End of the GRP and 'Oxymoron' of Targeted Reach

I was at the Streaming Media East show the week before last and a bunch of executives on a panel ("New Advertising Platforms and Networks") were talking about video measurement and what kinds of measurement is possible. They kept using common industry jargon until someone in the audience frustratedly blurted out, “What’s a GRP?!” After a little befuddled fumbling on stage, and a quiet gnashing of teeth in the audience (“how can this guy not KNOW?!” I could hear some people thinking) one panelist kindly explained that GRP is a gross rating point, a way of trying to figure out what proportion of the people in my target audience -- say men 18-34 -- have seen my message, my ad, how many times. Have 50 percent of men 18-34 seen my underarm deodorant ad five times each? Then that’s 50 x 5, or 250 gross ratings points. Gross is really the right word because it’s a very loose estimate and attempt to apply mathematics to something that’s not really all that mathematical or well-measured.

Mainly, though, I was reminded that:

1. We all have our jargon and in this converged and disrupted mediaverse we have to remember that a lot of people making a lot of decisions aren’t necessarily fluent in the currencies that other people they’re dealing with have and
2. we may be seeing the end of the GRP. I recently worked on a research report for JackMyers Media Business report about measurement in the advertising and media space and found that media buyers -- meaning the folks who take the money from companies and figure out how to spend it on ads -- were talking a lot about measurement and reaching their audiences and so on, but they weren’t talking a lot about GRPs or even necessarily TRPs -- a more refined version for more closely targeting an audience. I think we might be inching toward the end or at least gross diminishment of a measure that’s been a primary currency in the advertising business for decades.... and we’re going to increasingly see people looking to hit their targets in a very targeted way.

One of the people who makes me think this way is Dave Morgan, who told me that the “behavioral targeting” technology he helped bring into the world helped achieve the “oxymoron of targeted reach” -- a huge swath of people (reach, like an advertiser gets with, say, the Super Bowl), but in a targeted way (like an advertiser gets when they know exactly who you are because you’ve registered for soemthing and send you an ad based on your preferences). He’ll be a guest on Naked Media on Wednesday at noon, ET, then On Demand later. You can watch the first interview, with Jay Rosen, here.

The Coming Shakeout in Video Distribution

One big impression from the Streaming Media East show I got today: There are going to be shakeouts:

 - in content distribution networks, CDNs. There are too many to be supported by the market, even if the market IS growing 30% per year. How many do you need. There's Akamai. And there's Limelight. And then there are more than two-dozen others, about half of them with venture funding (too much  VC $$$, according to one person -- see Twitters in right column ), all claiming one niche or another. But those niches can't support it all.

- in standards. H.264. Adobe. Silverlight. These are all schemes for making videos and then getting them to the Web and into a browser or some other player that you can watch on your computer. But it's difficult to create in one and post in another. There's a rumor Microsoft will have Silverlight be agnostic, adopt H.264, and allow posting from all kinds of media into it, which could -- in the words of one observer -- revolutionize the industry. (Wouldn't that be something? Microsoft being the open ones.) for now, though, creators of the content are locked into different not terribly overlapping universes and the skills are not really transferable. 

- In video advertising. A bazillion schemes. Only some will survive.

- In video intake and display through the competitors to YouTube -- everyone from Revver to Veoh to Brightcove to Daily Motion. Fewer than exist today will survive.

Talked a bit, too, to show chief Dan Rayburn, who said part of the reason there might be less of a representation of revenue, and more of technology, than previous years at the show, is because he's got his ear to the ground -- and no one is really making money in video, while there's been the explosion of CDNs.

Coverage:

- Getting Nerdy (Online Minute)

- TV Worldwide 

My buddies at Scribe Media (who are doing the Naked Media show with my company and me as host) produced Streaming Media's video and will have it live in a couple days. 

Streaming Media East '07: Non-Media Companies Get Media

I thought I'd coined the term "every company is a media company," meaning that the accessibility of the tools and the imperative to touch customers directly makes every company -- whether Wal-Mart or HP or Sun Microsystems or GM or Caldwell Banker or the local New York ice cream shop with a website – a company that produces media for its customers, or "constituents," if you prefer.

Then I found out at Streaming Media East that The FeedRoom CEO Bart Feder has been going around saying the same thing. And he tells me Streaming Media honcho Dan Rayburn's been saying it, too. FeedRoom handles video in one form or another for all the companies mentioned above, and a bevy of others. FeedRoom's revenues from Enterprise clients has gone up 80% this year, compared to last, while their business from media clients is essentially flat, Feder said. And those companies are embracing many of the practices that some traditional media companies have been slow to adopt: encouraging consumer-generated content, trying viral video, reaching out directly to people over the heads of any mediators, creating communities of excited brand-loyal consumers, and using customers' input as marketing intelligence.

Feder also, in an interview, talked about "direct to constituent" video, meaning that companies reach out to their dealer networks, managers, consumers, the press, and so on, and target each of them separately, having either open or closed networks, with various levels of control. When someone on a panel Feder was on said companies were having trouble creating enough content, Feder suggested that every company should give its 250 smartest and most loyal employees video cameras, and get them each to produce one video. Voila, enough content to run one video a day for a year of business days. Cheap, too. (And, of course, more for The FeedRoom to run through its system, and charge for.)

Jeff Jarvis, who moderated a panel today, likes that there's no arguing at this conference about whether the way things are is right or wrong, that the way media is now is treated as a given. So does Steve Safran of LostRemote. (I was a fly on the wall -- well, a guy standing in the aisle - -when Safran was speaking to Jarvis.) Jarvis argued earlier th at media companies should encourage consumers to distribute their media, stop worrying about how to control it and instead start worrying how to get it into consumers' eyes and ears.

He pointed out in a conversation a the conference today that perhaps the reason corporate America is so happy to use media in all its flexible ways is that for them, it's a cost. Or, as I would put it, it's not what they make – it's just what they do, that they're happy to give away, or take a short-term "loss" on producing the media to get people to pay for whatever it is that they really do. And the better the cost-effectiveness, the better for them. They're certainly not worried about making people pay for subscriptions, or making ad revenue on whatever media they produce. And in that they have a luxury that the traditional media companies don't.

Streaming Media East '07: Scoble's Six Figures

Scobeleizer's Robert Scobel, on a Jeff Jarvis-hosted panel called "Creating the New Television" lets on that he earns six figures per quarter from his show on PodTech, which is basically geeks talking to geeks. He said he earned that much because sponsors want to reach that rarified geek audience, so even if it's only a few thousand, or tens of thousands of people it's the right 10,000.

Others on the panel sounded like they were still looking for a way to justify the cost -- save, perhaps, Adam Elend, who Executive Produces the Wall Street goof WallStrip.com,Blogger: MediaFlect - Create Post and says he spends $2,500 to produce each daily episode, uses a SAG actor as a host, and also has the kind of rarified audience advertisers love to reach.

Mary Matthews, producer of 39 Second Single, whom Jarvis has promoted mightily on his blog, referred to needing a day job, and J. Crowley's Black20.com is done on a shoestring, as well.

Watching the various videos -- other than Scoble -- especially Crowley's little comic vignettes, I couldn't help but think that, yes, this is interesting, new content, targeted, Crowley says, at a young male demographic ("We're in that demo, so why not have us call all the shots" instead of going through some media execs who would control it, he said) - but it's still just amusing stuff, that anyone with a good comic sensibility can produce. Cheaper, fun, funny, and a matter of taste. But still, basically, a video vignette -- could have been Saturday Night Live or any other sketch comedy show, really.

Streaming Media East '07: It's Not Streaming

Am at the Streaming Media East conference and one thing immediately occurs to me: Streaming Media is a misnomer. Everyone here is talking about distributed media, getting it out to people on demand, at the least, and more likely via podcasts, or embedded Flash or other kinds of means that will make the video "viral."

More, shortly.