Jaffe Juice

For many years, there has been so much talk about the wonderful experiences awaiting us as digital technologies/media converge.  However, convergence and wonderful experiences still seem to be pretty far from reach today.  From what I experience and what I read in a variety of sources, no one seems to have a clear vision of how to make this work simply and seamlessly for a world of confused consumers.  Likewise, advertisers and agencies struggle to determine how to build brands and sell products in what will someday be a converged world.  I am no electronics engineer nor web aficionado, but I can picture what nirvana would be for me as both an advertiser and a consumer if someone can figure out how to put all of the parts together.

I find it very easy to envision what the ideal environment would look like, but I don’t have a clue how it gets integrated and how many players need to collaborate in order to bring this world to us.  For me, it would look something like this:

·         As a consumer, I would have a very easy-to-use media server in my home connected wirelessly to as many screens in my house as I want, be they HDTVs, computers, mobile phones, etc. 

·         The media center would have Tivo-like capabilities and the user would be able to port content and store it on stationary as well as portable devices for time and location shifting. 

·         The server would have 3-5 terabyte capacity for storing thousands of hours of HD quality programming. 

·         The media center would have the capability to receive input from a variety of sources including:  satellite, cable, off air antennas, telephone companies, etc., etc., etc.  The media center would seamlessly give users access to content, irrespective of the source.

Sooner or later, these technological challenges will be overcome.  On the other hand, for those of us who like to take our media with us in order to watch what we want to, when we want to, Digital Rights Management protections are likely to continue to frustrate us in our efforts to do this for a very long time.

When it finally does happen, convergence is fantastic for enlightened advertisers, agencies and media companies. They will have the ability to deliver highly targeted media and advertising to consumers.  By knowing preferences of users, they will be able to utilize unusual forms of messaging to entertain consumers with topics of personal interest to them, while also promoting brands and products.  This somewhat addresses the ad skipping concern that advertisers have today in that it has been proven that people who skip ads, tend to skip ones of personal interest less frequently than those of little or no interest.  Another key benefit for advertisers, already being experienced by Tivo, is the incredibly rich, reliable viewing data available in their database to advertisers and broadcasters, alike.  The data are so conclusive that inevitably, advertisers will demand and get performance-based pricing on all of their cross-platform media buys.  Chief Marketing Officers will then be so accountable that the average tenure will jump much higher than today’s 23 months or so.

When I think about the obstacles to be overcome to accomplish the above, I am overwhelmed.  My list, which I am sure is incomplete, includes the following:

• Complexity for the consumer – it is frequently reported that roughly half of the TV sets in homes today that are HD ready are being viewed by their owners with non-HD programming.  Apparently, they think that the old model of plug the cable into the back of the set is all you need to in order to see the beautiful pictures they see in the stores, in bars and in friends’ homes.  The added irony here is that these very expensive TVs show analog pictures much more poorly than the old analog sets.  Add to this the complexity of all of the devices that need to be integrated in order to have a desired home theatre experience, not to mention the issue of keeping track of all of the remotes in order to operate.  Yes, there are some good integrated remotes available today, but the average consumer would struggle to program them.
• Digital Rights Management – I certainly don’t claim to know all of the ins and outs of DRM, but it is clear that content owners’ desire to protect their assets flies in the face of consumers’ desire to view what they want, where they want and when they want. 
• High speed networking will likely come in the next few years at speeds that can efficiently handle HD content.  Today, when I record an NFL game in Hi Def (four hour recording) on my HD Series 3 Tivo, I can download it to a laptop via my wireless home network but it takes about 10 hours to do this! 
• Cross-platform integration by content providers, advertisers and agencies.  The networks continue to move very slowly in this regard and will, ultimately, get it.  The view by the content providers/distributors seems to continue to focus on each delivery platform as if it lived in a vacuum.  As a result, it still is up to the consumer to figure out how to navigate across all of the delivery systems.  And few companies have a clue as to what consumers are viewing, where and when they are viewing it.
• Consumer electronics companies – does any one of them have a vision for how they will integrate all of this in the future?  Seems as if most manufacturers tend to take their own product-centric view of how they can take existing products and adapt them to do more.  Is there a company that is using research tactics such as ethnography to understand how consumers truly do consume media in the real world?  I don’t see any evidence of any company anywhere in this space that understands my world, and I know I am not alone.
• Is anyone doing breakthrough work in new, cross-platform advertising approaches?  5-10 second pre-roll spots online are a pretty lame adaptation of the old world advertising model to the emerging world we find ourselves in.  I challenge networks and agencies to really develop innovative approaches in this arena.

There is so much more to this than my somewhat informed point of view reflects and I am sure there is a lot that I don’t get.  I do believe that my concerns are real and I hope that thought leading companies will develop and launch some breakthroughs in these areas, sooner rather than later.

-  Jim Garrity