​For a visionary thinker on the future of media technology, VivaKi chief strategy and innovation officer Rishad Tobaccowala gave a surprisingly stripped down speech at Thursday’s Station Summit Keynote: “Re-Invent, Re-Think and Re-Imagine Ways to Thrive in Today’s Marketing and Media Landscape.” Promising “no slides, no video and no audio beyond the sound of my voice,” Tobaccowala gave a speech small on frills and big on ideas about where local TV and its marketers need to go.

After reassuring the crowd that “TV is a massive growth industry and video is the most powerful way to market… things look very positive,” Tobaccowala presented two principles currently guiding media technology: Digital Leakage and People’s Network.

Digital Leakage, Tobaccowala explained, is grounded in the notion that “things that become digital refuse to acknowledge what has come before.” Amazon leads the digital world in transactions, while Google leads it in discovery, yet both “leak” into transactions and both leak into discovery, in their own ways. It’s important to assess how people “behave in a world of digital leakage,” he said.

If the internet connects people, creating a “people’s network,” then smartphones give that network godlike powers, Tobaccowala said. They can watch whatever they want, whenever they want it, and business models that don’t adjust to this new reality will be left behind. “I don’t give a damn about your business model,” he said. “I’m extremely empowered. Don’t wait for someone to take away your business.”

Tobaccowala encouraged personal reinvention, which he talks about in the clip above, as a way to stay ahead of rapidly changing trends. For local stations he suggested to “get your group together, have some alcohol, and say ‘how do we use our own assets to appeal better to our viewers and advertisers?

“Change sucks,” he said. “The reason it sucks is because when things change you don’t know what you’re doing. You have to relearn everything. [But] the future does not fit in the containers of the past… The future does not fit in the mindsets of the past.”

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