Tag Archive: video

1. Instagram faces a backlash against ‘TikTokification’

   September 1, 2022 11:32 Comments Off on Instagram faces a backlash against ‘TikTokification’

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   For many years Instagram was the undisputed leader of the social media platforms. Just 12 months after launch, it had acquired 10 million users, and it had 1 billion users by June 2018. By 2021, Instagram had generated around $25bn in ad revenue for parent company Meta. It has helped build influencer careers and activist communities, as well as helping people stay connected with their friends and family and the brands and influencers they like.

   Despite that success, Instagram has recently been making changes in order to address the threat posed by TikTok. However, those changes are proving deeply unpopular with users, provoking a backlash against Instagram. Is it losing touch with what made it so popular?

   The TikTok-shaped elephant in the room

   It won’t come as a surprise that TikTok has enjoyed spectacular growth over the last four years. Just four years after its launch, it had 1 billion active users – not far off Instagram’s 1.3 billion. Many experts believe that it will soon overtake Instagram in this respect. In terms of engagement, TikTok is far ahead of its rival: users spent an average of 25.7 hours a month on TikTok in 2021, compared to just 7.9 hours on Instagram. TikTok is also the favored social platform of teens: 33% said it was their preferred platform in 2021, compared to 31% for Snapchat at 22% for Instagram.

   And while Instagram still dominates in terms of ad revenue – $47.6bn in 2021 compared to TikTok’s $4bn – TikTok’s is projected to raise to nearly $12 billion this year, making it bigger than Snap and Twitter combined. It’s on track to become a serious threat to Google/Meta duopoly of digital advertising.

   Reeling them in with Reels

   Meta is clearly flustered by TikTok’s continued growth. Its response has been to significantly increase its focus on video on both Facebook and Instagram. Indeed, Mark Zuckerberg said on a call to investors that Reels is a major part of Meta’s TikTok defence strategy. Instagram launched Reels – short, snackable videos – back in 2020, and have given them increasing prominence ever since. In 2021, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri announced that the platform would be pivoting to video because ‘we’re no longer a photo-sharing app. People are looking to Instagram to be entertained. We have to embrace that’. Instagram started adding slots for recommended videos from accounts users didn’t follow into their regular feeds. In summer 2022, it announced that all videos posted onto Instagram would become Reels.

   A backlash against Instagram

   This approach, whilst understandable given the wider move towards video, has thrown up a number of problems for Instagram. Chief among them is the effect that it has had on user experience. A large proportion of users’ feeds is now content from people they don’t know, usually in the form of Reels. Posts from their friends and people they follow are drowned out by a cacophony of video clips and sponsored content. Testing of a full-screen feed, similar to TikTok’s, has exacerbated the issue.

   Instagram has suffered a significant backlash, with highly influential users such as Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian, who each have more than 300 million followers, criticizing its new strategy. Other users have commented that Instagram no longer feels like somewhere to share photos and videos, but more like a ‘chaotic hub for Meta to build relationships with brands’. The danger is, of course, that by neglecting the user experience, Instagram is deterring the very audiences that those brands are paying to access.

   Why do users love TikTok but hate Instagram’s move into video?

   It’s not the move into video per se that is behind the Instagram backlash. There is a clear movement into video by creators. Users are lapping it up on many platforms, including – and particularly – TikTok. So why has TikTok got it right and Instagram wrong?

   A key factor in TikTok’s success is its superior algorithm, with its remarkable ability to suggest content that users love. An effective algorithm relies on high-quality data, and TikTok is pretty aggressive in how it harvests data from its users – much more insistently than Facebook or Instagram. This means that good content on TikTok reaches millions of users, even if the creator has no followers. This makes it a very attractive platform for creators, and therefore brands.

   Another factor in the discrepancy between TikTok and Instagram is the simple fact that Instagram appears to be trying to be TikTok – but users want it to be Instagram. Its huge popularity grew from sharing photos and stories. This allowed users to connect with their friends as well as the brands and public figures they liked. Right now, Instagram seems to be actively pushing against that original mission by suppressing content from people you follow in favor of suggested Reels from people you don’t. And in following this path, it is losing sight of what made it so popular in the first place.

   It’s not just TikTok that Instagram copies

   Meta has form for copying or acquiring innovative products. Some critics suggest that this is because innovation at the company is lacking. Just last week, Meta announced that Instagram is testing another feature which appears to be copied directly from a competitor. Candid Challenges mimics the BeReal concept, which prompts users to post an unfiltered photo of themselves once a day. It has tapped into a desire for authenticity, which allowed it to push Facebook out of the Top 10 apps on the App store. However, Instagram faces a challenge thanks to its user interface. Candid Challenges risks getting lost in the myriad Instagram features. Meanwhile, BeReal is designed around this single purpose – much like TikTok with snackable videos.

   However, Meta had much more success with Stories, which took Snapchat’s disappearing photos as inspiration. Their success came from a desire for realness and authenticity – people were beginning to feel that their everyday lives weren’t ‘Insta-worthy’, so they stopped posting every day. Stories – which delete after 24 hours – meant that they required less thought. In two years, Stories attracted 400 million daily users and changed the way that people share and consume online.

   After the backlash, what does Instagram’s future hold?

   To see off the backlash, Instagram needs to sort out its user experience. Mosseri has recognized that the full-screen feed is ‘not yet good’, and said that ‘I want to be clear: we’re going to continue to support photos, it’s part of our heritage’. But he still maintains that videos are the future. ‘More and more of Instagram is going to become video over time. We see this even if we change nothing’. Clearly users will engage more with video if video is what they are fed, but Mosseri is right that video is undoubtedly the future. It makes sense for Meta to continue its drive towards video, so that it maintains a key role in the creator ecosystem.

   Another factor that Instagram has in its favour is that it is by far the largest platform for influencer market. Furthermore, its wide variety of content formats are almost all shoppable, which is a big draw for advertisers.

   It’s not over for Instagram. It is so much bigger than TikTok that it shouldn’t need to mimic what the Chinese social platform is doing. In doing this, it risks losing sight of what made it popular in the first place, and alienating its users. It needs to find a way to hero what users want from it – namely, sharing and seeing photos – and integrate Reels seamlessly, in a way that works for users, creators and advertisers.

   What does it all mean for advertisers?

   First things first: despite the backlash, Instagram isn’t going anywhere, so don’t pull your social spend from the platform.

   Advertisers should remember to follow buying power and respond to demographic characteristics. The belief that users stay with the platform they have grown up with appears unfounded: teenagers, for example, seem to migrate to Instagram as they enter early adulthood. They are moving to Instagram as they accrue buying power, making Instagram a wise choice for media investments. What’s more, younger people – on TikTok – learn faster and require less frequency to remember an ad or brand, which means less investment is required on TikTok.  Even Instagram seems not to have realised this.

   However, TikTok should still play a key part in any advertiser’s marketing strategy, especially those seeking to target a younger audience. And the very fact of TikTok’s success and Instagram’s pivot to video should point the way to a video-first future. Social content can no longer just be about photos – it needs to feature short, engaging video too. Brands need focus on their video game and optimize their content for the platform on which they are publishing.

   value@ecimm.com

2. Is this the end of the entertainment mergers?

   May 27, 2021 16:54 Comments Off on Is this the end of the entertainment mergers?

   Last week, AT&T announced a $43 billion deal to combine its content unit, WarnerMedia, with factual TV network Discovery. The telecommunications giant will unwind its acquisition of Time Warner, which it renamed WarnerMedia, to create with Discovery a new media company that could be worth as much as $150 billion. The move is a sign that the huge conglomerates which resulted from a flurry of mergers just a few years ago are no longer big enough to contend with the major streaming giants Netflix and Disney. 

   What’s the context behind the deal?

   The much-discussed streaming wars are currently being won, by a large margin, by Netflix and Disney who both enjoyed significant growth during the pandemic. But even Disney is struggling to keep up with Netflix. Netflix has a huge 206 million subscribers and is still growing, albeit more slowly than Disney, which had 106.6 million subscribers as of early April. Netflix had a significant head start over the other streamers, and has a huge international footprint – crucial for continued sustainable growth in this competitive landscape. What’s more, Netflix is finally able to sustain itself financially, and no longer has to borrow money to fund its programming.  

   The American media conglomerates anticipated this situation, leading to a raft of mergers and acquisitions in recent years, such as Disney’s acquisition of Twenty-First Century Fox and AT&T’s purchases of DirecTV and, of course, Time Warner. These deals created huge entertainment companies, but the WarnerMedia/Discovery news suggests that even they are not big enough.  

   But the new company created by WarnerMedia and Discovery just might be. 

   Teaming up to win the streaming wars

   The Economist neatly summarised the four key things that a streaming service needs to compete successfully in the streaming wars: scale in the domestic market, high-quality content, a flexible balance sheet and the ability to expand globally. WarnerMedia’s HBO Max meets the first two criteria, but falls down on the third and fourth. Parent company AT&T’s financial woes made it difficult to keep up with Netflix in terms of programming spend, while the decision to licence content to foreign companies, such as Sky in the UK, means that its international footprint is very poor. The merger with Discovery will help WarnerMedia to address both of those problems: it will no longer be held back by AT&T’s revenue sheet, and Discovery+ already has a significant presence in Europe and India.  

   The resulting company will present a significant headache for the current winners Netflix, Disney and Amazon. WarnerMedia and Discovery’s combined content library will be huge and diverse: it will include HBO’s critically acclaimed dramas, Warner Bros’ blockbuster films, Discovery’s unscripted shows and a variety of sport and live news services. It will be very interesting to watch how the company unfolds. Will they merge their streaming services, creating a ‘one-stop shop’ that would compare favourably to Netflix but would undoubtedly have a high price point (HBO Max currently charges $15 a month, significantly more than competitors)? Or will they ‘bundle’ existing services and new ones for a discounted subscription price? 

   An admission of failure by AT&T

   The merger between WarnerMedia and Discovery is a de facto admission by AT&T that its foray into entertainment has failed. When it acquired Time Warner, which it renamed WarnerMedia, just a year after its purchase of satellite service provider DirecTV, the plan was to vertically integrate the businesses of content creation and content distribution – but that plan has been shelved. AT&T’s CEO John Stankey said that the telco giant lacked the global reach necessary to build a successful streaming business that could match the likes of Netflix and Disney. DirecTV will be sold to TPG. 

   What does this mean for advertisers?

   The question on every advertiser’s lips is ‘how many unique individuals can I reach through as few companies as possible?’. By merging, WarnerMedia and Discovery may provide the most convincing answer yet to this question. They will aggregate more inventory than the separate companies already do, and will provide advertisers with a huge, diverse audience. This will put them in a very strong position, particularly as Netflix does not currently host any advertising on its platform. 

   Interestingly, however, WarnerMedia’s ad tech arm, Xandr, is not part of the merger, and will remain under AT&T’s ownership. This is likely because it would take a lot of time, effort and money to disentangle Xandr from AT&T’s customer data, but given the importance of targeting and measurement in TV and streaming, and of mining media companies’ first-party data, it is would certainly be an advantage for WarnerMedia/Discovery to have its own tech stack. 

   A scramble to create more mergers

   With the streaming landscape now dominated by three giants – Netflix, Disney and now the company formed by WarnerMedia and Discovery – the rest of the industry is now scrambling to form mergers of their own. One of the most significant is Amazon’s purchase of Hollywood studio MGM, confirmed this week for a price of $8.45 billion. The deal will bolster Amazon’s TV and film library for its Prime Video service, and the jewel in MGM’s crown, the James Bond franchise, will help Amazon to compete in the streaming wars, even though it will only own 50% of 007. 

   AppleTV+ is yet to take off, despite giving away a huge number of free subscriptions – more than 60% of its 40 million users are thought to be on a free trial. However, it does of course have plenty of money to spend on acquiring another media company if it chooses to do so.  

   The other giants of American entertainment, NBCUniversal and ViacomCBS, themselves the products of huge mergers a few years ago, have found themselves in a difficult position. The very fact that WarnerMedia and Discovery have decided to merge is a sign that even NBCUniversal and ViacomCBS aren’t big enough to compete with Disney and Netflix. The problem? There isn’t really anyone left for them to merge with. They have too much competing content to merge with each other and anyway, the Federal Communications Commission prohibits such a move. That is unlikely to change given the current White House’s stance on antitrust. They could purchase smaller media companies, but this wouldn’t give them the global scale they need. 

   The race to grow and consolidate audiences continues

   As the world opens up again after the pandemic, people will be spending less time in front of their televisions. Many may decide to unsubscribe from some of their streaming services as TV no longer plays quite such a central role in their entertainment schedules. The race to grow and consolidate audiences – and therefore advertising dollars – continues, and the company resulting from the WarnerMedia/Discovery merger will be well-positioned to catch up with the current leaders. 

   Header image: atk work / Shutterstock

3. How can vehicles like YouTube be made safe?

   April 4, 2019 23:07 Comments Off on How can vehicles like YouTube be made safe?

   YouTube is embroiled in yet another brand safety scandal

   YouTube was recently beleaguered by yet another scandal involving brand safety. A Wired investigation revealed that many major advertisers, including Alfa Romeo, Grammerly and L’Oreal were featuring alongside videos that had widespread activity by paedophiles in the comments section. In response, brands such as AT&T, Disney, Nestle and Epic Games pulled their YouTube spend. This isn’t the first time that they’ve had to do this following a brand safety scandal: in early 2017, UK newspaper the Times revealed that brands were unwittingly funding terrorism by appearing next to extremist videos. Indeed, AT&T had only recently resumed its spend before pulling it again after this latest issue.

   It appears that media vendors continue to sell very poor-quality content, and buyers continue to purchase it – will anything change? How?

   Why is this happening?

   With their ads appearing alongside some of the most unsavoury content imaginable, you’d be forgiven for assuming that brands would turn their backs on YouTube permanently, or at least until they could be assured that it wouldn’t happen again. You could also be forgiven for thinking that tackling this matter would be top of vendors’ list of priorities, given that their business model is so dependent on advertising. So what’s going on?

   It’s all about the money

   The answer is, as it so often is, money. For vendors, the temptation to sell huge bundles of automated or semi-automated impressions can be too strong to pass up, while the sheer reach of those impressions is hard for advertisers to resist. The issue here is a lack of motivation on both sides to police content: brands could be doing more to monitor their campaigns, while vendors certainly have work to do around the content that appears on their platforms, and what advertising appears next to that content. The algorithm always goes where eyeballs go, which can lead to errors: for example, children’s videos often have high viewing figures, and children don’t tend to skip ads. The algorithm thinks this is fertile ground for an advertiser and promptly serves… an alcohol ad. This is especially likely if the child is looking at mum’s iPad and the brand is using demographic targeting. To be fair, Google has gone to significant effort to build tech that can track consumers across all devices, but that hasn’t stopped its targeting capabilities falling short, as the example above illustrates.

   In short, these scandals are happening because of an industry that continues to reward quantity rather than quality.

   So what can be done to improve brand safety?

   This is a difficult battle but it’s certainly one worth fighting as digital advertising becomes ever more prevalent and important. Responsibility lies with the platforms, of course – they must try much harder to make their content safer (not just for advertisers), and to prevent ads being served alongside potentially damaging content. But brands have work to do as well.

   Advertisers must be more careful about where their ads are being served, and what bundles they buy. There will always be a conflict between reach and relevance: while vendors and tech firms sell a dream of the automated purchasing of millions of hyper relevant, this is completely unrealistic, particularly in the short and medium terms.

   Using premium marketplaces

   One avenue that some savvy brands are pursuing in order to mitigate the risk of ads being served alongside ‘unsafe’ content is premium marketplaces, such as Google’s Preferred programme, private marketplaces and programmatic direct deals. These platforms give brands access to – at a premium price – inventory that is higher quality, brand safe and more relevant, in theory at least. However, these platforms are becoming increasingly crowded by concerned advertisers, and the packages often leave out high quality content. Alarmingly, there have even been instances where the packages have included content that has caused the brand safety scandals that brands are desperately seeking to avoid.

   Other formats are an option

   Of course, there are other options to the ‘traditional’ video ad: native advertising is not only safer, but also easier to target at the right audiences, so you get relevance and reach.

   Vendors must act too

   Of course, it goes without saying that the platforms themselves must really focus on weeding out inappropriate content, and on being stricter about which content can be monetised through ads. This might be controversial amongst content producers who rely on ad dollars for their income, but it will be critical to the success of the video platforms and avoidance of the scandals that have beset them in recent years.

   There’s no easy answer

   This is a complex issue which will take a lot of work from both brands and vendors to overcome; there’s no silver bullet. Google’s EMEA president even admitted that the tech giant may well never be able to guarantee 100% safety for brands. Advertisers will need to accept that they can’t have both huge reach and hyper relevance: greater relevance will come at a cost through programmes such as Google Preferred or private programmatic exchanges. Meanwhile, vendors must of course invest in tools and technology to make their content safe – for advertisers and viewers.

   Image: Shutterstock

4. The march of the tech titans on live sport

   August 21, 2018 14:14 Comments Off on The march of the tech titans on live sport

   Facebook, Amazon, Google, Twitter and others are leveraging the power of live sports to help them grow.

   People are watching sport online

   The FIFA World Cup earlier this summer and other major sporting events have confirmed what everyone has long suspected: that an increasing number of fans are streaming matches online instead of watching them the more traditional way, on television. This is very good news for tech companies such as Amazon, Twitter, Google and Facebook who are looking to leverage the passion of live sport viewers and its appointment-to-view nature as a way of reaching new users and increasing ROI on existing ones.

   Facebook has been looking for ways to super charge its growth

   Facebook in particular has upped its live sports game, aggressively pursuing the rights to air football and other sports across the world. At the end of June, the social network announced disappointing results for the second quarter: this was in part down to issues surrounding GDPR in Europe and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but also, ironically, due to Facebook’s huge success – it has reached near-saturation point in mature markets in North America and Europe. Its future growth strategy therefore relies on two things: increasing revenue on each existing user in these mature markets, and attracting more users in countries where Facebook is less ubiquitous, particularly Asia and Latin America.

   The answer: live football

   The latter part of the strategy is already well underway, with live sports playing a key role – this was evident when they hired Eurosports CEO Peter Hutton to lead the push. Last week, it was announced that La Liga had signed an exclusive three-year deal with Facebook to live stream all its 380 matches for free to Facebook users in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Nepal and the Maldives. The platform has 348 million users across these markets, with 270 million of those in India. India is a key growth market for Facebook: it already has the largest Facebook user base in the world (270 million versus the US’s 210 million) but, with a population of around 1.3 billion and a projected 500 million internet users by the end of this year, there is huge room for growth for Facebook. Increasing smartphone penetration, relatively affordable mobile data and a passionate football fanbase means that the La Liga deal is a smart move from the platform. This move is in addition to Facebook’s plans to roll out its video platform, Watch, into India – it’s currently only available in the US.

   La Liga isn’t Facebook’s only move into live football streaming: just a few days after the La Liga announcement, UEFA confirmed that Facebook had bought the media rights for certain Champions League live matches in Spanish-speaking Latin America for the

   2018-2021 cycle. The matches they have the rights to include the final and Super Cup games, and the number of top international players involved in the tournament means that it is a huge deal across the continent.

   Other tech companies are also snapping up live sports rights

   Facebook’s activities in the live sports space are matched by its competitors’: Amazon in particular has been signing deals to attract more customers to its Prime platform, including a five-year deal for the exclusive broadcast rights of the US Open tennis tournament in the UK, the rights to screen 20 Premier League football games each season, also in the UK, from 2019 to 2022 and streaming rights for Thursday night NFL games in the US. Meanwhile, Twitter works closely with the NBA, partnering with them to help people keep up with the latest news and developments and watch the games, no matter where they are. YouTube has the rights to Major League Soccer games, including the Seattle Sounders and Los Angeles FC, for which it has both streaming and broadcast rights.

   The future of live sport and entertainment looks dramatically different

   There are concerns amongst consumers, particularly in India, that slow broadband speeds will affect their enjoyment of games, and that it will take something away from the camaraderie of watching games as a group on television. This is perhaps mitigated somewhat by the fact that the games will be free to view. From an industry perspective the arrival of tech platforms on the live sports scene is a seismic shift. For advertisers, concern about TV live sports strategies being adversely affected will surely be offset by the huge opportunities presented by delivering targeted ads to passionate sports fans in real-time. For the major players in broadcasting space, it is the fear of the existential threat that this precise situation causes that has led them to rethink and overhaul how they operate; this has led to some of the huge mergers we have seen recently, including the AT&T takeover of Time Warner and Disney’s deal to purchase 21st century Fox’s film and television assets, which was recently approved by shareholders.

   There can be no denying that the media and technology industries are converging at breath-taking speed, and that the landscape will look very different, very soon. Agility and a willingness to innovate and take calculated risks will be the ways to succeed as this transformation takes place.

   Thumbnail image: Shutterstock.com

5. Why can Google do no wrong?

   August 15, 2018 16:04 Comments Off on Why can Google do no wrong?

   While fellow tech companies showed signs of wear and tear in second quarter reports, Google is going from strength to strength. Why?

   A sector under scrutiny

   As technology becomes more and more integral to our everyday lives, and we rely on it for everything from keeping in touch with friends and consuming news to running our businesses and monitoring our health, so we have started to question the tech companies more – as consumers and as brands. How they handle data has become of particular concern, leading the European Union to implement the infamous GDPR legislation. Many have come under fire, both in the courts of law and in the court of public opinion: the financial ramifications were evident in Facebook’s second quarter reports, and Snapchat and Twitter suffered too. All three social networks lost users in the wake of GDPR, while the Cambridge Analytica scandal was particularly painful for Facebook.

   Google is thriving

   So where’s Google in all of this? More than 86% of internet searches are carried out on Google and it handles a vast quantity of consumer data, so it would be unsurprising if they too had been affected by negative sentiment and distrust. However, if parent company Alphabet’s second quarter reports are anything to go by, they have not just weathered the storm, they are positively thriving. Thanks to better-than-expected earnings ($11.75 per share versus the $9.59 projected by analysts) and revenue ($32.66 billion versus the $32.17 billion estimate), Alphabet’s share price soared by 5% in after-hours trading, settling at an increase of 3.2%.

   A bleak future for TV?

   Indeed, you could be forgiven for believing that the growth of mobile means a bleak future for linear TV. The young, mobile generation are increasingly tending to stream video content instead of watching traditional linear TV, and often do so on a mobile device. Many tech companies have noted this and are acting upon it: in June, CBS announced that it will be streaming NFL games on mobile devices from this autumn, while, shortly after closing their acquisition of Time Warner, AT&T announced the launch of their new mobile streaming service, Watch TV. These services will no doubt be popular, thanks in part to the smaller ad load for content streamed on a mobile.

   This remarkable success was in spite of the issues surrounding GDPR in the European Union, YouTube’s brand safety scandals, a $5 billion fine from the EU for competition abuses and condemnation following reports that Google will in effect be supporting state sponsorship by launching a mobile search app in China that will allow blacklisted content to be blocked. So how is Google doing it?

   Resilience lies in diversity

   Resilience often lies in diversity and, as we mentioned in our blog about Facebook’s woes a few weeks ago, Alphabet’s revenue is less heavily reliant on advertising

   than its competitors’. While a massive $28 billion of its second quarter revenue was from Google’s advertising business, that wasn’t the only revenue source. Google’s other revenues, such as its cloud services, hardware and app sales grew by 37% to $4.4 billion. By contrast, 98% of Facebook’s Q2 revenue was from advertising, and this will become increasingly difficult to grow as it reaches saturation in many mature markets in North America and Europe. Furthermore, Google has an impressive seven billion-user products – Search, Gmail, Chrome, Maps, YouTube, Google Play Store and Android; YouTube in particular has enjoyed strong growth recently, meaning that Google doesn’t rely solely on Search for ad revenues. That said, it should be noted that YouTube (and other video ads) are still under scrutiny for shortcomings in terms of measurement – a mere just one second of viewing is defined as ‘seen’ – and in terms of the quality of material the ads are shown in. What’s more, brands and agencies still need to work out a creative format for video success: currently, many video ads are simply replicas of TV ads and not optimised for the channel, meaning they are not as efficient as they could be. The search business, by contrast, is much more stable, comparable as it is to the telephone books of yesteryear: if your business isn’t there, it may as well not exist.

   Looking towards the future with ‘Other Bets’

   While Google will without doubt remain a highly profitable business for Alphabet, Alphabet isn’t putting all its eggs in one basket. The new corporate structure has separated the core Google business from the more experimental companies, known collectively as ‘Other Bets’, which collectively brought in $145 million in revenue in quarter 2. These include healthcare projects, venture capital, internet providers, a think tank, driverless cars and an AI research lab, among others. While they represent a small percentage of Alphabet’s huge turnover and are currently loss-making, only one or two need to make it big to make Alphabet’s success even more stratospheric. The favourite for huge potential is Waymo, a self-driving car business which plans to launch a commercial ride-hailing service by the end of this year. In June Morgan Stanley estimated that Waymo could be worth $175 billion in the next few decades.

   The very existence of this ‘Other Bets’ strategy is a demonstration of Alphabet’s commitment to diversifying their offering and their investment in the future – and we believe that it is this approach, this mindset, that will continue to make them an attractive partner for brands and a safe bet for investors for years to come. And that is why they’re rapidly approaching the trillion dollar mark.

   Thumbnail image: MariaX/Shutterstock.com

6. Does mobile pose a threat to TV?

   August 7, 2018 14:21 Comments Off on Does mobile pose a threat to TV?

   Audiences appear to be increasingly consuming video on their mobile devices. What does that mean for TV?

   A few weeks ago, we posted a blog asking if video streaming spelled the end of the TV industry as we know it. We concluded that TV would survive – even thrive – as long as it adapts and innovates. But the medium is not just fighting a battle on one front: mobile is another contender for the throne.

   The mobile decade

   Arguably, nothing has changed the face of media consumption – and therefore advertising – over the last decade as much as mobile. The statistics are familiar: in many developed countries, smartphone penetration is at around 70%, and mobile connection statistics tell a similar story: in 2008, there were 4.02 billion mobile connections globally, while in 2018 this had more than doubled to 8.53 billion – and in 2020 the figure is projected to be 9.02 billion. Human beings are duly becoming more reliant on their phones: in the UK for example, people spend around 24 hours a week on them, on average, and check them every 12 minutes, and this trend is reflected around the world. The mobile phone has replaced the television as the media device that we most miss; in 2007, 52% most missed the TV, while 13% missed their phone the most. 11 years later, the figures were 28% and 46% respectively.

   A bleak future for TV?

   Indeed, you could be forgiven for believing that the growth of mobile means a bleak future for linear TV. The young, mobile generation are increasingly tending to stream video content instead of watching traditional linear TV, and often do so on a mobile device. Many tech companies have noted this and are acting upon it: in June, CBS announced that it will be streaming NFL games on mobile devices from this autumn, while, shortly after closing their acquisition of Time Warner, AT&T announced the launch of their new mobile streaming service, Watch TV. These services will no doubt be popular, thanks in part to the smaller ad load for content streamed on a mobile.

   TV is still the most popular medium for video consumption

   However, Nielsen data released this week suggests that mobile is not denting TV’s success as much as it seems. Of 5.57 hours a day that US adults spent watching video in quarter one of this year, 4.46 of those were on live or time-shifted TV, while only 15 minutes were on a smartphone or tablet. Young people aged 18-34 were the only demographic who spent longer on a tablet or smartphone consuming general content (not just video) than on a TV. What’s more, even those households that don’t have a traditional TV don’t rely on their mobile devices to watch TV programming: 27% use a computer and 30% go elsewhere (to a friend’s or public place), compared to 16% using a mobile device.

   TV versus mobile in the future

   Will this change as the young, mobile generation grow older and take their mobile habits with them, replacing the more stagnant habits of older people? Or will they change their habits as they age to reflect those of their parents? Will increasing concern around mobile addiction and interest in digital detoxes encourage people to put their phones down and switch their attention to television? Time will answer all these questions, but we believe that TV is here to stay. One commentator said that ‘mobile is a wart on the ass of TV’: while we think that mobile is more significant in the video space than that, we can’t imagine that consumers will transform viewing habits so much that they will choose en masse to watch long-form content on a mobile over their television. TV is safe for now but, as always, needs to innovate and adapt to stay ahead of the game.

   Thumbnail image: Lolostock/Shutterstock.com