The third place in media

Starbucks is often referred to as “the third place”- neither home nor work, but a neutral place in between. A place of utilitarian comfort, where urban consumers can both relax and connect. We have a growing sense of that third place arriving in the media landscape. For the last 50 years there have really only been two media strategies: service search or ambush. The former drove the establishment of classified sections, and with the advent of digital media the behemoth that is Google. As advertisers we serve consumers that self-identify by their immediate needs. The latter has been the mainstay of all other media revenues since advertising began. Whether it’s a carved graffiti directing sailors to the brothel in Ephesus, or 400 TVR on ITV, we use content to attract consumers to our “ambush” marketing messages. And consumers, with few exceptions, are happy with this Faustian bargain. But a third way is emerging within the emerging “media third place” and that is the App. Apps can have the content that entertains and engages as does mainstream media, but the functionality and detailed information that classified provides. Most of our clients have a continuity revenue model at the heart of their business. Whether its regular donation, sustained subscription or repeat purchase, each has a relationship with an organisation that goes beyond the merely transactional. And that third place, the App, seems to have a new role in serving that need and creating new growth. Mike Colling Managing Director

Paper or Pixels

Hot on the desk is the PADD (Print and digital data) survey from the NRS. Long discussed this is the first formal measurement by the NRS of readership across both paper and digital versions of their titles. To a very large degree a lot of the learning here has been presaged by Touchpoints, who have been measuring readership on and offline for several years. But it’s the first time our gold standard readership currency has published joint figures, so it’s worthy of note. The numbers on national press hold no surprises. Biggest gainers from adding digital are The Guardian - web adds another 65% to their daily readership, and 119% to their monthly reach. At the bottom of the newspaper pile we find The Daily Star, chalking up just 1.3% gains from their website. Much more interesting are the magazine results. Firstly we see a bigger impact across the board. Of the 110 odd tiles measured 2/3rds of them recorded net gains by adding web of more than 30%. And at the top end, really big gains - 984% being the record to date. And secondly, and I think more interesting - we see a marked difference between the business models off and online. BBC Easy Cook, who topped the rankings with a massive 984% gain, has bbcgoodfood.com as its web partner. Now to call bbcgoodfood.com a magazine is stretching definitions more than a little in one sense, but it does reflect the major reason why the magazine is purchased - for recipe ideas and support and services that the consumer needs in the most efficient way possible. The second major trend is the partnering between offline magazines and online ecommerce sites. In some cases the magazine came first (eg Boots Health and Beauty and Boots.com) but in others (eg Asos) the magazine is the “new” media channel. I rather suspect that we may see more of the latter as our pure play digerati learn the lessons that Google has learned and turn to old fashioned print for marketing. We think that this is an area worthy of more debate, and it will form part of our next seminar “The future of print: paper or pixels” on October 10th. If you would like to join us then call Cathy Lawler on 020-7307 6104 for a place on the guest list. Mike Colling, Managing Director

TV’s may be staying dumb and not getting much smarter

Last week’s global conference on the future of “integrated TV” in Amsterdam saw an interesting reversal of one stream of conventional wisdom on the future of television
Manufacturers in particular have long believed that it is the destiny of the television set to become “smarter”, with full super-fast broadband access, and with a range of accompanying “apps” that enable deep exploration of fab facts associated with the broadcast stream. They also see the main television screen as the focal point for “social TV”, ie real time messaging with your friends and family via Facebook or IM.

Three things are conspiring to frustrate this vision of the future.
Firstly, the refusal of “live TV” to go away. The number of minutes we spend watching TV is still rising (up to 242 minutes per day) , 85% of which is live TV. This is a figure that has remained stubbornly the same for the last 5 years, despite the fact that 50% of us now own DVR’s. We want to watch TV live and now, and not have the effort of controlling it.

The second reason the TV is for TV and not other things is that it’s often not just our choice. More than 50% of viewing is still “shared” viewing with others in the room. If our wives want to watch Eastenders what chance do we have to play with the Top Gear app?

And the final reason for the likely failure of the smart “big screen” is the rapid advance of the smart “medium” screen.

11% of us now own tablets, up from 2% a year ago. And 17% of us say we will buy one in the next 12 months. Zero to 30% penetration in two years is good going.
The big surprise on tablet usage is the amount that is in the home (87%) and when watching TV (68%).

All of a sudden there is a personal, alternative screen sitting on our audience’s laps that they can turn to in order to explore, respond, or just chat.

And that’s just what they are doing. Our betting - learn about tablets rather than smart TV’s, that’s where the testing efforts should go.

Mike Colling, Managing Director

Media inflation - dead or alive?

For the majority of my media career both advertisers and agencies accepted that the price of media rose inexorably each year, sometimes at the inflation rate of a small South American country.

But since the twin influences of rampant increase in supply with digitalisation of media and the slowdown in total ad spend, growth since the credit crunch has seen effective deflation in media prices for the last few years. To paraphrase “you have never had it so cheap” … or at least not for more than a decade.

But there is one notable exception to this - and that’s the price of search. Here inflation is not only alive and well, but running at rates seen in the Weimar Republic.

Why do we, collectively as an industry, allow ourselves to pay more and more for what is essentially a coupon?

Search facilitates, it adds no value. It owns no content, it creates no reach of its own, it merely facilitates a journey that is started with engagement with a “proper” media channel. It also creates little long-term value for marketers - just look at the loyalty of customers who come to you via search vs those from other channels.
Yet we divert more and more money from channels our customers spend hours with rather than seconds with. Why?

The advertising and marketing community has the creative talents that can match those showcased in the Olympic opening and closing ceremonies. Surely we can harness some of that creativity to find ways to better value each stage in the journey, and invest appropriately?

Mike Colling, Managing Director

Olympic results - a game of two halves

Avid readers of this blog (all of you!) will know that I have been a little obsessed with warning that immediate response to media activity would be severely depressed by the Olympics.

“The world will be out to party” was how I referred to it back in May!
Well, with the typical smugness that accompanies “I told you so”, “I told you so”!
The majority of clients still using mass media to recruit mass audience customers have seen a fall in response of between 30% and 50% over the last week.
Hooray! We can still predict accurately.

What’s really interesting though is that this is a game of two halves. Olympic fever is much more pronounced in London and the South East than in the North and Scotland.
And the impact is seen much more on offline than online media. So much so that we are seeing search results improve (albeit marginally) week on week in the North and Scotland whilst declining by 20%+ in London

Even with TV audiences in the 20 million bracket this is clearly not an evenly distributed madness. It appears that London is the kitchen of this particular party!

Mike Colling
Managing Director

Back to the 70’s for TV viewing

This weekend’s TV viewing figures are really quite remarkable. Friday night’s BBC1 peak audience to the Danny Boyle show of 26.9 million viewers has been well documented, as has the 82% share of audience.

These figures are comparable to Sunday night at the London Palladium figures back in the day, when a single show could capture the attention of a nation.
Friday shows that with enough creativity that feat can still be replicated. Interesting food for thought for an investment case for content?
What is possibly more interesting is that BBC1 sustained an Olympic audience across the weekend. Not at an 80% share, but across Saturday and Sunday evenings approaching a 40% share, more than double their previous week’s total audience share of 19%.

Total viewing is up a little, but not a lot; most of these viewers have been stolen from other channels, not other places. And most of the theft seems to have been from other “terrestrial” channels not from the long, long tail of multichannel TV.
That tells us one of two things. Either that the satellite audience is so engaged with its 115th repeat of Friends that they refuse to give it up, even for Rebecca Adlington, or that they are so non-engaged with their televisions that it matters not what channel they are tuned to.

Given the response rates we see from our long tail I wonder which of these scenarios might be true?

Mike Colling
Managing Director

We don't talk any more

we see this “voice avoidance” as a trend that will only continue to rise. The Last week saw the launch of the Ofcom communications market report. This annual piece of bespoke research always brings new insights into changing consumer behaviour, and this year is no exception.

The first gem that caught my eye really resonated with behaviours we are seeing across our client base.

Ofcom asked a representative sample of the UK population “How do you prefer to communicate with friends and family?”

Back came the politically correct answer: 67% of us claim we prefer to meet face to face. Phone calls and text messages are said to be poor relations at 10% and 5% respectively.

They then asked an actual behavioural question: “what do you actually use on a daily basis to communicate with friends and family?” Face to face falls to second place, at just 49%, and the winner is, wait for it … text messaging, 9 points clear at 58%!

If we split this latter question by age the difference is even more severe - with 90%of 16-24 year olds using text to communicate with friends and family on a daily basis.

This really chimes with both what we see in the pub and in our daily results from ART™.

In the pub we see social groups interacting less physically and more virtually. They may be present together but they are “talking” (texting) with a virtual group of friends. And in our response results for clients we see the inexorable rise of text as a response channel. For many clients more than a third of all response is now initiated by an inbound text.

Given the ubiquity of the mobile phone, and the invasion of face to face marketing good news is that it brings opportunities as well as threats. But more anon.

Mike Colling
Managing Director