This week, I'll be moderating a roundtable of television marketing leaders at Digital Media Wire's DMW Video Future of Television event in NYC, featuring speakers: Matthew Barnhill, EVP, Corporate Market Research,BET Networks; Linda Schupack, EVP, Marketing, AMC Networks; and Don Buckley, EVP, Program Marketing & Digital Services, Showtime.
Below are the questions I sent to them in advance. What else would you want to ask them? Which questions are most important to you? I'll aim to share some of the answers here after.
- Say you're giving a keynote talk on the future of television. What's your 30-60 second synopsis of the talk, or an elevator pitch for what that future will be?
- Depending on where those answers net out, I may do follow-ups such as what excites you most about the future of TV, or what concerns you the most?
- Who do you see as your main competitors now? Who or what are you competing with when it comes to your consumers' time and advertisers' budgets?
- Jeff Zucker coined the "analog dollars for digital pennies" term in 2008. Then he went up to dimes, and the most recent version I can find is his reference to "a little north of quarters" this summer. Where do you see this now? And where is mobile for you on this spectrum?
- How holistically do you plan marketing now? How much do you integrate vs separate plans for digital and traditional. And within digital, do you have specialists handling search, social, mobile, etc? To what extent do you rely on internal specialists and specialist agencies, vs generalists? How is this changing?
- I'm sure the Kevin Spacey talk will have been referenced by now, and 90%+ of the audience will have seen it.This is one panel that needs to address it. What do you think of the Spacey thesis?
- I know we're avoiding outright shilling, but I can allow a little wiggle room, since there are so many fans of your networks and programs here. What's one example of how your network is marketing itself or one of its programs that indicates something about the future of TV?
- Lightning round: I'll name a few technologies/products out there right now. How big an impact do you think this will play on the future of TV for the next 1-3 years? Just answer "low," "medium," or "high" for each of these: Netflix, YouTube, Google's Chromecast, Roku, Aereo, Xbox, Apple TV as it stands now, the rumored Apple television.
