TVNewsCheck
Predictions
By Michael Depp
NetNewsCheck,
Many local broadcasters have been feeding off newspapers’ pain for years now, but don’t be surprised if 2015 sees them falling from their lofty perch.
As we look ahead to next year, local television and radio are in the most precarious position they’ve been in for a long time, hampered by their slow and deeply unimaginative moves in digital. They will be challenged to do their own evolving, and that trend will be hastened by the growth of over the top and the growing clamor of users for more personal content.
1. Local TV news will feel newspapers’ pain. It’s not going to be the newspaper apocalypse all over again, but the inflection point has arrived in 2014, setting the stage for local broadcasters to understand the anguish of losing audience and advertisers. Certain spot ad categories are gone for good, and younger audiences just don’t give a damn about a shopworn, linear crawl through “breaking” news, weather and sports as appointment viewing.
2. Smart TV news will experiment with format, spurred by digital models. This may be far more hopeful than likely, but all we need is for one local broadcaster to break ranks and follow cues from the digital upstarts like VICE Media that are really reinventing the form. Can you imagine a future local news that ditches the anchor desk, the phony standups and tired, lacquered inauthenticity of local news reporting? If news execs really want to capture multiplatform audiences, they’d better start imagining that future themselves or else brace for their audiences to say goodbye.
3. Data will show a positive correlation between social media use and Nielsen ratings. Want to talk to an audience? You find them on social. Those broadcasters who use these platforms well will invariably find themselves evolving in tune with what their audiences really want and care about. Their programming will be more relevant, their engagement much stronger and their proposition to advertisers hugely more valuable. Look for more and better quantification of this in studies this year, and look for the execs who are shaking their heads in incredulity at this thought to lose their jobs shortly after.
4. An over the top television land grab is coming. This item isn’t just for broadcasters — newspapers and video-producing pureplays have just as much to gain from reaching on-demand audiences on OTT. Of course, the monetization is elusive, but users are massing there and so media companies will need to be there, too. An OTT initiative should go hand-in-hand with any ramp-up in digital video investment, and who isn’t doing that for 2015? Think it’s impossible? Just ask tiny Calkins Media how it put its community papers there already.
5. The stigmas around programmatic buying will fall away. Late 2014 already saw this dynamic happening. Newspapers have begun to see that with a smart strategy in place, they can actually make some real money through automated buying. There are already leaders to follow, starting with The Star-Tribune, and there are too many compelling arguments to be made for publishers to be dismissive.
6. Newspapers are still in for another very rough year. It’s not likely that any major papers are going to be turning out the lights in 2015, but their problems are not going away, either. The most enterprising papers developing new revenue lines aren’t yet likely to see dramatic ROI from their digital marketing services or content marketing/native advertising lines, even if they do see double-digit digital growth each quarter (still a likely occurrence). Of course, most executives and staffers in publishing already know to leave their seatbelts on — there’s a lot of turbulent air still ahead.
7. Radical publisher thinking will gain traction. There was no move so risky in publishing this year as the release of La Presse’s $36 million tablet app in Montreal. Publisher Guy Crevier not only made the app the centerpiece of the newsroom’s daily publishing endeavor (the daily paper is curated out of its interactive stories), but he ported the business model over to it as well. Now 53% of the paper’s ad revenue comes from the La Presse+ app, and it picked up its first white label software client last month with the Toronto Star. If this isn’t what the future’s newspaper looks like, it’s damned closer than anyone else has gotten. (Watch in January for our own Digital Deep Dive into La Presse’s tablet move.)
8. Beacons will open up a new flank on mobile monetization. There are already some 30,000 beacons set up in retailers across the U.S., honing in on opt-in consumer locations with the power to geo-customize alerts and offers. Many local media outlets have long crossed the tipping point of over 50% mobile traffic. Put these two dynamics together and it’s like chocolate and peanut butter, and some publishers will start to see that in 2015 as they make their first forays into beacon partnerships with retailers. The barriers to entry are far fewer than most realize, and barring a major privacy or regulatory backlash, the revenue potential is dramatic.
9. The media’s metrics priorities will shift toward attention and engagement. Forget chasing clicks. Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile has pointed the way to a brighter future for everyone via his company’s metrics for attention, the first ever to be accredited for such a measurement by the Media Rating Council. Haile’s idea — that it’s the amount of time a user spends with content, not the volume of those who click through and leave within seconds, that counts — may just be intuitive enough to gain momentum with advertisers. The Financial Times is already testing it. And, who knows, this system could actually reward good content instead of tawdry clickbait.
10. Wearables’ time has come. If the fever hasn’t yet overtaken consumers, just remember that Apple’s new smartwatch won’t be available until later this winter. When that product drops, watch for the wearables zeal to lift by orders of magnitude and see major media companies scramble to offer consumers something to put a stake in the space. Any media with health-related content — and who doesn’t have some of that? — ought to be looking now for their play, as the biometrics angle is the most obvious point of entry.
As we look ahead to next year, local television and radio are in the most precarious position they’ve been in for a long time, hampered by their slow and deeply unimaginative moves in digital. They will be challenged to do their own evolving, and that trend will be hastened by the growth of over the top and the growing clamor of users for more personal content.
2. Smart TV news will experiment with format, spurred by digital models. This may be far more hopeful than likely, but all we need is for one local broadcaster to break ranks and follow cues from the digital upstarts like VICE Media that are really reinventing the form. Can you imagine a future local news that ditches the anchor desk, the phony standups and tired, lacquered inauthenticity of local news reporting? If news execs really want to capture multiplatform audiences, they’d better start imagining that future themselves or else brace for their audiences to say goodbye.
3. Data will show a positive correlation between social media use and Nielsen ratings. Want to talk to an audience? You find them on social. Those broadcasters who use these platforms well will invariably find themselves evolving in tune with what their audiences really want and care about. Their programming will be more relevant, their engagement much stronger and their proposition to advertisers hugely more valuable. Look for more and better quantification of this in studies this year, and look for the execs who are shaking their heads in incredulity at this thought to lose their jobs shortly after.
4. An over the top television land grab is coming. This item isn’t just for broadcasters — newspapers and video-producing pureplays have just as much to gain from reaching on-demand audiences on OTT. Of course, the monetization is elusive, but users are massing there and so media companies will need to be there, too. An OTT initiative should go hand-in-hand with any ramp-up in digital video investment, and who isn’t doing that for 2015? Think it’s impossible? Just ask tiny Calkins Media how it put its community papers there already.
5. The stigmas around programmatic buying will fall away. Late 2014 already saw this dynamic happening. Newspapers have begun to see that with a smart strategy in place, they can actually make some real money through automated buying. There are already leaders to follow, starting with The Star-Tribune, and there are too many compelling arguments to be made for publishers to be dismissive.
6. Newspapers are still in for another very rough year. It’s not likely that any major papers are going to be turning out the lights in 2015, but their problems are not going away, either. The most enterprising papers developing new revenue lines aren’t yet likely to see dramatic ROI from their digital marketing services or content marketing/native advertising lines, even if they do see double-digit digital growth each quarter (still a likely occurrence). Of course, most executives and staffers in publishing already know to leave their seatbelts on — there’s a lot of turbulent air still ahead.
7. Radical publisher thinking will gain traction. There was no move so risky in publishing this year as the release of La Presse’s $36 million tablet app in Montreal. Publisher Guy Crevier not only made the app the centerpiece of the newsroom’s daily publishing endeavor (the daily paper is curated out of its interactive stories), but he ported the business model over to it as well. Now 53% of the paper’s ad revenue comes from the La Presse+ app, and it picked up its first white label software client last month with the Toronto Star. If this isn’t what the future’s newspaper looks like, it’s damned closer than anyone else has gotten. (Watch in January for our own Digital Deep Dive into La Presse’s tablet move.)
8. Beacons will open up a new flank on mobile monetization. There are already some 30,000 beacons set up in retailers across the U.S., honing in on opt-in consumer locations with the power to geo-customize alerts and offers. Many local media outlets have long crossed the tipping point of over 50% mobile traffic. Put these two dynamics together and it’s like chocolate and peanut butter, and some publishers will start to see that in 2015 as they make their first forays into beacon partnerships with retailers. The barriers to entry are far fewer than most realize, and barring a major privacy or regulatory backlash, the revenue potential is dramatic.
9. The media’s metrics priorities will shift toward attention and engagement. Forget chasing clicks. Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile has pointed the way to a brighter future for everyone via his company’s metrics for attention, the first ever to be accredited for such a measurement by the Media Rating Council. Haile’s idea — that it’s the amount of time a user spends with content, not the volume of those who click through and leave within seconds, that counts — may just be intuitive enough to gain momentum with advertisers. The Financial Times is already testing it. And, who knows, this system could actually reward good content instead of tawdry clickbait.
10. Wearables’ time has come. If the fever hasn’t yet overtaken consumers, just remember that Apple’s new smartwatch won’t be available until later this winter. When that product drops, watch for the wearables zeal to lift by orders of magnitude and see major media companies scramble to offer consumers something to put a stake in the space. Any media with health-related content — and who doesn’t have some of that? — ought to be looking now for their play, as the biometrics angle is the most obvious point of entry.
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