Is the Intention Economy about to disrupt the EPG?

Nowadays, the question facing consumers is less about ‘What’s on?’ and more about ‘What would I like to watch and where can I find it?’, says GfK’s Colin Strong, and this poses a real challenge for the venerable electronic programme guide, which seems increasingly ill at ease in today’s environment…

Unusually our family did not actually get a television set until I was 12 years old. I remember the day we got it – my brothers and I sat transfixed by Saturday afternoon horse racing (in glorious black and white) whilst my parents rolled their eyes, disappointed at what had happened to our sitting room and what they considered was about to happen to our young minds.

But the constant talk of last night’s telly in the playground had led to us nagging our parents incessantly until they were so worn down they had no choice. Everyone pretty much watched the same programmes and talk of these was the social currency whether you liked ‘It’s a knockout’ and ‘The generation game’ or not!

Today I wonder if we would be nagging our parents for a TV or for a tablet. Because, of course, the proliferation of over the top (OTT) video services means that we can watch pretty much whatever we want when we want. And the question facing consumers is less about ‘What’s on?’ and more about ‘What would I like to watch and where can I find it?’

And this is the challenge for the venerable electronic programme guide (EPG), which seems increasingly ill at ease in today’s environment. Scrolling with a remote control through a linear, text based listing of programmes that is structured by channel and time seems incongruous with other ‘content discover’ platforms.

Google has long changed our perceptions of how we search and discover material, typing pretty much whatever comes into our heads to be magically presented with a list of relevant content. And Apple has irreversibly raised the game on the user experience with icon based colourful touch screens.

So to discover relevant content, the EPG now has competition with the rise of second screen apps and OTT interfaces which present TV programmes based on criteria such as ‘most watched’, ‘friends’ favourites’ and ‘favourite channels’. Pay TV companies are also getting in on the act with more dynamic interfaces and search capabilities on their EPG supplied by companies such as Rovi.

And surely discoverability of content is the key challenge for media companies as fragmentation takes apace. As Ryan Garner recently pointed out, ‘the current media landscape offers consumers as many permutations for consumption as ordering a coffee on your way to work’.

This is a challenge not isolated to media companies of course. In pretty much every purchase decision there has been a phenomenal boom in the scale and scope of choices made available to us. The current accepted practice for meeting consumer needs is for brands to get ever more clever about the data they collect, hence the proliferation of ‘most watched’ and ‘favourite’ options.

However, this may be about to be turned on its head. Consumers are increasingly sensitive about the way their personal data is used – with a recent GfK study finding that 65% of consumers admit to sometimes feeling stalked by online advertising.

And legislation across a number of geographies, including the UK, are creating the possibility that consumers will be responsible for curating their own personal data as brands are required to make this available in a ‘transportable and machine readable format’. Already personal data stores such as Mydex and Paoga are emerging, thus providing the mechanisms that consumers will need to navigate this space.

Of course, as we start to curate the data about our lives and use services which leverage the value of this data, the balance of power subtlety shifts from the vendor to the individual who is increasingly able to aggregate what the brand knows about them.

We move from CRM (customer relationship management) to VRM (vendor relationship management). This term for this shift, coined by academic and commentator Doc Searls, is the Intention Economy.

This creates huge threats and opportunities for media brands. The threat for Pay TV brands amongst others is that it could make it easier to shop around for the best deal based on the information viewers collect about their own viewing habits across different platforms and devices.

But the same mechanism also provides opportunity – imagine how rich a content recommendation service would be if viewers offered their web browsing data to help refine the algorithm. Or provided access to their TV viewing across platforms. And this can be combined with a better understanding of ‘intentions’.

Instead of always second guessing what consumers want in order to make recommendations, viewers can be asked what they actually want. The media company searches for relevant material but using data supplied by the viewer in order to refine the search.

These are early days for the Intention Economy so examples are few and far between, but an interesting case study from a different category is the Cheap Energy Club run by moneysavingexpert.com.

Here, you enter details of your energy usage and your current tariff (in the future this will likely be automated). You are then asked for the level of savings you would like to make in order to consider switching. Every month the service undertakes a search on your behalf to identify tariffs that generates a sufficient saving for you to consider switching.

So information is provided upfront by the individual which is then used to shape the nature of the engagement with brands. Albeit a very different category, sound like an interesting business model?

Of course, for all of this to work smoothly there will need to be Open APIs much more widely available but that is not inconceivable. In the UK, banks, telcos and utility companies are at the forefront of this but media is an obvious candidate. And then it has to be asked, where does that leave the EPG?