The old school definition says that media companies are: "audience aggregators that make money by selling advertising to third parties who want to reach those audiences".
That definitely describes newspapers, magazines, radio stations and TV networks - they create content to attract audiences of a certain type, then sell space to advertisers who want access to those audiences. But does that describe your venue? With a shift in thinking, and a boost from Venue Networking, it could: You just might be a media company.
Media Company = Audience + Media + Advertising
You could look at every venue as an "audience aggregator". People gather at venues. If you're a venue operator, you already have an audience. Odds are you know your audience well. You know what brings them in and what keeps them coming back. For that select group, you likely have deep insight into what sort of screen content would hold their interest.
For the aspiring media mogul, up until now the "media" part of the equation was a very high bar to pass. Even with a ready-made audience and great ideas about what content would grab the attention of that audience, finding, creating, producing, scheduling and presenting it all in a consumable format has been well beyond the means of most. That was then. Take a look at ScreenScape and the last five years of Internet evolution and make your own evaluation of whether publishing media is still the hard part.
The "selling advertising" part of the equation has also been mostly unrealistic up to now. Your venue might have a fantastic audience, of a demographic highly desirable to certain advertisers. You might have fantastic content that keeps attention glued to your screens. The problem is (was), at any given time your audience is only 50 members strong. Needless to say, not a sufficient starting point for the mega brand ad campaign pitch. But if you roll your venue audience up with 100 other venues of a similar persuasion... things start getting attractive. What would a media planner pay for easy access to thousands of highly targeted well timed ad impressions, at your venue and others like it?
If you can group the displays of those 100 venues to be sold as a single venue network, and perhaps throw in an ad broker who knows the niche inside and out, suddenly there's some real potential for "third parties" and their advertising. Those 100 venues become 100 small media companies, creating and sharing their own content for their own audiences, but each taking a share of potentially lucrative ad campaigns.
That's the potential that ScreenScape is creating.
Are you a media company? You could be...
