• by Andy Oakes  @andyoakes, October 25, 2013

Last week, I attended the annual IAB Engage event in London. The IAB claim it’s the biggest and best event of its kind in the UK (but when do event organisers ever claim anything else), and brings together an audience of several hundred marketers and digital professionals.

Sadly, the event fell into the trap of thinking that we always want to hear from the digital behemoths of Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft so we sat through the usual sales pitches and ‘inspirational’ video content that replaces so much of decent conference content these days.

However, even amongst all this, a theme surfaced that could be one of the central platform battlegrounds over the next year, and that was how to work with TV.  Facebook, Google and Microsoft each have a different take on how this plays out but, as a veteran of this industry, I found it interesting to see the old Digital V TV game reinvented. I remember back in September 2009 when I worked at New Media Age magazine and our cover story was ‘Bigger than TV’. It caused a major row with Thinkbox, the body that promotes TV advertising, which rumbled on for many a month. Looking back, I can see that the way we measured ‘online advertising’ was slightly skewed as we included email, search and display in the mix.

So when I heard Facebook VP EMEA Nicole Mendelsohn telling us that there is an audience the size of Europe checking Facebook every day, and that in the UK, 20 million people log in on mobile, a figure that is bigger than the UK’s two top TV shows combined, I began to feel that we have still to work out the TV and digital relationship. It felt like an attack, especially when Mendelsohn added the sting, ‘With Facebook, Prime Time is now all of the time’. The 500 advertisers in the room were left in no doubt how hard Facebook were pitching for their business.

Mendelsohn went on to give examples of campaigns where both TV and Facebook were used, and, guess what, this resulted in greater engagement. But then surely that’s the point of every multi-channel campaign?

Next up was Matt Brittin of Google who, among other items from the Mountain View catalogue of goodies, demonstrated Chromecast. It seems that Google have given up on Google TV following an almost total lack of interest from the market. Obviously, Chromecast and Google TV are two different products. They don't share the same features or functionality, and Chromecast is by far the cheaper option. But they're both attempting to make your TV smarter, albeit with competing philosophies. So whilst this isn’t a TV Killer outright, it is viewer time that the TV is being used for something other than traditional broadcast programming and advertising. It’s early days, especially here in the UK, but this is a development worth monitoring.

Later in the day came Microsoft with one of their trademark ‘high on video, low on insight’ presentations. Their big play was for the Xbox One and the opportunities for marketers. Perhaps wisely, Ross Honey, GM Xbox Advertising, avoided the controversy started by Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft chief marketing and strategy officer, who recently hinted that the Xbox One's bundled Kinect bolt on could track living room activity in order to serve users better-targeted dashboard advertisements. Although Microsoft have subsequently said that this is not an active plan, it is obvious that the potential is there.

Like Chromecast, the Xbox uses the TV to show ads that aren’t run by TV stations. Both mess with the models of multiscreen viewing, and both will add to TV exec’s worries.

So whilst the rule of engagement have changed, the battleground remains the same. Online V TV is a debate that will continue to rage.