I added this web page to the MetaTV Intranet to update all of the new employees who were curious about our marketing strategy
Background
Interactive television (iTV) is being widely enabled by Cable and Satellite operators who are seeking to add interactivity such as access to information services, play along capabilities, commerce and advertising capabilities to digital tv programming that consumers can eventually access with a simple click of their remote control. Also particularly interested in iTV are TV programmers (such as major TV networks like ESPN, DIY etc), Advertisers (such as Ford/J.Walter Thompson) and existing eBusinesses (such as Etrade etc). The market for technology that supports iTV is an emerging business-to-business market.
MetaTV was established in March 1999 to develop software that formed a platform that would enable the deployment and management of iTV applications, services and content. In June 2000, the company began to make their presence felt through a relentless marketing campaign that has so far yielded significant results as measured by customer acquisition and satisfaction, press and analyst coverage, overall industry brand awareness delivered under cost and budget. The campaign continues to this day and in an ongoing effort to strengthen our brand leadership.
Key Milestones and Campaign Strategy
From the start, we determined that we wanted one continuous relentless campaign rather than several smaller disparate ones. Our goal was to rise above the noise being generated by several larger, better-funded competitors and industry players to establish a dominant market position and mind share within the fairly expansive category of iTV technology.
We began by first establishing a company brand identity and personality which we would permeate into every aspect of our business
o Our employees goals and objectives
o Our internal and external collateral and materials
o Our outbound marketing press and analyst positioning
The company brand identity was derived from understanding the core values of the people who had founded and joined the company at the time (30 in all) as well as the requirements, needs and attitudes of our potential customers. Through surveys and several internal exercises we established our 3 key brand traits
o Innovate – Represents the technology we produce as being unique in the industry and how innovation was the back bone of our culture and our drive to become industry leaders
o Adapt – Represents again how our technology is adaptable to any environment. One of our core strengths is the ability to run our applications on any platform regardless of hardware or middleware. It also represents our view of all challenges as opportunities and has enabled us to continue to turn difficult situations into overwhelming successes in all aspects of our business to date.
o Amaze – Represents an attitude to “always exceed expectations” at MetaTV whereby we strive everyday to amaze our customers, partners and ourselves with the quality, efficiency and dedication of our work ethic.
In addition to the core traits, we fostered a “play fair” attitude whereby we treated all of our competitors with respect, always accentuating the positive both internally and externally.
The main thrust of Innovate. Adapt. Amaze. (IAA) was to allow us to brand by reputation, execution and consistent image building without the need to spend dollars on advertising (to date the company has spent only $1000 dollars (for a single ad) on paper, web or electronic advertising).
IAA is embossed on the back of every MetaTV employee’s business card and we constantly remind each other through all communications how our activities support our premise and goals.
From IAA we began to produce the collateral and communications materials that would represent our brand and image including:
o Datasheets and case studies and a company brochure with a common base line design theme of blue with our logo bug being the center piece of a TV screen that would represent the various iTV applications that could be produced for each customer segment
o Custom MetaTV font to emphasize visual recognition of MetaTV documents, proposals and collateral.
o A clear and concise website that did not overwhelm the visitor with a lot of flash elements. Sufficient to demonstrate the quality and robustness of a technology company but not animation for animation’s sake. We also were very careful to focus on traditional HTML designs so as to best exploit our web search engine strategy
o A tradeshow booth that continued our themes to represent us at our major industry tradeshows
o Giveaways that represented IAA – we made a conscious effort not to provide mass giveaway items and gimmicks such as bouncing rubber balls at tradeshows but to focus on high-end items for our qualified customers. Premium items such as an “atomic clock” and multi-function adaptive pen were big hits with the key decision makers of our customers and partners.
o Video elements in the form of DVDs which could demonstrate the power of our applications platform and to simulate the end-consumer experience
o A targeted push to proactively influence the press and analysts of the traditional cable and satellite space. Focusing on 10 specific editors and writers with an objective of garnering increasing coverage proportional to the evolution of our technology and company messaging
Selected sub campaigns and measured results:
1. Owning the TV Portal Category within iTV to cut through the noise
As previously mentioned, when MetaTV first entered the iTV space there was a lot of noise. The excitement about this new emerging industry was competing with a pre-existing negative stigma associated with some notable prior failed attempts at iTV. As a consequence, MetaTV’s marketing and brand building task not only involved establishing a reputation among partners and customers, but also convincing the press that there were viable business models and demand from various customer segments for specific kinds of iTV offerings. The landscape consisted of significant competition consisting of numerous well-funded start-up as well as some public companies who had raised significant capital in the markets. There were middleware providers such as companies like Liberate, Microsoft and OpenTV who would be great partners as well as set-top box manufacturers such as Scientific Atlanta and Motorola.
Given all of this, we decided to position MetaTV to capture a pragmatic segment of the market looking to deploy what was widely known as “portals”. i.e. the AOL model. To the skeptics in the press, this was one concept that had been somewhat validated in the Internet model (note that this was in 1999/early 2000 pre-dotcom implosion) as well as validated by deployments in Europe. By reasoning that a simple, functional portal would form the core of a service that would enable a cable or satellite operator to extend their branding, MetaTV positioned our technology to articulate the value of how we could address the significant cost and risk associated with developing and maintaining a portal. Our product line naming and outbound marketing messages focused on portals (With products such as Portal Designer, Portal Server and the Universal Portal Platform).
Our relentless branding allowed us to “own” the portal category. As such we were able to turn back all competitors that attempted to “enter our space”. Even though our technology platform was applicable and could support all kinds of applications, not just portals, our campaign around the specific concept of a TV portal has put MetaTV in a leadership position.
The result of our efforts is that to date, MetaTV has managed to secure Comcast/AT&T Broadband, Cox Communications (two of the three largest cable operators in North America) as both investors and customers.
When the noise has died down, we transitioned the messaging to remove the portal terminology to accentuate our overall platform capabilities. We renamed our entire product line to remove “portal” from the product branding (e.g. Portal Designer became Application Designer, Portal Server became Application Server and the Universal Portal Platform simply became The MetaTV Platform). This pre-planned product-naming shift was accomplished in less than 30 days allowing MetaTV to position the move as part of our strategic product evolution to support the growing needs of our customers and partners.
2. Proactively influencing press and analysts
To date, MetaTV has successfully developed relationships with all of the major analysts that cover iTV (Forrester, Jupiter, Gartner, Yankee). In addition, MetaTV has been featured in over 50+ magazines, newspaper articles and video/TV programs. http://www.metatv.com/news/inthenews.htm
Prior to our marketing campaign, MetaTV had participated in two industry panels. Since June 2000, MetaTV has been invited to and has presented at over 40+ keynotes and panels at major industry events.
3. Achieving leadership status in the web search engine mindshare category
We analyzed the search criteria of all of the major search engine platforms and determined that the search terms “Interactive TV” gave very fragmented results. In addition, it appeared that most companies were paying for online advertising and sponsorship placement around these search terms. We decided that once again to cut through the noise we would work our campaign to make our website search engine friendly along the terms “Interactive Television” (completely spelt out) while we continued to make incremental progress on the search terms “Interactive TV”.
By spending zero dollars on sponsoring links, we focused on meta-tagging and architecting our web content and layouts to be search engine friendly.
To date we have achieved the following gratifying results (note that positioning may change as the search engines recalibrate but these were the results as of 3/25/02):
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&q=Interactive+television
MetaTV appears on the first page of the most popular search engine on the web and ahead of most of the leading larger iTV technology players
http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Business_to_Business/Entertainment_and_Media_Production/Television/Interactive/
MetaTV appears in the “most popular” category on Yahoo
http://srch.excite.com/d/search/p/excite/;$sessionid$2ORTQXAABPYFSCQCBGMAPUQ?c=web&qcat=web&s=interactive+television&Partner=infospace_excite_search&_requestid=2223921
MetaTV appears as #5 on the list – again ahead of any other iTV company
http://www.altavista.com/sites/search/web?q=interactive+television&pg=q&kl=XX
MetaTV appears as #6 on the list – no other iTV company makes the first page
http://www.ask.com/main/askjeeves.asp?ask=interactive+television&o=0
MetaTV appears as #1 on the non-sponsored companies ahead of Liberate, OpenTV (who are public companies)
4. The MetaTV fact cards (or how anyone can explain MetaTV’s value proposition in 2 minutes)
As part of our continuing efforts to have everyone at MetaTV be marketers and for anyone outside of the company to be able to do our “value proposition” pitch, we created a deck of MetaTV fact cards that outlined our basic value proposition as well as the benefits and our target customer segments.
These cards (see attached) enabled anyone to explain the core values and benefits of MetaTV as well as how we could provide the technology to enable iTV applications for interested customer groups. The cards were meant to also be give-aways at trade shows (again instead of bouncing rubber balls) and eventually be collectable items. Small and sturdy, they could easily be placed in a shirt pocket and produced to explain MetaTV by not only our employees, sales and marketing folks, but also leave behinds for press, analysts and even partners and customers. A quick reminder of a 2 minute pitch that would be delivered by a MetaTV employee. The cards were also similar in shape and style to “Tarot cards” since we knew that many of our major cable shows were often held in New Orleans.
Together with the cards, we created a “discovery tour” on our web site that matched the look and feel of the cards
http://www.metatv.com/solutions/tours.htm
At trade shows, as we gave out the cards and collected business cards and e-mails, we would scan the e-mail addresses into an e-mail list in which that same evening we would send out to attendees. The e-mail would thank them for visiting the booth as well as point them in the direction of the web site where the tours would provide more information. This accentuated our reputation as a technology company and allowed us to achieve “amazing” results through results and efforts that “amazed”. We continue to add to the cards with architectural and technical fact cards forming an end-to-end series which everyone can use as a quick reference guide to our value proposition and technology.
Finally if you are interested in our color pallet and style guide you can view the PDF here
That’s it! If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to come chat with me. Rest assured MetaTV marketing is in good hands. I have a great team and they all realize the importance of our efforts. We won’t let you down.
Ramon Chen
VP Worldwide Marketing
MetaTV