• by Adrienne Mand Lewin , August 2, 2007

Consumers now get news, music and video in a multitude of forms. Are you ready to plunge into the digital deep end?

In a world where you watch "Heroes" on a 50-inch plasma screen, stream it to your laptop for free on NBC.com and download it to an iPod for $1.99, the question arises: Do platforms matter? Do people care whether they're watching "TV" on a TV set, a cell-phone or a monitor at the gym?

Sure, industry insiders make all sorts of distinctions: out-of-home, online, broadcast, cable and the like. But do consumers? And if it doesn't matter to them, should marketing become more fluid? Do the traditional strategies for media campaigns no longer make sense?

We asked media executives and other industry experts their thoughts. Their answers were as varied as today's entertainment options themselves.

"The television in the living room is the predominant media experience of our day," says James McQuivey, principal analyst at Forrester Research. "The average adult watches 28 hours a week - that's a part-time job."

Television, however, has one major problem: Scheduling. The networks' long-standing practice of airing shows at specific times simply means that many people would never have the opportunity to view certain programs without a hi-tech assist. "The PC as a platform has made so many inroads because a pc is so much more convenient," McQuivey says.

It was consumers' desires to rearrange programs to fit their own schedules that sparked the first wave of time-shifting via VCRs in the 1980s. Since then, consumers' ability to time-shift has evolved into an ability to platform-shift, thanks to broadband. Now, with networks streaming shows online and selling them as downloads, video programs can be watched anywhere - on iPhones, laptops, even Xboxes. At the same time, devices like the Apple TV and Slingbox threaten to even further disrupt media - if disrupt can still be considered the right word for enabling a phenomenon as widespread as video on demand.

"What's happening now with the younger generation is they grew up with an interactive environment," says Jason Hirschhorn, president of Sling Media Entertainment Group, maker of the Slingbox. "They don't distinguish the platform they get the content from ... but they sure distinguish instant access."

Instant access means everything from portable DVD players, iPods, mobile phones and laptops with wireless service to Slingboxes that allow viewers to watch their TVs or DVR through computers and remote devices.

But, while consumers might want content on demand, that doesn't mean they view platforms as fungible - and they definitely don't think ads translate well across all devices.

Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO of Denuo, Publicis Groupe's futurist consultancy, says the same people who view TV programs on cell-phones, for instance, resent ads on those gadgets far more than on TV screens. "A mobile phone today is considered to be an extremely personal device, and you don't want stuff pushed at you," he says. "Content that is created for something you ask for, that knows where you are, that's deeply personal, with a small screen - that content obviously is very different than when you're sitting at home watching a 100-inch LCD television set that doesn't know where you are. Both have video content, but it's completely different."

And then there's context. "I don't think there's any question that the platform or device through which a consumer's accessing content matters in terms of what the programming structure and advertising model is that's delivered," says Adam Gerber, former vice president of advertising products and strategy with Internet TV service Brightcove and a member of the Interactive Advertising Bureau's digital video committee. "I don't think you can look at it just in terms of platform or device - consider where the consumer is as they're using it."

Lori H. Schwartz, senior vice president and director of the Interpublic Emerging Media Lab, agrees that what consumers are doing while they access media is important. "I think context matters a lot - the context in which you are consuming it reflects your state of mind," Schwartz says.

In other words, killing a half-hour in a Starbucks by watching Verizon's vcast content is an entirely different experience than being at home playing an Xbox game on a big-screen plasma TV for three hours.

"These different platforms have a lot to do with context - where a person is, where in the moment in their lives that they are, what they're in the mood for," Schwartz says. "I think that a lot of companies are experimenting with little treats of video instead of full-length pieces.

"You look at video snacks on your phone, as opposed to a bigger screen with a more comfortable seat. Little three-minute overviews - sports highlights, trailers, all those sort of snacks - work better in portable situations. It's different than, say, a Slingbox or an iPod or a Verizon experience of watching an hour-long movie on an airplane trying to kill five hours," Schwartz says.

Gerber adds that producers should keep these distinctions in mind when creating content that consumers will likely view on-the-go. They need to consider "how you create different programming experiences" for the different contexts, he says, noting that TV networks have already started to figure this out with "Webisodes" and "mobisodes," which have extended programs beyond the traditional TV season.

In the Eye of the Storm

For content creators, the new reality also means re-examining long-held business assumptions, says Barry Parr, a media analyst with JupiterResearch. "Essentially, what we're saying to clients now is, if you're a content producer you need to be more like a network and not like a destination. [You need] the broadest possible distribution, and it's incumbent on you to find ways to do that."

Parr says there will need to be "a complete rethinking of what a television program is because you don't have any reliable notion anymore about where that thing's going to show up. Ten years ago, you had a pretty good idea what your lead-in was. That's not true anymore. It's going to be trial and error."

And that has left content producers, distributors, advertisers and agencies scrambling to figure out their next moves, says Paul Woolmington, founding partner of Naked Communications.

"Everyone's sort of caught in the eye of the storm at the moment," Woolmington says, "and they're not really sure what to do."

Fast-Forwarding into the Future

Content might be flowing across different platforms, but advertising isn't transitioning nearly as smoothly.

"Although we have opportunities, the marketplace is slow to make investments," says Stacey Lynn Schulman, CEO of media consultancy firm Hi: Human Insight. "People look at new media and they try to interpret it through the lens of what they know, and that's a big mistake."

Formerly president of Interpublic's Consumer Experience Practice, which guided clients in how to use emerging media, Schulman says marketers often asked for plans showing them how to get into such areas as video-on-demand or streaming video - but they'd balk when the formats couldn't be measured in traditional metrics.

Advertisers also are skittish because there is much more happening with their brands that is beyond their control, Woolmington says. "There are more silos now, channels that consumers are engaging with. What people are doing, their instinct is to build their models around the silo - let's have more of these pipes. One way of combating fragmentation is just to embrace all these pipes.

"I think actually what you have to do is understand the consumer ... understand which of the channels is going to be relevant," including blogs, he says. "Understanding how consumers interact is more critical in realizing how you deliver on that. The stuff that's failing is stuff that's repurposed from somewhere else."

McQuivey adds that the newer category of download-to-own or pay-per-video and streaming is "just about to explode." These are ad-supported downloads where users can watch episodes of shows online but the ads can't be skipped. New technology will allow media players to have the ability to rotate in new ads if users watch the clip another time online and will allow users to forward clips to others.

"This gives [advertisers and programmers] the kind of control that they've never even had in regular television," McQuivey says. "They're very excited about it. Now, for first time in history, they're going to encourage you to forward it to your friend. Suddenly, instead of saying, 'They're copying our shows,' they're saying, 'They're forwarding our ads.' It changes the game completely.

"In a world where they're all threatened by the DVR, it's [a change] that everyone from the network to the advertiser is going to welcome with arms wide open."

Tobaccowala says marketers will be challenged to come up with a cohesive brand strategy to accomodate consumers' changing habits. "Marketers have to recognize we're moving more and more, regardless of the device, into an on-demand world. We also are recognizing we're moving into a world where people will be passing along things to each other," he says. "But at the same time, how do you re-aggregate all these messages? You're going to have to have, at some stage, an understanding of what your brand is, whether it's a content brand or distribution brand."

And with so many ways to distribute content, the old dynamics will no longer make sense.

"I believe it will be a world where the economics of measuring the impact and economics of distributing are all changing," Tobaccowala says, adding, "They're going to have to sort of recognize that increasingly more of their money is going to go into measurement and content creation than into distribution."

Gerber says on-demand will create opportunities for advertisers to drive a deeper brand connection than traditional advertising.

"The beautiful thing is the kind of 30-second, intrusive TV model becomes much less imperative and there's a much more engaging opportunity that advertisers have in that they can produce interactive content, they can produce longer-form content, they can do things that are completely out of bounds of the traditional TV model," he says.

Sling Media's Hirschhorn agrees. While advertisers used to have to buy space, now "they also can just take space online." He noted that Snoop Dogg has a hugely successful MySpace page promoting his career, but "10 years ago you had to buy an ad in Billboard."

Woolmington urges advertisers and agencies not to come to the table with individual biases. They should work together, he says, to come up with a "big idea." "American Idol," he proposes, is a perfect example. Yes, at the heart of it, it's a TV program, but the big, big idea sells with the events, tours, partnerships, licensing of 'American Idol' apparel, karaoke machines, consumer electronics. It's spawned multiple industries, multiple revenue streams."

But how can agencies approach these new ideas?

"What the agencies are struggling with requires really good integration, a great composer of a strategy, as well as a great conductor," Woolmington says. "It has to be a conductor who can make each of the instruments work in harmony. That's the macro issue. The micro is taking an opportunity like a partnership with 'American Idol' - how do you fully exploit it?"

Parr says there will be considerable adjustments.

"Advertisers and agencies are extraordinarily conservative about things they'll sponsor," he says. "Second, these newer models make it really difficult to measure issues in just getting the scale to get the kind of reach and frequency to make it happen. And finally, we don't know what the ads will look like in new [media]. It's an era of experimentation. It's difficult for folks, and the market is going to move much faster.