Vidéotron had been announcing the "end of time" for some time. It arrived last week with the launch of its wireless phone service in Québec. I'll leave it to others to assess the nature of Vidéotron's offer and its potential impact on the market.
Much has already been said about the fact that Vidéotron
won't rely strictly on pricing and is betting on content to make its offer attractive.
Access to video on demand via Vidéotron's Illico Mobile is a no-brainer and
likely only a first step in a strategy that will leverage the significant
content generated by Quebecor Media's properties.
But there's clearly another aspect of convergence at play
here: promoting Vidéotron's wireless offering through Quebecor Media's
properties. While the end of time was advertised via out-of-home posters and
other non-Quebecor owned media, Le Journal de Montréal seems to be the official
voice of Vidéotron. There's nothing new with this approach. Leaf through any
magazine owned by Rogers Publishing and you'll see ads for Rogers, lots of
them. If it reaches your target and it's free or almost free media, it's smart
business.
Blurring the lines between news and ads.
It must be awfully tempting to go beyond simply leveraging media opportunities in the publications you own when you can not only run ads for free but also ensure positive news coverage of your products and services. Here again, there's nothing new in attempting to get the media to report favourably on what you're selling. But I question how far this should go when you own the news outlet and, in Quebecor's case, the news "agency" QMI.
Here's a "news" item from QMI in today's Journal de Montréal.
The article reports that Maher Yaghi, an analyst with Desjardins Securities, apparently decided to test the reliability of Vidéotron’s wireless network by driving 330 km around Montréal over two days. He got excellent signal (four or five bars) 72% of the time while Rogers got the same 78% of the time. It’s not clear if Mr. Yaghi did the driving himself (which would have required that he keep his eyes on the road instead of on two Blackberry handheld devices). To my knowledge, objective third party firms using sophisticated equipment usually do these tests.
Is this news? Or an advertorial? Unless I'm mistaken, other publications didn’t pick up the news behind this QMI story.
On a related note, Bell explained its purchase of CTV last week in part by claiming its renewed focus on convergence. Perhaps we'll soon hear Lisa Laflamme deliver the news about Bell's new Fibe TV service on the CTV National News. I just hope she won’t sign off with “That’s the kind of day it’s been at Bell.”
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