1st Nov 2010

Telemedia360 Manchester Preview: Monetising Media through new channels

By Paul Skeldon, editor, Telemedia-news.com

Monetising media content through new channels is crucial to all media businesses, yet there are plenty of hurdles and challenges to making it work – not least regulation, device fragmentation and gaining the trust of social network users. This is the message coming from the media industry and what the Telemedia360 event in Manchester on 16 November will be tackling.

Telemedia360 Manchester is a boutique event designed to bring together the media, brands and retailers with the mobile networks, aggregators, service providers and billers of the telemedia community to develop new revenue channels for media content and to look at how microbilling services can be used to monetise new interactive and social media channels between brands and their consumers.

The issues-driven conference will be looking at all the factors that are driving the change in how viewers and readers are becoming consumers of media content across a range of devices and channels, not least mobile, tablets, iTunes, red-button and even games consoles – not to mention the role of social networks in how consumer spread content and virally market content for brands.

AIME’s Chairman, Edward Boddington, will be leading a keynote industry panel to kick the event off as the telemedia and media industries come together ahead of the Manchester Media Festival to look for answers and solutions to help media companies make profitable use of the evolving comms technology world.

“They key thing is understanding that consumers are doing other things when they are watching TV now,” says Boddington ahead of the show. “They are using mobiles and other devices to interact with the shows, find out more about the shows and interact with other viewers using social applications while the shows are on. The challenge facing media companies is how to monetise these secondary channels and ancillary services through sponsorship and advertising, subscriptions and free-mium models.”
Fellow keynote panellist Colin McCaffery, Director of Products at 2Ergo agrees. “The savvy broadcast media companies are now looking at other ways to monetise their content and measuring engagement rather than advertising impressions.

“Viewers can now be treated like customers consuming a brand and advertising is only one stream of revenue,” he says. “Loyalty schemes, affiliate marketing programs, couponing and other communication tools mean that income can be generated away from the core business of broadcast.”

Engagement with viewers is more possible than before, which has taken traditional CRM to a new level, believes McCaffery. “Affiliate marketing will become more and more commonplace as media companies link their properties to other brands, both within the media marketplace and outside of it. The smart media companies are also using mobile ticketing and couponing to great effect.”

Engagement also encompasses polls and text based interaction, allowing for greater customer retention which can directly generate income and provide additional sales marketing opportunities.

There are also interesting developments in the media space with the likes of Channel 5, now owned by Northern & Shell, purveyor of many a print title, looking at how media types can combine not just through TV and newspaper tie ups, but through other channels as well.

“Channel 5 and to some extent News International are great examples of how the media landscape is really shifting,” says Boddington. “Media types are crossing over and mixing to offer a range of new products. This is making the landscape very interesting.

The other area where media groups are looking to make changes is through loyalty programmes and social networking. “The desire to create more one-to-one relationships with consumers, or customers, and to use those relationships to sell advertising and sponsorships is increasingly important,” says Boddington. “And how this plays out with social networks, where people are sharing content and talking about content, also needs to be very closely managed. Social media has a lot to offer, but has to be handled with care.”

New hardware is also having an impact. The iPad is garnering all the headlines as certainly something that print media companies are hopeful can revive their fortunes. Fellow keynote panellist Barry Houlihan, founder and CEO of MIG says: “It is an interesting time to be in publishing, with the arrival of the iPad finally delivering a platform that can mimick, as well as rival, newsprint and MIG has been at the forefront of this, developing the iPad app for News International’s Sun newspaper – which, on launch went straight to the top of the paid for apps chart here in the UK.”

But the advent of the iPad and the raft of other devices that are increasingly becoming web enabled access devices does lead to some challenges. Developing for all these devices is costly and you have to try and deliver a great experience across them all, believes Alex Meisl, who will be speaking on the New Devices panel at T360 Manchester. “Mobile and PRS are already highly fragmented and fragile,” adds Boddington, “so it all has to be handled with care.”

The other hurdles that face this monetisation of media content – and what T360 is really in place to tackle through its conference, drill down sessions and general show floor networking – including regulation and compliance issues, giving value for money to consumers and how to use social networks effectively – something that still eludes most companies in all lines of business.

Regulation and compliance has been a staple of the Telemedia events series over the years and T360 Manchester is no exception, featuring a special PPP workshop designed to look at how its new code of practice will impact on the premium rate sector and what that means for media companies looking to develop direct or ancillary services.

AIME is also taking a strong hand in the regulatory side of things at T360, extending its work to get people together to talk about the needs they have and how they can fit in with regulation.

“AIME is also looking at how to get working groups together that can tackle the specific demands of new areas that perhaps aren’t yet regulated formally,” says Boddington. “Self regulation of new business channels as they come about will be down to AIME to get the right people together to sort out how to do it in each instance. This is going to be very important. TV companies don’t want to get their fingers burnt again and newspapers don’t want to be involved in anything that looks like people are being ripped off – new devices and channels to market open up a lot of possibilities, but also open up new risks. Everyone is very careful these days to handle these with care.”

One such area is social networking. While the benefits of social networking are still becoming defined for most media companies and brands, there is already a very strong case for looking very closely at how to use them and how not to abuse –or, indeed, be abused – by them.

One of the central themes of T360 Manchester will be to explore the gamification and social sides of media monetisation with a stellar speaker line up from TalkSport, Guava, Make it Rain, BP Bullhound, enteraction, RouletteCricket, M-Law and Zed talking both these issues at the centre of the seminar programme.

“Companies need to be savvy about their editorial policy towards social networks,” says Boddington. “They have to know how to engage with the social threads about their products without being patronising. They also have to look at how to befriend the experts in each thread and get them working for the brand without obviously pressurising them to toe a certain line.”

These are just a handful of the hurdles and challenges that media companies face in looking to monetise their content through new channels and Telemedia360 Manchester is there to offer expert advice on getting it right. A full run down of what’s on offer and the seminar and drill down programmes can be found at www.telemedia360.com where you can also register to attend this must see event.