Dear Publishers: Think Like A Broadcaster

Banners suck. They do. We all know they do. We've all always known they do. Our audiences know they do. EVERYONE knows they do. I'm sure when banner ads become super intelligent after the coming singularity and they get together for their meeting inside the matrix, the first agenda item at their meeting will be recognizing that they, themselves, suck. And yet.....they persist.

They persist because we chose a print-based model for advertising way back in 1994 (thanks a bunch, Wired Magazine & John Nardone). And change is hard. Change is weird. Change requires commitment. And most importantly, change requires a mindset that rethinks audience engagement with content. Yes, content - ads are content (they are fighting for attention right alongside the content you create).

Now, I know what you're going to say. "BUT SCOTT! The world is going to be (or already is) a VIDEO FIRST world, so we're just going to use banners to fill in revenue around our video content."

I'm sure you're now wondering what banner advertising, videos, and broadcasting have in common. The answer is this: NOTHING. And that's the point.

Here's what I mean: digital publishers adopted a print-like model for advertising and have been lamenting it ever since. But in the video-first world we now inhabit, publishers need to look to broadcasters as a business model to guide them in their growth. And more than ANY OTHER FACTOR inside a broadcaster, publishers need to look to changing their content strategy in order to succeed in the future. By changing their content strategy, publishers will be better positioned to provide advertisers more of what they want and less of what they don't (banners).

Broadcasters...or channels....have a strong sense of branding: they understand how their brand voice intersects with their audience, and then source or create content that matches that intersection. This isn't terribly different than most publishers in concept, but with one huge exception - SOURCING content vs. creating content exclusively. Broadcasters use outside production companies, have teams of business developers working to identify new content, and are constantly receiving pitches for new ideas/shows/content. They may create content or use use outside producers to create "O&O" content, but their goal is to CURATE content (regardless of source) that most readily matches their brand vision.

Publishers today struggle mightily with video content creation; it's expensive, hard to scale in terms of total video volume, and hard to scale in terms of total reach against that content. And yet, the world's largest video broadcasters create ZERO content themselves - Google/YouTube and Facebook. Publishers remain wedded to the internet 1.0 model of content creation: own it and operate it, much like they remain wedded to the internet 1.0 model of advertising. So it's time for publishers to rethink & reframe their approach to content creation so they can lean into the future of advertising.

This means that publishers need to start thinking about themselves as a broadcaster/channel/curator, blending O&O content with relevant third party content. A publisher MUST start thinking about how they increase time on site and user sessions per month (aka Lifetime Customer Value), and that means curating an experience for their users to keep them engaged. So if users want to consume videos, and videos are hard to create, that means that publishers must start sourcing non-O&O video content to offer consumers a channel-viewing experience, not an article-reading experience.

Because O&O content does matter (especially for margin purposes), publishers must ALSO start looking at tools that also allow them to create first party video in a way that is faster, lighter, and more flexible than what they have today. Building a video production studio isn't for everyone, but video is what everyone wants. This means publishers MUST identify technologies which allow them to efficiently create O&O video content so that they can continue to lean into this business.

Unfortunately, many of today's video management platforms are a good start, but many are either solely for ads or too heavy-iron (from a functionality and cost stand-point) for most publishers to easily adopt. But there is a new generation of video creation/curation/management/syndication platforms which address this idea of Publisher-As-Broadcaster, offering client the ability to create light video content, source trending video content, curate playlists (both first and third party), and deploy via flexible methodologies which support multiple video formats (monetized on both a first party and third party basis).

It's a brave new world, and looking to the old world of print will only serve to hold publishers back - as it did with with banners so many years ago. But by adopting a new approach to video, publishers will have more video inventory (and more varied types), reducing their reliance on a somewhat outdated ad format.

Nimble and light, owned and leased, video and mobile; these are the pillars of growth that publishers have to start to embrace, and it means wholly rethinking their approach to video content & the systems which underpin that line of business. And that means approaching the future less like a publisher and more like a broadcaster.