Resonance Blog - www.resonanceblog.com - Jane Young -[email protected]- Sept 09 Resonance Blog Advanced communications for growth 8.9 billion. That’s the number of videos US internet users watched last month. Last month! 99% of those were on YouTube. The average number of videos watched per person on YouTub e was 74. 8.9 billion. It’s a mind blowing figure. Now let’s think about this for a moment. The vast majority of content on YouTube is what we call ‘user generated’. All of it is user posted. It’s clear that what we’re Marketing Week Conference - The Future of TV Advertising Jane Young September 2009 I’ll kick ofby showing you a truly remarkable number.
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Resonance Blog - www.resonanceblog.com - Jane Young - [email protected] - Sept 09
To reach the volume of YouTube, the big three US networks would need to work
together on creating original content and airing it for.... 4,500 years!
4,500 years! And don’t forget that those hundreds of thousands of hours of
content were shot, produced and uploaded free. It’s an unbelievable number.
From the time the printing press was invented it took almost 50 years for the
number of books in circulation in Europe to go from next to nothing to 15 million.
We’re only about 3 years into the world of YouTube and online video.
Imagine where we’ll be in 50?
The reality is there’s a massive shift towards participation. Social media isn’t justTwitter and Facebook. It’s ‘an umbrella term that defines the various activities that
integrate technology, social interaction and the construction of words, pictures,
videos and audio’ [wikipedia].
The hugely significant point to note here is that the vast majority of social media
users are producing content.
What’s more, media consumption is internationalising along language lines,thanks to global social platforms.
Resonance Blog - www.resonanceblog.com - Jane Young - [email protected] - Sept 09
A massive opportunity resides in the fact that well over 80% of active internet
users globally watch video clips online; and around 40% have uploaded a clip to a
video sharing website.
Now, the growth of social networks is, as we all know deep down, at the expense
of other activities and media. This swap is most pronounced among teenagers.
Teenage girls now spend 21% net less time watching TV, because they’re busy on
Facebook, MSN and so on. They also spend 31% less time doing their homework :)
Traditional media suf ers disproportionately - TV, books, magazines, newspapers
and DVDs are all sacrificed.
This obviously has huge implications for broadcasters and publishers going
forward, given that teenagers are unlikely to revert to traditional media, as theirbehaviour patterns are established and founded in the digital world. So it isn’t
surprising that traditional media will find itself increasingly squeezed by its digital
‘competitors’ and alternatives.
The other obvious concern we’re all talking about lately is the astoundingly high
Resonance Blog - www.resonanceblog.com - Jane Young - [email protected] - Sept 09
When watching recorded commercial television, just under half fast forward past
the adverts ‘all of the time’. A further 1 in 3 skip the adverts ‘most of the time’.
Only 6% rarely or never fast-forward past the ads. This behaviour is fairly
consistent across all demographics and is certainly not only early-adopter
behaviour. Added to this, 2 out of 3 people in the UK agree with the statement ‘I
actively try to avoid as many television ads as possible’, showing that ad
avoidance in the digital age is a real issue.
But we already knew that. We’ve been turning up late at the cinema to avoid the
ads and flicking past them in newspapers for ages.
Who’ll admit to turning the volume down when spotify ads start?
Has anyone clicked on a banner lately? Or... ever?
Some think advertising embedded in content by means of overlays and top-tail
sponsorship is the answer to avoidance, given that it’s less vulnerable to such
trends. Perhaps the same crowd that think unskippable pre-rolls, mid-rolls, post-
rolls, ham and cheese rolls are the answer online. I’m not so sure, but we’ll come
back to that.
Another interesting point is that 70% of people would rather put up with ads andreceive content for free. This seems like good news. Brands, advertisers and
publishers hear ‘We want ads!’, ‘Give us more ads!’. BUT... are viewers engaging
with them? Are they resonating? Are they relevant, or interruptive?
So long as advertising is impression-based as opposed to impact-based, we’ll
continue to sacrifice user experience. We’ll continue to celebrate 95% failure rate.
Or 5% click-through rate, if you want to put it that way.
We’ve been suf ering from a tendency to spot a space - a piece of ‘real estate’ -
Resonance Blog - www.resonanceblog.com - Jane Young - [email protected] - Sept 09
Does this boom mean there’s no longer a place for professional production? Of
course not. It means you have a wider, more diverse, more cost ef ective creative
resource and distribution mechanism than ever before.
If this really is a revolution, like the printing press, it doesn’t take us from point A
to point B. It takes us from point A to chaos. The printing press precipitated 200
years of chaos.
This is the Virginia Satir Change Model. You may have seen it before. There are
four basic steps:
1. Status quo - from which point change is inevitable and necessary. It’s just amatter of recognising that the status quo needs to change and then we can
influence it.
2. Introducing the foreign element - something outside the status quo, putting
pressure on the status quo.
3. Chaos - the result of the status quo being interrupted by the foreign element,
causing disorientation. When things are no longer the same as that which we’re
Resonance Blog - www.resonanceblog.com - Jane Young - [email protected] - Sept 09
What’s revolutionary about the internet is its many to many pattern. It supports
groups and conversations. What’s more, it has become a vehicle for all other
media. Phone conversations, movies, music, radio, have all migrated over. This
means all media are next door to one-another. People can not only see and hearstuf , they can gather round and talk about it. Audiences can be producers as well
as consumers. We all have the same equipment.
What we’re getting from all this connectivity will be one machine. All our devices
are just little windows. Every screen is just a portal into the One Machine. Some
people call this the Cloud. Yes, we’re still downloading stuf and running software
on our devices, but this will change. It’s already changing. Our devices won’t need
storage and will always be connected. Think of the Cloud as one global computer.
Every spreadsheet, every document, every video will be on the web. More devices
will become part of the web all the time, adding to it. Humans are extensions of
the Cloud. Look at Flickr - where millions of pictures are uploaded and tagged by
individuals, continually adding and linking.
Everything will have connectivity embedded in it. I mean everything. Household
objects, humans. There will be a convergence of the atomic and the digital. The
spectrum of media we see right now becomes one media platform. Copies will
Resonance Blog - www.resonanceblog.com - Jane Young - [email protected] - Sept 09
The great news for broadcasters, brands and agencies is that we now have the
capability to ride this wave of change. Some might be thinking it’s a lethal
tsunami come to wipe us all out, but I think quite the opposite. I think it’s the
biggest, best waves of our lives. Lucrative, rewarding and harmonious.
Think of social networks as extra distributors for your content... as discovery tools
to help you target exactly the right people and to help them find you. Think of
social networks as retail environments. Focus on making the process of discovery
to purchase conversion as easy, intuitive and as ‘social network friendly’ as
possible.
Social production is the critical shift cause by the internet. Embrace it. Help others
embrace it. Build platforms for self expression and collaboration. And remember,
people will always pay for what they value.
Build cooperation into the infrastructure, like Wikipedia or Flickr. The first
iteration of Wikipedia, Nupedia, tried to control production. They tried to monitor
quality, to manually approve, check and shape. It didn’t work. They needed
volume. As soon as they set it free, Wikipedia rose to become one of the most
visited websites in the world, revolutionising our ability to find information, to
learn. As it grew, and their exposure and risk of giving false information grew,they simply built functions into the system that enabled it to remain free and