Kiwi marketers have a chance to efficiently target their marketing across an array of screens consumers now use to access media.
But that doesn’t mean they should get all creepy about it, an expert panel says.
At the recent Snakk Media AGM, analyst Stephen England-Hall said UK marketers had recognised the shift towards ad spend on mobile – there the proportion of spend had reached 23 percent, compared with just one percent here.
He said 77 percent of the time we spend watching television is now combined with viewing content on another device. The average US teen now consumes betwen eight and 11 hours of media per days, in fragmented “snacks”, he said.
Those stats spell big opportunity for marketers.
“When they do all of this they leave a footprint, and that brings about the data world. That matters because it increases efficiency. In the media world our data ecosystem enables us to reduce digital waste.”
Each of the panel members – along with moderator Vaughan Davis who heads creative agency the Goat Farm – had experienced digital marketing that was a little too ‘big brother’.
Those included receiving emails and tweets soon after online searches.
The CEO of a major web portal told MediaWorks director of interactive Siobhan McKenna that companies could now tailor
horoscopes to include messages relevant to a potential purchase someone had searched online.
McKenna added that audience fragmentation resulting from social media was changing the game for traditional models.
“Social media is the new water cooler in terms of where your audience is and what they want. It’s often not a running race, it’s a game of cards and tactics.”
She said social channels had also changed how consumers interacted with TV shows.
“Television formats are changing very much to event-type televison. For X Factor, people were able to jump in and have quite shameful conversations as contestants came on that added a layer of entertainment that was better than anything the judges could have said. It was quite a phenomenon to the point that there were 20,000 Tweets on the final night.”
Snakk chairman Derek Handley expanded on the multi-screen trend, saying he no longer watched television on one screen. He used a combination of Netflix, Google Television and on-demand services.
“The most interesting thing that’s going on is content consumption on multiple screens interacting with eachother and changing the role of the main screen in the living room. That’s yet to hit New Zealand and many countries but once it does it will change what media means to advertisers.”
