TV & Entertainment Advertising at CES 2010 Digital Hollywood

Back now to a freezing cold London, I’ve been reflecting on sunny Vegas & what I learned at the Digital Hollywood sessions at CES.

The last two tracks I attended on Friday were The NexGen Entertainment Home Experience and Hollywood and Media Reinvented where we were represented by Sean Alexander, a director in our Advertising Business Group, and Erin Foxworthy our Entertainment Category Director.

Both hours discussed the value of great content being at the heart of any successful TV business model. Sean said that with products like Xbox Live, where there are 30M units out there and 20M of those connected to the internet, there is a clear value exchange. That kind of audience is attractive to brand advertisers as consumers are connected and engaged to a great experience.

Buddy Snow from Motorola articulated they see the drivers of success as being content, community and control.

Viewers are wanting to control their experience like never before and have a say in the content lifecycle. From their own research they’ve seen that this kind of desire to dictate pervades strongly across all demographics. They see service providers as crucial in managing content well and creating differentiating experiences for users.

The word “choice” was used over and over again. Providing viewers with choice in this evolving landscape is important as they want more of a retail experience. They know what they want, and they want it when they want it. They don’t want to be beholden to one service if it can’t deliver on demand.

When Sean’s panel were asked for their single most important market factor for 2010 this is what they came up with:

- Home network

- Remote user interfaces

- Very sophisticated content management systems

- Business models around broadcast that work

- Connection through power sources

- Customised entertainment personalisation for consumers

- Rise of natural user interface – Project Natal

Future trends were on the menu in Erin’s session too, with panellists forecasting a plethora of connected devices giving consumers multiple ways to consume media, a lot more opportunities to utilise internet video, creating content for branded entertainment, personalization and openness and traditional companies and internet businesses engaging on and offline with their customers.

Richard Sussman, Director, Media & Entertainment at Nielsen Online, explained it was crucial for brands to understand where the consumer is. They need analyse the data & connect the dots. Understanding the consumer more effectively across all paradigms is becoming more and more important for success – Engagement Mapping immediately sprang to mind as he was saying this.

Summing up the whole week I’ll refer to a post I wrote for Media Week:

“Given the amount of gadgetry on show here, it doesn't take a genius to work out how important integrated marketing is going to be. Not just online/offline, but between devices.

The big message was around joined up efforts to not only push messages out in a unified way, but the need to track it back and understand where each channel fits in the mix.”

Find more of our CES coverage & photos on our Facebook Page.

Cheers

Mel