TV Ads Empowered With Tags : Going Beyond Mass Media

The television advertising market is going to experience huge modifications within the next few years. Some of the main change will include:
The rise of video on demand: People need the
The rise of new hardwares: TV consumption will become more and more important on mobile and computers
The rise of conversion with Internet videos: As we see, Google TV will change the way we use television, by providing a better experience in program searching, but also with the possibility to seek through several different sources (TV, Youtube, Video on Demand websites and so on).

The TV advertising market has been suffering from the spring of Internet advertising. I found an interesting article about TF1, one of the leading media agency in France and n°1 TV channel, which is launching an innovation: In certain commercials, you will have 3 different tags available in order to go further with the brand:

• Information about the products
• Bonuses, which includes making off, or games
• Coupons

TF1 conducted a survey where 77% of the respondents declared they would be to log on a specific website to get further information about a commercial they have just seen.

TF1 TAGS TV Vidéo TF1Pub sélectionnée dans Pub

Those three features are available on TF1's website. Here are some thoughts about the concept:

• It provides added value to the brand which wants to use the media. It can now become more interactive with the audience, which remains the weakness of the medium.
• It will generate traffic on the website of TF1, where TF1 will be able to sell more ads... This looks like a virtuous circle right?
• It will provide valuable metrics to brands. So far, television was the perfect mass market medium. But audiences are plumetting, due mainly to the use of the Internet. Now, television is empowered with new metrics, and it may help marketing managers to determine the return on investment they may get with TV ads. Moreover, coupons is becoming one of the hottest trend in marketing.
• Now I kind of regret the lack of technology inspiration... Couldn't we just access those information through the TV, or through a mobile phone. Indeed, logging on the website remains a hurdle. I would not leave my seat while watching TV just to get bonuses of a great app. However, if it is available at my hand, either on my TV or on my phone (via a mobile tag to flash), I believe I would do.
  Television has never been a customer relationship management medium, because of the lack of interraction you may get. Of course, the brand equity you may built with the large exposition of TV will impact your customer relationship management value... But thanks to these new tools, TV would actually provide new ways to envision how to conceive TV commercials. I believe these new features will become very popular, and it may be adopted by some other channels.

What do you think about it?

Can Internet Replace TV Retail Advertising?

The Internet audience is getting larger and larger. Internet usage is growing at a fast pace. Also, the spike in mobile Internet usage will for sure mark heavily this statement. On the other side, TV consumption is getting lower and lower. TV companies are hurt by the Internet competition. The consumption of videos on the Internet, either streaming shows, Youtube-like videos and video on demand, has been way more appealing than a large TV channel choice, which actually becomes difficult to scan through.

Tony Ceresoli owns a very interesting blog about retailing and TV advertising. Retailers have been big fan of TV advertising. As they are reaching a large number of customers, this mass media was of good use. Actually, this is very funny to compare retailer's usage of TV advertising in the United States versus in France. Indeed, in France, until 2003, French government forbid retailers to advertise on TV, in a silly attempt to protect local businesses. Now they struggle into getting the best of this medium.

Tony wrote a great article about Gap's new marketing strategy. On a recent blog post, Tony commented on the new advetising campaign named "Born To Fit". For once, this campaign has dedicated its whole budget to Internet, according a large amount to new social media.

Julie Channing, senior account director with The Gap’s digital agency explains the strategy this way, “We were really looking to reach out to fashionistas and influence audiences to start a conversation about how Gap has built this line of denim from the ground up.”

Really? So, consumers are going to visit a Facebook page and soon after begin conversing with friends and family about the development of a new brand of blue jeans?

What should we think about this attempt? Is it possible for a large company like Gap or other retailers to get rid of their TV budgets, to set it online. Of course, you need to check your core target, and see if actually that makes sense. For young active people, the Internet might actually be a better bet than TV. But can you really avoid going on TV if you need to reach the mass market?

Maybe someday it will be possible. When the Internet will be stronger, Internet companies will be able to propose to reach such large audience as the TV can right now. But so far, it remains unknown what kind of results those kind of campaigns might generate.

And you, what do you think about it?

Google TV Video: The Future Of Video Entertainment

Google is now dominating the advertising market on the web, and has great ambition on the TV market. Indeed, new technologies are making the border between TV and computer screens thiner and thiner. Video games hardware at some point have already made efforts in that regard. But there is still a great potential that needs to be unfolded.

I found this video on Loic Lemeur's website. It shows in details the solution Google is looking forward to proposing. Now what I like about it is that Google use its own technoly, its core competitive advantage, to get into anoter market. As you can see, the added value of Google TV results in the search engine capabilities of the tool.

Now the Internet content will be in competition face to face with TV content. It might actually help some TV media corps to boost their advertising revenues, thanks to the content they may provide on the web, which will be bold.

I believe that actually the next TV revolution that will help producers to boost their sales won't be neither OLED, nor 3Ds, but actually enabling to unleash the full Internet content potential.

Do anyone of you have further details about this new project? Do you know when it will be released?

Moving Toward TV Apps

The TV concept is changing fast. The TV advertising market is plummeting and new technologies have revolutionized the way we consume it. Several changes have made TV consumption not a mass media any longer:

• 
  Video on Demand
  Cable TV, which provides more and more channels, more and more specialized
  The rise of P2P first, and then streaming videos on the Internet, with shorter content
  
  Hence, TV sets producers and high tech companies are rethinking the concept. And it would not be surprising if we will see soon enough some TV applications, which would makes the TV usage more interactive, and more compelling. Indeed, there is little difference between an Iphone and a TV except for the size. You may watch some TV shows on your mobile phone, and if you have Iphone apps, why couldn’t you use them on TV. Therefore, some companies have started to work on TV applications.
  
  So far, it is a struggle to launch into the market. Regulation is heavy. But I believe that the difference between a TV and a computer will be slim, and you will be able to access some nice applications, like the ones you may use on video games hardware for instance. I believe the market is penalized by the large number of TV makers, which makes it difficult to have a consensus and hence to create applications that could generate thousands of downloads. But once TV makers, and maybe a provider like Itunes has become for Iphone apps will appear, I believe this market will become very interesting.

Online Videos have not killed TV

A lot of people are thinking that the arrival of online video services like Youtube would probably kill TV. We could hence see that TV companies' revenues are decreasing since two to three years. A new study shows that online viewers would rather see longer content.

In this chart, we can see that US users would actually rather watch video on TV than on a computer. We can see also that the different results shows that some of the Internet video clichés are wrong: only 11% of people watch fewer TV shows on TV because they watch online videos, and 7% watch fewer DVDs because they watch online videos.

We can see that the TV medium still have somehow some future. Not because of the format, but mainly because TV offers a better comfort of viewing than a computer. We can therefore identify a challenge for online video websites: Enter the TV screen. I know that in France Dailymotion has a channel on cable TV (via the Neuf telecom box). We can expect more of that.

Long is better than short
The study report that "But full-length TV shows were ranked as the most highly desired type of TV content by US and Western European adult Internet users surveyed in Q1 2008 by Opinion Research Corporation for Accenture." Robert Scoble was also explaining in his blog why youtube should use long videos in order to generate more advertising revenues.




This chart is also killing the idealogy of the amateur videos generating more interests than professional ones. You can see that professional content (TV episodes, full-length movies and movie trailers) are by far what online videos consumers are seeking.

In the end, this study is really shaking the idea that amateur onine videos can at the moment compete with TV. What do you think about this study?