Mediaboss Marketing

Media affects us in interesting and not always straightfoward ways. Image: Flickr/mike@bensalem cc license

Usually when scientists wonder if something affects something else, they set up a randomized control trial some people get stuff and some people get not stuff and then they watch with bated breath and spreadsheets to see how these two groups differ. But you cant exactly prescribe a long-term course of more, less or even different media (for one thing, people who stick to the program are just too naturally different from those who wont to make any results meaningful). And so instead of randomized control trials, scientists are increasingly turning to natural experiments to explore things like long-term media consumption that you cant approximate in the lab or prescribe in life. These natural experiments just happen to split people into stuff and not stuff groups, without researchers doing the splitting.

One of the pioneers of this approach is UCSD economist Gordon Dahl. I interviewed Dahl about one of his natural experiments the data-driven observation that an unexpected home-team football loss leads to a spike in domestic violence in the teams home city for my book, Brain Trust. A recent review by Dahl in the journal Family Relations uses the natural experiments to discover how media affects families.

For example, Dahl points to a study showing that due to the happenstance of Indonesias topography, some villages have better TV signal strength than others. Independent of how far these villages were from major cities, or any other factor the researchers could imagine, citizens of cities with better TV signals had less involvement in community organizations. The papers somewhat doomsday title is Do Television and Radio Destroy Social Capital?

On the flip side, take a similar study of 180 villages in India researchers watched as some of these villages got cable television for the first time. And as cities got this digital view of the wider world, acceptance of domestic violence decreased, women experienced more autonomy and the be-cabled villages had lower fertility rates than their otherwise equal but de-cabled counterparts. This papers decidedly more upbeat title is Cable Television Raises Womens Status in India.

So the amount of media we consume certainly affects us in interesting and not always straightforward ways. But what about the content of the media we watch?

Well, in 2005 the Brazilian network Rede Globo produced nearly all of the countrys soap operas. But some parts of the country had Rede Globo and others didnt. Dahl points to a study showing that as communities got soap operas, their rates of divorce rose and their rates of fertility dropped. Children born in Rede Globo communities were much more likely to share characters names. And those dropping fertility rates? While they dropped among all young women in the viewing demographic, they dropped most among women closest in age to the soap operas main characters any given year.

So how does media exposure affect families in the United States? To answer that question, Dahl points to a recent study that looked at the intelligence of kids as television became available in U.S. counties in the 1940s and 1950s. Due to the random introduction of television, some kids had more years of exposure than others like a serendipitous randomized control trial, some kids got stuff and some kids got not stuff and there was no measurable difference between the groups except for stuff, which in this case was TV.

As youd expect it turned out that TV rots kids brains.

Actually thats not true at all. Dahl writes that, each additional year of childhood exposure to television increased test scores during adolescence by 0.02 percent of a standard deviation.

More here:
Natural Experiments Show Media's Effects on Families

SiriusXM has filed a request with the FCC, asking the Commission to reject Liberty Media's latest attempt for approval of control over the satcaster. According to The Wall Street Journal, yesterday SiriusXM asked the FCC to once again reject a filing from John Malone's company, which asked theCommission on May 31to reconsider its original rejection of the plan to take control of the company by gradually acquiring a majority of its stock.

In its filing yesterday, SiriusXM said Liberty's filing "attempts to create the impression that Liberty Media has firmly committed itself to take control of Sirius XM. However, it provides no specific proposal on how or when Liberty Media intends to do so." According to the WSJ, SiriusXM added thatLiberty's petition "offers nothing more than a refined menu of options for how Liberty Media might assume control of Sirius."

The filing continues, saying that Liberty"still has not stated definitively that it will convert its" preferred stock, initiate a proxy contest or buy more stock in the open market. "Liberty Media's inaction speaks louder than its words," SiriusXM concluded.

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SiriusXM Asks FCC To Reject Liberty Media Takeover Request

As weve mentioned a number of times, Twitter has been gradually tip-toeing further and further into the media business for some time now. It has already become a real-time newswire for many, a source of breaking news and commentary on live events, and now with the launch of curated hashtag pages like the one it launched late last week for a NASCAR event it is showing signs of becoming a full-fledged editorial operation. It may not be hiring investigative reporters, but the areas of overlap between what it does and what media companies do is growing, and so is its attractiveness to the advertisers that media entities desperately need to hang onto.

The NASCAR page may not seem like anything to be concerned about, since it appears to be just a typical grouping of tweets collected by hashtag. But there is editorial control behind it as well as algorithms, with an editor choosing which messages including photos, videos and commentary from NASCAR insiders were highlighted during the event, and which streamed by unacknowledged. And Twitter has made it clear that this kind of effort is not aimed primarily at brands (although it almost certainly will involve them at some point) but is intended for events. In other words, for the news.

Its easy to imagine a similar page constructed around a revolution in Libya, or an earthquake in Japan, or virtually any other news event. Would that be something that media companies could use to their advantage, or a competing service, or both? In some ways, it could be a much better, crowd-sourced version of Google News. Twitters efforts have at least one editor for a mainstream media outlet concerned for his job, and that of others like him in a blog post, Ross Neumann of Reuters says:

Twitter revolutionized journalism once before, and news organizations responded with the social media editor. Now it seems that the social media editor, the reaction to disruption, could be a victim of it.

Is Twitter trying to put media companies out of business, or even social-media editors? Probably not, at least not directly. But in a way, its formal intentions dont really even matter it could easily wind up doing so by accident, in the same way that Craig Newmark accidentally decimated one of the main cash cows of the media industry when he disrupted the classified advertising business. That wasnt his intention at all, but he accomplished it nevertheless.

Twitter clearly sees itself as a partner for media companies, which is probably part of the reason that CEO Dick Costolo often denies that the company is a media entity at all. And theres no question that using Twitter has been a boon for the media it allows reporters and writers to reach a much broader audience, it enables them to build their personal brand through direct engagement with readers, and so on. And new hires like editor Mark Luckie describe their jobs as helping media companies do that better:

@knash99 @AnnaTarkov I'll come up w/creative ways journalists use the platform, increase engagement and elevate Twitter use in newsrooms.

Thats all well and good, but there comes a point where a partner can start to look like a competitor if you tilt your head the right way, and I would argue that Twitter is nearing that point. Facebook is also a partner for media companies who use it to host their comments, or have brand pages there, or rely on the social network to promote their work through frictionless sharing apps. But at times it can seem as much like competition particularly for users attention as it does a partner.

Thats part of what I think blogging pioneer Dave Winer means when he warns that media companies should not see Twitter as their friend. To the extent that Twitter is offering news consumers of all kinds access to the information they want regardless of whether that information consists of user-generated content or links to other media outlets it is a competitor. And to the extent that it can offer better curation or aggregation or filtering or targeting of that content, it will win.

And that kind of targeting isnt just a threat to the information-management or journalistic aspects of the traditional media industry, as is every other digital-native media source such as The Huffington Post or Buzzfeed. It is also an arrow that is directed at the heart of the financial underpinnings of the traditional media business namely, advertising.

Link:
Why traditional media should be afraid of Twitter

BRUSSELS, Belgium--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Openwave Mobility, a global software innovator of value-added services for the mobile telecommunications industry, today announced the availability of the latest version of its Congestion Control (CC) Media Optimizer product, a video optimization solution that enables mobile operators to manage congestion when it occurs in localized hotspots rather than requiring brute force compression of all video on the network at all times. CCs Media Optimizer automatically triggers optimization when the network reaches pre-determined thresholds and gives operators the ability to intelligently analyze and implement video optimization based on real-time network conditions.

Today MP4 videos make up a high volume of video traffic, creating a strain on the networks. Openwave Mobility has observed in customer deployments that roughly 80 percent of all smartphone video traffic is MP4. This new version of Media Optimizer provides inline MP4 optimization, which dynamically optimizes MP4 video traffic only when necessary while maintaining or improving user quality of experience (QoE). This inline MP4 capability is in addition to Media Optimizers existing inline optimization already available for earlier video types.

Operators are focused more than ever on staying ahead of the growing number of mobile video formats and bandwidth demands stemming from the ever growing popularity and proliferation of Android and iOS devices, said John Giere, CEO, Openwave Mobility. We believe our inline MP4 product, which has been tested live in our customers networks, will deliver immediate network efficiencies and increase subscriber QoE for MP4 video traffic.

Media Optimizer is part of Openwave Mobilitys Congestion Control solution and can be delivered pre-integrated with Openwave Mobilitys other Congestion Control and Price Plan Innovation solutions. Openwave Mobilitys Media Optimizer is available immediately. Please contact sales@owmobility.com for more information.

About Openwave

Openwave Mobility is a category leader in video optimization and dynamic data plan management for the mobile telecommunications industry. Openwave Mobilitys products and services help mobile operators create new revenue opportunities and dramatically reduce bandwidth costs. The companys global customer base consists of leading mobile operators.

Openwave Mobility is a privately held company headquartered in Redwood City California, with offices in Belfast, Tokyo, Sydney, Kuala Lumpur, Dubai, Johannesburg, Madrid, Reston and Overland Park. For more information about Openwave Mobility, please visit http://www.openwavemobility.com.

Openwave Mobility and the Openwave Mobility logo are trademarks of Openwave Mobility Inc. All other trademarks are the properties of their respective owners.

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Openwave Mobility Introduces Industry’s Most Comprehensive Smartphone Video Optimization Solution

NEW YORK, June 12, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Record global sales of tablets and smart devices are underlining the rising revenue opportunities from digital delivery of entertainment and media (E&M) content and advertising to increasingly connected and mobile consumers. According to PwC's annual Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2012-2016 an in-depth five-year outlook for global consumer spending and advertising revenues directly related to entertainment and media content released today, the industry is approaching the 'end of the digital beginning' with digital now embedded in business-as-usual and moving to the heart of many E&M companies.

To view the multimedia assets associated with this release, please click: http://www.multivu.com/mnr/51656-pwc-us-digital-now-business-as-usual-entertainment-and-media-industry

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20100917/NY66894LOGO)

The Outlook forecasts that global E&M spending is expected to rise from $1.6 trillion in 2011 to $2.1 trillion by 2016, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.7 percent. The U.S. E&M market experienced the largest increase since 2007 with faster growth expected, growing at 5.2 percent CAGR reaching $597 billion in 2016, from $464 billion in 2011.

The report finds that growth in digital E&M spending will continue to significantly outpace growth in non-digital spending during the next five years. Digital spending is expected to account for 67 percent of all growth in spending during the next five years, globally. Digital spending in the U.S. is expected to account for 31.5 percent of all E&M spending in 2016, up from 21.7 percent in 2011.

"Change in consumer behavior is pervasive and accelerating and the E&M industry is in the front line of this change," said Ken Sharkey, entertainment, media & communications US practice leader, PwC. "The past uncertainty triggered by the digital migration has given way to a sharper focus of E&M companies on executing their digital strategies. While experimentation will continue, the way forward is becoming clearer as companies focus on identifying, choosing and executing the right business models, organizational structures and developing the skill sets to understand consumer behaviors and motivations in their connected, multi-screen environments."

According to the Outlook, the challenge ahead is in the implementation of digital strategies and the E&M industry is reshaping itself around three perspectives:

Understanding the connected consumer - To engage and immerse consumers in the connected multi-screen future, companies need to understand their behaviors and motivations. Data analytics tools are required to mine the mass of customer data. However, consumers' fears over privacy risk triggering a public and regulatory backlash. PwC believes that avoiding this will require a shift of industry mindset from 'customer ownership' to putting the 'customer in control.'

New business models to reinvent the value proposition of advertising and content - Digitally-derived insights are now redefining advertising and expanding its value proposition, enabling it to become paid, earned and socialized. This is driving new performance metrics, new roles for agencies and other participants in the value chain and new flexible pricing models.

Developing organizational models to harness new behaviors and grow revenues in the 'new normal' - To date, many E&M businesses have developed digital as an adjacent operating group, with separate infrastructure, solutions and staff. In the 'new normal,' this siloed approach no longer works. Companies are now embedding and integrating their digital operations into the main enterprise, driving improved profitability, scalability and innovation. Realizing these benefits means tackling challenges around right, royalties and piracy.

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Digital Now Embedded in 'Business-as-Usual' for Entertainment & Media Industry, Says PwC US