TRUST, DATA SECURITY & INNOVATION — A BRIEF LOOK AT TOMORROW'S NEWS REPORT
For the fourth consecutive year, Reuters has published its Tomorrow’s News report. The study was conducted over 2 months, December 2019 to January 2020, on over 1,700 Reuters professionals working in various fields such as IT, Finance, Media/Marketing, and Manufacturing amongst others. The insights that it brings on the evolution of online use and news consumption leads us to imagine what strategic levers will rule over the internet tomorrow.
THE VALUE OF TRUST
It is perhaps the most prominent topic that comes out of the survey and yet the most subject to debate. The value of trust, when it comes to news consumption is a key driver for users to select their sources. As a result, 72% of respondents “selected ‘trusted and intelligent content’ as a factor that makes a news brand appealing”. To the contrary, social medias rank last (32% of respondents) when it comes to be the top online source for news.
Traditional media, through their online platforms, still have a clear advantage over pure players : they remain symbols of accuracy, impartiality and trust compared to less organized or professionalized media. It is however important to put this in context of how media consumption shifted from a text-oriented approach to a video-oriented approach over the years.
As video is set to represent 90% of worldwide internet traffic in 2022, video content has become a strategic lever for media brands to reinvent themselves and preempt new territories such as social platforms. New short featured formats have created innovative ways to get information in a snap through trusted sources.
In the meantime, personal video content outbreak and editing technologies available for all have greatly diminished the value of User Generated Content overall : even though very popular for some, UGC related to news consumption is often associated with biased information, untrusted sources and lack of judgement. “64% of people have a more favorable opinion if a news appears on a trusted news site”, Reuters says.
With the amount of time people spend on social media every day, estimated to be around 3 hours in Western countries, it could be thought that news on social media would be taken more seriously. Yet interestingly enough, it is used as a complementary source to other news and not as the primary source of information. It is through social media however that the highest amount of video formatted content is shared, whether it be regular video or live streams.
This brings two important topics regarding providing valuable video content on media platforms : the ability for standard media to provide only and strictly only verified, valuable content and filter everything that would not follow strict brand safety guidelines. On the other hand, the necessity to clean social media from unverified, harmful or even worse dangerous video content, for them to become reliable sources for the audience. To this aim, Reminiz provides such capability and ensures full safety of all distributed content, no matter the medium.
DON’T MESS WITH PERSONAL DATA
The everlasting preoccupation of what happens to our data online is still prominent today. Only 59% of people are willing to share information regarding their internet navigation with companies even though they have trust in them and almost all (94%) wish to have the possibility to delete at all times their personal information that business can use. Although highly understandable, companies need information on their target audience to deliver relevant content, so this presents tremendous challenges they have to face.
These statistics concerning the sharing of information and protection of data go hand in hand with another hot topic these days which is the use of cookies and whether they should be kept or not. Google has already announced that by December 2021, they will completely stop the use of third party cookies and search browsers such as Mozilla Firefox have already stopped using cookies on their platforms. With the protection of data at the forefront of the challenges facing internet and online consumption, media and business will quickly have to find new ways to innovate and adapt.
One way to approach this challenge for media is using a technology able to understand the context of what a viewer’s interest is at a given time, not through the use of cookies to have access to their search history, but rather by understanding what they are currently viewing. Having access to such contextual information and being able to analyze it will help advertisers select targeted ads in a much safer way which would require much less registered data on users and be more compliant with GDPR rules.
There is a lot to bet than the reality will probably be halfway, through a clever mix between qualified personal data and contextual data. But what this survey brings to the table is the necessity for media and brands to rely ever less on users to improve their targeting, if they do not want to risk loosing their audience.
PROVIDING INNOVATIVE WAYS TO TELL STORIES
How can the media industry couple in-depth storytelling and use of artifical intelligence ? At first sight, these two do not quite match together, as artifical intelligence could be seen as a way to deprive any content from human touch. However, the past years have shown that Artifical Intelligence could in many ways serve stories on three main issues.
First, by improving interaction with the audience : automating personnalized content pushes, creating innovative formats, creating white lists and black lists depending on the user or the brand’s requirement, giving the ability to navigate throughout a chaptered content are as many examples where artificial intelligence has proven efficient, both in quality and quantity in comparison to human managed processes.
Second, by bringing transmedia storytelling to a new level. Artificial intelligence allows even more to understand context of appearance and resume content or brand’s presence on various platforms and devices, whenever it is stopped. Over time, media consumption has shifted from a very linear and geo-located frame to fragmented and globalized habits. Automating a contextual approach is the only way to learn from these new habits and adapt content to consumption. To make sure content will adapt to the daily worker watching news in the subway as well as the occasional reader who has 10 minutes to kill on a sunday at home.
Third and not the least important, by finding the right match between content and advertising. 57% of people judge the advertisers they see on a trusted news website can influence their opinion of the news brand. In this sense, a technology having the ability to instantly analyze a content on a video to help advertisers and publishers keep track of who they’re going to be affiliated with in terms of advertisement is crucial.
No wonder then that 86% of respondents are judging artifical intelligence very likely to influence news consumption in the future.
KNOWLEDGE BUILDS TRUST
Throughout this survey, the idea of providing a secured, trusted and personalized context to any information will become more and more essential to the relationship users build with online media. This is even more so important for video, as a single hateful content, fake news video, wrong advertisement or non relevant piece of information, can tarnish the media reputation.
At Reminiz, it’s been a long time since we know for sure that the only way to build a trustful relationship, with a media, with an audience, with a brand is to gather knowledge on content we provide. The ever growing flow of information and especially video content has made purely impossible to rely on human-based processes to ensure this trust. Artificial intelligence in this case, is not a futuristic and meanless word : it represents the ability to rely on technology in order to create knowledge instantly out of any piece of video and take decisions based on shared and common rules on whether a content is likely to be a problem for the audience.
The good balance is still to be found to make sure contextual understanding is used at its best to build trust, secure data privacy and provide innovation to media consumers.
