Tele 'cross the Mersey – T360 Liverpool captures the zeitgeist

Timing is everything. Just as we gear up for Telemedia360 in Liverpool on 21 October – where the media and telemedia industries come together to look at how to monetise cross-platform content and services – a flurry of activity out there in ‘the real world’ has shown that the timing of this show couldn’t really be any better.

Today the Internet Advertising Bureau has announced that, in the UK at least, online advertising has out stripped spend on TV advertising for the first time in the first half of 2009. This marks a momentous shift in the old world order and chimes very nicely with the appearance at T360 of Jon Mew, IAB’s head of mobile, who will be talking delegates through how mobile fits into this model.

At the same time, the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) in the US has also published a study that finds that its US members in the print and online media industries are all desperate to take their brands mobile in a bid to increase revenues, reach, eyeballs and advertising. Again T360 features a raft of publishers that have all turned to mobile in one way or another to boost what they do.

The Financial Times will be on hand to demonstrate how it has used downloadable apps to drive people to pay for subscriptions to its website – the FT being the only publisher to charge for online access from day one, and so they are quite rightly, in the pink – while Future Publishing and Piri will also be there, speaking about how Piri helped Future use mobile to target third party adverts at its readers through mobile.

Bauer Media – the leading UK lifestyle magazine publishers – will also be joining in the debates at T360, with digital director Paul Wright, joining a distinguished panel that also includes leading UK newspaper group Trinity Mirror to look at how the print media has embraced online and mobile channels to expand from being simply a newspaper to being a multimedia set of channels – better serving readers and advertisers alike.

The other interesting development in the past few weeks that again chimes with what T360 is looking to do is explore how micro-billing – in fact all kinds of non-operator billing – are really the key to making media services succeed in their goal of monetising these new channels. The launch this week of Coinz from Charge2 is a case in point.

Debuting at T360 next month, Coinz provides online & digital businesses trading within the new media sector with a viable and effective payment solution to charge the new generation of micro-consumers for content, services or products. Any Coinz spent within the digital arena are able to be redeemed or exchanged by the respective Merchants for monthly revenue out-payments.

A Coinz user is provided with an individual secure account that can be dynamically charged using a variety of standard and widely acceptable payment methods such as credit/debit card, bank transfer, mobile recharge or PRS mechanisms. The Account converts and stores the value of money into Coinz and provides the user with a simple, consistent, secure and anonymous user experience across a multitude of digital businesses.

News and media are being consumed differently today and publishers are struggling with a vast reduction in circulation figures and the conversion of their readers to an online, payment based alternative. With circulation & advertising revenue dramatically falling in the commercial sectors and an increased number of broadcasters offering online catch up TV, the demand for charging micro-payments is being heavily supported within the industry. The boom of “Tube” style websites has also contributed to the trend to micro-consume content and has been extremely detrimental to businesses trying to gain equivalent revenue through pay-as-you-go and subscription based services. Coinz aim is to facilitate the “Billing of the Un-billable” by bridging the revenue gap between the online Premium and Free market sectors, which to date have so far remained elusive or at best difficult to capture.

Similarly, other alternative billing tools are also coming to the fore in the telemedia world, circumventing the old skool PRS and PSMS routes and opting instead for innovative ways to use credit and debit cards, and even cash, through the online and mobile channels.

Core Telecom, for example, will be at T360 exploring the role of its unique per minute credit card billing tools, which offer the ease of PRS, but without having to use PRS. Txttrans will also be on hand to discuss how it uses text in innovative ways to deliver flexible and interesting billing solutions.

Of course, there is far more than just these zeitgeist-grabbing topics at T360 on 21 October, but I just wanted to illustrate just how topical what this event is looking to do actually is. There are some major issues out there within the media – not least how to make enough money to keep going. Telemedia offers the channels, the billing and the track record to help them deliver this. Make sure you are there.

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