GLOSSARY OF NEW MEDIA

There is a perceived lack of common understanding around what opportunities there are to market on New Media types, and how they can best be used. In collaboration with IAB SEA+India’s New Media Working Group, we strive to provide consistent definitions which are agnostic and incorporate views from across the industry.

WHY THIS DOCUMENT?

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)

WHAT IS ‘NEW MEDIA’?

The New Media on which this glossary focuses are new media for advertising which have become available as channels for advertising and will also consider emerging technologies that are allowing brands to reach consumers in new ways. Some of the media types covered may not strictly be new, but the use of new technology or data means that there are new opportunities to use them as drivers of engagement and loyalty.

AI means creating machines or processes which are able to think and react in an intelligent manner, i.e. take the place of humans. However, as it is automated, AI is able to do this at a much more rapid pace when compared to humans, creating the possibility for far more efficiency.

AI can also be built and/or programmed to learn, which is why the term is often conflated with the concept of ‘machine learning’. Machine learning is a specific application of AI which allows an algorithm to improve and react based on parsing large amounts of data. An algorithm is a set of rules specifying how to solve a group of problems.

In digital advertising, AI has a few use cases. It can be used to identify patterns of speech, faces, behaviours, and react accordingly. This enables the use of voice assistants and augmented reality (AR), for example. It can also make use of previous data-sets to predict and analyse what consumers will find interesting and engaging, which allows more specific personalisation.

AI is itself not a ‘New Medium’ - but it is technology which continuously evolves and underpins a lot of New Media.

AUGMENTED REALITY (AR)

AR uses technology to alter the real world through virtual means. This can be done in a number of ways, but the most common application is to make use of smartphone applications to visually project items onto the camera’s viewfinder. This can be done for entertainment purposes to change people’s appearance, through camera filters, or to provide information in a unique way through projecting images through the camera’s viewfinder.

Due to its nature there are many potential applications of this technology. As smartphones are now commonplace in most parts of the world, including in Southeast Asia and India, there is ample infrastructure in place to make use of it in creative campaigns.

CONNECTED TV (CTV)

CTV is a broad term used to define television sets which are connected to the internet - therefore it includes Smart TVs, devices like Chromecasts and Apple TVs, gaming consoles and more. There are many different ways for people to connect to their television set to the internet, and as a result there is a large market already available.

Within the CTV space there are many different services for displaying video, which come with different funding models. The commonly known video streaming services are subscription based (i.e. Netflix, Amazon Prime), but there are also ad-funded services available in Southeast Asia, like iflix, Viu, and HOOQ. A key challenge for CTV is the lack of consensus on a measurement framework, which makes it hard to have a consistent understanding of effectiveness.

DIGITAL AUDIO

Digital audio broadly refers to the consumption of different types of audio content via digital platforms. This predominantly consists of music streaming in Asia Pacific, but podcasting has seen growth in mature markets in the region. The main providers of digital audio content in the region include global players like Apple Music and Spotify, but there are also regional players like TenCent’s JOOX, and Taiwanese KKBox. There are also more opportunities to target users using programmatic audio advertising, with platforms like Rubicon Project and Google’s DBM launching buying and selling capabilities in the region.

DIGITAL OUT-OF-HOME (DOOH)

DOOH advertising consists of any screens outside of a traditional residential or office environment, often consisting of billboards and large screens in public areas like shopping malls, transport hubs and on the roadside. It is sometimes also referred to as ‘outdoor advertising’ as a result. As cities become more connected, more DOOH placements are connected to the internet and ads on these placements can be sold programmatically.

Asia Pacific is the region which has the largest market for OOH advertising, and more companies are providing capabilities to buy DOOH inventory programmatically here. Attribution can be a bit challenging, but more adtech platforms are offering capabilities for this.

VOICE

Voice advertising is driven through the use of both smartphones and smart speakers and their respective voice assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, and Microsoft’s Cortana. In China, Baidu’s DuerOS voice assistant technology has become the dominant voice assistant in 2019.

Voice advertising is heavily built on the use of AI to both recognise queries and commands, as well as interacting with users. While an interesting new channel for advertising, this currently relies on widespread adoption of these voice assistant technologies.

A barrier in this region for the proliferation of voice is that currently infrastructure is mostly built on the English language, meaning that in many Asian countries the availability of voice as an advertising channel is limited due to language barriers and accent barriers.

Many brands are focusing on building voice capabilities as opposed to actually delivering voice led campaigns in order to future proof and be ready for when voice search campaigns become more widely adopted and activated. Having the methodologies, business processes and expertise either in-house or with their respective agencies means they can be ready to deliver when the adoption curve reaches a tipping point.

VIRTUAL REALITY (VR)

Virtual reality is a simulated experience, which is intended to immerse the viewer into a virtual environment. Most commonly, the viewer is shown images through a screen placed inside a headset which moves along to the movement of the viewer’s head. This way, it appears that they are inside of a virtual world.

Primarily, it functions as a tool for entertainment, i.e. through VR games. Logically, it seems like an interesting medium for advertisers as it implies full immersion of viewers into the creative. The requirement of a headset limits scalability, however, and despite cheap cardboard versions being available, the more immersive VR experiences require expensive headsets.

Because of this, there have only been limited successful applications to marketing campaigns, and it is still rather experimental, similar to AR but with smaller potential scale.

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