What does it mean to be a media owner in the 21st century? If a media owner is defined, as Mark Brandon, chief operating officer of digital creative agency Siren, suggests, as "anybody who can aggregate an audience that is of interest and value to an advertiser", then developments in technology have widened the goalposts to welcome telecommunications, mobile, search and web TV companies into the fold.
Social networking sites must also now be considered important media owners, with millions of global users all busily creating user-generated content and cross-promoting brands between profile pages. As a sign of the times, Vodafone recently announced its partnership with social networking site MySpace that will offer Vodafone customers "a MySpace experience via their mobile phones". This is due to go live in the UK in the next two months. Vodafone is also in the final planning stages of its deal with Yahoo!, which will become Vodafone's ad sales house by the end of June.
Emerging TV providers include BT, with its BT Vision next-generation TV service; Orange, with its plans to extend its IPTV offer to the UK; the recently created Virgin Media, and start-up web TV companies such as Joost and Babelgum, both currently in beta-testing phase and due to launch this year. Meanwhile, Google and Apple are both courting European mobile companies with a view to developing their own handsets - Apple is hoping to launch the iPhone and Google is looking to produce a "GPhone" that will make it easy for users to search for information using their mobile handset.
So, with search companies moving into mobile, mobile companies moving into TV and TV companies signing deals to distribute their content online and on mobile, opportunities for advertisers are multiplying at breakneck speed.
But how many media owners can the world of advertising support? Will the new media owners dilute a finite pool of advertising budgets, or will they, as Neal McCleave, managing director of media services at Tiscali, says, create and grow entirely new markets?
"Since Tiscali already had the telecoms infrastructure business, it made sense to expand into broadband and IPTV," says McCleave. "There will always be someone competing for the same ad spend - Tiscali's linear TV channels are competing for the same spend as the traditional TV channels. However, we are also expanding the market through creating new online/TV crossover spaces for advertising."
Traditional media owners, far from perceiving the emerging media owners as a threat, seem to be embracing the competition. Andrew Bagguley, head of mobile strategy at News Group Newspapers, says: "We are extremely pro-competition because that breeds creativity and innovation. Emerging media owners are creating further market capability. In the future, the good established media brands will continue to provide the majority of content; these new media owners are simply providing more channel options."
In line with Bagguley's position, News Group's mobile strategy is to build partnerships with mobile operators, while strengthening its direct-to-consumer offer. It has plans in the pipeline to extend both the Sun Mobile and the News of the World Mobile services through mobile operators' portals, and to make news content directly available on the sun.mobi WAP site. News Group is also in discussion with all five major mobile operators on "a new and widely publicised mobile football service in the UK", following last year's successful joint bid by News Group and BSkyB for sole rights to the FA Premier League's mobile video package.
Meanwhile ITV, which provides a streamed simulcast of ITV1 to mobile operator 3 and has partnerships with mobile network operators, service providers and content producers, is interested in "being on any platform where consumers want to see our content", according to Melissa Goodwin, head of mobile.
"ITV offers a rich and broad range of content for our advertising customers, from targeting regional and niche audiences across the ITV1 network and digital channels, to branded content, broadcast sponsorship, online, interactive and mobile advertising," she explains.
However, the Telegraph Group is taking a more cautious approach. Director of new media Shaun Gregory warns against rushing to colonise the new platforms, unless the consumer offer is unique and best-suited to that route to market. He argues: "There is no point in repackaging the newspaper and shoving it down a mobile phone, because consumers are more savvy than that now. We have to offer something rich and unique that fits with our other platforms - only then can we start to wrap advertising solutions around it."
Conversely, the challenge for the new media players is to remember that - although they have a new route to market and a large consumer base - they must offer more than just clever technology. Siren's Brandon says: "Contrary to popular belief, the new media players can learn a lot from traditional media companies who have established sales resources that are skilled in providing what advertisers and agencies want from their spend. New media owners would be well advised to spend more time going back to basics and focusing on their customers' objectives."
Key to achieving this, he says, is a new spirit of cooperation between established and emerging operators to provide advertisers with what they increasingly want - advertising solutions across multiple platforms. He says: "There needs to be a much more collaborative effort between media owners, catalysed by a new breed of creative digital solutions companies that can think, make and implement relevant campaign strategies for advertisers in the digital age. Things will get really interesting as the media and advertising business moves in this direction."
Gregory, whose partnerships at The Telegraph include Google and ITN, agrees: "If the past was about acquisition after acquisition, the future is about clever alliances that add value for the consumer."
He says: "If you are fighting for cash on one discrete platform, then that battle will no doubt be twice as hard in the future. Advertisers now want multimedia solutions that cross numerous platforms, as well as finely tuned targeting. The fragmentation of media means media companies have to be cleverer about who they work with, otherwise they will simply lose out."
- Virgin Media, the company created by NTL Incorporated's acquisition of Virgin Mobile in July 2006, is the first UK company to offer quadplay - mobile and fixed-line telephone services, broadband internet and cable TV.
It is also the only media company with more than three million consumers on every platform - 3.3 million broadband subscribers (making it the UK's largest broadband operator with 27% of the market), 4.1 million mobile customers, 10-12 million visitors per month to its portal virginmedia.com, and 30 million viewers per month for the linear and cable TV channels.
Virgin's linear TV offer comprises Virgin Media Television, a rebranding of the Flextech channels, UKTV, a joint venture between Virgin Media and BBC Worldwide, and Setanta Sports, which has just won the four-year rights to the FA Cup and England football games in a £425m joint bid with ITV.
Programmes are a mix of acquired and commissioned content, with UKTV originating 800 hours of programming for 2007. Virgin Media also offers two cable video-on-demand channels, one of which is the new flagship channel Virgin Central, launched on 20 February.
A growth area for the company is web, or broadband, TV. Virgin Media has five scheduled web TV channels, and 29,000 hours of web TV were consumed in the week following their launch. From August, Virgin Media will hold three-year broadband rights to all Premiership football highlight clips, to be broadcast on broadband and mobile.
Virgin's advertising strategy is to move from a subscription to an ad-funded model and to cross-promote brands across all five distribution channels, following its first cross-platform web and mobile campaign for the Fox film Night at the Museum.
Philip Townend, head of advertising, says: "Our major aim is to drive people from one platform to another and then have advertisers communicate with them wherever they go."
- Orange, while best-known as a mobile phone network, is also Europe's largest broadband provider, with an online portal, www.orange.co.uk, originally launched as Freeserve in 1998. Its mobile network Orange World offers 27 mobile TV channels, including ITN and Living TV, as well as mobile internet. On 14 February, the company added the Orange Ad Network to its portfolio. This is an online ad network that sells ads on behalf of third-party internet sites. Network partners to date include news service Ananova.com, poker community pokerzone.tv, and the travellers' search engine SideStep.com.
Orange has more than 20 different content channels, from film, TV and games to communities and e-mail. Some content is sourced from suppliers such as ITN, eBay and Money Supermarket. The remainder is user-generated or produced in-house - for example, last summer's World Cup blog and video footage from Baden Baden.
Mobile advertising is a new area for the business. It trialled mobile ads across 11 handsets from last summer, tested by five clients - Jaguar, Peugeot, Xbox, Vauxhall and United International Pictures. Orange has since evaluated the user experience and plans to extend mobile advertising to the rest of its 15 million-strong customer base.
Like Virgin Media, IPTV is a key growth area for Orange: it currently has IPTV offers in France, Spain and Poland and is looking to launch the service in the UK in the second half of 2007. In France, a basic digital TV offer has become standard in the market, with seven internet service providers offering it as a product option. As of 1 June last year, Orange France rebranded its Ma Ligne stand-alone digital TV offer as TV by Orange. The company currently has 425,000 IPTV subscribers worldwide.
- Italian telecommunications company Tiscali has grown from a dial-up and telephone service provider, to offer broadband and, most recently, IPTV, following the acquisition of the Homechoice IPTV service in August 2006. Tiscali TV, which launched on 1 March in London and Stevenage, is rolling out to other major metropolitan areas over the next two years. By the end of 2007, the service will be available to more than 10 million UK homes.
Tiscali TV's base pack of broadband plus TV for £14.99 per month provides around 30 digital channels, a replay service (BBC programmes only) and pay-per-view movies-on-demand. Customers can choose to upgrade to the Big Pack or add the pre-school Scamp channel or the Music Pack. Tiscali TV, which claims to have the largest amount of on-demand material available from one provider, buys its content from film and TV companies such as MTV, Warner, Paramount and BBC News 24.
Neal McCleave, managing director of media services, says the appeal of the new platform lies in its content mix. "Tiscali is offering a TV and online aggregate package through a new interface," he explains. "The content is not exclusive. What makes the service unique is the exclusive combination of programmes."
Tiscali's strategy for brand advertising is to offer multi-platform buying through packages of online and TV ads. McCleave adds: "The benefit of the TV ads, which will go live from next year, is that they will be great for behavioural and demographic targeting. We will be able to target consumers down to an individual level. All the information gained through users' registration and their viewing and search habits will be available to advertisers to enable precise targeting of ads."
- Nokia became the world's largest mobile phone manufacturer in 1998. Since then, the Finnish telecommunications giant has concentrated on staying at the forefront of emerging mobile technologies. In 1999, Nokia launched the world's first WAP handset, following this with 3G phones, mobile multiplayer gaming and the next generation of multimedia devices, the Nokia Nseries.
Most recently, Nokia has introduced two new platforms to connect advertisers and media owners with mobile - Nokia Ad Service and Nokia Advertising Gateway. Nokia Ad Service, which launched in Europe at the ad:tech trade fair last month, is a mobile ad network aimed at mobile publishers such as nokia.mobi that provides a platform to plan, manage and optimise mobile advertising campaigns. Advertisers who have used the service to date include hotel owner Accor Group, Dunlop and Sprite.
The aim of Nokia Advertising Gateway, which will become commercially available in the second half of 2007, is to partner with third parties - traditional media owners, aggregators, platform companies, operators and internet sites - to help them serve advertisers by offering easy access to a mobile audience. The Gateway acts as an "intelligent switch", selecting between text, visual, audio and video ads - depending on the user's context - and feeding the ad to the mobile device.
One area of expansion for Nokia is to tie in mobile advertising with other advertising media such as outdoor and retail, according to Tom Henriksson, director of Nokia Ad Service. He says: "The focus on user experience is a key benefit for advertisers, publishers and consumers. Nokia will continue to own, and partner with, content and platforms to deliver a rich mobile user experience."
WHAT IS A MEDIA OWNER?
"Anybody who can aggregate an audience that is of interest and value to an advertiser" - Mark Brandon, chief operating officer of digital creative agency, Siren.