Behavioral Based Social Media System for the Cable TV Market
Cable has long history of failing to develop 1-1 target marketing. Canoe Ventures (MSO venture) was touted as the Holy Grail of targeted advertising and was less than a success.
"By the way, don't think that the Internet is a killer application in direct response advertising and electronic commerce." David Verklin, CEO of Canoe Ventures.
http://www.itvt.com/interview/3353/canoe-ventures-ceo-david-verklin
Interview highlights the indifferent attitude of cable operators towards the Internet and targeted ads. Which has led to losing major ad revenue to Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
"Most TV ads are still stuck in a broadcast mindset, failing to emotionally engage viewers and missing the opportunity for social engagement."
http://www.forbes.com/sites/onmarketing/2015/01/26/what-you-can-expect-for-social-video-in-2015/
“Advertisers have weighed in heavily on the future of TV, with both their thoughts and their considerable wallets. Advertisers are increasingly expecting to present their advertising messages to just their desired audience…and not to anyone else. For over 60 years, video advertising could only be bought via a TV show’s projected audience, which served as a blunt proxy for a certain target audience. The result has been many wasted impressions and an often irrelevant experience for consumers. In the near future, advertisers will demand the ability to target their messages to people rather than targeting their messages to TV shows as proxies for people.”
The obvious alternative, with the least cost to implement is an independent Cloud CRM solution designed to cross index cable subscriber households with their corresponding social network interests. The current regulatory and privacy issues experienced by cable TV operators gathering unauthorized data from set-top boxes could be mitigated by validating subscriber and even eliminated by essentially having an opt-in plan (provided conveniently by the social media). Access along with profile and interests of households would be controlled by the subscriber’s social media platform of choice. Facebook and Twitter have high consumer acceptance and could be used for household profiles, product interests, social interests, and viewing entertainment interests. There would be incentives to the subscribers to opt-in including notification and reminder of viewing favorites, Groupon type ads, and specific ads matching interests with infomercial type group discounts and urgency to buy.
The current design of cable TV's target marketing advertising ventures is fundamentally flawed. They focus on demographics, and fail to identify the individual behavioral current and future household interests.
Project would involve developing a bidirectional Cloud interface program using a CRM application between the social media and MSO subscriber records and communicating behavioral marketing - business advertising, discounts, specific videos/groups, family albums – providing subscriber awareness of TV programming -- movies, products, etc. similar to Amazon and Groupon. This would make subscriber stickier and substantially reduce turnover.
"Millennial consumers are the largest generational group to be widely targeted by marketers, and for good reason. They shop quite differently than older age groups, and online retailers must learn to relate to them in order to capture their loyalty."
"The key to capturing this generation’s disposable income is to stay agile when it comes to their ever-changing preferences. A strong marketing plan geared towards millennials will maintain forward-focused strategies that target their behaviors, values, and opinions."
http://dazeinfo.com/2015/02/18/millennials-focus-e-commerce-strategy-social-media-marketing/
To paraphrase a comment I made in the CED 1999 publication about the Internet, cable TV operators need to become the new best friends with the over 1 Billion members of social media.