Global Head Of Digital For Pepsi: Digital Will Overrun Current Media

[Joe Hass]

Sivh Singh had an op-ed in Ad Age a couple days ago on emerging media
trends, and three touched on this group: NBC's ignorance of real-time
feedback loops, HBO's refusal to sell HBOToGo outside the cable world,
and the ability to pin/share/post significantly smaller-sized portions
of content. He thinks a la carte cable is inevitable, but not through
current cable providers.

http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/digital-trends-worry-media-companies/236677/

[Tom Wolper]

My problem with Singh's op-ed is that he mentions these innovative
trends without accounting for the characters who have to adopt them.
Traditional media companies and advertising companies are stubbornly
rejecting making any changes to their model as a reaction to these
trends. And the media companies have more influence over the FCC than
do digital upstarts and they can limit the power of a regulatory
agency to open up the market. So while Singh talks about an evolution
of the media business, I see it more as denial of the innovations
until a crisis occurs and then they either emulate Verizon, which was
a landline phone business which acquired cell phone companies and
developed broadband and TV delivery businesses far away from their
core model, or they could be like Borders and collapse into
irrelevancy and disappear from the face of the earth. I don't see a
gentle evolution.

[Joe Hass]

On Aug 17, 2012, at 10:39 AM, Tom Wolper <two...@gmail.com> wrote:

> My problem with Singh's op-ed is that he mentions these innovative
> trends without accounting for the characters who have to adopt them.
> Traditional media companies and advertising companies are stubbornly
> rejecting making any changes to their model as a reaction to these
> trends. And the media companies have more influence over the FCC than
> do digital upstarts and they can limit the power of a regulatory
> agency to open up the market. So while Singh talks about an evolution
> of the media business, I see it more as denial of the innovations
> until a crisis occurs and then they either emulate Verizon, which was
> a landline phone business which acquired cell phone companies and
> developed broadband and TV delivery businesses far away from their
> core model, or they could be like Borders and collapse into
> irrelevancy and disappear from the face of the earth. I don't see a
> gentle evolution.

I think Singh knows this. He's on the client side, and undoubtedly he sees this, especially when it comes to media planning. Heck: look at how bad sports are locked up.

As someone who works in the ad world, it's been interesting to see the first shift to stand-alone digital shops, and now to larger agencies (or combination agencies) as they realize that it's inefficient to have two sets of branding creatives. Media buying agencies (at least the good ones) know what's out there and what can be done. At the end of the day, it'll be a combination of a significant lowering of TV ad budgets, the collapse of the sports TV rights bubble, and the demo becoming filled with more and more digital natives (which will drive the ratings lower and lower).