IBC: New activity is going on around TV, more than within it

An IBC debate, ‘Changing the Advertising Paradigm’, convinced few at this week’s Amsterdam confex that the core TV advertising paradigm would change in the short to mid-term, but did illustrate the activity and opportunity growing up around television.

Delegates heard from Evan Krauss at Shazam, whose music app is on 150 million phones now, and sells 200 million songs per year. But now Shazam want to partner with the broadcasters too – and have struck up their first major deal with NBC, where you can “Shazam” a programme or even an advertisement and get more information, or an offer or discount.

Screenreach offers more of the same via its Screach technology, including purchases from screen (for example, buy the same dress as the soap star). Bauer Media has opted to embed the Screach software development kit into its existing radio apps, to add location-based content. In the US, college football on Fox will use the Screach app itself and encourage soccer fans to download the app to access extra information in real time as they watch the game.

Early adopters. But the question will still be who should be dealing with who, and who needs who most? Krauss illustrated the problem with his “three levels of fans”.

“Superfans only want to use the show’s site; the mass could use Shazam, but very many also use Facebook independently”. Mascha Driessen from Google Benelux was clear about the strategy – “go to where the audience is”. She meant Facebook, Twitter and Google.

Driessen also encouraged ad experimentation – promoting a new service where the advertiser only pays if all 30 seconds are watched. Ironically, earlier Fru Hazlitt of ITV had shown a case study where the viewer could answer a question in a 30 second online ad. If they get it right they can skip the rest of the commercial – rather than watch all 30 seconds – and go straight to the video content. Driessen suggested that “advertisers are scared of their ads being skipped, and only interested in reach and target market”.

Tom Gutteridge, founder of Screenreach, had said that Screach could be employed without the broadcaster – even by talking to individual production companies – but was better run in conjunction with them.

Matthew Kershaw, content director at BBH, was positive about the technology, but agreed with Driessen – “advertisers want scale and the right environment…  if the users are on Facebook or Twitter when watching TV, build on that. Tap into where they are.”

So where are ITV in this context? Well, they have scale and the company is trying to build a complete picture of VoD users – 2 million registered so far – and 1 million downloads of the ITV app so far, with 1 billion VoD impressions last year (mind you that is compared to 350 billion TV impressions on ITV, said Hazlitt). But there was still little conviction that ITV was moving forward fast enough in this space – “lots of the networks are slow,” said Krauss. Hazlitt felt that other activity around TV shows remained enhancing, “but we need to make money out of other platforms too.” Indeed!