• by Charlene Weisler , Op-Ed Contributor, July 3, 2013

The first Maxxcom Collaborative Alliance, which made its debut this June, focused on digital media and featured speakers from Conde Nast, ESPN, Time Warner Medialab and Fordham University, as well as speakers from Mitch Oscar’s Media Dadaists from Collective, Rentrak, Trendrr and TVB.

All in all, it was a spirited forum that spawned new ideas across print, television, mobile and cross platform.  Two videos from the Maxxcom Collaborative can be viewed here.

The Collaborative has an illustrious history. Mitch Oscar’s vision to ignite the “Televisual Revolution” began with his quarterly Collaborative Alliance events, which launched in 2004. Oscar has set the futuristic pace since then, offering prescient insights into set-top-box data before it mainstreamed, addressable advertising before it became a cogent business model, and multiplatform advancements before it hit the zeitgeist. He tries to keep pace with the ever-evolving media landscape and is often ahead of the generally accepted wisdom. Even his title of Televisual Application Executive is a bit ahead of the media curve. I don’t know anyone else in the industry with that title!

“Fragmentation is happening and continues to happen,” says Steve Farella, CEO of Maxxcom “But today we featured a number of different vendors and a number of different pieces of technology who illustrate that not only is television a strong medium, but that digital video is a great complement  -- whether to extend a reach of a campaign or add to the frequency of a campaign.

 “What we tried to do with the Maxxcom Collaborative was address video across platforms, second screen, social TV. These are things that we think about all the time,” says Oscar. He put together a series of panels to more deeply explore the impact of digital media on social, print, television, advertising and measurement.

Whether extending the influence of print and its second screen with Scott McDonald’s Conde Nast presentation, or combining digital media with set top box data to extend the reach of television, as Justin Evans from Collective, did ,or describing live broadcast mobile television as Stacey Lynn Schulman did, it is clear that digital media has a strong role to play, especially in conjunction with other forms of media.

But what about measurement? Glenn Enoch of ESPN offered a solution in the form of Project Blueprint, which combines five platforms -- TV, radio, PC, smartphone and tablet -- and Arbitron and comScore data into one integrated measurement.

Turner’s Howard Shimmel presented “The Five Principles of TV and Social Media and Second Screen Engagement” with a neuroscience-based study from the Time Warner Media Lab. Through the use of biometric monitoring including heart rate, skin resonance, fidgetiness and eye tracking, Turner was able to ascertain unexpressed yet biological consumer reaction to media stimuli and cross platform. They also included a quantitative survey to measure branding and were able to find the right combination of on-air and digital touch-points for specific tested programming and their viewers.

Closing the forum, Professor John Carey of Fordham University discussed the history of mobile phones. His entertaining presentation took us down memory lane -- from the heavy and cumbersome shoe-box-sized mobile phone and the early modes of car phones to today’s pocket-size entertainment center. In the span of 80 years, we have gone from carrying a contraption in one’s car that needs to be wired to a telephone pole to something that fits in your pocket and works anywhere in the world.

This just goes to show that digital media is still a moving target. Technological advancements make it critical that we as an industry always try to keep up, if not ahead, of the consumer.