Lessons from Manchester: Media’s industrial revolution needs you
Opinion: 100% Media 0% Nonsense
Tech is radically changing media and advertising but our first Future of Media Manchester event reminded us that what matters most to creativity and sales is the same now as it was 200 years ago, writes the editor-in-chief.
When it comes to education and business, Manchester is a special place.
England’s first civic university, the University of Manchester, is celebrating its 200th anniversary this year. Manchester is also home to the industrial revolution, having established itself as the engine room of Britain’s rise to become the world’s first superpower nation in the 19th century.
The city became a place where capitalists and labourers could better themselves through ingenuity and effort, rather than rely on patronage or privilege, which were the only routes to success in England previously.
Manchester is the original land of opportunity. It even has an Abraham Lincoln statue.
So it was appropriate that we held our first Future of Media event in Manchester last week.
This was not just The Future of Media London on tour — the conference dealt with the region’s specific challenges, such as why Manchester’s prospects are being held back by a lack of infrastructure, a failure to harness the region’s talent and perception issues that lead to a dramatic flow in media agency billings from north to south in recent years.
Manchester, once again, gave us a meaningful education about the business of media and advertising.
But there were two broader themes that should be a focus for our flagship Future of Media conference, which returns to London next week.
Is the era of ‘wastage’ over?
First, are we at a “tipping point” when it comes to VOD becoming the industry’s most important ad-supported medium?
Sam Taylor, speaking in Manchester about the future of TV, suggested we are a pivotal moment in how advertisers spend on VOD, because they are simply better at understanding the data that goes into targeting VOD audiences. Whereas VOD was considered prohibitively expensive for newer or smaller advertisers, Taylor said it is becoming easier to justify that higher cost per VOD buy.
He explained: “Go back five years, you’d be saying: ‘Why do I want to be paying five times, 10 times more to utilise VOD platforms versus terrestrial, linear TV?’ [You’d say] ‘wastage is good… it’s more effective to have wastage’.
“But when you’re looking at it now and using more powerful data… suddenly it’s OK to pay five times more to access exposure on a VOD platform when it drives 10 times better outcomes, because it’s about effectiveness.
“We’re at that tipping point where quality of data is going to drive effective outcomes. It’s less about the cost per unit and it’s more about outcomes.”
UK audiences on VOD are growing, too, putting paid to the lie that TV is somehow waning in popularity and influence. Rather, TV is, as former Thinkbox CEO Tess Alps once delicately put it, “having fucking babies”.
That’s partly because ITV launched ITVX in 2022, a much more superior streaming service than predecessor ITV Hub, while Channel 4 has simplified its VOD proposition and used YouTube as a shop window that, according to sales chief Ewan Douglas, has provided “zero” cannibalisation of its core audiences.
Streaming land is also far more diverse and replete with ad inventory, enabling VOD advertising to scale across multiple platforms and larger audience segments.
And there’s a simpler reason that’s often overlooked — home broadband speeds.
Matt Hill, the outgoing insight guru at Thinkbox who is joining Sky Media next year, demonstrated at a recent event (pictured, above) how much faster the average home broadband speed is today compared with five years ago. This simple fact should force us to reconsider conventional wisdom of the last decade that younger people “want to watch everything on their phone”, meaning film and TV content is “too long”, or that Netflix had hooked consumers on an ad-free experience.
Isn’t it also the case that most UK households simply did not have fast enough internet to stream TV until very recently?
We need to sell selling
Infrastructure is crucial to business success.
Just ask Denstu Creative managing director Julie Chadwick, who told last week’s conference that it was quicker to travel from Manchester to London to Edinburgh than it was to go direct from Manchester to Edinburgh.
The future of media, just like the future of UK plc, needs investment to thrive. It also needs great salespeople.
Something struck me last week about a presentation ITV gave at our Manchester event about Coronation Street and its advances in product placement and sponsored activity. Flanked by series producer Kate Brooks and a Bafta statuette (Corrie won Best Soap and Continuing Drama in 2012), ITV’s Manchester-based business development director Jason Spencer asked the audience: “How many of you are in sales?”
It was a rhetorical trick question, because we’re all (sort of) in the business of selling. Even for someone like Brooks, whose day job involves overseeing scripts and managing relationships with actors, selling is an integral part of content creation.
A creative idea does not simply get made on the basis of some divine judgment about what makes something “good”. An idea must be communicated, executed or forced into existence, especially in a world where the patrons who bankrolled da Vinci and Michelangelo are few and far between.
I noticed a similar sales-centrism (a word I’ve just made up) during ITV’s upfronts almost a year ago. What has historically been a US-style celeb-fest to woo advertisers could have been renamed “the Kelly and Dags show” last year, such was the prominence given to its most senior commercial operators, Kelly Williams and Simon Daglish.
Insiders at ITV tell me last year’s more “salesy” Palooza event came about due to feedback from advertisers themselves, which are demanding to know more about media owners’ product development and data offering.
Being human is your unfair advantage
In any event, this is all for the better. Just like Manchester’s heritage in creating Britain’s middle class by being shameless about establishing new industries, the media and advertising industry needs to be just as bold at selling itself in the 21st century.
Because here’s the thing about the industrial revolution: it eventually happened everywhere in what we now call “the developed world”. Technology is not a source of competitive advantage in the long run because it can always be emulated, rivalled and bettered.
Yes, AI may play a leading role in how we create or sell ideas in the coming years. But eventually AI will be accessible to everyone — even children — like computers and smartphones are today.
Which means that, even if the human element of what we do becomes ever smaller, it will still be the most important part of the recipe.
Omar Oakes is UK editor-in-chief of The Media Leader. 100% Media 0% Nonsense is a weekly column about the state of media and advertising
The views in this article are expressed by the UK editor-in-chief for publication in The Media Leader UK and do not reflect the views of Adwanted Group
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