NEW MEDIA SUCCESS MEANS STAYING RELEVANT

My local police department provides a community alert service to which I subscribe. They e-mail me a whenever there is a property crime or other event they think will affect residents. Lately there’s been a series of burglaries, which I learned about soon after they occurred because I signed up for the alerts. This is an example of what Jimmy Schaeffler, Chairman-CSO of The Carmel Group calls “relevance and choice,” I’ve chosen to receive this information because it’s about things that can affect my home or my family.

Schaeffler was the keynote speaker for BCFM’s West Coast Regional Seminar, “Anytime…Anyplace: Making Money from the Trend toward Personalized Media,” which was held recently at the ABC Building in Burbank, Calif. He told our attendees that relevance and choice offer a really good start to a business model. As we look at the dramatic increase in media choices that are now available to our viewers and subscribers, it’s clear that we need to be even more relevant to what’s happening in their lives if we want them to continue choosing our brands and companies.

One of the examples that Schaeffler provided was the digital signage market opportunity for local broadcasters. As he outlined in his “Stations Could Shine on Digital Signs” guest column in TVNEWDAY, broadcasters are primed to play in the new medium because they already have several key ingredients: content libraries, the ability to make new content and local sales and billing operations. This translates into the assets, the know-how and the relationships required for participating in a market that The Carmel Group believes will grow from $1 billion to more than $2.5 billion in annual revenue by year-end 2010.

Seminar attendees also heard about the importance of ensuring the personal relevance of cross-platform content from a session entitled was “Technology Now and the Future.” that included Cory Bergman of KING5.com, who’s also founder/managing editor of LostRemote.com; Michael S. Scherotter, a developer evangelist from Microsoft Corp.; and Scot Silverman, head of audio partnerships at Google.

One of the discussion topics that struck me concerned the significance of ringtones. While we may not be surprised to learn that teenagers, as a group, are the biggest consumers of ringtones, what drives their consumption may be surprising to learn. To them, ringtones are a mark of social capital. Each contact has a different ringtone. The more ringtones you have, the greater your number of friends. Ringtones delineate their world and their connections.

Examples like the importance of personalizing ringtones remind us that localism is as much a business issue as it is a regulatory issue. The FCC aside, it should also be important to us because it’s a way to keep our audiences tuned in, “anytime, anyplace,” by providing relevant information.

So, what’s the business model for personalized content?  One of our speakers pointed out that there are only two ways to monetized content—either the consumer subscribes to it or it’s supported by advertising.

Izzy Abbass, a partner in Enki Strategic Advisors, made a point of telling seminar attendees that hyper-local content is well-geared to mobile phones. One example he gave was of a restaurant offering a free bottle of wine with two entrees if purchased within two hours of the message being sent. In this scenario, the restaurant pays to deliver the message to the subscriber. The advertising may be charged on a pay-per-performance model, say $3 for each message received. Signs in the local shopping area would notify customers that they can get restaurant offers by texting to a specific short code number.

Alan Simkowski, vice president of entertainment for Vibes Media, which launched the first mobile campaign in the United States and has generated over 300 million text messages, provided some context for these two business case examples of personalized media. Online ad spending expected to top the entire radio ad market in ad spending this year. Moreover, mobile revenue, which originates from sponsorships as well as traditional advertising and premium subscriptions, represents a $350 billion market.

Consumers are rapidly expanding the way they use mobile phones, Simkowski reported. Of the 237 million wireless subscribers in the U.S., 70 percent use their phones to text message. Citing addional data from Nielsen Mobile, he noted that more than 32 million of us accessed the Internet on our phones, in the last month alone. The data also challenge some assumptions we may have about the mobile market. Seventy percent of families with incomes under $25,000 use cell phones, and cell phones serve a truly multicultural market.

Milton Stumpus, director of national business development for Cox Media, gave our seminar attendees insights on the value of cross-platform marketing campaigns. Using the Nevada Caucuses for a case study, Cox teamed up with public officials at the national, state and local levels to collaborate on the first “made for VOD” political educational communication program.

The campaign demonstrated the value of “interactive telescoping,” which allows cable customers to click on an icon or message that appears in a TV spot and be taken directly to a VOD asset. In this instance, viewers seeing a TV spot promoting the Nevada caucuses could click-through to five-minute tutorials about the Democratic and Republication caucuses. Cox also provided links to the Caucus ’08 videos by thought its FreeZone HSI Web site.

By using MicroVision, a segmentation and consumer targeting system from Claritas, the campaign collaborators could analyze the user data based on the demographic, lifestyle, socioeconomic, buying, media and behavior characteristics of households within every ZIP+4 geographic area.

Microvision’s ability to provide the type of targeted analysis for the Nevada Caucus campaign serves as a great reminder that our advertisers are also focusing on targeting their content. Not only do they want the technical capability to allow for this type of marketing, they will require the new forms of measurement and analysis that will allow them to measure its effectiveness.

As our seminar presenters demonstrated, there may be two business models, ad-supported and subscription-based, but there are an infinite number of variations. Based upon the overwhelmingly favorable response we received for both the New York and Los Angeles seminars about making money from these emerging markets, we’ll be talking about even more of these variations at our annual conference, “Your World. Your Connection,” which will be held at the Fairmont Hotel in Dallas, May 13-15.

Like these seminars, the annual BCFM/BCCA Conference is designed to provide a great ROI for attendees through actionable information and ideas for improving the financial performance of their local business units and companies.

For more information about the conference (or other BCFM programs), go to www.bcfm.com.

I look forward to seeing you in Dallas.

Mary Collins is the president and CEO of the Broadcast Cable Financial Management Association, a professional society for addressing the diverse needs of financial and business professionals in the broadcast, cable, and electronic media industries. Her column appears here every other Friday.