Sky Sports News: it’s just not cricket

Friday 18th June was a disastrous day for sport. Forget England’s passable impression of an over 70s team in the scoreless bore-fest with Algeria, I’m talking about Sky’s decision to withdraw Sky Sports News from Freeview and turn it into a pay TV channel. One quotation which appeared beside the BBC report caught my eye. It reads as follows:

“There is a broad, emerging consensus that in the multi-media era it is insane to give content away for nothing”
Tim Luckhurst, Professor of Journalism, University of Kent

Interesting. Provocative. Utter claptrap.

The fact is that as the world becomes more advanced in terms of multi-media content, the easier it becomes to find content of similar quality and substance. Since I churned from the Sky platform to Freeview and subsequently Freesat last year, I have not once laid eyes on Sky Sports and my scarily useless knowledge of all things sporting has not diminished as a result. BBC Sport does the same job in terms of headlines and there are scores of places I can get my Spurs and Surrey fixes earlier than Sky could ever report the gist of the story. Indeed, most of the time Facebook and Twitter get there first.

There are three possible reasons why Sky have taken SSN away from Freeview.
1. They actually think it a valuable commodity. As discussed above, this is crazy. As media fragments, generic content such as SSN becomes less valuable, whereas the crown jewels become the prize. Where else can the UK public watch shows such as 24, Lost or Premier League Football? Professor Luckhurst described SSN as a “loss leader”. He is probably right, but will Sky 3 +1, which has replaced SSN on the Freeview EPG, be as successful?
2. They want to annoy Freeview. In times of recession, downturn and economic strife, downtrading becomes a serious concern for premier businesses. By taking away even the smallest piece of content from Freeview, Sky are flexing their muscles in a public way. It is worth PR in itself.
3. Murdoch’s pay wall is writ in stone. This could be a clear indication that Sky are aggressively pursuing the pay-per-view model for all of their content.

Whatever reason it is, I doubt that there will be serious ramifications for either Sky or Freeview which just makes the decision all the more puzzling.

Going back to the dear Professor, I think I may have been a little unfair. He is not entirely worng – he is just missing a word. Had he said “the wrong content” he would have been spot on. Giving away some of your content as a sweetener is vital – we have seen from our years of work with Which? that giving a free guide gives a much better quality of customer than prize draw. Customers recruited on brand values stay longer and are more profitable than those lured in on a false premise whose latency and inertia provides any revenue. These themes are explored in an article on the subscription business model which can be found on the mc&c website.



Tim Part, Business Development Manager

Twitter or TV?

At the iMedia conference in Brighton this week there was a good deal of discussion about social media and how best to measure it.

Oddly though, there was little consideration of the fact that different verticals will be able to benefit from social media in very different ways.

One way of looking at verticals is to place them on a grid where one axis runs from low to high emotional importance and the other axis runs from low to high rational importance.

Verticals with high emotional importance contain products that we buy because they “say” something about us. Verticals with high rational importance contain products that we buy because we need them.

Using the emotional-rational grid we can divide verticals into four sectors:

High rational, high emotional (HRHE) verticals like travel, motor cars and electrical devices. These are verticals where the functionality needs to be right, where we are risking relatively large amounts of money, and where part of why we buy is because we feel comfortable with the brand

Low rational, high emotional (LRHE) verticals like fashion, print media and charity. These are verticals where we are not risking a great deal, where we don’t really need the products but where we do feel emotional engagement because the products we buy “say” a lot about us

High rational, low emotional (HRLE) verticals like banking, retail and utilities. These are verticals where the functionality needs to be right, where we are risking relatively large amounts of money, but where we are not emotionally engaged with the brand

Low rational, low emotional (LRLE) verticals like washing powder and petrol. These are verticals where we are not taking great risks and where there is no emotional involvement with the brands. While products in these verticals are important the functionality they deliver is generally simple.

HRHE verticals can use social media very creatively. As well as using social media to research the marketplace by listening to conversations and to manage their reputation they can actively “campaign” messages through social media.

LRHE verticals are in a similar position – able to exploit their emotional connection with consumers through social media, although they may need to work harder as there is little they can say about rational benefits.

HRLE verticals however will find it far harder to exploit social media for campaigning. They have little emotional connection with their consumers and proactive use of social media platforms will frequently be considered intrusive – who wants to hear from their bank on Facebook? They can however use social media for market research and importantly for managing their reputations. For instance few people are likely to praise a bank’s service to their friends but many will criticise it if something goes wrong.

The LRLE verticals are the Cinderellas of social media. No one is interested in them: why would you blog about washing powder or review a cleaning fluid? For brands in these verticals social media are far less important. While they should monitor conversations just in case a big issue starts to brew, they need to do little more than that.

Both HRLEs and LRLEs need to employ advertising techniques to add a layer of emotional connection to their brands. But for HRHEs and LRHEs that are considerable opportunities to enhance their brands through social media.

The lesson here is that brands should consider whether they are in a vertical that can usefully use social media for active campaigning or merely for research and for more reactive communication.

A failure to understand this can result in wasted budgets and in losing the opportunities that more powerful media activities can deliver.

Jeremy Swinfen Green, Digital Director
jeremy@mcand.co.uk

What should digital TV really look like?

The kind folk at Broadcast magazine recently asked me to act as one of the judges for their Digital Broadcast Awards. It was a fascinating afternoon with, as you would expect, some excellent entries.

My first thought though was: why “digital”? I was told that the awards were about content aired on digital terrestrial channels which of course encompasses anything from BBC 1 and ITV to more niche channels like BBC parliament and FiveUSA as well as various shopping and information channels.

But these days, “digital terrestrial” seems a slightly out of date and artificial set of channels to base an awards ceremony around.

OK they are all free, which is, I suppose, a point of difference. But there are many “TV channels” that are now available purely online while others provide so much content online that you don’t really need a TV to watch them (although of course you still need a TV licence!).

Restricting the awards to purely “digital terrestrial” means that anything winning a “Streamy” award wouldn’t be included for the Broadcast awards.

I am not sure if all that’s particularly important. But it did nake me think about the nature of TV programmes on a digital platform and how they can be developed beyond simple long form TV to enhance the viewer’s experience.

And looking at some of the entrants to the Digital Broadcast Awards helped me identify some of the possibilities.

As well as programmes that make no attempt at online enhancement, there seem to be two aproaches, one which we might call “normal” and one which is very definitely "advanced".

Normal enhancements

There is a “normal” level that looks pretty like the “extras” you get when you buy the DVD of a movie.

• You get the long form video (of course)
• You probably get some additional editorial, perhaps some short form clips and out-takes, pictures and text based bckground
• And you are pretty certain to get one or two more interactive elements: voting perhaps, a forum where you can submit comments, even the opportunity to upload your own pictures or video
• The channel might also market the programme by uploading clips and information to other, third party sites such as YouTube where more people may discover it

Advanced enhancements

But increasingly many programmes are developing advanced online content and applications that really blur the boundaries between the long form TV video format and online interactive formats.

Thus some programmes:

• Use viewer interactions or feeds from Twitter and other sites to tweak story lines
• Create immersive video games based around the programme
• Provide alternative storylines and extra characters online
• Merge the real world with the programme by for instance sending emails to registered viewers from characters in the programme
• Introduce new characters (or even the whole programme) online before they have been seen on the programme

These advanced enhancements are where the real creativity will be seen over the coming year or two. With the rapid acceleration of the long awaited “convergence” between online and TV (as witnessed by the launch of internet enabled TVs) perhaps this area should be the focus of future awards.

It is certainly the area that programme makes should focus on!

Jeremy Swinfen Green, Digital Director

jeremy@mcand.co.uk

The first step in a revolution. Or a bold experiment doomed to failure?

So it's finally happened. After months of speculation the first of the UK national newspapers will start charging for online content from June.

It's a brave move which will be watched with interest by many different parties. And despite the confident soundbites coming out of NI there's no doubt that this is a high-risk move.

However it's not necessarily as risky as some are making out. Only the quality papers, which attract an online savvy audience, will be going paid-for initially.

TimesOnline currently has 1.22m daily users. Even if only 5% of these convert they would bring in £1.8m on a daily pass. The initial success of TimesPlus suggests that these numbers aren't just pipedreams.

Moreover the new Times and Sunday Times sites will be very popular with advertisers. In a similar way that paid-for papers bring in a better quality response than the freesheets so NI will have an effective monopoly in this sector and could theoretically charge accordingly.

If Murdoch follows through with his promise of improving content to differentiate his sites from other publishers' then NI may well succeed in stealing consumers away from the free sites. It's no coincidence that this announcement comes hot on the heels of the BBC's declaration that they will be significantly reducing their online offerings.

But it still feels like a very risky move. TimesOnline simply does not inspire the same brand loyalty as Guardian.co.uk, MailOnline and the behemoth that is the BBC. While there are so many other free alternatives out there it's hard to see what NI can offer consumers to put themselves far enough above their competitors to justify charging for content.

Chris Skone James, Senior Planner Buyer

The London Weekly – myth or reality?

The London Weekly, a new free newspaper aimed at the London commuter market was launched at the start of February, aiming to fill the gap left following the demise of the London Lite and thelondonpaper in late 2009.

Created by a group of private investors calling themselves Global Publishing, the paper is distributed outside Underground stations on Fridays and Saturdays. The team behind it describe it as "the only free newspaper in London covering light entertainment, gossip, politics, health, music and fashion" – obviously unaware of the London Evening Standard.

Working in the heart of media land, I use the tube to travel to Tottenham Court Road from Stockwell and back again daily, where I’m constantly exposed to the Metro, City AM and the Standard, as well as weekly magazines, such as Shortlist, Stylist and Sport. However, as of yet I’m still to be offered one of the supposed 250,000 copies of the London Weekly – and we’re now on issue 5.

Have I just been in an oblivious daze as I stumble out of the tube on Friday morning still half asleep? Possible but unlikely it seems, as a quick survey of the office reveals nobody else has seen it either – and I’m pretty sure at least half of them were awake.

Launching a new free-sheet in London is a daunting task no doubt, and anyone attempting to do so would of course face difficulties along the way and bumps to smooth. However, targeting Friday and Saturday tube users (Friday users likely being very different to Saturday users) and failing to make it readily available, especially in its first few weeks of existence, seems like a bad way to start.

Kyle Seeley, Planner/Buyer

Adding some rigour to social media measurement

Measuring the effectiveness of social media marketing is a fairly fuzzy activity. Putting a little structure around it can therefore be useful.

There are three main types of measurement you can consider. There's absolute data – data that measures size. There is trend data – data that measures change. And there is comparative data – which you could use for benchmarking.

Absolute data is factual – I might have 5000 Twitter followers, or 37 people might have commented on this blog post. Or perhaps 6000 people viewed my video on YouTube. Or my brand was mentioned 5000 times in forums. Etc etc. Some of this can perhaps be assigned a value in media terms. And while it isn't always easy to assign an appropriate value (what is a Facebook fan worth?) at least you can make a start.

Trend data is also factual – but as you are comparing two sets of data, as you can with tools like Alterian's SM2, the important fact is the change in the data. Thus if there are 10,000 positive mentions of my brand through social media in August that may or may not be good: it's hard to know. But if there were 9000 in July and 12,000 in September I can be pretty confident that I am going in the right direction and that the value of those mentions in September is 125% of the value in July.

And there is comparative data. I might have 12,000 positive brand mentions in September. But if my competitor got 50,000 that month I'm not looking so bright!

We can also separate the results of social media conversations into four areas: views, conversations, actions and effects.

First there are views. Sometimes it's possible to measure the number of people who have seen some of your social media conversations – for instance by measuring visitor numbers to your blog. You won't always be able to measure that – but where you can this may be a helpful metric.

Often these numbers will be small – perhaps too small to be relevant in media terms. But they might not be. If Sony Bravia gets a couple of million views of its ad on YouTube then that's worth something. Probably more in fact than 2 million OTSs on TV.

Then there are conversations. These are simply mentions of your brand or your competitors in various places – forums, blogs, file shares etc. They can be good, bad or indifferent (and you should be measuring that). At its simplest it equates to your PR agency counting the press clips.

Next there are actions. This is when people have done something – taken an action of some kind, perhaps signing up to follow you on Twitter, or responding to a comment you have made in a forum.

Again often the numbers here will be very small – and the real value may not be in terms of media but in terms of the opportunity they bring to engage with brand advocates.

And finally we have effects. This is when you can see that social media activity has had an effect on something else you are doing. For instance, and at its simplest, you could measure the effect (or at least some of the effect) of social media on web traffic by tracking people from appropriate sources such as social networking sites.

Other effects might only be measurable through data analysis, for instance identifying links between social media campaigns and calls to a call centre or online sales.

Of course the effect might well be softer than a measurable and identifable action. It may be a shift in purchase propensity or brand favourability on the part of people exposed to your social media. That's harder to measure although not impossible using standard quantitative research techniques.

So there you have it. A little 3 by 4 matrix that should help you put some rigour into the process of evaluating social media.

Jeremy Swinfen Green, Digital Director
jeremy@mcand.co.uk

Mobile Media Metrics: a good start by the GSMA. But...

The GSMA announced the launch of their mobile media metrics tool, delivered by Comscore, at the London Imax yesterday.

It was certainly a popular event, and massively over-subscribed by all accounts. So I went along ready to be impressed.

Well, to their credit, the GSMA have managed to get the five main UK mobile operators, O2, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile and 3UK, into one space, sharing usage data to allow robust reach and frequency numbers to be accessed by media planners.

That’s useful. We can see that 16 million people in the UK accessed the web via mobile devices (by which they mean phones – small screens, limited ease of use, but always on and always with you).

And we can see where they go: Facebook, Google, the operators, the BBC… (Actually, when you look at the figures in a bit more depth and examine page views and minutes of use, you find that mobile media is really little more than Facebook Media, but that’s another story.)

And, because GSMA have negotiated a survey of a section of mobile users we can even make some assumptions about the socio-demographics of mobile web site visitors. (Although these are assumptions and I believe will be open to some question.)

But. And it’s a very big but:

There is still no independent data. At the moment all the data comes from the operators. So you buy some media. And the operators will tell you whether or not it has been delivered.

For mobile media to have any credibility (and Michael Smith of the COI was quick to point this out yesterday) we do need to see independent campaign data such as that which is delivered by third party ad servers in “fixed” internet advertising.

Without that (and irrespective of whether you feel the heavy dominance of Facebook is an issue), it will be hard to justify serious spending on mobile media.

Jeremy Swinfen Green, Digital Director