Is it harder or easier to market your brand in a multiplatform world? How do you grab the attention of audiences, especially those younger millennials when there is so much content out there and so easily available? These are some of the questions members on the panel ‘Storytelling in a Multiplatform World’ had to grapple with, after presenting some of their work on recent ad campaigns.
“It is getting much harder to target audiences than five years ago and much more resource intensive,” said Lee Raftery, the marcom executive vice president of NBCUniversal in the UK. The company recently launched Hayu in the UK, a reality show on-demand service with a massive promotional campaign, using traditional TV advertising as well as social media and online marketing.
But there are also a number of new advantages, he acknowledged, especially “getting real-time data back from the content and being able to better tailor it as you go along”.
According to Canal+ creative director Olivier Schaack, part of the problem is having to get multiple messages across at the same time and the hierarchy of communicating them. “People have to understand that all our different channels belong to the same group and have the same DNA as our flagship Canal+ channel and we haven’t quite cracked it yet,” he admitted.
The group is planning to launch a web-based drama series hub later this year called Studio Plus, with a view to seducing a new, younger audience. “Most of our subscribers are now 60-plus,” he admitted, the ageing demographic being one of the key problems the French broadcaster has to face.
