Media streaming and other technologies

Panelists positioned against the light appear in silhouette

At times it can seem that  technology solutions are ahead of the need for them and marketers are hunting around looking for ideas to utilise these new platforms and tools.

The Internet has been the catalyst for major changes in marketing, but for many this adds up to a company web site, email campaigns and dipping into the social network pool at best. There are lots more options for marketing content, often demanding their own share of the budget and some of these have already come and largely gone. Example. QR codes for a while appeared on ads in the trade press, bill-boards and even on products. Some still do. The technology was great for customers to quickly be transported from the media of print to the Internet and given access to masses of further information. And yet could people be bothered to switch on the app on their iPhone? For news feeds RSS was a great idea too and for a while was built into browsers, but outside the techie world is not widely used.  Then there is Blippar - the window to augmented reality. "We turn your phone into a magic lens giving you a whole new, interactive view on the physical world around you using Augmented Reality and Image-Recognition technologies." Podcasts and apps have been around for some time, so too webinars and streaming video. In fact a whole raft of new tools. But in the b-2-b marketing world are many people using them?

Last week one of our clients was participating in a panel discussion from a conference in London which was streamed live to an audience watching on the Internet. It raised some technical issues in my mind and some marketing ones as well. This particular example simply shot in the venue and clearly without the benefit of suitable lighting - participants sat in front of large panoramic windows, so appeared in silhouette. The biggest problem was transmission, but unlike buffering where the action pauses while the download catches up, parts of the presentation were skipped once the feed restarted. Technical issues aside what about the marketing value? Is the subject sufficiently compelling for your target audience to spend 30 minutes or more viewing? It seems to me this calls for more research before spending marketing money on them to discover the benefits they deliver and the value to your clients.