By STUART ELLIOTT
THE nascent state of the business of providing consumers video content — whether on television or on so-called second screens like computers, smartphones and tablets — is not unlike the nascent state of the television business six decades ago, when this newspaper ran an article carrying the headline “Coast-to-Coast TV Appears Certain.”
That was the message offered by speakers on Thursday in New York at the 2012 TV and Everything Video Forum presented by the Association of National Advertisers. The conference was sponsored by Google, whose YouTube division is a reason the video-content business is offering marketers opportunities amid the struggle of adapting to the most significant shift in media habits since, well, the dawn of television.
“It’s a head-spinning time to be in video,” said one speaker, Justin Evans, senior vice president for emerging media at Collective, an online advertising network. “I guess that’s what it feels like when you’re at the beginning of the future.”
Another speaker, Mike Proulx, agreed.
“It is early days,” said Mr. Proulx, senior vice president and director for digital strategy at Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, whose new book, “Social TV,” explores how social media like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter seem to encourage consumers to watch television shows live so they can share comments and content.
“We’re experiencing television in such different ways,” Mr. Proulx said, that Madison Avenue ought to “look at TV as, believe it or not, a new medium, and get rid of the word ‘traditional.’ ”
The emergence of social TV — as demonstrated this month during the broadcasts of Super Bowl XLVI on NBC and the Grammy Awards on CBS — may help explain a survey released at the conference by the advertiser association and Forrester Research. The number of respondents who said they believed television advertising had become more effective has tripled since the last survey, taken in 2010.
Although “it’s been pretty fashionable for different pundits to bash television,” said Bill Duggan, group executive vice president at the advertiser association, watching video content and interacting with it on various screens is booming.
He acknowledged that “the more screens there are, the more challenges there are to measure who’s viewing,” but cited initiatives like Making Measurement Make Sense, by the advertiser association, the Four A’s (formerly the American Association of Advertising Agencies) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau, to develop standard metrics.
One speaker, Ralph Santana, represented a company that makes screens and uses them for advertising. “Second screens are changing the viewer experience,” said Mr. Santana, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Samsung Electronics North America, who cited statistics from Nielsen that 68 percent of smartphone owners, and 70 percent of tablet owners, said they used those devices while watching television.
“We’ve got to continue to be brave and do a lot of experimentation,” he said. “We need to start rethinking content and how we tell stories as marketers.”
Mr. Santana advocated “story-sharing, fueled by social media,” as a successor to brand story-telling, and gave as an example a campaign, the U.S. Olympic Genome Project, that will support the Samsung sponsorship of the 2012 Summer Olympics.
The campaign, created by the Team Epic unit of the Aegis Group, will enable Facebook members to learn “how closely they are connected” to members of the United States Olympic team, Mr. Santana said.
Another speaker, Chris Robison, senior director for product management and advertising solutions at Adobe Systems, urged Madison Avenue to recognize that “consumers are adopting digital video faster than we are.”
“Our challenge is to make advertising more relevant and impactful,” he added, “through video, social and mobile.”
Mr. Robinson demonstrated in personal terms how the phrase “second screen” is a figure of speech.
“I’m carrying six different devices with me right now,” he told the audience. In an interview later, he identified them as two smartphones, Android and iPhone; two tablets, iPad and Motorola Xoom; a MacBook Air; and a MacBook Pro.
Another reminder of the relative aspects of the second screen was provided by an executive who attended the conference, David F. Poltrack, chief research officer at the CBS Corporation.
“Before you can have a second-screen experience in this new, two-screen world, you have to have a first-screen experience,” Mr. Poltrack said, smiling, which is where CBS can “deliver for marketers.”
In a conference call Wednesday on CBS’s earnings, Mr. Poltrack’s boss, Leslie Moonves, chief executive of CBS, discussed the viewership for the Grammy Awards on CBS, which broke recent ratings records, and how the Grammys Live iPad app offered by CBS Interactive “reached No. 1 on the iTunes chart.”
Tom Cunniff, vice president and director for interactive communications at Combe Inc., asked the members of a panel he moderated whether the second-screen experience may “risk splintering people’s attention.”
Nadine McHugh, vice president for global media at Colgate-Palmolive, replied, “Consumers are already fragmenting their attention,” adding that if a video promises “a good story, a story worth sharing, it’ll capture their attention.”
She said she preferred the term “sociable TV” to “social TV,” urging marketers to start “creating an experience consumers want to engage with over a longer period of time.”
An example was given by another speaker, Bob Kraut, senior vice president for advertising and marketing communications at the Arby’s Restaurant Group, who described a casting-call contest that invited consumers to create online video based on the Arby’s ad campaign after he noticed clips on YouTube in which consumers performed versions of the campaign jingle.
“Maybe we were estimating 300” entries, Mr. Kraut said. “There were 1,400.” The winner, Andy Johnson, an Iowa schoolteacher, received $10,000 and appeared in a commercial created by the Arby’s ad agency, BBDO New York.
Both were shown at the conference, and Mr. Johnson’s was better.
