Valencia Festival of Media
With Comscore chairman and co-founder Gian Fulgoni, and Comscore mobile expert Paul Goode, both speaking at the event, I travelled to Valencia last week to attend the Festival of Media.
The sun shone brightly on the modern senate building, providing a welcoming emblem of an ancient industry transitioning itself towards a Web 2.0 world. Inside the congress centre, allegory gave way to action, as the impressive surroundings rang-out with a pragmatic and pioneering determination to find genuine answers to the key questions facing the industry today.
In this respect the Festival was one of the most rewarding industry gatherings that I have attended in some time. The recession has sparked newfound momentum in the industry’s quest to integrate itself into the advertising world, and that focus made for an electric atmosphere throughout the two day program.
For our part, we were glad to be involved in the debate, and able to emphasize the importance of accurate quantitative tools in helping move the flow of ad-dollars online.
If there a few remaining outlaws in the media world who still refute this approach, then I would cite my own allegory to emphasize the impact that good research can have on media content and advertising. When Will Smith moved to Hollywood for the first time, he sat down with his agent and together they researched a list of the top 10 highest grossing movies of all time. From that list they found that:
- 10 of those movies involved special effects
- 9 of those movies involved special effects with some form of creature
- And 8 of those movies involved special effects with some form of creature AND a love story
This kind of data collection empowered “Big Will” to become a most successful film actor, and highlights that even an industry that trades upon its creativity and individuality must employ quantitative analytical techniques if it is to truly excel.
With that in mind Mr. Fulgoni took to the stage on the morning of the first day to brief the room on how relevant and reliable data can provide the catalyst for changing media markets and specifically in today’s digital climate, move ad-dollars online.
His presentation was followed by a press conference examining online media business models alongside Hernan Lopez, COO of Fox International Channels, and Saul Berman, Strategy & Change Practice Leader for IBM Global Services. For exclusive highlights of this press conference stay tuned for another update here on the Comscore blog later this week!
The media industry still has a long way to go before it is able to realize its full potential on new and growing digital platforms, but what I witnessed in Valencia was an industry not only now set-up to deal with that change, but ready to welcome it with open arms. Just as we know that people like going to the movies, we also know that they like going online – over one billion people accessed the Internet around the world in March. The key now will be to find those digital platforms that involve special effects and a creature and a love story, to facilitate the monetization of content online.