GLOBAL – UNITED STATES, FEBRUARY 18, 2013 – American broadcast media is set to undergo yet another shift as Comcast closed a $16.7 billion deal to purchase the remaining half of General Electric’s stake in NBC Universal.
The end of an era and the start of another, this is how most pundits view Comcast’s recent acquisition, which is expected to see the arrival of a new, digital era in which cable-giant Comcast has emerged as a dominant force in entertainment and communications.
The acquisition means many things for American broadcast media and Comcast, solidifying the cable and broadband giant’s role as a media titan. As it assumes full ownership of NBC Universal, Comcast takes full control of an historic media jewel, whose foundations include the emergence of modern broadcast media in the 20th century. NBC Universal includes NBC News, MSNBC, CNBC, Universal Pictures, the Universal theme parks and resorts, and several popular cable channels including Bravo.
Founded in 1963, Comcast awakens a new era and represents a clear commitment to cable to broadcast television despite the wider range of entertainment choices presented by the internet revolution. Notwithstanding past fears of internet effectively putting TV advertising to death, much as it has done to print media, television remains a highly profitable and growing business.
TV advertising continues to survive
A follow up study done by Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) to their 2011 study on the future of TV advertising found that the internet will not truly trample TV when it comes to advertising. However, TV needs to adapt to varying trends in order to compete with online.
First, “channels will go away”. According to the study, channels will no longer be a means of accessing programming. Video on demand, Intelligent Programming Guides and personal video recorders (PVRs) has changed the way people access TV programs, putting linear broadcasting to history’s pages. The power to access content has evolved to a multiscreen, multi-device, multi-modal, on-my-schedule user-controlled experience, presenting a challenge for advertisers as they can no longer get the promised audience number per ad inserted in episodes.
Cisco sees solutions to this challenge which involves new forms of addressable advertising:
1. Ads will be delivered to on-demand viewers in real time or prepositioned in PVRs, requiring new capabilities for ad delivery as well as yield management through analytics.
2. Measures and reporting will increasingly need to reflect actual viewing of the ads, as well as brand engagement and impact.
3. As product placement continues to play a greater role, campaign design and development activities will need to become even more closely integrated with show development. Branded entertainment, where content is funded by companies seeking to advertise their product, will flourish and the lines between entertainment and infomercials will further blur (e.g. some of today’s reality shows). This will drive the need for higher-quality branded stories.
Ads get personal
Things have to get personal if advertisers wish to keep their audience’s attention. Instead of targeting an entire segment with one piece of advertising content, TV advertising will evolve to a further segmented audience which will be served different pieces of advertising based on the audience’s characteristics. To avoid huge additional costs for advertising, creative development, detailed metadata and new rendering approaches will allow partial automated dynamic modifications of video based on the viewer’s segment, the study said.
The strength of online advertising is in involving the audience. TV, which has started involving the audience through social networking sites, will need to strengthen this trend. Brands will increasingly partner with new types of apps associated with popular TV and movie characters. A popular app cited in the Cisco study is the augmented-reality app-based representation of a judge from “America’s Next Top Model” will be able to assist in dress selection at a store.
Neuroscience marketing
The inclusion of the other senses, aside from audio and visual, is increasingly becoming popular in advertising and marketing. Cisco predicts that brands will target the other senses. Making use of tactile feedback technology (haptics), smell and even taste will be used in TV advertising, supplied through “new remotes” (i.e. game pads, tablets). This can be achieved with the proliferation of 3D printers where the audience will be able to print a model of a new car, while haptic feedback will allow the experience of driving it on a mountain road.
These new trends will require a makeover in advertising production. The creative side is easy to deal with but Cisco, in the its conclusion, urges agencies, media buyers, aggregators and studios to start developing audience-tracking capabilities; better metadata that describes video, scenes and technical production details; and new analytics to better predict viewership, timing and demand.
