Publicis Groupe's Denuo unit is a new strategic initiative designed to anticipate and exploit the rapidly changing digital, interactive and mobile communication environment. Denuo is a standalone business but not based on any pre-existing industry model. Denuo functions as a strategic consultant, an inventor of solutions and as an investor in partnerships. The company is also venturing with a variety of startups including Brightcove, an open Internet TV service, and Shadow TV, a streaming video service that provides access to live and archived television content via the web. Denuom meaning "afresh," "anew" in Latin, is led by Rishad and has offices in Chicago and NYC.
Yesterday, we asked about the future of ROI measurement (8/31/06 TVBR #170).
In 2009, analog TV spectrum will be surrendered. How might this change things?
Increasingly what we're finding is that in the past, distribution used to be a choke hold. If you thought about it companies basically got born because of location or distribution advantages. What has begun to happen, because of a combination of broadband and wireless and the Internet, the advantages of distribution have basically fallen a lot. You needed distribution to get audiences. Now you can get audiences without distribution.
So you would have space and space there would be local there would be national, even space all the way to the 30-second ad and the print ad. Now what is increasingly happening in the new world, space and time is not following the rules of space and time. Where all of a sudden time is being shifted and space is being shifted. What's happening is either you can shift not only your programming from one time of day to another, but you can basically shift them from device to device with things like Sling Box and Akimbo and Orb Networks. You can also shift them from country to country. So the whole idea of the boundaries of geography, the boundaries of distribution, the boundaries of time are collapsing so 2009 is just another indicator of what probably began 10-12 years ago and which has now reached sort of a rather large emphasis.
In our March interview with Jack Klues, he mentioned a project of yours that was like MRI reverse engineering. Tell us more.
If you think about MRI they basically say the people who use your product what media do they use? So you use product behavior as an important way of doing things. The insight we basically had was that somebody either in an on demand world (because of the way you utilize media when everything becomes itemized-you can pick programs, websites, streaming channels). Then in effect if I could know your media behavior down to the program level, it tells me more about your interests and passions then even your product behavior. So in effect what basically happens is the best way to target media will be through media behavior.
What areas are you concentrating the most effort right now for your clients?
I think there are three areas. The first is providing products and services and ideas so that people can say we make tangible solutions that can go to market. Word of mouth, gaming are a couple of areas. The other is we are spending a lot of our time identifying new opportunities and new companies and new types of technologies, which allow our clients to begin to engage in this new world of what we call people rather than consumers.
Then the third area is we're trying to simplify the world because what we found is that clients are being often left with huge books and decks and plots and plans but no one says, "Okay here's the two or three things you should focus on and here's what needs to get done let's go do it."
The overall theme it's about people not consumers. When you think about consumers you think about two problems. One is you think about it from a brand perspective. A person is much broaderthan a consumer of a brand. The other is by consumer you're thinking of people in the old way that we would just consume content or consume media. Today many of us consume as well as we retransmit.
We say people are gods or people are goddesses because it's about people, which is broader in all the power that you and I have with all the new technologies. We almost have goddess or god-like power.
