CES: This Year, It's The Consumer Experience Show

FROM: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2012/01/07/ces-this-year-its-the-consumer-experience-show/

The 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show gets off to an unofficial start Sunday with some preliminary press events, and continues for nearly a week. CES as per usual will be a hotbed of gadget announcements – tablets, smartphones, PCs, TVs will be unveiled by the gazillion. But in some ways, the show’s name is something of a misnomer.

Just ask Steve Hasker, president for product leadership at Nielsen, where he overseas the company’s media measurement products.

“CES has outgrown its name,” Hasker said in an interview with FORBES last week. “Rather than being a conference on consumer appliances, it’s become a show about consumer experience..” His basic thesis: the success of any particular device is predicated on the experience provides through apps and contents rather than device features.

In other words, you can’t just produce technically astonishing devices: success or failure depends on giving consumers the ability to watch great content and run useful applications.

Social integration

Steve Hasker: It's about the experience.

Hasker thinks the integration of social media into consumer device experiences could be the single biggest trend at CES 2012. He sees social media as providing both disruption and compliment to audio and video content. Facebook, Twitter, Weibo, Orkut – all in various ways are pushing the social media experience into the video and audio content sector. In some ways, he says, the social sites stand to disrupt the profit pools available to the content providers.

“We prefer to choose our audio and video based on what our friends are recommending, rather than that which is pushed on us or we randomly discover ourselves,” he contends. With 800 million people on Facebook alone, and millions more on other social sites, he says, there’s a resource in place to allow people to get recommendations from peers “on a massive scale.”

Hasker’s view is that all of this will end up being good news for owners of premium content. “We’d argue that we are in the golden age of content,” he says. “There’s been an explosion of devices and viewing occasions.” He notes that the number of hours people spend watching video content is increasing – and that socially enabling content will further the trend.

And he thinks that there will be good alternatives for content owners to monetize their stuff. He expects a range of business models to emerge. “Major markets and CMOs have woken up to social media,” he says. “You can see that in Facebook’s advertising numbers. But also increasingly iTunes has taught us to seamlessly pay for content we like.”

Hasker is a little more bullish on the emergence of a la carte models over the all-you-can-eat approached offered by subscription services like Netflix. In the case of Netflix, he says, there are “a relatively small number of people consuming a lot of the content.”

Social-local-mobile
Hasker is a believer not just in the social media, but also in the two other hot trends of the moment in online content: local and mobile.

On the local front, the Nielsen exec thinks that local broadcasters should have a “buoyant” advertising year in 2012 thanks to the upcoming general elections. But he notes that TV stations have longer-term concerns on the trajectory of their businesses over time. He notes that there are host of startups attacking some aspect of the local media market, in some cases taking shares from the Yellow Pages and classified ad markets, in others pecking away at the valuable local TV ad market.

“There is a tremendous battle for the $150 billion in local media spend,” he writes. And Hasker thinks that a good part of that will end up in the mobile market.

The logic seems inescapable: if you’re trying to choose a restaurant or bar, or retailer, or pharmacy, there’s a pretty good chance that you will be searching on a mobile device. He sees a market for local and mobile services coming together. “Local TV guys will be able fund some interesting this year in mobile,” Hasker predicts. On the other hand, he says, the local advertising market will increasingly be targeted by Groupon and other new companies targeting local commerce and advertising.

Getting interactive

TV stations, he adds, need to find ways to get mobile – and to get interactive. Nielsen, he notes, offers a service called Media Sync which runs on mobile devices, identifies programming that consumers are watching, and providers additional content. Essentially, Media Sync makes your mobile device “content aware.”

Hasker also says the TV stations need to find a way get mobile – among other things, he says some broadcasters are investing in technology that will easily allow mobile devices to receive over-the-air TV signals.

“We’ve seen a number of clients investing in that technology,” he says.

Overall, he says, local television needs to adopt new technology to stay relevant. “It’s about getting mobile, enriching the experience in the home, and getting interactive,” he says. “Many local TV stations have real equity around news and sports. And they have not really exploited that to make themselves more relevant in the consumer’s life.”