On October 2, Allison Rube, public relations major, class of 2013, visited Newhouse and shared insight into her role at Viacom in digital, social and television advertising for MTV. I am glad to have attended this event and would like to share some of my views here.
In her presentation, Allison used several slides of graphics to display data and it reminded me of my own presentation on last week about pr practitioners should learn how to use visual contents to attract targeted audience. Data visualization is a trend for not only pr or marketing professionals but also workers in other fields.
Another conclusion that I could draw is that money talk and that is why marketing and pr department always work together to achieve one goal: bringing in revenue. Just as what we did in mimic social, in the end, only income matters the most.
One key takeaway from the presentation is that Allison said, “consumers reshape the media landscape” that I am in line with. According to the Wall Street Journal, more than 1 million consumers canceled their cable-TV or satellite subscriptions in the third quarter of 2018. 2018 also witnessed that the five biggest U.S. pay-TV providers saw their traditional subscriptions shrink 4.2%. 70.3% of the total U.S. population uses another digital device while watching TV. Nielsen data suggests that prime-time television usage among 18- to 49-year-old declined by 11% in the current TV season. As millennials are becoming the leading consumer group in the states, no wonder markets are keeping an eye on their consumption behaviors.
For social media platform, Allison talked about the partnership between Viacom and Facebook. The cooperation between these two is so obvious that Viacom has contents while Facebook has distribution platform. With the advantage of all the data that Facebook have, brands could create a deeper and more concise audience personas to make sure all contents are delivered to targeted audience.
Allision used “The Exclusivity Factor” to describe Facebook platform, it reminded me of “social currency” in Dr. Luttrell’s book. People are more likely to share something “unique” that is “shareable”, which means companies have to come up with appealing contents to draw attention. #LikeAGirl is a legendary campaign with commercials run for several years and it hits on all women and girls to the point, which also resonated one factor behind shareable contents: brands and causes we care about.
But Facebook is facing backlashes from the public and governments about data concerns, this is also an alarm for pr and marketing professionals. Currently misinformation spreads through election campaigns are on the main stage, however there are growing concerns about abusement of consumers’ data. What is the right thing to do and what is our stand as a company? There are a lot of ethical questions that we have to ponder upon. The catch there is still some grey area and I would like to say regulations step in as soon as possible.
Allison also shared an interesting story. She had to delete or block some part of the show because the character was saying something like, “get a Uber”, and Uber is not doing commercials on MTV. She and her team had tried to reach to Uber for potential partnership but that didn’t go through. Thus she had to blur Uber’s name because nowadays no one would say “get a taxi”.
It is a wonderful perspective into the pr world and as I said to Briana, my classmate, I didn’t even notice that one hour passed.
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