ASIA-PACIFIC BROADCASTING

With this inspiring quote from Mahatma Ghandi, Maria Ressa, senior vice-president, News & Current Affairs Division of ABS-CBN, told participants of the APB ConneXxion Forum 2010 how the Philippine broadcaster harnessed the power of multimedia and multiple platforms to engage its viewers and touch their hearts.

She shared how her TV network’s latest undertaking, the Boto mo, iPatrol Mo: Ako Ang Simula (BMPM) project (translated: Patrol your votes; I am the beginning of change) — a series of media initiatives designed to inspire people to take their votes seriously in the National Elections in the Philippines last month — led to a more level playing field. Using traditional newsgathering methods combined with citizen journalism, the initiatives became a movement that gained momentum of its own.

ABS-CBN spent five years nurturing its citizen journalist community as it believes the future of journalism lies not only with professional journalists, but also with people in the streets. It conducted talks and workshops on how ordinary citizens can make a difference in matters affecting their lives by patrolling their votes.

Step by step, the power and benefits of good citizen journalists became apparent, astounding the broadcaster on how quickly and enthusiastically large numbers of its audiences (both local and international) embraced such platforms as SMS, Twitter and Facebook, plus blogs and microsites on the Internet, contributed instant reports, opinions and videos of wrong-doings by crooked politicians during the National Elections process.

Ressa explained that the broadcaster used traditional media such as the ‘megaphone’ and the new media as the means to aggre-gate opinions.

“Every new technological advancement that our companies do, actually translate to changing the way we think. And if we change the way we think, we are actually changing reality,” she said.

“If you can harness every single person to move in a single direction, then slowly everyone should get to the tipping point. It’s the same organisational change that we use at ABS-CBN.”

And as if to underscore the power of new media, Gabriele di Piazza, Microsoft’s managing director for Media & Entertainment Business Communications Sector, shared how the pace of innovation and technology is creating an impact. He said: “We’re in a new world of marketing where understanding consumer behaviour and their experiences with devices, the importance they attached to these, and the content they choose to see, listen, interact with as well as share with others is critical to marketing investments and ROI.”

Di Piazza pointed out that achieving cross-media marketing strategy has never been more exciting and yet so challenging when targeting specific and highly desirable audiences.

According to Stephen Farrugia, technology director for Broadcast Australia, there are similar strategies of audience engagement being used by Australian broadcasters as well, and that in order to remain relevant, broadcasters in general need to deliver content in an effective and timely manner.

Noel Matthews of Ericsson, on the other hand, stressed that “TV today is all about experiencing, and that TV still has a great future as long as broadcasters and other content providers deliver what customers want, when they want it, and in whatever platform”.

He also shared some very interesting results of Ericsson Consumerlabs 2010 survey on consumers’ TV/video behaviour and consumption. (A copy of it will be available upon request.)

Finally, Stan Moote, Harris’ vice-president, corporate development, CTO Group, said technology providers can help broadcasters such as ABS-CBN hurdle challenges, for example, verifying information being sent via SMS or e-mails by using solutions with geo-tagging like Harris’ own Newsfish solution.

The Q&A session that followed yielded some very interesting questions from the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union, Indonesia and Singapore.
Full report in the July edition of APB.

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