The Marketing world of Corporate Brand Building has been changed completely by new technologies. Now Corporations can leverage new technologies to brand build with reach, like never before.
Back in the not-so-distant good old days, corporations did a mix of TV, Magazine and Newspaper Advertising. However traditional linear TV viewership has dropped off globally and significantly. Families don’t sit together and tune in on a certain day, at a certain time, to watch a program on a specific channel the way they use to. That ship has sailed. They don’t even watch the evening news the way they use to. The ubiquitous proliferation of OTT streaming platforms like Disney+, Netflix, Hulu, ESPN+, Prime Video, HBO Max, YouTube TV and Peacock along with a plethora of local and regional streamers have stolen swathes of viewers from Linear TV operators, irrespective if the destination is a TV, computer or mobile device. Along with those viewers goes the effectiveness of Corporate TV advertising.
Similarly, advertising in Magazines and Newspapers has had a similar impact from social media, antisocial media and new media. Magazines and News Papers have in large, been replaced by Apps like X, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, WeChat, Pinterest and Reddit, etc. etc. This growing cohort of largely unregulated media platforms are now, like it or not, the replacement for our old and regulated TV, News, Newspapers and Magazines. The effects of all this change on society is not the subject of this article, albeit likely the subject of conversation and university studies for years to come. This article is focused on how Corporations manage their Brands and Brand Building in this new world taking into consideration the dramatically reduced return on investment for TV and Print advertising.
This is the beginning of the age of Corporate Brand Building 2.0, which is to say, Corporate Brand Building by Video.
In August 1981 MTV changed the world of music when it launched with the broadcast of the ironically named song 'Video Killed the Radio Star' by The Buggles. Thankfully 42 years later we still have radio stars, but music without a video just didn’t fly after that. For example, by 1985, the release of A-ha’s debut hit “Take on Me” was delayed for months waiting for the video to be finished. All this time we relied on TV to provide for our growing appetite for video, be it music, news, sport, drama, or advertising. Skip forward to 2023, where there is ubiquitous internet bandwidth and mobile phone ownership, at least by the population targeted by Corporations for advertising and brand awareness. Now, like never before, thanks to new technologies like NDI®, Corporations can create and distribute their own professional video content with their own message and their own advertising globally and securely to targeted audiences. They can do this with their own websites and apps, or over the top of other platforms like YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
So, what is different about NDI® and why is this important for Corporations marketing mix?
Up until recently professional video editing was an expensive bespoke art, mainly living in production and TV companies. Along comes YouTube and TikTok and suddenly half the planet can do video editing, but moreover, most of the planet now has access to video. So, for example if 94% of the population of Singapore has a smart phone, and you can create and distribute professional video cheaply, why would you pay TV channels for adverts, at advertising rates that have not changed nor got any cheaper? Why indeed. The leap here, is that using NDI® based technology is not only dramatically cheaper than the technology that broadcasters use, its also much easier to use. Walk into any Broadcast TV studio and there are super expensive production cameras with equally expensive lenses, all connected to wall boxes with SDI coax cables and more power cables etc. This SDI signal chain goes through complex and expensive broadcast baseband equipment like SDI routers and SDI multi viewers and SDI vision mixers. All run by professional production engineers with good broadcast technology skills. No corporation wants to build one of these studios in their office to create corporate content. They don’t even have any broadcast engineers with the skillset to mange or maintain such a studio. But in the NDI® world, its all-standard IT computers, and standard IT networks. Even the cameras can be NDI® so no need for SDI at all, and no need for the corporation to have specialist broadcast engineers. The whole studio can be maintained by existing IT staff with some product specific training. Corporations equipped with low-cost NDI® based TV studios can create and distribute mountains of high-quality video content, be it product training, advertising, even the town hall speech can now be viewed globally, not just in the town hall! With this growing ease of video creation and production, Corporations are not just limited to their new studios, they can patch in remote commentators in remote locations live via Zoom and Teams and created TV-like shows which can be delivered live or viewed later or they can do a 90-degree flip and create content in portrait for TikTokers.
While we at Ideal Systems are a Systems Integrator born out of the broadcast business, we also recognise there is a rapidly growing market for Corporate TV. From our experience of having delivered NDI® based studios for Fintech Corporations, Property Corporations, Computer Hardware Manufacturers, Universities, Churches, Government Departments and even Traditional Broadcasters and National Sports Bodies, we now see that NDI® is not just about agile technology and reducing price, it’s about lowering the overall barrier of entry into the world of professional quality video production and distribution by leveraging new technology to do it faster, simpler and with less people than has ever been possible before. By leveraging NDI® we have now entered the age of Corporate Brand Building 2.0, which is to say, Corporate B2B and B2C Brand Building by Video.
Link to PropNex introducing their new NDI Studio and Production facility.
https://youtu.be/Sjg8aqn9GNo?feature=shared
AUTHOR: FINTAN MC KIERNAN