Interview With Social Media Week on The Future Of TV - May 2017 - Los Angeles CA

With the coming disruption of television, I think some things will change and some things will stay the same. I think what's going to change is that TV networks are no longer going to be the arbiters of the content that's brought into our home. Nor will they enjoy the benefits of massive TV advertising budgets. Because consumers don't need TV networks to curate what they should watch and they don't need TV networks to distribute what's in their home. I think what's going to stay the same is that celebrities, which have really reinforced their dominance, are going to become more and more powerful and content is ultimately what's going to win. Not advertising, but content that consumers love. And the challenge for brands is going to be how are they going to effectively integrate their brands into content that people love at scale. So I think the space for brands in a new model is going to be having to understand who their consumer is, what they care about when they wake up, and where a brand actually fits in. And that's a big departure from the world where brands would create TV spots, which basically pushed their unique selling proposition of 30% more absorbent V6 horsepower, 360 horsepower, things of that nature that consumers don't really care about. And they were being forced to watch that content before they could skip over or have other arenas to consume content. But now that type of advertising based approach just doesn't work or reach consumers anymore. So brands really need to kind of re engineer the way they think in terms of how they approach the consumer. And it's really consumer first, understand the consumer, understanding what they care about, understanding who's influential in what they care about and how can brands partner with them. I think that's the new model. It's branding. Entertainment meets influencer. Marketing is where we're really headed. So what brands can do now to start preparing for a new model is really starting to get a better understanding of their consumer and where they over index in terms of their passions and micro passions and start to create partnerships with companies that, that and influencers that really push out great content in those passions. Because once you can do that, once you can create partnerships with people who are creating stuff that your consumers love, that's really the first step. I think brands also need to create systems internally where they can create not one, five or ten 30 second spots, but hundreds if not thousands of individual pieces of content to speak to people based on their passion. So brands really need to become much more adept at the long tail of content. And that's a big departure from where they are today. So the emerging trends I'm focused on in this space are a couple, first of all, is voice. I think voice is going to have a massive disruption. I think it's the next big thing. The next big social media, if you will, is voice recognition. Because I think it's going to eliminate typing, it's going to eliminate visual displays. So when you order something, packaging is not going to matter as much anymore. Branded design is not going to matter as much anymore because you're just going to be speaking into an Amazon Alexa or your phone via Siri and, and ordering things and making purchases and making decisions without visual. And that has just a massive impact. So I'm obviously looking at that. I'm looking at how these big, you know, obviously the massive tech platforms are gonna evolve. Cause they're really controlling the future. You know, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Google. You know, these are the companies that are controlling the way that media is distributed, the way that people buy, the way that people communicate. They are having reverberating impacts on everything from politics to healthcare to commerce. So I'm really always interested. Every little announcement they have just has massive effects on how we all do business.