The Evolving Roles of Producer, Advertiser and Audience In an On-Demand World

Dale Herigstad Chief Creative Officer Schemati

The advertising industry has paid little attention to the imminent arrival of connected television. Yet it is perhaps the most complex change to hit our daily entertainment lives for a long time—a change as significant as the advent of the 30-second spot, mass adoption of cable television, or the invention of VHS and DVD formats. As a digital partner to major consumer electronics companies, cable providers, television networks, and film studios, Schematic has been working to define the IPTV experience and the impact it will have on producers, advertisers, and audiences. This is not television as we know it.

Despite technical descriptions that suggest IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) amounts to little more than “the Web on your TV,” it actually signals a paradigm shift. The advent of IPTV transforms the television set from a piece of furniture upon which we watch only what we’re offered, into a highly personalized tool for exploring the world.

IPTV promises to provide an entirely new audience experience and everything about that experience is still up for grabs--including all associated marketing. Why can’t commercials run inside programs? What will commercials look like and how should they behave? Why can’t commercials be interactive? Why can’t we watch two channels at once? Who says there will even be channels?

Audiences, producers, and advertisers are accustomed to a television landscape of certain fixed entities: there are channels (branded aggregation and scheduled flow on a tightly controlled time table) and there are networks (the brands that control this scheduled flow). But these familiar paradigms are changing. Content no longer needs to reach viewers at pre-determined times, selected for them on the basis of generic demographics. Instead, viewers are now in control of finding and selecting the content they want to watch — in effect, creating their own personal channels by pulling from various sources and brands. We call this concept “Dynamic Assemblage,” and it has serious implications for all of us in marketing and media.

The term “Dynamic Assemblage” refers to a completely personal, responsive, and fluid aggregation of content based on user preferences. Imagine a continual flow of content in dialogue with its viewer; a content stream that responds to all auto and manual inputs, and adjusts the programming in real time. This will be a truly interactive channel experience.

Making Metadata Work Harder for IPTV
Over time, the natural evolution of trends in IPTV and non-linear programming will lead to experiences as seamless as the linear television watching of today. But the flow of content will be generated in a completely different way. Content segments (from 15-second advertising spots to 60-minute documentaries) will assemble themselves into channel-like arrangements. These new channels will be generated by user interactions and metadata: either “official” (normalized information about stars, plot, genre, etc.) or the free-form communal sort generated by tagging and user ratings.

So, for example, if a viewer pauses and interacts with a piece of content, the “channel” will understand this as a preference and reassemble the upcoming programming flow to be better attuned to this profile. This change in flow will also apply to the transitional moments that mark the appearance of advertising and promotion. These interstitials will have to take on new form and function if networks are to create a truly dynamic experience that compares to today’s rigidly controlled linear channels.

Dynamic assemblage requires a sophisticated infrastructure that uses metadata to generate the best possible content recommendations based both on individual user behavior and the preferences of the larger community. There are two big challenges here. The first is to usefully and appropriately integrate Web-based communal metadata (like tags and ratings). The second is collecting and using what we know about an individual user’s behaviors and preferences. To achieve this we need intelligent metadata systems that can anticipate and present what users want without a lot of effort on the individual’s part, and without infringing on privacy.

There are already many early precursors to this infrastructure — Apple’s Genius playlists, Netflix’s rating system, and Pandora’s dynamic internet radio, for example -- but we have yet to see a mainstream application of this sort of recommendation engine for television that could become a stable platform for content providers and advertisers.

The Audience is the New Creative Class
In the distribution chain, control is passing to the consumer. Community-viewing platforms and social recommendation engines have superseded the TV guides of the past, and we are as likely to view content passed through a peer as that supplied by a network. This all points toward a new interactive landscape that is only partially driven by technology; what the future looks like will be largely defined by new forms of consumption behavior.

Content has been increasing exponentially ever since production tools became available to the masses. As back-catalogues are digitized and made available online, the long tail of content is growing longer and longer. We have also been inventing new forms of content, with data, games, and applications becoming experiences of their own. What we need now are better ways of experiencing, enjoying, and distributing content.

In the world of dynamically assembled content, the audience can also edit and distribute while watching. In other words, they’ll behave very much like a producer. This presents an interesting proposition for the future: viewers who expect not only to access content when and how they want, but also to re-craft that content for themselves or the community at large, simultaneously.