So Long Sasquatch: Hello Inverted, Iterative and Immersive Content

The first essay from my new booklet Extra Sense, which explores how technology and consumer behavior are changing how, where, when and from whom we see content, including advertising. You can download all five essays from here.

I’d like to remind those bingeing on Netflix and HBO that American TV actually reached its zenith during the mid-1970s. As a young boy growing up in the Midwest I had three entire TV channels (the public broadcasting channel didn’t really count) full of such American cultural masterpieces as The Love Boat, Welcome Back Kotter, and Laverne & Shirley. Some of these programs would inevitably make their way around the world; you’d be shocked and perhaps slightly disturbed by the number of Dukes of Hazzard fans you encounter outside the USA.

I would further argue the absolute peak of 1970s TV was the two-part Sasquatch episode on The Six Million Dollar Man that saw bionic-man Steve Austin battle Bigfoot, who actually turned out to be an alien. For a brief moment, millions of young American boys and girls across the country were glued to their tiny rabbit-eared square TV sets.

Alas times changed and by the beginning of the 21st century those old 4:3 ratio TV sets and programs would vanish, replaced by fancy if not seriously huge 16:9 widescreen TVs with picture-perfect panoramic shows such as The Wire and The Sopranos. So long Sasquatch.

History, as they say, repeats itself. So here we are again, another decade and another device currently rebooting the shape and experience of content for a new generation.

However, this time around the TV set is simply being abandoned altogether in favour of the Internet and increasingly the mobile devices used to access online content. According to Childwise, in the UK the average time spent online is now three hours per day, compared with 2.1 hours watching linear television on an actual television set. In fact, 15 to 16 year-olds increased their online consumption to almost five hours a day. So while Millennials and Generation Z still watch some TV, particularly sports and live events, they are increasingly taking their eyeballs elsewhere. Overall the number of online video users is expected to double to 1.5 billion in 2016 alone.

This phenomenon is not unique to the UK. Similar trends can be witnessed in other parts of the world. In the US, according to Nielsen, viewership of broadcast TV shows on the big four networks (ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC) among 18 to 49 year-olds is down 25% from last year, with the biggest drop among 12 to 17 year-olds who watch only 15 hours of major network live TV compared to 2011, when they watched about 25 hours a week. That’s 10 hours less of broadcast TV a week. The same trend is occurring in China. According to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), China’s digital online viewership as of Q2 2014 had reached 439 million users; 80.1% of them are in the 10 to 39 year-old range. A July 2014 A.T. Kearney survey found that: Internet users in China devoted 35% of their time online to entertainment. 

To make matters more complex, many of these Millennials are watching programs from people most adults have never heard of before. PewDiePie is a prime example of the many superstars born via online channels
like Vine, Instagram and YouTube. Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg is actually a 26 yearold Swede who launched his own YouTube channel in 2010. Said channel essentially features videos of himself – hold your breath
– playing video games. Sounds boring to most of us, yet over 40 million people now follow PewDiePie, amounting to over 10 billion video views and a reported $8 million dollar pay check from advertising revenues. 

But it’s not just YouTube. Teens and Millennials can increasingly be found in places like Snapchat. The anti-Facebook social app initially made its name by enabling people to share photos that only lasted for ten-seconds before disappearing into the ether, which was very convenient for those sharing nude photos. Despite those odds and ends, Snapchat has caught everyone off guard by growing to 100 million plus users, with 86% of those individuals between 13 and 34 years old. In other words, prime targeting territory for those wishing to get to Millennials and Gen Z audiences.

Snapchat has also been a major catalyst in the recent evolution in video formats. The relatively young social app currently gets over seven billion video views each day and most of these videos are filmed and seen vertically, not horizontally. Sure, some of this content consists of user-generated clips of Millennials lighting up their farts. However, Snapchat has had huge success with professional publishers using its platform to deliver content that typically would get delivered on TV. For example, more than twelve million people watched MTV’s live streaming of its VMA awards, more than on TV, and a further twenty-five million views occurred later on the MTV Snapchat channel. More Americans watch US college football (the one with helmets and hands) on Snapchat than on TV.

And just like the shift from the 4:3 to the 16:9 TV format, studios are now beginning to create bespoke video for mobile. For example, Tastemade Studios is producing its SnapChat Discovery Channel show in an inverted format. If you happen to stumble into Tastemade’s studio you’d notice the furniture has been specially assembled to fit into a vertical lens. Even the widescreen TV screens around the building have been placed sideways to best view vertical SnapChat clips. Video is increasingly being inverted by 90 degrees, flipped on its head to fit a different delivery device and changing consumer behaviour.

Snapchat’s data suggests all this effort is worth it. When content is developed in a bespoke format for mobile the viewing rates are higher, particularly for advertisers. According to Snapchat, vertical video ads have a nine times higher completion rate than regular landscape formats and get an average completion rate of over 50% compared to the drop-out rates for traditional ads, which is typically between 60-70% after three seconds. Big advertisers like Unilever have taken note. Its recent TRESemme Fashion Week campaign used vertical video formats extensively and saw better viewership rates compared to previous Snapchat campaigns. 

Another reason the TRESemme campaign worked so well is that it embraced the second major content trend triggered by the growth in digital and data - iteration. Creating multiple versions of an advertisement is not a new idea; it has been widely practiced by direct marketers even before the Internet came along. However, with the growth in programmatic media over the past few years more marketers are now realising the power and potential of customised ads even when it comes to highly emotive brand campaigns.

Diesel’s Creative Director Nicola Formichetti is arguably best known for creating Lady Gaga’s meat dress. However, he may now be recognised as the first creative guru to crack the code when it comes to bringing iterative creative at scale to the world of programmatic media.

For Diesel’s recent Decoded campaign, Formichetti designed more than 400 different programmatic ads aligned to different users and their behaviour in apps like Tinder and Shazam. For example, within Shazam, if you tried to identify a song and Shazam didn’t recognise it, a Diesel ad appeared on the screen stating “I didn’t get that either.”

The challenge for many marketers is how to solve this new need for iterative content, which often doesn’t appeal to Cannes Lionsseeking creative teams. Some marketers are increasingly exploring low-cost production models and establishing on-going asset libraries. Other marketers are tapping into new third-party creators and distributors like Twitter Niche, Trufflepig, Fullscreen or YouTube’s Influencers to fulfil content needs. Unilever recently worked with onesuch influencer called Zoella to create iterative content for its All Things Hair YouTube channel. First Unilever used search data to identify the biggest trending hair style themes among its target audience of young women and girls. Once the content requirements were identified, Zoella quickly created some Millennial-authentic videos naturally featuring Unilever products such as V05. Zoella also has nearly ten million followers, giving Unilever instant distribution to a large target audience eagerly awaiting her next post. The All Things Hair channel has nearly 200,000 subscribers in the UK alone and 300,000 globally and is now the most-subscribed hair brand channel in the world amassing over 64 million channel views across the UK, Canada, the US, the Philippines and Brazil.

The last major content trend is around immersive content and in particular the dramatic increase in virtual and augmented reality. VR and its cousin AR were everywhere at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show and Mobile World Congress, with major players like Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Sony showing off their latest technology and laying the groundwork for another clash of the titans once the goodies go on sale. And from a virtual standstill, interest in VR and AR has steadily climbed; Digi-Capital estimates that the VR/AR market will be worth $150 billion by 2020.

Facebook has arguably made the biggest splash with its $2.3 billion investment in Oculus and is busy exploiting the technology in several ways; not least introducing 360 degree immersive video formats into its social newsfeed. Nestlé has already successfully explored the format with its Nescafé #ExploreTheWorld campaign, which enabled people to take a virtual reality tour into kitchens around the world.

The Nescafé example is just one way Facebook and others plan on bringing virtual reality experiences into existing devices. Of course the other way is by actually selling proper virtual reality headgear, which is exactly what Facebook plans on doing by putting The Rift on sale. As recently as the
2016 Mobile World Congress, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke eloquently about his vision of a future virtual social world, where everything from games to business conferences will be done via technology like Oculus Rift. Facebook has even developed a technology using Intel’s RealSense 3D camera that captures your facial expressions and recreates a virtual body double within your virtual environment.

Not to be outdone, Google is also experimenting in the reality space race. Google has invested over $500 million in a highly-secretive AR start-up called Magic
Leap. The company already has some 200 employees all conjuring up, well, magic, in an old Motorola office building in Plantation, Florida. Based on the few videos released so far, the technology looks stunning. Magic Leap uses patented technology that it claims is far superior to any existing AR applications and brings cinematic-quality virtual objects into the real world through glasses and some laser mumbo-jumbo that I don’t fully understand. It’s ‘totes amazeballs cool’ and coupled with a tactile glove in development, the complete tech could let you see and feel virtual things right in front of every day environments.

There are dozens if not hundreds of similar technologies and apps in development, most notably Microsoft’s Hololens VR and Blippar’s AR mobile app. In fact, Gartner predicts that 25 million VR or AR headsets will be in consumer hands by 2018, many with hard-core gamers. This figure doesn’t include the countless others that will experience immersive content through existing devices, primarily mobile phones.

According to the Digital Marketing Bureau, 30% of smartphone owners in “mature” markets use AR technology at least once a week. Furthermore, 864 million smartphones have AR technologies already embedded into them, a figure sure to rise as the major handset manufacturers and OS players like Samsung, Apple, Google, LG and Sony look to exploit the renewed interest in immersive applications by simply baking the technology into new releases. Marketers are naturally taking notice, creating the most adaptive advertising experiences yet. Tommy Hilfiger used Samsung’s GearVR device to enable shoppers to virtually experience its seasonal fashion show, allowing anyone to get not only a first-row seat along the catwalk but also exclusive access to the backstage, an area even off-limits to those actually in attendance. HSBC created an augmented reality banknote that brought the story of “The Bank” to life through a mobile app that let users explore the company’s rich history in the evolution of Hong Kong. Pepsi Max unbelievably and memorably brought aliens to bus shelters using AR technology. Volvo used Google’s Cardboard VR kit to let anyone with a smartphone and its app take a virtual test drive of its new XC90 model. Even the United Nations has leveraged VR tech to create an immersive film called “Clouds over Syria” that lets people follow first-hand the plight of a young Syrian refugee.

Whether inverted, iterative, or immersive, the shape and experience of content is going through a monumental change as new digital technology, more data and new forms distribution continue to scale and take hold, particularly with today’s teens and Millennials. While a great idea remains the ultimate test of whether content will be successful, understanding the new ways those ideas are being delivered and consumed can give those brilliant concepts the extra edge in succeeding or failing. And given our average attention span has gone from 12 seconds to 8 seconds since 2000 (less than a goldfish), the format and relevance of your content may actually make a big difference.