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Four years ago, hardly anybody had a smartphone. Today, less than ten percent of people have
a connected TV.
TV is going to dramatically change in the next decade. I think it’s going to become
more interconnected with the devices in your home. I think it’s going to become more
seamless with who you are as a person, which I think historically it hasn’t. And I think
you’re going to see some pretty bold things happen with respect to the TV in the years
to come.
You have seen a lot of networks creating their own online presence or tablet presence or
anywhere, and people having the ability to just go online and watch these shows, and
just not on the TV but also on a tablet or a cell phone.
In a few years, when every television that ships has some sort of connection to the Internet,
you’ll have a stack of Internet connectivity in your living room.
We’re already starting to see people under 20 and 30 are not getting cable. They’re
just watching Hulu and Netflix and YouTube.
I anticipate that the idea of Connected14 will become a reality and become a practice
within 12 to 18 months for most major brands.
The Internet is just having an amazing impact on our society in terms of the democratization
of information. And we’re only still beginning to understand the impact, sociologically,
anthropologically, and obviously in the context of marketing and advertising.
With Mass Marketing, you didn’t have technology, so you had not option but to create Mass Marketing.
But now, you have technology that actually enables you to know your consumer and to be
able to communicate with them on a personalized level; not just in terms of the content you
provide to them, but also in terms of knowing their habits, the devices they use, the time
preferences they have, the mechanisms of communications that they prefer. All of those things, and
we have to respect that.
People don’t want to be advertised to, but they want to opt in to how they have a dialogue
with the brand. That’s going to be the most important thing here, as both a consumer and
a marketer. That is the Holy Grail of how you can talk to a consumer without them feeling
like you’re trying to push something on them.
My hope for the future is that there’s more connected devices with users consuming more
content across all those devices, and that the technology continues to accelerate in
terms of the innovation.
Smartphones are going to get smarter. I mean, Siri’s a good example from the perspective
that I can reach into this device and ask it to do things for me. Computers are going
to get smarter. They’re going to get easier to use.
There’s no slowing down, and it’s a tremendously exciting time to be a marketer.
I would like to see brands working with strategic partners to start having the conversation
around ownership. What’s possible? What’s coming? Picking a platform as their racehorse
and going with it, and knowing that it’s okay to be wrong.
I would hope that the way things go is, there’s one standard and you can have different devices
from different companies, but they could all work together.
That’s really interesting from a marketing standpoint because that means billions and
billions of marketing dollars are going to shift to digital, and that really helps the
Connected14 because when there’s more dollars in digital, that means the technology and
the marketing can be that much more effective because it can be tracked and measured.
We’re thinking about a Connected14 experience, which is great, and that allows us to basically
own the entertainment space within ourselves, but we could be thinking a lot more broad
between the Connected14 and going to a Connected30, Connected100, Connected500. I don’t know
what the number is because the digital experience is omnipresent, and in an omnipresent opportunity,
why put a number to it? So, the really important part of the Connected14 is really the connection
part.
I’m sure the question can be raised that we’re going to go too far on this. I don’t
think there is a “too far”. I don’t think we’ve even touched the tip of the
iceberg of what customers want from us, and I think brand owners and owners of businesses
need to be focused in on delivering whatever the customer wants, when they want it.