DM: You have a strong pedigree in helping the Australian market engage in new media and technology platforms, how is it now tracking?|
Mike McGraw: The Australian media market, has had this broadband penetration cloud hanging around. Historically this has put a dampener on a lot of innovation and allowed more traditional channels and solutions to hold on to their incremental relevancy for longer than they should have. This is obviously changing rapidly but it feels like a lot of the big media companies, ad agencies, broadcasters and publishers are still smitten with the portal. Whether it’s a full-blown publisher destination or a small promotional mini-site, I'm surprised by just how pervasive these “come to us” solutions continue to be. Content likes to travel, we know that now and so far I haven’t been seeing the distributed content model taking hold in a big way in Australia.
DM: Big Fuel – explain the concept – why are big brands jumping on board?
Mike McGraw: Big Fuel represents the creative fuel now needed by agencies to ride these waves of technological innovations that keep rolling in. It started as a content development house and everyone here, save a few select agency types are used to thinking in terms making things people want to watch or play with things like TV shows, webisodes and websites. A need arose a couple of years ago for agencies to be very nimble in deploying campaigns across new platforms. The big agency model doesn’t really address that too well. Now, you have to be able to do strategic planning, conduct research, execute creative, distribute content and measure the results very quickly and many times over in the course of a single campaign. That’s why we decided to have the agency, studio and network housed in the same place, so we can react quickly. We’ve also made a commitment to stay relatively small and partner well with specialised companies.
Digital Media: Branded entertainment is a core focus where is the concept heading and is it the future of content monetisation?
Mike McGraw: I don’t know if branding entertainment is the future of content but it’s certainly looking bright; probably because it is the obviously place to put your ad dollars in an environment where people can increasingly choose to ignore your message. Fragmentation of platforms and demographics play a big role here as well. If you are trying to reach working mom’s 35 to 45 who love Oprah, you can pretty safely bet that these people will not be turned off by sponsored content if it speaks directly to them. Notice I used to the term “sponsored” instead of “branded”. Yes, I’m a believer the in the notion that sponsored programming, will continue make a resurgence in the new digital realm.
Digital Media: How does your network distribution model work?
Mike McGraw: It is the disbursement of content by any meansy. After we come up with a big idea and create the assets, we then use a combination of paid and non-paid placement of the editorial content on large publisher sites that are looking for rich media of a certain type. We’ve developed a large data base of these destinations and spend a lot of time finding out what kind of content their looking for. This is not in-stream video ad we’re buying, it’s placement of short form sponsored programming in most cases. We recently had a lot of success with a Neutragena campaign and were able to rack up over seven million views for an eight-episode online reality show with less than 200k of media spend. Viral seeding and social media marketing are also a big part of getting the content to where the audience lives.
Digital Media: What is the panacea to monetising video content?
Mike McGraw: That’s kind of like asking me to Google map the fountain of youth. First there’s the usual suspects: brand supported, promotional, subscription, pay per view and download to own. Beyond that your going to be hard pressed to find another way people are going to get paid for their video content. The short answer is all the above, in reality its picking the right model, for the right content at the right time. For example, in the ‘three Ps’ category of premium (sports, movie, music TV etc), porn and prophets, subscription models will gain strength as rights holders get real about licensing fees and libraries consolidate. Eventually subscription portals will compete on the basis of filtering and the overall user experience as pricing and margins find the floor. This is also one place where portals will remain relevant. I think rent to stream models will eventually win out in the short term over download to own as delivery speeds up. Pride of digital ownership continues to wane but untimely brand supported or sponsored content will be king in the near term as people hold on to the “content is free” notion for the foreseeable future.
Digital Media: What is rising from the ashes of Entertainment Inc 1.0?
Mike McGraw: The social media juggernaunt is swallowing more media time of more people at an alarming rate. Also, mom’s are emerging as the hub of the digital household for most of the family’s discretional spend while dad’s are becoming about as relevant as pets … well pets that bring home a paycheck.
Mike McGraw is a special guest speaker at the X|Media|Lab Melbourne “DIY TV” conference being held on August 1. www.xmedialab.com