10:30 – Dave Hatfield shows up on stage wearing green pants. “Being a Limelight employee I am passionate about my company.”
10:33 – Introductions of panelists
10:46 – Hatfield: What are the best practices that you have to monetize engagement?
10:46 – Davis: Challenge is getting media onto other platforms. With Disney, we are proud of our heritage and IP, we always go back to the story. For us, we look to build out events based on that IP. Capitalize on the success of Hanna Montana, Jonas Brothers, WALL-E
10:47 – Hatfield: What’s the most innovative thing?
10:47 – Davis: Release of Camp Rock was the largest Internet event for our company. A “four network” release – Disney Channel, ABC Wonderful World of Diseny, ABC Family, and then Disney.com.
10:49 – Kinzie: We have a different approach. We tap our audience to build experiences to engage them for longer periods of time. Let the audience modify, craft, improve their identity online. Also have an ad renevue model, but our biggest success is in monetizing virtual items that let our users craft their identity.
10:50 – Kinzie: We have a virtual economy that is based on a fictitious currency. Partnered with MTV to create a virtual “The Hills” — users could buy virtual branded items, which were only available for a short period of time. Create scarcity. Keeps the discussion going long term as items are resold.
10:51 – Rockwell: MTV looks at our properties and ask what can we do online that we can’t do on broadcast. Example – Colbert – you can slice up the show, cross-reference older episodes. Keeps people engaged longer. We try to think about a viewers relationship in terms of gameplay – what types of things can we ask viewers to go that will get them more engaged and sustain it through the lifecycle of the property.
10:53 – Hatfield: Do you partner or build yourself?
10:53 – Rockwell: It depends. Will partner, sometimes those things evolve so quickly that we have to do it ourselves to make it down to the wire.
10:53 – Hatfield: What about FOX? How do you think about this?
10:54 – Berryman: There is a 30 cent gap per viewer in what we make offline vs. online. Need to educate the sales team to sell digital assets – to explain and monetize the innovation. The monetization is not yet there on the online side for us today but we are working on this.
10:56 – Davis: Disney has a cross-functional sales team, but there’s still a lot of continuing education that has to happen with the sales team, because there’s always a new digital widget to sell.
10:57 – Berryman: There’s a disparity between the broadcast and online spend, and it will be that way until we can improve the online experience.
10:58 – Hatfield: What can the ecosystem do to remove the friction?
10:59 – Rockwell: The simple answer is that we all should agree on standard ad units and traffic. On the other hand, all of this innovation is happening beacause we don’t have those standards yet. We should agree on certain things – what’s a midroll, etc.
11:00 – Berryman: Also measurement systems need to be standardized.
11:00 – Rockwell: When no one is quite sure which measurements matter, you will spend an infinite amount of time analyzing.
11:01 – Hatfield: if you could pick one thing for the ecosystem to work on, what would it be?
11:01 – Davis: The real value is trying to understand how content is being used. We all have our hypotheses. And how do you have all of these devices converge into one experience, together. So you can txt while emailing and watching TV.
11:02 – Berryman: Agencies today like preroll because its a guaranteed impression. Midroll isn’t guaranteed. Need to standardize the meaurement info.
11:02 – Kinzie: I am always interested in diminishing returns. At what point do we force pre-roll impressions and start annoying viewers? And lack of measurement standardization makes that question even more difficult.
11:04 – Rockwell: Would like to see a session-based approach to serving ads. Thinking about what’s a user doing during their entire time of engagement, and not just when rolling video.
11:05 – Berryman: We are doing a tremendous amount with metadata to drive contextual/behavioral advertising. Using speech-to-text to do very targeted context advertising. But that’s spending money. Need to make money.
11:06 – Hatfield: Do you see in these times a shift in more dollars into online vs. broadcast?
11:07 – Davis: We take an approach – we have partners that want to feel like they own a piece of say, ESPN or Hanna Montana content. We try to put values around letting partners own certain things — like ESPN College Game Day.
11:08 – Rockwell: Are we at a point when we are seeing households that would have been cable households that are not going to be anymore? Will consumers not want to pay the expense of cable + set-top, and just go with online. Like people forgoing landline for only a cell phone.
11:09 – Hatfield: Is the increase in bit rates a factor? How does quality matter?
11:09 – Berryman: The quality needs to be there, which it is. But it starts with what you’ve got going in. It starts with innovative programming, and how can we monetize live. Need to differentiate based on type of content.
11:12 – Rockwell: You can’t make the decision to not go up to the highest quality someone can receive. You need to make your viewers happy, and go as far as you can.
11:13 – Davis: The differentiator isn’t quality. Its the unique experience you can build vs. just broadcasting linear television.
11:14 – Hatfield: What about security and encryption?
11:14 – Davis: We all deal with the same challenges as publishers. Its hard to control especially with the expansion of new platforms.
11:15 – Hatfield: What are the keys to a lean forward to a lean back experience?
11:15 – Kinzie: Its about what we can do around the content. Its not a read-only community anymore, and that’s where the magic is.
11:16 – Davis: For us, specifically, its gaming. Providing more enagament in a non-liner mode. By the time Camp Rock got to the online piece, kids had already seen it. So we knew it wouldn’t be their first experience with the content, so we created an online wrapper to provide engagement.
11:17 – Kinzie: That’s essentially what we’ve done, too. The content and a wrapper to provide better social interaction. To let them interact and become part of the story or experience.
11;18 – Berryman: It depends on what device you are using that determines lean forward vs. lean back.If I am on a PC I can be really engaged, It doesn’t make sense to be engaged on a TV.
11:19 – Rockwell: Agree. Lean forward is about social and search.
11:20 – Hatfield: Time for audience questions.
11:20 – What’s a compelling lean back broadband experience?
11:20 – Berryman: Apple, Sony, have a typical hardware approach which is closed platform. They don’t work. Cisco doing some great things with set-tops and open platforms to help the industry.
11:22 – Davis: Gaming consoles can be engaging, but they are creating their own environments. We always want to make sure that a Disney user, say on XBOX, can always connect back to the mother ship.
11:23 – Where are new business models being created from metadata analysing how customers are interacting with content?
11:23 – Berryman: We are seeing in local markets with newspapers, targeted videoads.
11:24 – Rockwell: I will be the contrarian. Targeted advertising based on content metadata is amost completely valueless for high-value content.Long tail, maybe.
11:25 -Berryman: How we mine the metadata is important.
11:25 – Davis: I think you are going to see subscription models – like a cell phone or home phone plan – begin to happen. High-value content will need to be monetized.
11:26 – Kinzie: Its hard to get everyone in the value chain paid.
11:26 – How are you rethinking distribution – particularly expiring or non-expiring content?
11:27 – Berryman: Lets take news. Its timely, We are testing some models where after a two-week period you have to pay for archival news footage.
11:28 – Kinzie: For our audience, being timely is as important as being popular.
11:29 – Davis: The understanding of new technology in an old media world is a challenge we face every day.
