Marketing Managers: 3 Ways to Keep Customers Tuned into Streaming

As a marketer working in television, you know that the industry is changing and the competitors are increasing each day. I’m a marketing graduate student at Northwestern University and someone with experience in media, and I have found two articles on the streaming television industry highlighting how your channel can be the best in the business.

In Brian Barrett’s Article, “The World Just Moved One Step Closer to Cord-cutter Utopia” for Wired Magazine, Barrett highlights the newest technologies in the streaming television industry. He emphasizes a trend in simplicity, such as being able to switch between all your television streaming accounts without all the hassle. He also mentions a growing number of users sticking to an antenna for national broadcast television, to complement their streaming accounts. While he recognizes that many barriers to this simple switching remain, he believes this is what customers want and therefore, where the industry is going.

           

Image: Source

Nathan McAlone from Business Insider speculates on who could be the next biggest competitor in television streaming, YouTube, in his article “How YouTube Could Win TV.” McAlone says that YouTube is rumored to be working on a paid television streaming service called “Unplugged.” While Unplugged will be entering a crowded market, McAlone says that it will succeed if the company avoids technical issues in its launch. Also, he suggests that YouTube leverage its parent company Google’s vast amounts of viewer data for more personalized watching and advertising.

Based on my review of the two article and my relevant studies at Northwestern, I have come up with three action items marketing managers in the television industry can use today to make sure their products keep up with consumer trends. They are:

• Test Streaming First - Customers have trusted their cable to work at all times for decades now, and they carry that trust into this new streaming realm…so, work out any glitches before the product launch.

• Simple Works Best - Many streaming TV watchers also take advantage of free national channels through an old-fashioned antenna, so make sure switching TV inputs doesn’t require a Ph.D. and that your customers know it’s easy to switch.

• Make it Mobile - More streaming services are entering the mix that already have vast amounts of experience in mobile (such as YouTube's “Unplugged”); if your company can’t keep up, you’ll be on your way out.

While the streaming television industry will no doubt continue transitioning, these are just a few steps brands can take today to make sure they can keep up with competitors.

Rachel Williams

I’m an aspiring brand strategist, currently pursuing an M.S. degree in Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University, with an expected graduation of December 2017. I was a local news producer, but now I’m back on the marketing side of media, with a special interest in the changing landscape of the television industry. You can connect with me on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Brand Managers: Sponsored NBA shirts are a Challenge and a Reward

New branded shirts for the NBA are the first or many new way to reach a target market...but you have to know how best to use them. As an Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) student and sports fan, there are two issues in discussion: how will the fans react to this new trend, and how will brands benefit from the new 2.5x2.5 inch ad space?

According to Tony Manfred in his article titled "The NBA's Massive New TV Deal Clears The Way For Putting Ads On Jerseys" for Business Insider, the sponsored shirts are tied to the new $24 billion deal with ESPN. Both the Network and the league expect to see profits by displaying a highly viewable space on the players. With some issues that still remain un-resolved, such as if the sponsors would be national or local brands, the NBA commissioner, Adam Silver, referred to the ads on NBA jerseys as “inevitable”. Sponsored shirts is something that will happen in the near future, a groundbreaking innovation to the league that will have a major impact on teams, sponsors and fans.

Image source: http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2012-07-20/nba-jersey-ads-likely-in-2013

Kim Skildum-Reid offers a critique on her blog powersponsorship.com, arguing that “(teams) You’re hurting yourselves, limiting your value, and limiting the appeal of your sponsorship to companies who don’t get it – a rapidly diminishing pool.”  Furthermore, she elaborates on how shallow is it for a brand to only take a space on a shirt, hoping to see returns from it, as opposed to actually engage with highly passionate communities such as sports fans.

After reviewing these two articles and drawing on my sports marketing expertise developed in the Northwestern Medill IMC program, I have three action items you need to consider when developing your marketing strategies as a brand manager of the actors here involved:

• Set a goal that transcends the jersey - As a brand manager from the sponsor side, you must think about what you want to achieve by buying a space in a jersey. That Engagement Strategy might not be well rewarded if not followed by a thorough IMC plan.

• Match brands and team positionings - As a team brand manager, think what´s the price to have a sponsor on your shirt. You might want to be picky and choose one which stands for the same values as your team and deliver consistency to your devoted fans.

• Take care of your league - The marketing division of the NBA must take care of their league, establish homogenous criteria for sponsors and teams to not affect the league´s image as a whole.

In sum, the league is opening a door for sponsors to have a bigger presence in the NBA. For the first time in its history, the league will have branded shirts, and this new scenario compels all actors involved to think clearly and strategically of how to deal with it to have benefits for all.

Manuel Altomonte| @manualtoIMC
About the author: 

Candidate, Integrated Marketing Communications at Medill (Northwestern University, Chicago IL). I have work experience in corporate communications and marketing, development and management of communication platforms and digital marketing. I enjoy team-work to find creative solutions to challenges.

Attention Brand Managers & CMOs: 3 Tips on Leveraging Snapchat’s New Discover Feature for an Enhanced Customer Experience

As a Brand Manager, you know your high value markets are using social media and new messaging apps such as Snapchat to talk about you, your brands, and their experiences, all in real-time.
Snapchat’s new Discover feature that delivers curated content opens up new avenues for branded content. As a graduate student at Northwestern University in the IMC program and from my past work experience as a Marketing PR and Social Media strategist, I found two articles to support this topic, that I think you’ll find interesting.

The first article was one I found was Snapchat Adds News, Entertainment Content To Messaging Service on Business Insider, which originally appeared on Reuters. This talks about news from January 2015: Snapchat – the most actively growing social messaging service has partnered with CNN, ESPN, Yahoo, Warner Music and 7 other media companies to feature videos and articles on its cellular messaging service. The social messaging app views itself more as a blend between a media company and a messaging platform, and wants to position itself away from social media company by giving power to the editorial staff that chooses what public content the users see. This is interesting because the app is going the traditional route, choosing curated content over socially generated content, possibly lending itself more credibility by doing this.

Source: https://thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com/tag/tom-fishburne/

The second one I liked is an infographic followed by a write-up on The Shrinking Attention Spans of the humans by NBC News' Alexa Keyes (@alexa_keyes). Did you know that as humans, our average attention span is 8 seconds?! That of the average goldfish is 9 seconds! (National Center for Biotechnology Information: the U.S. National Library of Medicine)

This poses a great challenge to content producers and distributors. As marketers, we no longer have the luxury of time when it comes to making an impact!

Based on these two articles and on my grad-school learnings at Northwestern, here are 3 Action Items that all Brand Managers & CMOs should consider, given the volatile & dynamic media environment:

• Invest in Quality Content - Content is still King and customers will still invest their time if you give them a compelling enough reason to.

•  Provide An Experience - Let your audience take-away more than just a message.

• Leverage Celebrity Power - Get a celebrity to endorse your brand by taking over the Snapchat channel as a guest editor for a day. Offer sneak peaks & other exclusives!

Real-time engagement is the way to go, and with plummeting attention spans, marketers are not left with much time to make an impact. Leveraging Snapchat’s new feature may be the best way to reach out to primarily women, between the ages of 13-25, considering this demographic dominates Snapchat’s 100 million and growing user base.

Yashna Malhotra is a Masters student at Northwestern University’s Medill School, studying Integrated Marketing Communications. She is also pursuing a specialization in Media Management from Kellogg School of Business.

She is an experienced Social Media and Public Relations professional with three years of work experience with prestigious brands in the realms of hospitality, lifestyle, fashion and non-profit in Mumbai, India.

If you have a question or would like to connect, feel free to reach out to me:
Email: yashnamalhotra2015@u.northwestern.edu, 
Twitter: @YashnaIMC
Professional: Linkedin