Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: new media

  • Television’s argument for relevance

    Television’s argument for relevance

    One of the notable things about the media’s collapsing business model is how television has suffered nowhere near the same downturn in advertising revenues as the other channels.

    This has been baffling for many of us pundits so a series of interviews I’m doing with media executives on digital disruption was a good opportunity to discuss why television is holding the line where print has dismally failed.

    While the executive has to remain anonymous at the moment, the series is for a private client, their view on why television has so far avoided the advertising abyss is simple – accountability.

    We have something, as do my friends at other media companies, that YouTube and Facebook don’t have which is we create quality content. What will differentiate us is we have premium, locally produced content that is one hundred percent brand safe and one hundred percent viewable and, most importantly, is independently measured by third parties.

    My view is that advertisers in that environment is a much more powerful experience than advertising in Facebook or YouTube

    While many of us may laugh at Australian commercial TV being described as ‘quality’, it does appeal to audiences far bigger than the typical YouTube channel or Facebook Live stream.

    The advertising industry’s established systems also, unsurprisingly, work for the television industry in giving the sector accountability that the online services lack in a world where ‘click fraud’ – software tricks to report false web impressions – is rampant.

    Even more importantly for the new media giants is the ‘brand safe’ message being pushed by the incumbents. The advertising crisis for Google is real and the established players intend to exploit it.

    While the TV executive is pushing their own product, it’s clear the fight for advertising and marketing dollars is far from over.

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  • When the Facebook tiger bites

    When the Facebook tiger bites

    Two years ago Buzzfeed’s head of global operations visited Sydney and laid out the company’s vision of being the New York Times.

    As Scott Lamb explained, an important part of the Buzzfeed model was generating traffic through social media shares — at that time a tactic which Iwas working well.

    Since then the gloss has gone off Buzzfeed as the company misses financial targets and traffic plateaus.

    Now Facebook has announced further changes to its newsfeed which sees more emphasis on users’ family and friends’ posts than news and brands.

    Sites like Buzzfeed are left in a bind as one of their key sources for traffic dries up and, once again, Facebook’s cahnges show how risky it is for publishers and marketers to rely on individual online platforms.

    In truth all of the major online services are predators with Facebook, along with Google and Amazon, being at the top of the food chain, just like tigers.

    For those riding the internet tigers, the risk of being mauled is real. As Buzzfeed and others are finding.

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  • How the old advertising models fail on new media

    How the old advertising models fail on new media

    Understanding how a new technology will change industries is a challenge that has faced every generation in modern times.

    Two of the industries most challenged by the rise of the internet have been the publishing and advertising sectors which have seen their established and wildly profitable ways of doing business demolished.

    One of the mistakes almost every industry and business facing technological disruption makes is trying to apply their old models to the new methods which almost always produces poor results, the transition from live theatre to movies and then to television through is a good example of this.

    So it’s not surprising that the advertising industry is now admitting that display ads on web pages have never worked and from that follows the maxim that print dollars equate to digital dimes.

    For the online publishing industry, we’re still waiting for our modern day David Sarnoff to figure out how to make money online.

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  • Programming the Internet’s advertising

    Programming the Internet’s advertising

    Michael Rubenstein, President of AppNexus is the first interview for a while on the Decoding the New Economy channel.

    Rubenstein joined AppNexus as employee number 18 in 2009 and has been part of the company’s growth from a small startup to a global technology company with a workforce of 1,000 professionals.

    AppNexus is one of the new wave of companies managing and programming online advertising, helping advertisers and publishers target their products better while giving ad tech companies deeper insights and data.

    In this interview, Rubenstein discusses some of the forces changing global advertising along with the challenges of dealing with a high growth business.

    Apologies for the bad hair on my part.

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  • User generated content starts getting expensive

    User generated content starts getting expensive

    Ten years after being founded YouTube is facing competition as new sites are being setup or existing video services start aggressively courting creators reports Variety magazine.

    YouTube is the poster child of the user generated content movement where it’s largely unpaid contributors who generate the material that people  watch on the service.

    This model works fine as long as it’s amateur cat videos people are watching but when as it becomes a big business the justification for not paying content creators becomes flimsy.

    Google’s management recognised this some time back and started rolling out its own partnerships with creators to add more income than the often tiny advertising revenues most earn.

    Now it turns out those popular video bloggers are being tempted over to other sites and for YouTube the cost of premium content is about to get expensive.

    For the Silicon Valley businesses is requires a change of culture as they simply don’t like paying creators; in the tech startup view of the world it’s only coders, founders and few lucky support staff who get the rewards while the bulk of people who add value to the product are treated as commodity ingredients.

    For a period it was difficult for media startups to get funding unless they had a free source of user generated content, as Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti revealed in 2012.

    Tech investors prefer pure platform companies because you can just focus on the tech, have the users produce the content for free, and scale the business globally without having to hire many people.

    The movie studios and record companies on the other hand have a culture of paying their artists and production staff, despite their reputation of exploitation and stinginess.

    It may well be that we’re past the golden era of user generated content and the free lunch for the sites that depend upon free materials.

    If it is, then standards on sites like YouTube can only improve even at the costs of Google’s profit.

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