“Every goal, every game, everywhere.” This is the tagline for Barclays Premier League Goals, a mobile service that delivers goal clips, game podcasts and post-match reports to audiences in the United Kingdom.

It is in line with the media industry’s shift towards new digital services. But it is also “hard to do, hard to make a business out of it, and hard to scale”, said Mr Unmish Parthasarathi, Senior Vice President of News Corp and General Manager,  (Digital, Sports) Southeast Asia/Japan, in his presentation at this year’s Digital Marketplace Forum.

For media companies, digital means two things, said Mr Parthasarathi. “You have to be a lot of things to a lot of people, and you have to be very clear what your definition is of success in that journey.”

Media companies will have to appreciate the fact that the rules and financial forecasting surrounding one medium cannot be applied to another.” It cannot be transferred from print or broadcast business to digital and mobile.”

The consumer dynamics will change with the shift to digital, with consumption patterns changing from all-you-can-eat to ala carte . Scalability will also be an issue. “The digital product must grow into an experience and must be capable of tiered monetisation,” he said.

From the challenges of the here and now, the topic moved on to “The next big digital innovations for media companies” with the next speaker, Mr Guillaume Sachet, Head, Strategic Planning, MediaCorp.

One of the trends that is having a big impact on the media industry is the rise of mobility, said Mr Sachet. In the past, content was produced for TV. Now the model is to create once, publish everywhere. “From the content perspective, we have to think about how we adapt that content to online, to mobile. We have to think 360 degrees when we create content,” he said. “Content has to play across different platforms. Mobile is not competition to television. We need to see how it can complement television.”

Another development that Mr Sachet sees happening in the media space is gamification. He spoke about how this can be used to engage digital natives who have different habits and different patterns in the way they consume content. “They could be watching TV and be on the iPad at the same time. They want fewer words, more images, more video. And they spend seven and a half hours a day consuming media, most of it in the form of music or gaming,” he said. “You have to talk to them differently, engage them in a different way.”

A similar observation was made by Ms Joanna L. Catalano, Head of New Products and Solutions Southeast Asia, Google. Presenting on the topic “Marketing in the Digital Age”, she observed that today’s consumers think differently about media. “It’s critical to think about 4Cs – Curation, Creation, Connection and Community,” she said. “This new-generation C, as Google labels it, is not defined by age or other demographics but has a common attitude in engaging and interacting in the digital world, and this is important from a marketing perspective.”

Another topic that was discussed at the Digital Marketplace Forum was how technology enables new monetisation models for digital advertising companies and helps them to enhance customer engagement. However, it also presents new challenges.

“In the digital advertising space, technology is opening up many possibilities, but it’s now harder than ever to find an audience and unify that audience across digital channels,” said Ms Wendy Hogan, Chairperson of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, Southeast Asia/ Singapore, in her presentation on the advertising technology and services landscape in Southeast Asia and beyond. “Digital advertisers are going to need help, both from a platform and service standpoint, to connect effectively across an increasing number of addressable channels,” she added.

The Digital Marketplace Forum was held at the Intercontinental Hotel on 5 December. Organised by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the annual event provides a platform for industry leaders to present latest trends and growth opportunities as well as facilitate industry collaboration opportunities.

Other topics that were covered in the forum included the megatrends in technology, media and telecom; consumer data and analytics; effective ad monetisation and mobile applications via audience analytics; the ad technology and services landscape; and talent, skills and training for the digital world.