Moving with the audience: How Canadian advertisers tap into multimedia

Advertisers are feeling the pressure to keep up with audiences increasingly moving from one screen to the next. A panel at Insight Information’s Entertainment Industries Summit late last month discussed strategies for growing advertising revenue in the face of audience migration, and explored ways to take emerging commercial strategies such as mobile phones, Internet and product placements to a new level. Maria Hale, CHUM Television’s VP of business development, presented a case study in successful ad integration. MuchMusic’s VJ Search series, a 10-episode reality program that started broadcasting in February, was created with audience and contestant interactivity on all available platforms in mind. Live polling and online discussion forums help build viewer loyalty, but these features don’t come for free: to help defray the costs, CHUM looked to product placement. As the series demonstrated, when it comes to integrating brands into programming there are many different engagement levels. For example, Proctor & Gamble Co. served as VJ Search’s main sponsor. Not only did the contestants have the company’s products available in the shared house, but they also used and discussed items like shampoo and soap on air. Brief P&G commercials also book-ended downloads to alternative platforms such as mobile and online. Advertisers could also take a slice out of the product integration pie by offering a more passive presence. For example, one sponsor might have the option to provide background items in the house, but an advertiser that pays a premium to place its cell phones could have the added engagement of contestants using and talking about their products. Although such strategies have helped whittle down the costs of multimedia endeavours, each new platform has a team behind it with a vested interest to create a series, which adds many voices to a project’s development. And with the second series of Canada’s Next Top Model just announced – the next CHUM property to get the product placement treatment – conversations with interactive producers, sales and marketing teams, and regulators are ramping up again. Speaking in overall terms, Hale says she’s now seeing a significant ROI from online advertising because it is more mature than other multimedia initiatives. However, CHUM is plowing its return from Internet products back into emerging platforms such as handheld devices in order to cover the associated encoding and transcoding costs. "These require money, but we expect it to have growth over the next two years," she says. CHUM’s bet could pay off sooner rather than later. Fellow panelist Peter Vaz, VP at Universal McCann’s M2 Universal Online division, said Canadians have an appetite for watching and listening to content on cell phones, with 15% of mobile owners using their handhelds to access videos and ring tones. Compare that to South America, where mobile downloading doesn’t even register in the top eight activities of phone owners. "As these devices develop, such as the new Blackberry TV (bbTV) for Research In Motion ’s popular handhelds or the Wi-Fi-enabled Zoom from Microsoft , there will be more robust experiences," he says. To tap into this growing trend, he suggests advertisers may want to explore sponsoring free downloads onto handheld devices. Although Canadians have been riding the high-speed wave for a few years, Internet downloading is only now reaching a critical mass thanks to an increase in broadband adoption among our neighbours to the south. In just the last 12 to 15 months, broadband penetration has grown to the point where 64% of the US population now has a high-speed Internet connection. Jennifer Stothers, senior director of sales at AOL Canada Inc., says the average minutes spent watching television figure has remained stable in the past five years, but Internet usage in Canada is up 54%. "The Internet is expanding the media pie and it’s changing the way consumers use media," she says. With that change comes new opportunities. AOL reinvented itself after the Live 8 concert held in July 2005 presented an epiphany of sorts. Five million people tuned into AOL to watch the concerts on their computers, while ABC Inc.’s exclusive broadcast attracted only 2.9 million viewers. "This showed us the Internet is not a toy anymore, and the money is starting to move into the space," she says. As top ad dollars are generated during the after-dinner hours on TV, investment in the Internet is creating a new key block – 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. "It’s a phenomenon we’ve seen in Canada, where the at-work audience grew by 18%, and it’s creating an online version of primetime," Stothers says. Not only has AOL Canada noted a spike in page views during this block, its parent company to the south has partnered with reality TV pioneer Mark Burnett to tap into the at-work audience. Gold Rush is an Internet reality series that tracks contestants from across the US in search of treasure. Its audience is the primetime reality-TV viewer, but instead of competing for space during evening linear schedules, Gold Rush provides bite sized online entertainment during work hours. Stothers says the site is generating "a lot of ad dollars" and there’s a lot of growth potential. Finally, the speakers agreed that advertisers should expand their reach on all of the platforms to reach the largest number of eyeballs, but tailor their messages to the mediums for ultimate audience engagement. "It’s a matter of time before the new measurement systems allows us to measure beyond just watching," Vaz says.

Moving with the audience: How Canadian advertisers tap into multimedia

Broadcast | November 15, 2006

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