Discussing Discovery
After the Digital Hollywood Media Summit in New York wound down last night, thePlatform was joined by 100 of our friends in the digital media industry for dinner and a conversation about increasing viewership through better content discovery. To spur the discussion, our CEO Ian Blaine invited three guests on stage to talk about approaches to growing our broadband video businesses.
Mark Kortekaas, Chief Technical Officer of CBS Interactive, walked us through CBS Interactive’s broad syndication strategy. Mark’s assessment: control of your content is important, but making it easy for consumers to find and watch your video is the priority. For CBS, this includes distributing content to a range of sites, which allows consumers to stay on sites they like to watch their favorite CBS shows. Ultimately, no one has all of the answers around broadband video, so Mark recommends testing everything. Good metrics and a willingness to occasionally fail will allow us to quickly optimize our approach to this new medium.
On the other side of the distribution pipe, Charlie Herrin, SVP of Product Development and Technology at Comcast Interactive Media, talked about building communities on their Comcast.net portal and their latest site, Fancast. For Charlie, Comcast’s online endeavors are a natural extension of a business that connects people to the content they love. Fancast has over 10 million web pages on the shows, actors, producers, and directors that create our movies and TV shows. Consumers can explore these relationships and discover new content. With over 100 content providers submitting video to Fancast, the audience can often watch their show without leaving the site. Building a community is an important aspect of Comcast.net’s approach. They have found that when users engage with their content by leaving comments, adding ratings, or creating personal playlists, video views by those consumers increase.
Our last conversation was with Jean-Philippe Maheu, the Chief Digital Officer for Ogilvy North America. Jean-Philippe advises advertisers against building their own communities. Instead, the most effective campaigns occur when they marry the spirit of a brand with a current macro trend. Dove’s “Real Beauty for Real Women” campaign is a great example of this. The last step is finding an existing community that will embrace the message. For Jean-Philippe, audience size doesn’t matter as much engaging a group of people about a particular topic. Programmers that use their content to make connections between audience members will find advertisers willing to sponsor their work.
We’d like to thank all of our guests that attended last night’s dinner. And a special thank you to Mark, Charlie, and Jean-Philippe for sharing their insights. We look forward to continuing the conversation.
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