting times for advertisers, agencies and publishers/media companies, highlighting the questions that now remain about just how far online advertising can go and the main opportunities for growth going forwards – key issues for the future of the creative economy that will be addressed at the c&binet forum next month.

Vodafone rebrand puts the consumer first

Valerie | 22 Sep 2009, 10:33

Vodafone has announced plans to revamp its brand and marketing, part of its biggest shift in brand strategy in four years.

The mobile-phone giant is replacing its “Make the most of now” tag line after four years in favour of “Power to you” as it prepares to launch a suite of new services to capitalise on the growing popularity of the mobile internet, highlighting the increasing shift of power away from brands towards consumer led engagement.

Speaking to the Times, chief executive Vittorio Colao said of the new brand identity:

“It is not the brand talking anymore and telling the customer what to do. It is the customer who will decide. I am trying to steer the whole company in this direction… It really means that Vodafone puts the customer at the centre of what we do.”

Having fallen behind rival O2 and dropping to third place after T-Mobile UK and Orange recently announced their merger, Vodafone’s challenge ahead will be to find new revenue streams in order to capitalise on a new breed of net savvy Smartphone users.

This autumn the company will launch an open platform that lets any developer create and sell software applications that can be downloaded to mobiles, recognising the success Apple has seen selling 65,000 applications from games to travel news more than 1.5 billion times and creating a new revenue stream for handset manufacturers above and beyond the initial sale of a handset.

Indeed, Vodafone has its sights firmly set on monetisation – Colao believes that by becoming a virtual kiosk, the company will be able to charge small amounts for small purchases.

“Every day we charge 1 cent, 2 cents for a text messages billions and billions of times,” he said. “Customers trust us to do it in a proper way. We are secure and we have big customer care operations that can deal with problems if they arise.”

As newspaper publishers try to work out how they can make their business pay in a digital world, it appears that Vodafone may have the answer for now in diversifying and offering new and exciting services to secure that all important customer loyalty.

Augmented reality: reality only better

Valerie | 18 Sep 2009, 09:56

Imagine a world where clouds of information—Facebook statuses, business cards, Twitter posts—float above your head as you walk down the street. It might sound like something straight out of the Matrix but if its plaudits would have it, Augmented Reality is set to transform our lives.

As Business Week and many others have reported, the concept of Augmented Reality, or overlaying the real world with text or images seen via a mobile phone’s camera or a Web cam on a PC, has gained a lot of attention in recent months.

Car manufacturers such as BMW and Toyota have used the technique to show off their latest models, whilst games developers have embedded it in their programming, creating Hidden Park for example, an iPhone app that uses the phone’s camera, accelerometer and GPS to create a fantasy game set in real locations: local parks. With tech companies from IBM to Microsoft and Nokia developing mobile-phone software and services in this space, the hype has continued to gain momentum.

As the Economist points out, AR has in fact, been around for a few years, but with the global release last August of a significantly expanded version of an AR application called Layar - dubbed the world’s first augmented reality browser – the field has been energised by the ability to implement AR using mobile smartphones.

And with virtual reality never really living up to hype, AR is being touted as the next big thing for advertisers, gamers and tech geeks alike.

According to this FT article, with the advertising sector facing cyclical and structural upheavals, advertisers are currently rethinking their business models as they try to keep pace with consumer appetite for digital and social media experimentation.

Unsurprisingly, advertisers are viewing AR as the latest new tool for brands to engage with their consumers, with its endless possibilities for direct, personal interaction.

Ian Pearson, a futurologist with Futurizon envisages an age in which everyone “views the world through the prism of enhanced reality”, which will not only draw on data about the world around us, but also combine this with our personal interests and preferences, enabling advertisers for example to target discounts and offers specifically as part of your personalised, augmented reality.

We have clearly just seen the beginning of what AR apps can do. As the dividing lines between the real and digital worlds continue to blur, its potential will undoubtedly become even more compelling.

AR Apps

E-week’s list of “10 Augmented Reality Apps you need to know about”
Urban friendly AR apps
Marketers pick their favourite AR apps

Moves towards charging online gaining momentum

Valerie | 02 Sep 2009, 18:27

Fresh from the recent Edinburgh International Television festival, where one of the key topics discussed was business models for online charging, a micropayment network is being developed in the UK, and could be active by next summer.

Due to be implemented as part of the Digital Britain commitment from the Technology Strategy Board, it also unveiled a £2 million fund for those with interesting ideas for applications and platforms.

Head of the TSB team Nick Appleyard told the Guardian:

“Once the beautiful future of micropayments is proved in this environment, you can then extend that launch to the external internet.”

Appleyard also commented that revenue models should be worked out together by content publishers, broadcasters, ISPs and banking providers: cooperation is necessary, he stressed.

The announcement comes as a number of companies have indicated in recent months that they are considering payment models, including RTL, ITV and FT.com.

Start-up Journalism Online also recently announced it would help publishers charge for online content, including all-you-can-read or pay-per-article schemes.  With affiliate agreements signed with publishers representing 506 newspapers and magazines and a Web audience of more than 90 million monthly visitors, the company has suggested that they could generate an annual $50 to $100 per subscriber from the websites’ most active 10 per cent of viewers with minimal loss of visitors.

It follows similar plans from News Corp that it was in talks with rival publishers about forming a consortium to charge for online news.

As this blog asks, could micropayments prove the ‘saviour’ of the British newspaper industry as publishers seek to increase online revenue amidst slowing advertising income?

This Marketing Week article draws an interesting parallel between the fundamentally different models for providing on and off line content:

“... in the real world, you need to make the content experience rich enough to charge for it; in the online world, you need to make the distribution experience broad enough for consumers to value it.”

As news providers increasingly reconsider and re-evaluate the sustainability and probability of their business models in the digital age, no doubt they will be closely watching for the possible start of a trend towards the adoption of micropayments.

Disney and Marvel strike super deal

Valerie | 01 Sep 2009, 21:10

The Walt Disney Company announced yesterday that it is to buy comic book giant Marvel Entertainment in a $4 billion (£2.5 billion) cash and stock deal in one of the largest US corporate transactions of the summer, the Guardian reports.

In addition to giving Disney ownership of cultural icons such as Spider-Man, the X-Men and the Incredible Hulk, the deal is also expected to inspire countless films, television shows and video games.

Whilst the comic and creative possibilities are endless, it is the commercial potential of Marvel’s Intellectual Property: 70 years of stories featuring over 5,000 characters that most believe to be the real motivation behind the deal. As the Guardian points out, Disney didn’t spend all that money to get deeper into selling comics, a business which is facing the print advertising slump just like everyone else.

Patrick Goldstein at the LA Times goes further, arguing that the Disney deal isn’t simply an acquisition, but a reinvention. He paints a picture of Disney as a “venerable animation factory” that had “run out of gas” and highlights one of the studio’s biggest failures of the last few years – its inability to broaden its traditional family brand appeal as illustrated by declining box office figures: since the studio’s lucrative “Pirates of the Caribbean” series premiered in 2003, Disney hasn’t been able to launch another broad-appeal international franchise.

As Disney’s President and Chief Executive Robert A. Iger explains,  the combination is “a perfect fit” with Disney, complementing its characters and stories with narratives that reach a different demographic. Indeed, and as this article argues, Disney is betting that with Marvel it acquires the kind of brand-name recognition it gained when it bought Pixar Animation Studios in 2006, especially among teens and young adults, who are the core drivers of the box office and are an audience segment Disney has struggled to attract.

In this respect, many commentators are surprised that the tie-in didn’t happen sooner, citing the similar business models held by both companies and the deal has, on the whole been welcomed, no less by comic book legend Stan Lee:

“Nobody can produce and market franchises better than Disney, and nobody has the extensive library of characters that would make great franchises that Marvel has.”

With analysts favourably describing the acquisition from the Disney perspective, as a meaningful growth opportunity, that will strengthen high-quality branded content, and allow the combined company to build the high-margin licensing business- change can only be a good thing.