Last week was the new/upfronts and the big news came from us via Magna and the announcement of a shift of $250M video spend to YouTube. A good signal to the marketplace that video has changed. Outside of our own news, there was an interesting undercurrent trend around “live” video – coming from Hulu, BuzzFeed and some rumors YouTube will offer a live service. If you think of this also in context of the twitter NFL deal and the more recently the Snapchat Olympics deal we could be starting to enter the era of OTT plays being more live TV-like vs on-demand. This week I also had Google highlight what content was live in a search result – so the trend feels like it’s going to hit broadly across the digital landscape. Clearly sporting and other event content rights holders will benefit when digital moves to live but it’s also going to put more pressure on linear TV.
Most clients have Facebook Brand Pages, well now it’s expected that Instagram is going to offer the same product. Not officially available yet, Instagram has confirmed on a number of occasions that the product is being tested. Business related instagram accounts will also offer contact and directions information. So if you have a client who is heavily into Instagram, this is one of those things to start thinking about now so when the product arrives you can tweak your media strategy accordingly.
Joshua