Category Archives: digital media

July 27, 2016 · 9:36 am

Restoring The Balance And Destroying The Blocking

If you are in business and you market that business at all, chances are that you’re using digital media of one form or another to do so. I suspect that much of your budget for that has shifted a bit based on how widespread the ad-blocking phenomenon has become. I’ve written about it a few times and the practice of installing ad blocking software on computers and mobile devices continues to grow.

While several ad agencies and the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) continue to denounce the software as violating the value exchange compact (attention to ads in exchange for free content), they’re finally getting around to studying ways to get consumers to turn off the blocking software. Both the IAB and Omnicom published some results of their studies and they’re enlightening.

Advertisements, Salem, Massachusetts

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

First Omnicom. Their study found that many ad-blocking users don’t dislike all advertising. They hate popups (who doesn’t!). 44% of those polled associate ad blocking mostly with blocking pop-up advertising. Popups are a type of ad that interrupts the content consuming experience, and that’s what’s pissing consumers off. As an aside, TV commercials do the same interrupting – is a remote control an ad blocker? Then there was this, as reported by MediaPost:

If consumers perceive a positive value exchange with websites, most are willing to go back to an ad-centric experience. In fact, consumers can be motivated to not only turn off their ad blockers, but will also disable them. Among those factors that would entice them to disable ad blockers, 28% would do so if the blockers slowed down their browsing speed, 24% if the ad blocker allows advertisements via payment, and 23% if they trusted websites to not serve annoying ads.  Consumers would disable their ad blockers if the website promised non-intrusive ads (35%).

In other words, people get that publishers need to monetize their content and don’t mind ads per se. They do mind being overwhelmed by ads or having to close several popups to get to the content they want. The IAB data echoed this:

A total of 330 people who said they used ad blockers blamed ads for making websites slower, either because the ads were too data-heavy or because there were too many of them…Not surprisingly, animated, moving and autoplay ads irritated consumers who used ad blockers the most, as did ads that covered up content and long video promos.

All of this sounds like common sense to me. Consumers don’t want their content consumption interrupted, delayed, or slowed-down. They don’t want to expend excess data loading ads. They understand the basic economics of the attention/value exchange but feel that publishers have tilted the balance too far in their own direction and are retaliating by blocking the ads that do so. If we’ll restore the balance the chances are good that they’ll go back to looking at the ads. Make sense?

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July 25, 2016 · 11:21 am

Why Free Data Is A Bad Thing For You

Everyone likes “free.” Heck, there are plenty of marketing tomes that say “free” might just be the most powerful word in marketing. Well, as usual, I’m here to burst your bubble about one particular aspect of something free which I find detrimental to us all. It’s something aggressively marketed by T-Mobile and Verizon but others do it as well. It’s called Zero-rating of data. Their “Binge On” and “FreeBee Data 360” offerings provide subscribers with free streaming media that doesn’t count against their data plans.

The basic concept is that ISP‘s – in this case the two aforementioned wireless carriers – don’t charge consumers for data used when the consumers use specific sites or services. That’s pretty appealing. In fact, T-Mobile reports that mobile subscribers who sign up for their “zero-rated video” offering immediately double their consumption of video. So why is this a bad thing?

Verizon bought Yahoo this morning. They previously bought AOL. One might expect that those two companies and their services will become zero-rated for Verizon customers. While T-Mobile has yet to buy a competitor, one can easily imagine them assembling their own lineup of content and service providers. Cable providers have been doing the same thing for a long time with fledgling cable networks. They take equity in these companies and, in return, provide carriage on a better tier (meaning it’s more widely available). These cable providers are also ISP’s.

The reason our digital ecosystem is flourishing is that until recently there was no one picking losers and winners. Zero-rating does exactly that. Think about the food court at a mall. There are two restaurants side by side, but one serves free food which is paid for by the mall landlords. Which one do you think will have the longer line, regardless of the quality of the food served? If a new streaming service enters the market but there is no data charge to visit their entrenched competitors, what chances do they have to succeed?

So yes, everyone likes free but in this case free is a bad thing. It will restrict the development of new companies. It will give more power to the gatekeepers. It enables internet providers to gain a significant advantage in the promotion of in-house services over competing independent companies, especially in data-heavy markets like video-streaming. Does that make sense?

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July 21, 2016 · 11:12 am

Mass Markets And Mass Media

I’ve written a number of times over the last few years about the changing patterns of content consumption and how those changes are affecting the media business. I read some statistics last week that make me think we’re almost at the tipping point where we’ll see some irreversible things happening that affect not just media but marketing as well.

First, the statistics. The report is GfK‘s The Home Technology Monitor and while there wasn’t much “new” in it, the acceleration of some trends is interesting:

New findings from GfK show that US TV households are embracing alternatives to cable and satellite reception. Levels of broadcast-only reception and Internet-only video subscriptions have both risen over the past year, with fully one-quarter (25%) of all US TV households now going without cable and satellite reception. TV households with a resident between 18 and 34 years old are much more likely to be opting for alternatives to cable and satellite; 22% of these homes are using broadcast-only reception (versus 17% of all US households), and 13% are only watching an Internet service on their TV sets (versus 6% of all TV homes). Overall, 38% of 18-to-34 households rely on some kind of alternative TV reception or video source, versus 25% of all homes.

Why this is meaningful has to do with the symbiotic relationship between mass marketing and mass media. As Ben Thompson put it in a Stratechery post:

The inescapable reality is that TV advertisers are 20th-century companies: built for mass markets, not niches, for brick-and-mortar retailers, not e-commerce. These companies were built on TV, and TV was built on their advertisements, and while they are propping each other up for now, the decline of one will hasten the decline of the other.

As you can see from the chart, viewing of traditional TV by young people in the first quarter of this year (traditionally a high-viewing quarter as many people stay inside during winter) dropped precipitously. There aren’t many mass markets and there really aren’t mass media. Why, then, are we focused on measuring things that are no longer really relevant? Anyone?

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