Beverly Doughty Question and Answer

Beverly Doughty Co-Founder of ODMG

Q: How does the current trend of media technologies impact content distribution?
A: As a content provider, I need to be on every single platform, in a world where we got an incredibly segmented universe of viewers, this is going to be the ubiquity of my brand.  So, I need a strong brand and I need to be in every single platform and accessible to the customer by multiple avenues to get in.  The challenge that an advertiser will have is what platform and how do I get the most for my advertising dollars across this fragmented viewer ship audience.  If I could go to a portal or website that could aggregate information I needed specifically about a certain product or service.  That’s one way to break through that clutter and then helping to drive viewer ships to a website, or some type of portal where I could find information on products services even television programming on a single source, those types of aids I think consumers will be drawn to because it’s getting very complicated from the viewers perspective.

Q:  Which platform is more valuable for advertisers?
A: The advertiser has to decide if there is not a lot of overlap between the different platforms where they put their advertising dollars.  Now most cases I think the content providers that sells advertising will of course bundle those services across the platforms.  But ultimately, the other challenge is how do you value a view on a mobile phone versus the view on a television set versus a view on the internet, I think the metrics by which we measure all this advertising is up for grabs right now.

Q: Is “on demand: technology beneficial for advertisers?
A: Where we are today and a lot of on demand technologies the ads are actually being hard coded into the content so you have no ability to do any type of dynamic advertising. The internet is ahead of the game but eventually again as an advertiser I am eventually going to want to do that across all platforms.

Q: How does “convergence” impact the media industry?
A: It’s going to get to be where we won’t even talk about convergence because it’s already happened.  So, there will be panels and flat screen panels and television sets or monitors they’ll be indistinguishable from one another.  Television will be delivered by a broadcast satellite, by an IP television and eventually it won’t even make a difference.  Us in the content world will need to know what platform and how to get the content distributed from point A to point B, and the encoding and meta-dating and all the backend office stuff that needs to be in place but to the end user it’ll be indistinguishable.

Q:  What are the pros and cons of entertaining advertisements?
A: The notion that an ad can actually entertain and inform and actually be something that someone would actually seek out is relatively new and I think it was BMW films that validated that concept. Because one of the things we’ve also found is that sometimes when an ad is too entertaining, you remember the ad but not the product. 

Q:  What are the pros and cons of entertaining advertisements (continued)?
A: I think in this world where you might have ads that are extraordinarily entertaining and people want to go find them again that there needs to be a way for me to go search and find it again and if I don’t remember the name of the company or if I remember the name of the company and they have so many product offerings I don’t remember the name of this specific product and if you had a way for me to search through to all of the advertising that’s out there and whether it’s through a key word or key phrase of the ad, I think it solves that problem in a very significant way.

Q:  What advantage does a centralized portal provide over traditional advertising mediums?
A: It’s one thing to place the ad out there and it’s another thing to really be able to track the backend results. So for example there was a product that I was interested in and I did my search and found what I wanted but I couldn’t find a store in my community that had it. If there is a way to connect the ad whether I remember the name of the company (or not, or the product), and if there is a way to connect that with the actual ‘brick and mortar’ store or to a website if I didn’t want to go there, I think that rounds out the value chain for the advertiser.