Archive for the ‘Advertising’ Category
February 2nd, 2010
Red Bull Better Give You Wings
It came to me first via @scobleizer.
And then there were some other tweets. Talking of this new site.
Featuring Red Bull.
And Silverlight.
And some crazy mother’ who is going to jump out of a balloon at 120,0000 feet in a spacesuit. Some crazy mother named Felix Baumgartner.
It is called Red Bull Stratos . And it just might be ‘The Bomb’. But not for the reasons you might think. It is astounding, crazy, freaky and powerful that a man is willing to ‘jump’ from such a height. I once jumped from 4,000 or so feet and though it had it’s moments of beauty that was enough for me.
Yes. There is the question of, “How do you brake?” But that hopefully will get solved.
As a media observer what is fascinating about this is the marriage of content, technology and brand, all of which is accomplished with nary a 3rd party distributor like a Yahoo!, MSN, YouTube or Hulu.
Red Bull has been ramping up the role that content plays in their marketing, and as we near the opening of the Winter Olympics this is only escalating with their sponsorship of fan favorites Lindsey Vonn and Shaun White. But with Red Bull Stratos you have something remarkably different, so different that it bears mention.
Here you have a one-of-a-kind activity (space jumping) with an ‘athlete’ in the Red Bull fold (Felix Baumgartner) creating a media event that is being powered by a technology company (Microsoft).
And this is to be the first of many, here’s an excerpt from blogger David William’s site outlining where Microsoft hopes to see this partnership go.
In parallel, Microsoft is in the process of developing a broader media technology and marketing partnership with Red Bull, where they want to bring together Red Bull’s premium content and innovation-in-marketing with our technology platform and worldwide reach with consumers. The goal of this partnership is to develop a cutting edge media distribution and marketing platform on our stack that will allow Red Bull and their +400 athletes and artists to run super targeted media and experiential marketing campaigns within their broad portfolio of events, including Formula One, Red Bull Air Race and Red Bull Music Academy and many others.
So, hat’s off to Red Bull. And all you Media Companies who think you make the content and then marketers have to pay you to be associated with it? Take a look at this slice of the future – the disintermediation of your role hasn’t simply begun, it’s in full swing.
Posted in Advertising, Strategy, Video, Web | 1 Comment »
November 24th, 2009
Will Hulu Go the Exclusive Route?
‘May you live in interesting times’ is the Chinese proverb and we most certainly do.
There is of course the less obtuse but equally vague – all things come in threes – which when trying to patch together what is happening in the TV/Video landscape is, at the very least simpler to draft off of. The three events that seem to be creating a very interesting lead-up into the year-end are the announcement by Oprah she’s leaving her show, the very nearly sewn up deal between Comcast and NBC-U (save for those pesky French) and Rupert’s saber-rattling with respect to pulling content from Google.
Oprah’s bowing out coupled with NBC’s barely hanging on as something called a ‘network’ has led to a chorus of articles ‘Broadcast TV is Dead’. And while it’s not quite dead this awesome and insane graph of the decline in viewership highlights that there is a very serious issue with the numbers that watch TV and the dollars that advertisers are willing to pay to get in front of those numbers. (Graphic at the end of this post.)
It’s not that Broadcast is actually dying, it is that the model is broken. To wit, between 15 and 20 years ago ten hit TV shows made enough money for everybody – studio, star, producer, network – that everything else was obviated. And by everything else all the other horrifically bad programs were allowed to exist because these monster hits covered up for them when the accounting was done. Those days are long gone at this point and while there are bright spots, from Leslie Moonves’ touting of NCIS – ‘Mr. Moonves noted that the two NCIS editions taken together “are a billion-dollar property”‘ in the same Times article the economics of creating a ‘Lost’ or even ‘Southland’ upfront, the 10s of millions of dollars to do that, and then sell your decreased audience to advertisers – it’s just not really happening.
Now, how does this relate to Hulu? At this stage in the game Hulu is looking more and more like TV. Even today there is a study out that highlights how much Hulu viewing mirrors TV viewing – as goes the Fall Season so goes Hulu. But here also the economics are shoddy. There are less ads per show on Hulu, and even if people watch the show on their laptop – it is still a smaller audience so advertisers are paying less money, less money leads to less production dollars. There is a massive gap between cost of creating the goods (TV) and paying for them (advertising). Add to this that, as mentioned earlier, Comcast is now in the mix with their acquisition of NBC, a Comcast that has its own very capable viewing portal called Fancast, and you begin to see that Hulu is starting to get boxed in by their own success.
As Quincy Smith, the former head of CBS Digital said at New Tee Vee – he loves the service, just doesn’t love the model. Well, I’m no economist and I don’t play one on TV, but I do believe there is a golden opportunity for Hulu to show they offer value above and beyond being a nice viewer for broadcast content and engage with the production and advertising community to create original content that appears on Hulu first. Why? Because there is a middle ground which would allow for production values that people would respect, and by not waiting for their parent companies to expire, Hulu can show added value by offering something they have yet to do. Quality original long-form programming that is native to online and is more than a simple branded entertainment play ” to sell more salad dressing or make-up.
Posted in Advertising, Strategy | No Comments »
November 16th, 2009
Megan Fox and the Sunday New York Times
I used to love the Sunday ‘New York Times Magazine’. That love may have peaked between 15 and 10 years ago but at the time it certainly felt like it made the national conversation. (Full disclosure – I wrote a few front of the book pieces for the Magazine and had first-hand knowledge of the impact being in the Times afforded your subjects.)
But that was then. Now, with our googlified world and bloggy universe the Times, despite its best efforts has been slowly and inexorably slipping into irrelevance. But I’ve had tremendous sympathy for that slide for much of it seemed to stem from circumstances beyond their control. However in looking at yesterday’s paper – this does not seem to be the case. The occasion of my scorn is the ‘Screens’ issue which just ran yesterday. It very neatly consolidates all that is not working at the Times – regardless of the whole ‘Will-people-pay-for-content-on-the-Internet…’ meme that is flying around.
THE COVER:
Megan Fox? I, like any other red-blooded male of very nearly any nationality and quite possibly any sexual preference find Megan Fox to be totally, absolutely awesome. But her movie career is nascent at best, and ‘Transformers’ had neither a massive DVD release nor a game coming out so for a news organization, the timing of a Megan Fox cover was off, to say the least. Moreover, a ‘Screens’ issue to me seems like the perfect opportunity to create a cross-platform advertising inventory bonanza with stories that not only merit flipping from newspaper to online and back – but demand it. Even a nominal mention of number of Megan Fox websites, fanclubs, images on the Web would have helped this. To wit, you’re putting linkbait on your cover and doing nothing about it?!
THE TOPICS:
Megan Fox, Pilpotti Rist, Octomom? I’ve already said my piece about the cover. I like Pilpotti’s work, and enjoyed wandering through it at the Met last year but this trifecta almost seems willful in its desire to not seek a larger audience. I know that the braintrust of the Times magazine is usually quite good at nailing the Zeitgeist, and even if there is some antiquated programming issues that stem from Screens being an annual publication the asynchronous nature of each of these features is nearly inexcusable.
THE LAYOUT / THE WRITERS:
Don’t shoot the messenger is an old saw and can it really be blamed on the writers? I don’t know. I’m not that far inside the Paper of Record but seeing how stale the end product of what could have been and should have been a real opportunity to highlight the brilliance of the New Media staff in tandem with the magazine, perhaps its time for Fresh Blood. How long can Deboral Solomon do her Q + A? Why wasn’t Brian Stelter utilized? And the ‘How to Read’, ‘How to Watch’, ‘How To Surf’? What on earth was that?!
IN SUMMATION:
The above mag would have been acceptable 10 years ago – but to publish such a counter-intuitive, tone-deaf, defiantly analog pub at this late date is incomprehensible. All the tools for a multi-platform slideshow orgy for the Screens issue are at their fingertips, choosing not to utilize them makes this armchair quarterback wonder how much they really want to stay around…
Posted in Advertising, Recovery, Strategy, Web | No Comments »
August 5th, 2009
Why the CBS Research is so Important
The blogosphere is certainly abuzz right now with the news out of CBS (via PaidContent.org) that there may be more value in online that in live TV. While there are some things that rub me the wrong way, getting the ad dollars to merely move over online is NOT the answer, the fact that a research guy from a major network dared to say that online might be more valuable is incredibly powerful. It suggests that the somewhat dodgy digital future of content may be getting less dodgy. Go CBS Research guy David Poltrack – Go!
Posted in Advertising, Research, Sea Change, Strategy, Video | No Comments »