Editorial Articles

Imagine a world where the content we want, finds us. 

A world where everywhere we go online we are served up with the high-quality films, TV shows and music clips we really want to see; like a TV channel made specifically for you, that knows you love romantic comedies, fashion and celebrity gossip. A channel that delivers content to you wherever you are online that caters to your unique tastes and interests.

How far off is this personalised viewing platform?
It’s actually not very far off at all. The technology needed to serve personalised content to online users already exists within the ad networks of today. Content distribution and monetisation platforms such as the Joost Video Network already serve contextually relevant content to millions of people on a daily basis via a global network of syndication partners.

What’s driving this new model of online content distribution? 
The need for content producers to find online audiences and monetise online video content, enabling them to recoup the cost of investment and achieve profit. The fragmentation of media and the migration of audiences online has made it increasingly challenging for content producers to reach their target audiences, making the internet the perfect medium to reach hard-to-find or niche audiences.

So how do you reach niche audiences and achieve the kind of scale required to deliver meaningful return on investment?
Instead of solely drawing your audience to a destination site to view the content online – what we call the pull model – content producers need to syndicate content, seeding it out to online environments where the fragmented audiences reside – what we call the push model.

This is where content and advertising distribution networks step in, with their vast network of syndication partners. These distribution networks are also equipped with the data intelligence to help deliver the relevant content to the relevant audiences – however niche. This is a distribution strategy with minimal waste – because you’re targeting only those audiences you know are likely to consume your content.

Our vision involves combining the principles of micro segment marketing, which Amazon has used so effectively through their recommendation engine, with the personalised media consumption used by Pandora, Last.fm and Spotify.

In the same way that music lovers no longer need to go to a music library site like iTunes to browse, consumers would no longer have to rely solely on searching for content on YouTube, because they would be piped the content they love on the websites they frequent.

This is good news for consumers who are only engaging with high quality content that interests them, and is great news for content producers who badly need to monetise their content.

All content producers need do to begin making money from what they produce is to partner with a company that has built a network of syndication partners and has a video platform, which includes a recommendation engine and a discovery engine. The rest of the technology needed – a content management engine, an IP-based platform powered by machine learning and algorithms – is already being used to serve targeted online ads.

So the technology infrastructure is ready and so, in parts, is the industry.

How about the consumer?
We’ve already witnessed a sea change in consumer viewing. We’ve moved way beyond the days of staring at a television that doesn’t thrill us because there’s ‘nothing else on’. Today’s content consumers are used to watching videos online. We’re also already seeing consumers warming up to the idea of watching internet-specific TV series such as promqueen. And in 2009 we saw Paranormal become the first movie available online – not in the cinemas –which created a lot of buzz through online and social marketing.

All the pieces of the jigsaw are right there. The real shift comes when consumers begin to find content that relates to the things they love being piped directly to them; and all they have to do is press play.

Matt Hunt
MD, Adconion UK