Originally published March 18, 2010. Refreshed as EPR's structural read on the cloud-content-distribution shift and the IMHO Media case study that framed it.
Cloud content distribution is doing to media in 2010 what it did to enterprise software the decade before: moving the working copy off the device and onto the network, and letting the network decide what gets served, to whom, in what order, and paid for how. The consequences for marketing, PR, and brand distribution are only starting to register.
The Category Shift
For a long time, media distribution was a per-device problem. You had a copy of the song on the iPod. A copy of the DVD in the player. A copy of the game on the console. The marketer's job was to sell the copy.
Cloud content distribution changes the premise. The song lives on a server. The consumer accesses it through an app, a browser, a social widget, or a set-top box. The device is a window, not a container. The business model shifts from selling the copy to renting the window — and from broadcast marketing to marketing tied to the moment of consumption.
This is the shift Netflix streaming ($8.99/month, launched 2007), Spotify (European launch 2008, U.S. still pending), Hulu (2008), and Rhapsody are already building against. What the next generation of players is trying to do is stitch that distribution layer directly into social platforms, so the recommendation, the play, and the share happen inside the same interface.
The IMHO Media Case
Former Sony Music chief executive Don Ienner has built one of the more instructive examples of the pattern. IMHO Media, currently in private beta, is a cloud-based media player that lives inside social networks — Facebook first — and combines media consumption, sharing, marketing, and gamification into one interface.
The design is a bet on three assumptions, each of which has independent value even if IMHO itself does not become the winner in the category:
The recommendation is worth more than the file. IMHO pulls content from the cloud on demand. It never ships a copy. What it captures instead is the graph of what the user played, shared, rated, and pushed to friends. That graph is the asset.
The social layer is the distribution layer. IMHO is not a destination. It is an app inside Facebook. The play, the review, the recommendation, and the ad all happen where the user already is. There is no acquisition problem in the traditional sense — the platform delivers the audience, and the app monetizes the moment.
Gamified attention converts. Points, badges, and adjustable ad density turn the media session into a loop the user has a reason to return to. The user opts into higher ad load in exchange for status and rewards. The advertiser gets attention that was volunteered rather than tolerated.
IMHO's early beta partnership with music-discovery service Nutsie illustrates the mechanic. Nutsie brings the catalog and the artists. IMHO brings the social distribution and the attention loop. Neither service could deliver the combined offering alone.
What This Means for Marketing and PR
The cloud-distribution shift changes what a marketing campaign is. Three implications sit at the top of the list.
Placement is context, not inventory. The old model bought media by page, spot, or impression. The cloud-distribution model buys the moment inside a stream — the ad served alongside the specific song, movie, or game the user just chose. What the ad sits next to is now more valuable than how many people see it.
The user becomes a distribution node. Every share, every recommendation, every badge earned is a marketing surface the brand did not have to buy. The IMHO design puts a dollar value on that surface directly: the user with more activity has more reach, and higher reach earns higher redemption value. That is a completely different animal from traditional word-of-mouth marketing.
PR moves from earned to embedded. Getting an artist covered in a music publication is one route to attention. Getting that artist's track surfaced inside the recommendation engine of a cloud player embedded in a social network is a different — and often better — route. Communications teams have to develop the second competency alongside the first.
What to Watch
IMHO is one entrant. The category is going to fill up quickly. Rhapsody wants distribution across every device. Meebo and Glue are already stitching social layers onto media consumption. Location-aware apps like Foursquare and Gowalla are building the gamified-attention grammar that IMHO is borrowing. Facebook itself will decide over the next twenty-four months whether it wants third-party apps to own this layer or whether it will own the media-play graph directly.
The five questions to track:
Which platforms allow deep cloud-player integration, and on what terms?
Which media companies license into the cloud players, and which hold back for exclusive walled-garden deals?
Which ad networks can price context-of-consumption inventory reliably enough to make cloud-native placements a real budget line for brands?
How does the user's data — the play graph, the share graph, the social identity — get monetized, and who gets the cut?
Do the mobile carriers extract a toll, or do they get disintermediated?
The Bottom Line
Cloud content distribution is not a product category. It is a change in the substrate that all media marketing runs on. IMHO Media may or may not be the platform that wins. The pattern it is building against — cloud-hosted content, social-layer distribution, gamified attention, context-priced advertising — is the pattern the next decade of consumer marketing will run on. Brands and their PR operations that only know how to buy pages, spots, and impressions are going to find themselves buying inventory that is no longer where the audience actually is.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
