What Matter box offers brands

What we’re offering brands is a unique human interaction with a set of kind of super-connected, primed, highly enthusiastic, pre-engaged consumers. Now, in very broad terms what they want to do with that that’s up to them. But rather than just leave it there we want, we have to encourage them to understand how this new kind of communications medium works and we’re there to kind of help guide them through this process of what they can get.
So their starting point should be to have some kind of outcome in mind. So come to Matter with something that you want to get.  If you want to drive word of mouth then we’ll help you create an object that drives word of mouth.  If you want to create digital impact than we’ll help you create an object that will help drive digital impact.

If you want to get people to have some other kind of behavioural response like, you know, call a call number or lots of things that are kind of the remit of direct marketing, we can help. You know, there’s nothing to say that you can’t have all of that cake and eat it as well. Matter can function just as well as a direct behavioural channel as it can an advertising attitudinal channel. But the key thing about it is the breadth of responses it can drive, and when we use the term response with Matter we include emotional responses, attitudinal responses as well as behavioural responses.

If you want to impact on a very large number of people it’s possible to do it. And in fact what Matter offers is the potential to invert the normal communications triangle which says that I’m going to go out to a very large number of people in order to impact a small number, Matter can invert that by going out to a small number and impacting a large number.

Given the nature of our subscribers who are very digitally sophisticated, they are very ahead of the curve, a lot of where they spend a lot of their time is online and that’s why when you put an item in a Matter box you see this huge wave of activity along the line of people talking about it, blogging about it, writing about it, taking pictures of it, taking movies of it etc, etc, etc.

Our initial boxes are going to our whole subscriber base because they tend to work as a kind of cohesive community of people that has a big enough scale to them. Once we get some scale to it and we start getting larger numbers of subscribers we’ll then start to segment the boxes into more specific audiences. Because Matter’s based on a universal insight, which is everybody likes getting gifts, then potentially we could have the whole UK adult population signed up as subscribers to Matter, in which case then we could then create very specific, very interesting, very insightful boxes based round some really fantastic audiences because one of the things when people join up to Matter because they’re going to get some interesting stuff they’re willing to tell us information, interesting things about themselves. So the vision for the future is that we take those insights and create quite unique, valuable kind of quite magical audiences that we believe advertisers are going to be interested in talking to.

There’s a lot of very un-cost-effective advertising that gets run at the moment because people think that, because people believe it to be effective. We think, just as one criteria, we think that one placement, one engagement with a Matter box could be worth 50 or 100 other engagements.  You know, how many, which is going to make you feel better about a brand, if they give you something or if you watch 100 television commercials? Well, when put up against the cost of running 100 television commercials Matter’s pretty good value.

The digital broadcast environment is going to get very interesting probably in the next five to 10 years. There’s a school of thought that says that in a fragmented media environment you really have to exercise some element of choice over what you’re going to be watching and Google have proved this with their search-based advertising model. 

The whole, the consumer journey through Google’s advertising model is instigated, well, the advertising that you see is instigated, is originated by your interests. So they wrap the advertising around what you’ve already declared an interest in. 

It’s very likely that the future of television advertising will be based around a similar model and will probably have a response component to it. So television without channels, which is ultimately one of the futures that we’re looking at, is going to have search-based advertising around it. I think that’s going to be quite an uncomfortable place for brands to be if not a very expensive place for brands to be because the temptation to just make the ads as cheap as possible, to drive the higher response as possible will make it quite difficult to justify the expense of doing brand advertising, and I think it will be a pretty odd place for brands to advertise. 

In that sense, it makes much more sense to do all your kind of transaction, responsive, behavioural advertising on that form of television, as it will exist in the future, and to then to engage consumers through giving them physical experience of something, something that they can feel something for. And it’s perfectly possible that we could see a scenario where physical engagement is the primary way that brands engage with consumers and digital interaction is the primary way that they get consumers to respond behaviourally. And what have hitherto been the two separate roles of media, where television has done brand and make people feel things, and physical has been the thing that drives response, those two things will switch over. 

And we also believe that we have the opportunity to become a genuine mass medium in time.  And I think that the only really difficult question is how long that might take to do. And really, we, even though we’re a physical medium we’re determined by the pace of progress of technology really, how long will it take for television to become channel-less?  Will it become channel-less?  You know, what will digital broadcast look like in five, 10, 15 years’ time?  Those are the, even though Matter is a physical thing, its outcome and its role in the world is determined by the pace of technology and how technology shapes media in general where we’re just one element in a much broader media landscape.