Proposal to evolve MetaTV’s positioning and brand

I drafted this proposal which ultimately led to agreement among the Executives around how we executed on our 2002 strategy and present ed to the team at the Global Summit offsite.

First there were Portals …

When MetaTV entered the interactive television space there was a lot of noise in the industry. There was also a lot of negative stigma associated with iTV because of the failures prior (FSN in Orlando etc). 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.

Competitors such as Respond, Wink etc were participating in the advertising space as well as betting on the higher end boxes such as the DCT5000. There were also companies such as ICTV, WorldGate who were potential competitors but also possibly good partners.

MetaTV’s business model at the time was predicated on capturing 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 such as BskyB in the U.K. By reasoning that a simple, functional portal would form the core of a service that would enable a netop to extend their branding and then positioning our technology to articulate the value of how we could address the significant cost and risk associated with developing and maintaining a portal, MetaTV was able to capture significant attention and mind share, building a strong reputation quickly.

Our initial product line naming and company branding aligned with differentiating MetaTV from other players and allowing us to “own” the portal category. Other players such as AccelerateTV (acquired by Respond), Excite@Home, MSNTV, InfoSpace etc all have attempted to enter our space. None to date have been successful and we have beat off many competitors in head-to-head deals (e.g. InnMedia – Excite@home)

Through proven execution, good partnering and proactively influencing analysts and press, MetaTV managed to established what could be considered a “gorilla” position in the iTV portal segment. MetaTV was able to achieve this through a number of key trials and partnerships notably the Liberate Variety Pack relationship and sole provider status. Although MetaTV could not claim any “deployments”, we piggy-backed off the public reputation of Liberate and their position in the iTV space and gained mind share through proven execution, delivering on Portals containing branded content. By out executing the competition in this regard and making good on our messaging to the press and analysts, we managed to vault ourselves into an iTV industry leadership position with minimal marketing spend.

Portal good, Portal bad …

A drawback of our portal positioning was that it appealed to the basic needs of the network operators, a main customer group of MetaTV but did not speak well towards non-eBusiness content providers such as TV networks who viewed portals as being associated with non-programming. This was a particularly tricky issue (compounded by the diverse goals of sales and business development and their associated objectives and rev numbers) since the view point was from both parties that the other should be paying for elements of our technology. Neither group disagreed that MetaTV did add value and we were able to successfully bring content providers and netops together, something that no other company in this space has achieved.

In a divergent market space, it is very difficult if not impossible for a small company such as MetaTV to market and message to two different groups, particularly when the technology and the needs of the marketplace are themselves still evolving. In addition, when we test marketed messages with content providers by claiming programmer friendly technology they often accused us of not being able to execute because of focus. Just as RespondTV and others were unable to break into our portal domain. The cost of aggressively positioning to two target customer groups is quite extensive and was not underestimated. While we continue to make gradual inroads into the programmer veil, our main technology base continued to focus on the needs and wants of  the netop customer group through portal designs etc while the TV services group (although leveraging Syndication capabilities) essentially were creating content partner specific projects by hand.

Domination within a Shifting Marketscape …

To counterbalance this scenario while attempting to maintain market and mind share, MetaTV added TV services (a credible industry definition at this time – still also used by Microsoft) and enhanced TV applications (to create the illusion/marketing perception to programmers that MetaTV could also service their requirements in that domain).

Also during the last 12 months, MetaTV has reviewed and pursued a variety of diverse concepts to try and find a good fit and business model  that would appeal to both customer segments. Concepts included an advertising network, cable companion, being a commerce provider (Vitessa), and complete content management and automation.

During our internal discussions and test market positioning iterations, the industry has shifted more than once (high-end to low-end boxes, virtual channels emerged strong interest, video etc). This has cause the exact gauging of demand, value and market potential for each of these offerings to be quite challenging.
ITV advertising for instance, because of recent events, has not as yet taken off (providers such as Wink and RespondTV face significant revenue generation challenges). Enhanced TV programming in general has met with limited success and has been curtailed somewhat by the pull back in higher end set-top deployments.

MetaTV in this time has secured strong funding and backing from key network operators and contracted to build out custom branded TV portals for Cox and Comcast further strengthening our position and expertise in this iTV domain. We have also made great strides through deployment of “virtual channels” such as E! Online, Worldspan, Zap2IT although at the time, they were referred to as general TV services.

More than just Portals …

The current landscape is such that many of the players have fallen by the wayside. Our demonstrated execution and commitment to the success of our customers has allowed us to “own the notion of iTV portals”. However, the price of this mind share is the “pigeon holing” of some customer segments as previously mentioned, notably the programmers. The goal now is to begin to build on and extend out to messaging as well as our technical capabilities across a more generic suite of iTV services and applications ensuring that we appeal to each group accordingly.

In order to accomplish this, It is important to gradually morph our messaging and positioning from a dominant Gorilla iTV portal enabling technology company to a more generic iTV services and applications company. Shifting public positioning too dramatically can have an adverse effect of confusing the market as well as potentially branding a company as either being in trouble or wishy-washy. In addition, we need to ensure that we are in position to deliver upon our revised positioning (whether it be content automation, VOD virtual channels, MOD etc) in relatively short order after we go public with our new positioning (6 months at best). Building market brand is a very delicate exercise and any loss in faith in a company’s ability to deliver and execute can reverse a significant amount of good will and credit built up in the minds of press, analysts and prospects.

In addition, a careful analysis of the impacts of new positioning relative to companies that currently view us as partners (e.g. Worldgate, N2BB etc) needs to be considered carefully prior to full-on unveiling of messaging in all visibly marketing collateral (web, press releases, printed, public presentations).

Finally there is a significant cost associated with revised collateral (electronic and hardcopy) to implement this move.

Outline of the Next Phase of our Grand Brand Plan …

An outline of the next phase of MetaTV’s Grand Brand Plan is to gradually evolve our messaging as follows:

1) Agree on committed  product roadmap, direction, sales targets, customer segmentation and align all company groups to sign up for those goals
2) Communicate internally and receive buy in from all internal teams (particularly engineering) – some form of company kickoff works best – target beginning of the year 2002
3) Adjust product naming, packaging and positioning to reflect evolved branding and to crystallize the message to external parties as to how our platform is evolving … just like we said it could and would
4) De-emphasize the term portal referring to more generic suite of iTV services (but still providing examples of iTV services naming portals, virtual channels and enhanced TV apps, as in the revised generic tag for MetaTV used on our home page/profiles and in press release boilers)
5) Execute flawlessly on announced milestone deployments of iTV services with Cox/Comcast allowing the press and analysts to associate and give us credit for deploying to live households. Taking that opportunity to hammer home the concept of a suite of iTV services and an enabling platform that supports them
6) All the time, leveraging new powerpoints, presentations and white papers to partners and prospects with new concepts such as the content automation platform in order to secure deals that will allow us to build the technology and execute upon a prototype project
7) Work within the marketing budget constraints to create mostly electronic (web and PDFs) collateral to back up the messaging
8) Build the associated public messaging that will back up those deals when they are announcable such that when we are able to go public with our updated “vision” of our product suite, we can further define it as having built on top of our existing proven successes. (e.g. we already set the foundation with our announcement at NCTA in July that extended our platform video and virtual channels)
Next steps …

We must execute both in implementation and with sufficient marketing resources to drive home our ownership of the content automation platform and how other content providers and network operators can participate. This will allow us to extend any prototypes (initial project) we can contract to develop to build critical mass.

Key milestones
• Management agreement of direction, roadmap, sales targets and customer segments
• Internal buy in – company positioning meeting weaved into goals for 2002
• External marketing materials, press, analysts, positioning
• Demonstrated success and execution to back up positioning

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