According to the Wall Street Journal (as reported by Adweek), Nielsen will be rolling out Nielsen Digital Program Ratings  “which will measure audiences for TV content viewed online. A+E, ABC, AOL, CBS, The CW, Discovery Communications, FOX, NBC and Univision have all signed on to participate in this test, which will begin in May and run through July.” And, according to Eric Solomon, senior vice president for Global Digital Audience Measurement at Nielsen, the company plans to cover mobile devices in future releases.

Adweek notes: “Nielsen Digital Program Ratings will track views primarily on the networks’ own desktop websites, with additional coverage for mobile devices planned for the future. The Digital Program Ratings will provide overnight data such as the number of unique viewers, stream counts and reach by age and gender.”

Nielsen may have been slow to adjust to the shifts in consumer behavior brought about by DVRs, Social Networks, mobile and online viewing, but they are now catching up. They’ve rolled out Online Campaign Ratings ”for brands that want to more effectively measure digital campaigns;” in February they started to measure broadband viewership; and they’ve introduced a Twitter Ratings System via their acquisition of SocialGuide.

I think it’s entirely possible that the television* industry is going to experience a new reality not unlike that which the music industry experienced when it started to update its measurement methods. First, Soundscan brought a level of accuracy to the industry that was woefully missing.  Now take a look at what Billboard charts track now: On-Demand Songs, Digital Songs, Steaming Songs and Ringtones just to name a few. That’s how Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop” becomes the Number 1 song in the country without major label distribution.

How will this ability to more accurately track viewership, across multiple platforms, affect content? If I were a programmer I’d be looking to create snack-size programming. I’d experiment with 15 and maybe even 10 minute shows. A really innovative programmer might take a page from the independent comics I loved as a kid: A 40-page main story and then an 8-page teaser for a new character that was being developed.

Think about that for a second. What if you extended a 30-minute sitcom to 35-40 minutes, then aired a 10-15 minute ‘mini-show.’ Let that mini-show develop over four or five weeks, see what kind of viewership it’s gaining on mobile devices and then roll it out in the fall as a full-fledged show. That has to be better than the current strategy most networks use.

I think you could also see ‘mobile first’ content that may be supplemental content to a main show. If you’ve got 10 minutes to kill, would you watch a little vignette that features your favorite secondary character from a hit show as the star of their own 10-minute piece? Of course you would! And networks could probably get interesting directors and guest stars for these mini-shows as well. Once they see the audience is there, they’ll be able to sell brands on sponsoring this content via product integration or hosting it as part of a 2nd Screen play.

Brad Barket/Getty Images for Hulu

There are probably a dozen more possible innovations in format that we’ll see as measurement becomes more precise and covers more platforms, but the net result could be an explosion in original content customized for various screens and featuring new angles on your favorite shows. That’s a future I can get behind. For more on what’s happening on the digital programming front, read this piece on Hulu’s plans from The New York Times.

*Television is becoming an increasingly inappropriate term to use. But “video content” connotes a certain sterility which I don’t much care for. What term should we use to refer to all the types of shows, from all the different distributors, on all the different platforms? Perhaps it is all ‘programming?’

If this is the future, you’d better have a plan that includes something more than 30-second spots.

The 30-second commercial is not dead, despite what Trevor Beattie thinks. But, here’s something to consider, I could easily consume 4+ hours of content, anytime and just about anywhere, night after night, and not see one 30-second spot. Game of Thrones on Demand via HBO or HBO Go, followed by two episodes of binge watching some old series on Netflix, then I’ll play an hour of Call of Duty on the Xbox 360, followed by catching an out of market West Coast Major League Baseball game online.  That’s not trying to get by on scraps, that’s all top tier entertainment.

Read the Netflix Long Term View  and you’ll get a glimpse into how that company sees the future. It’s a fascinating piece, and shows how they, along with HBO and others, are likely to be capturing the lion’s share of attention, certainly from the upscale market. So, if you are a brand like Land Rover or Virgin Atlantic or Waldorf or Revlon or Dell or Crystal Cruises what do you do? We’re not talking about simple DVR commercial skipping, we’re talking about a future where some of the best, most watched and talked about content simply doesn’t have ads at all.

Last week I went to the Machinima Digital Upfront. If you don’t know Machinima that’s ok, unless you are trying to reach the global, male 18-34 demo, then it is a problem. Machinima racks up more than 2 billion views per month across it’s network (internationally, online and mobile devices). They do this with original programming that is tailor made for its audience. At the event they announced new partnerships that will get them into the massive EDM (electronic dance music) market, as well as a partnership with the director Ridley Scott.

On another front there is a discussion over who is going to own the App Battle that is going to be taking place on your phone, tablet, Smart TV / Internet TV / Connected TV and video game console. You can argue who the winner is going to be – Alan Wolk of KIT Digital thinks it will be the MVPDs who have the advantage. I think brands have agreat opportunity, but the truth is, arguing whether we’ll be using a Comcast app or a Google app or a Nike app isn’t the point, the point is we’ll be launching video content from all sorts of providers and producers and that won’t feature a traditional 30-second spot.

So, what’s your post 30-second spot plan? Product integration directly into the content? In-app sponsorship? Create your own app that enhances the viewing experience around content relevant to your brand? Create your own content? Create your own content channel that hosts video from a wide range of producers that aligns with your brand?

Those all sound like pretty compelling options, but “option” may be a misnomer. I think your “TV strategy” needs to be a lot more diverse than simply deciding between broadcast and/or cable. It’s going to involve a sophisticated plan based on your audience and their viewing behaviors. It will require new social analytics like the ones developed by Bluefins Labs, which was recently bought by Twitter. And it’s going to demand a partner who can help you manage a complex web of partnerships and collaborations with content producers, distributors and tech vendors you may not have even heard of five years ago… because they didn’t exist.

Yes, for the foreseeable future the 30-second spot still has a place front and center in your plans. But right now the smartest brands are preparing for a future where YouTube, HBO and Netflix are the equivalent of ABC, CBS and NBC 40 years ago.

Science Fiction, by its very nature, has always been about exploring new possibilities.  The very best of the genre has given us glimpses into a realized future, paving a way for innovation.  The Syfy channel may just be doing that now with their new show, Defiance, but not necessarily in the way you think. While the show may be borrowing from a variety of past creations, the producers are trying something rather groundbreaking with the production – creating a transmedia IP that is living as both a television program and video game concurrently.

It’s a gamble, but it’s one with a certain logic behind it a Content Lab reports: “It’s also an attempt to cater to a highly engaged, billion-dollar audience: participants of massively multiplayer online (MMO) games.”

Syfy is pouring a lot of money, a reported $60-70 million on the game alone, to make Defiance a hit. For HBO, the costs of an ambitious show like Game of Thrones can be covered by subscriptions, but Syfy needs to generate revenue in other ways, and no doubt had that in mind with the creation of Defiance. Again, from Content Lab: “Moreover, the transmedia [Ed. note - actually, I'd call it intermedia] approach also raises intriguing possibilities for in-game advertising. It’s not too difficult to see how a product used in the show, such a vehicle or branded clothing, could appear naturally as elements in the game.”

No doubt this is new territory and Syfy along with game partner Trion have got a lot riding on the success of Defiance. While initial reviews of the show and game were tepid, Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat reports: “In fact, the premiere of Defiance outperformed Game of Thrones on its own premiere day. Syfy hasn’t had a show this hot since Eureka, and its second-screen tablet app posted its best day ever with the debut. The digital stats in terms of uniques, page views, and visits are stellar.

Meanwhile, the massively multiplayer online game has scored 6 million hours of playtime since the launch two weeks ago. I’ve poured around 10 hours into it myself. This transmedia — or a story that is told in more than one medium — has to be considered a success in terms of its ability to grab attention even though it appeared on the same day as the Boston bombings.”

I honestly don’t know if Defiance is going to be a success, it’s impossible to know for certain after two weeks, but I do feel confident in saying that brands should be working to understand what’s at play here. Consumers’ attitudes and expectations towards entertainment and content have changed. The idea of watching unique content on multiple platforms, sometimes even simultaneously, is becoming more accepted, if not expected. This provides massive new opportunities for brands to integrate across multiple touchpoints, creating longer engagements with fans through programming they want to watch. Categories like food, travel and technology could all look to take advantage of this in new and compelling ways.

This is an edited version of last week’s Ignition newsletter, my weekly look at a topic I believe is of interest to marketers. If you’d like to receive this in your email each Monday morning, fill out the form on the right.

 
Adapt or Die. Sounds like something recently uttered by any number of marketing gurus. In fact, attribution is owed to former South African Prime Minister, P.W. Botha. But South Africa’s ability to adapt is a tale for another day. Right now I want to talk about how brands are taking this lesson, as well as academia’s “publish or perish” rule, to heart. If you read Digiday, the headlines this past week told you that change was truly afoot. Here’s a sampling:

How Virgin Mobile Fell in Love with Content
Brands Cozy up to Start-Ups
The Onion’s Quest to Make Brands Funny

Or how about this one from Mashable: New York Times Launches Start-Up Incubator

Those are pretty provocative titles if you ask me. I don’t think they signal acts of desperation, but rather an acknowledgement by brands that cultural and business shifts are happening so quickly, and in ways they are ill-suited to react to, that partnerships are the only way they can maintain their footing. Smart brands are realizing that posting “like this if you think puppy dogs are cute!” as a Facebook status is not going to get the job done. As a result, partnerships with Buzzfeed, The Onion, Funny or Die and Vice make sense. Those content publishers have cracked the code. They understand culture and what type of content people want to engage in, something that the vast majority of brands don’t understand very well.

Start-Ups present brands with an opportunity to inject new ideas and perhaps a needed shot of enthusiasm into the mix. The Mashable piece notes, ”The goal is to seek out new ways of creating, collecting and distributing news and information. The Times says it’s primarily seeking startups focused on mobile, social, video, ad technology, analytics or e-commerce who have raised “at least” seed-stage funding.”

Of course this brings up its own set up problems. Which content providers do I partner with? How do I identify which start-ups to engage? What’s a hackathon?

Great questions and no easy answers. So much of this is still new territory, with numerous players and myriad options. This is where a trusted agency partner can play a vital role. With an intimate understanding of the brand, a history of crafting compelling stories and a knowledge of how to engage with culture (that’s my bit), an agency can identify the right opportunity, collaborate and leverage the partnership for maximum effect.

At Y&R we understand the need for this type of thinking, and the process behind it. Through our Spark Plug program we’ve partnered with a variety of small, innovative companies that create some of the most cutting edge technologies around. We work with them in all sorts of ways to create new and compelling communications solutions for our client partners.

I don’t think you have to be an “edgy” brand to benefit from this sort of thinking either. The key is in understanding things like the media consumption habits of your intended audience or how technology could unlock new functionality in your brand. If the articles linked above and this note have got you thinking, give me a shout and let’s talk about how to find a content partner or host a hackathon.

This piece originally appeared on The Advertising Week Social Club on January 7, 2013.

Recently I read Umair Haque’s e-book, Betterness, and was deeply affected by the themes and insights discussed within. It was heartening to read as his cri du coeur more eloquently and powerfully articulated sentiments I have been feeling recently.

The book is a call to arms and manifesto for a paradigm shift in the way business, and society as a whole, values and defines wealth. The underlying premise is that by focusing almost exclusively on a financially-driven definition of wealth, we have not only forsaken a more holistic approach to the matter, but have not done a particularly good job of even achieving the financial definition outside of those that are part of the now famous 1%.

I work in the advertising industry, so it’s quite easy for anyone reading this to ask if, before adding my rousing “here, here!” to Haque’s criticism, I have looked in a mirror lately. Indeed, we Madison Avenue-types are the very engine of the more, bigger, faster, cheaper, now society that Haque decries. I get that. But I say the following not to assuage my own feelings of guilt, but to put forth the notion with an attempt to foment conversation around the following:

How can we develop ideas that are measured not by the three dreaded letters: ROI, but rather by the inverse – IOR: INVESTMENT ON RETURN?

What do I mean by Investment on Return?

First, let’s define the term ‘return.’ I don’t mean product sales, gross or net profits or even social media-influenced terms such as ‘follows’ or ‘likes.’  Ultimately all those things are the results of actions taken by people. Notconsumers or target audiences or demographics, but people. The goodwill and patronage of people is the return on investment that brands seek to attract.

So, what sort of investment are brands making on this ‘return?’ On people? Let’s again get clear on what we are talking about, this time pausing to reflect on what we mean by ‘investment.’

Traditionally, brands have viewed returns purely in the financial sense, and so view investment similarly. “How much money are we spending and how much are we making in return?” is the traditional viewpoint of ROI. But if now we decide to view return as equaling people, we need to view investment as something more than money as well.

Investment could mean all sorts of outlay once you step back from the myopic prism of the purely financial. It could mean emotional investment, educational investment, informational investment, social investment, community investment, time investment, political investment, advocacy investment, environmental investment –and the list could be endless if you think about it.

You get the idea, though.

Do some of those things require a financial outlay?

Yes, but that is secondary to the deeper human investment these other forms carry.

You may point to the charitable and philanthropic work that many companies do –  and those certainly have meaning. But I think there is a difference between donating $1 from every sale to a worthwhile cause, or selling your product in the color that represents support for a specific disease research – both of which are good things – and thinking about how you are investing in the very people that make your company a success.

How many companies measure that as they do ROI?

So, what role does the agency play in this?

We don’t make the products people buy, but we do play a significant role in the way people perceive brands. And now we must ask ourselves, in the current era in which we live, how much longer will simply touting the more, bigger, faster, cheaper, now approach be tolerated by people? How much longer will they be satisfied with nothing more than that from the companies to which they are giving their money?

If you believe, as Haque does, and as I do, that that time is nearing an end, then you must ask yourself the following question: How am I helping to position my client to succeed in the future? Not in a ‘how can we fudge this,’ ‘how can we merely change the perception,’ ‘how can we fool folks for another couple of years,’ sort of way, but in a way that truly shapes the very business of our clients? In a way that doesn’t just hype the notion of whiter teeth, fresher laundry and shinier floors, but in a way that clearly states that the brand is based on the fundamental premise that making an investment on the return is a critical pillar of their business.

The truth is, brands that live by the Betterness ethic know that being committed to people and making a profit are not mutually exclusive. Companies as diverse as Stonyfield Farms, Interface Carpets and TOMS shoes have all found ways to make compelling products that consumers want to buy, while also making a positive impact on the lives of dairy farmers, managing a gentler carbon footprint and providing footwear to impoverished children, respectively.

This sort of approach should be a boon for agencies as well as powerful stories can be built on such foundations. The ad industry need only look to the 2012 Cannes Lion Grand Prix-winning effort from Chipotle to see how rich this territory can be.

As is regularly pointed out, ours is a world in which the individual increasingly has greater voice and the collective public have shown a willingness and ability to publicly punish those brands who do harm. So why couldn’t a brand start an initiative like Apps to Empower?

It would (and will) be the wise company that invested (and invests) in the idea of IOR.

This piece originally appeared on Digiday.

William Gibson.

If I were hiring at an advertising agency, in addition to looking at VCU Brandcenter or Miami Ad School I’d be looking for graduates of the MFA programs at universities like Iowa, Michigan and Texas; they are turning out the next generation of great writers.

Having written content for a variety of platforms and channels, award-winning science-fiction author and noted scientific consultant David Brin understands the challenges facing advertising-industry pros. He suggests that “in times of very rapid change, a good source of ideas can be the literary genre that’s all about change and its effects on human behavior.”

I’ve read more than my fair share of books on marketing, advertising, branding and the like. But sometimes I read fiction to escape from the demands of the job. Science fiction, in particular, is an area of the bookstore (or section of Amazon) that I frequent more than others. What sparked this idea comes from some of the science-fiction books I’ve read recently.

The “Bigend” trilogy by William Gibson, for example, features a woman who is a marketing consultant, or possibly even a planner, as the heroine. “IQ84″ by Haruki Murakami follows a math teacher and part-time novelist embroiled in a mystery surrounding a fantasy novel and its author. “REAMDE” by Neil Stephenson centers around a cast of characters that have created, work for or play a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG), similar to World of Warcraft. Not a space alien, laser beam or rocket ship in sight. These are three of the biggest names in science fiction, and their worlds are contemporary, their characters just a shade or two removed from what we in the marketing industry do every day. But perhaps more importantly, what the writers themselves do is becoming closer and closer to what we have to do every day.

The role of the brand steward has always been to tell stories — to make the customer believe a lie, as Seth Godin famously wrote in his “All Marketers are Liars.” But the method of the storytelling has changed, and it more closely resembles the intricate plots and complex narratives so masterfully crafted by the likes of Brin, Gibson, Murakami and Stephenson.

With the explosion of platforms, channels and technologies available to marketers now, a new skill set is required. Simply having

On Mad Men, it was account exec Ken Cosgrove who wrote Science Fiction. But in real life, sci-fi writers would make great creatives like Don Draper.

a presence on five different social networks, three blogs and two websites to go along with an advertising campaign takes into account neither the sophistication of consumers nor their hunger for a cohesive story. Steven Johnson, in “Everything Good is Bad for You,” explains how storytelling on shows such as “Lost” or “The Sopranos” has risen to meet the needs of consumers who have come to expect, and demand, these densely packed narratives filled with a host of characters and interwoven subplots.

So why, if video games like Bioshock, movies like “Inception” and books like “House of Leaves” are so popular, do we not demand the same type of sophistication from our marketing efforts? Why do we, as an industry, not strive for the same level of complexity and depth in creating a story with which consumers want to engage?

Yes, in some cases we do see transmedia storytelling efforts, usually in the service of big films (and often these are science-fiction or comic-book movies), but why can’t a car company or a mobile carrier have a deep narrative structure running through all of its consumer touchpoints? The answer surely isn’t that consumers don’t want this. The answer, more likely, is simply that people in the advertising industry haven’t been formally trained in creating these sort of plot structures. But professional writers have.

If this notion seems a bit far fetched to you — science-fiction writers employed in the service of a brand — here’s who didn’t think it was crazy: Intel. In trying to better understand how its products might be used by, and benefit, consumers in the future, it created the Tomorrow Project, enlisting the help of scientists, and science-fiction writers, to come up with plausible scenarios for the future.

As elements such as video content and social media interaction continue to play a larger role in consumer-facing efforts by brands, the opportunities for people who can create characters and plots, who understand pacing and dramatic tension, will grow and there will be a talent war for these people among agencies. Now is the time to start finding these future advertising stars.