The year ahead in media
From Twitter’s ad proposition to the future of the BBC, and Local TV to Facebook’s falling popularity, Raymond Snoddy shares his views on the most important media trends to watch out for in 2014.
If you are Chinese, 2014 is the year of the horse and it is a particularly auspicious time if your Zodiac sign happens to be the rat.
For the rest of us it will be the year when reality strikes; when we can start to see whether high stepping trends and rising stars are all they are cracked up to be.
Can the rise of OTT television, content marketing and social media continue ever upwards? Will BT be able to continue to challenge BSkyB’s dominance in subscription sport? Will BBC director-general Tony Hall manage to turn round the scandal-ridden Corporation and can local television confound all the sceptics?
Reality will strike for all of them in 2014.
Certainly by the year’s end it should be clear whether there is any sign of life in local television or whether it really was Jeremy Hunt’s folly all along. The big moment will come in March with the launch of Lebedev’s London Live. If local television doesn’t work in London it won’t make it anywhere, outside the ranks of the hobbyists.
As for Tony Hall, this will be the most difficult of years. His very appointment and the first few months in charge generated such goodwill that it was the media equivalent of walking on water. None of the scandals and embarrassing evidence of managerial incompetence had, after all, anything to do with him and he was brisk in canning the hopeless Digital Media Initiative project and capping leaving pay-offs at £150,000.
There will be the final inquiry into the activities of Jimmy Savile and then Hall should be shot of the whole sorry chain of misfortunes.
But then he will have to prove he has a vision for the future of the BBC that will carry forward into the toughest round of licence fee negotiations the Corporation will ever have faced and on to charter renewal. And the tricky part is that it is difficult to predict which politicians the BBC will be dealing with come May 8th next year.
Don’t discount the possibility of another coalition government.
There is also the small matter of the Scottish referendum in September that could lead to the creation of a Scottish Broadcasting Corporation. Probably it won’t. The Scots are far too canny to be swept up in the Flower of Scotland dreams of Alex Salmond.
It is likely, however, that whether there is an official inquiry or not, Lord Hall will find himself having to justify everything about the BBC – its structure, size and financing – as never before.
This year Facebook may have to face the reality that it is no longer cool, at least with a key demographic, largely it seems because they don’t want to be part of something where their parents can join in and monitor their behaviour.”
We will find out this year whether he really is up to the realities of such an enormous task or whether it would have been wiser to stay at the Royal Opera House.
It may be 2015 before reality strikes in the next battle for Premier League television rights but it is easy to predict that BT is more than capable of taking more Premiership football packages from BSkyB, with potentially disastrous consequences for Sky and the hapless consumer.
BT is an unprecedentedly dangerous opponent because its sole purpose in going head-to-head with Sky for TV sports rights is to boost its much larger broadband network business.
The story of the past five years has been the apparently unstoppable rise of social media but there are signs of worry – and fatigue at least for some of the big players.
Facebook is probably powerful enough to laugh off the signs of trouble, but the Global Social Media Impact Study among older teenagers that found that Facebook was “not just on the slide, it is basically dead and buried” sounds serious.
This year Facebook may have to face the reality that it is no longer cool, at least with a key demographic, largely it seems because they don’t want to be part of something where their parents can join in and monitor their behaviour.
According to the study, young people are deserting Facebook in droves and using simpler sites such as Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp.
The research says WhatsApp has overtaken Facebook as the number one way for teenagers to send messages while images exchanged on Snapchat are wiped after a short period to maintain privacy.
As Twitter now has to face the daily reality of the stock exchange after its successful float at $26 a share, the challenge will be to justify a current share price of more than $60 with evidence of new revenue and profit streams.
It will be a year for consolidating the argument that publishers should be judged on the overall impact of what they create rather than focusing on falling paper sales.”
If there is a positive answer from Twitter then deployment of its content will be an important part of the solution.
This year we should also find out whether content marketing really is the wave of the future, rather than born-again contract publishing and whether we really are becoming averse to advertising.
Don’t place too many bets on the advertising industry going up boots up any time soon, although like everyone else in these interesting times the ad world will have to adapt and change in order to survive.
More subtle, creative and ultimately less intrusive ads that display greater variety may be the order of the day. More could mean less; the endless repetition of the same ad could be, not just a waste of money, but a real turn off for the consumer.
Reality could strike for OTT, the year in which it reaches a plateau as a useful add-on offering, apart from maintaining the semblance of growth through international expansion. Its place in the media firmament is now secure but the economics still loudly say second tier offering.
As for the most traditional media of all – newspapers – reality had already struck a long time ago, but there are signs that perhaps belatedly, the industry is starting to get the balance right between the old world and the new.
It will be a year for consolidating the argument that publishers should be judged on the overall impact of what they create rather than focusing on falling paper sales.
We might even learn to love, then even use, the term “newsbrands”.
Perhaps to ensure a happy year of the horse and the rat newspaper executives should pay a visit to retailer John Lewis which seems to be getting the balance between “the bricks and the clicks” spot on.
Raymond will be joining fellow journalist Torin Douglas and MediaCom’s MD, Claudine Collins, at MediaTel’s invite-only The Year Ahead on the afternoon of January 15th, 2014.