Media planners these days are spoilt for choice. For those lucky enough to avoid working in channel silos, you can’t help but get excited at the possibilities a campaign can entail. Two Cents were fortunate enough to attend last week’s Media Landscape Forum at what truly is a groundbreaking time in communications history.
Looking past the shameless self promotion from various publishing networks, the resonating point for us came from Seven Affiliates Sales general manager Ross Howarth as he reminisced about the old days. Fifteen years ago, there was essentially a choice of four media channels and four channels only... Now look at the media landscape.
As an NGen planner, I have more choice and technology at my fingertips than ever before. No longer is it acceptable for agencies to restrict planners to one, two or three channels. In order to achieve a holistic campaign, a comprehensive knowledge of traditional and non traditional media is now required. At the risk of sounding clichéd, communications solutions are now only limited by our own imaginations.
It was clear that all future innovations for offline advertising channels surround the ability to harness digital, whether that’s through digital outdoor panels, streaming digital radio, catch-up TV or iPad content applications. The boundaries that once separated advertising channels into their relative silos are truly beginning to blur. Four out of the five channels discussed can attribute their success as a medium to their strength of content. While content adaptation is fundamental to the growth of traditional mediums, ironically it’s also the biggest factor in the decline of newspapers, radio and TV audiences in their original form.
Now here’s the kicker: Once content is adapted across multiple media channels, it becomes a brand in itself with massive potential to outgrow its publisher network. Titles like Better Homes & Gardens, Taste or even the MasterChef franchise are now multi platform brands that can potentially host and grow their own revenue streams. This is a big change and as media planners, it’s time to extend ourselves beyond traditional thinking and get out of narrow-minded, single-channel silos.
Future success lies in the ability to ignore the individual networks and publishers and start to look at the growth of multi-platform brands. Who cares which network won the nightly TV ratings war? Forget which station or publisher increased its share of voice because in the future the successful networks will be the ones which create and allow content to cross pollinate and then harness their power to exist independently.