Archive for the ‘Strategy’ 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 »
January 30th, 2010
TV Needs a Brand Manager (via Wayne Friedman @Mediapost)
So many things happened this week, it’s almost impossible to choice where to begin.
Davos. #wef.
iPad. #giantiPhone.
The return of ‘Lost’. #whocares.
And The President laying it on the line, first with the nation, but then, more pointedly with his Republican colleagues. But one thing which didn’t get as much play, but is kind of fascinating and important is some real acknowledgement of how audience development is playing more and more a role in having a successful TV program.
The money quote on this comes from Elizabeth Murdoch, “We can no longer afford to be [a] one-screen business. Social networks are finally the interactive dimension of storytelling. We now need to evolve with our audience. To resist this would be like resisting Technicolor.” via paidcontent. This was from her keynote at Natpe where she also suggested that fan-sharing had benefit even as it approached ‘borderline piracy.’ Both of these statements from one of the leading forces in global television are extremely powerful and should not be underestimated.
As the video consumption paradigm, something we used to call watching TV, has become so fractured it is no longer enough to have a quality, video program with distribution. To ensure the success of your investment, it is necessary to invest in what were once considered complementary or ancillary media like the Internet and mobile. If you’re not, you’re not even playing the game.
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January 30th, 2010
What does the ‘i’ in iPad stand for?
I know. It’s late.
I know. It’s all been said already.
I know these things and yet still I must chime in.
I will not be wowed by the chip processor (thanks tech crunch). Nor the development platform. Thanks Joe Hewitt. But, what I will be wowed by is – This is it. This is, for those of you who have slaved in the interactive TV world, Jennifer Aniston’s sweater. (For those of you that managed to stay out of that sticky wicket, the Holy Grail was that you would be watching ‘Friends’ and you could, with a click buy Jennifer Aniston’s sweater.)
Now forget for a moment that for the moment the iPad is not Cable or Broadcast TV so the TV example is only half appropriate, but think about what it means that instead of pointing and clicking, a mode of interaction that recently celebrated it’s 40th anniversary since being developed in the early 70’s at XEROX Parc, you now have a whole new way of interacting. Instead of scrolling, pointing, clicking, waiting for something to open. You can touch. Zoom. Re-arrange.
Yes, it is the vision we all saw with Tom Cruise manipulating files in ‘Minority Report’ but now, instead of that being a kludge or a gimmick, it is real. All of the ideas that Interactive TV developers have been working on for the last 25 years will begin to bear fruit as ‘touch’ computing goes mainstream.
So the i which once upon a time stood for the Internet in relation to the iMac and has now become simply a prefix. Well the i is now truly for interactive and this is a keeper peoples. This is it.
This will transform advertising.
This will transform purchasing.
And, if we’re lucky, it will begin to transform entertainment itself.
iPad is the new Avatar.
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January 10th, 2010
Who Says TV’s Dead? aka Leveraging Whatever Platform You’ve Got
Look at that image.
‘iPhone apps from TV Ads’
‘iPod touch games from TV Ads’
What better way for Apple to mitigate it’s marketing spend on TV and leverage where they’re spending their money. That image appears inside iTunes and is very nearly as powerful a marketing platform as that other bit of 2010 ubiquity – the google home page. Oh, and lo and behold, Google is doing the same thing with their little ad on the google search page for the Nexus One.
What’s going on here? Not only are Google and Apple engaged in a death-match with respect to how we spend our digital dollars but they are both becoming marketing platforms above and beyond their more traditional roles as search leader and fanboy fetishist plaything. It will be a long time, if ever, before you see a non-Google product on the Google home page but their willingness to pimp their own phone shows they have no qualms about using that giant leverage for whatever purpose they deem appropriate. And then there’s this Apple ad within iTunes touting for all those app and games developers – “If you catch our eye – look at all this value we’ll give you.” It’s a pretty powerful proposition and one that will only increase the value that Apple
So think about this. Google is so far beyond being a ’search engine’ as it multiplies the business it’s in – the multiplier effect is making it indispensable to everyone and everything. And then there’s Apple with this cute little ad inside iTunes. They are literally paying themselves. They place the ad on TV. You watch the Ad. You buy Apps based on the Ad and Apple gets a cut of the revenue when the developers sell the App. They also increase their power in the marketplace because they are able to show how if your App can make the cut you get money, fame and recognition. It’s not quite a virtuous circle – but it’s certainly a model sure to yield profits for those participating in the ecosystem.
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December 20th, 2009
Hulu Gets Its Own Show and Goes Global
Crafty those Hulu cats. Not only have they teamed up with Simon Fuller and his 19 Entertainment for youth Hollywood frolicking, “If I Can Dream”, but in one fell swoop they open up the international market. A tip of the hat to Peter Kafka for teasing this one out…The money quote via Peter’s Media Memo, “The press release announcing “If I Can Dream” says “it will be the first recurring show to be available to select international audiences via Hulu,” though it doesn’t spell out which countries or a time frame.”
And I thought it just was interesting because there was an opportunity to be first but Hulu gets to spread its wings and see if it can’t be an international destination hub. It will be interesting to see how it plays. “Quarterlife” or “Dr. Horrible”?
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November 25th, 2009
Content Matching Gone Awry
This was a fun thing to stumble across. While ad agencies and all form of media experts warn about the dangers of UGC content – what about good old-fashioned questionable editorial content alongside your home-maker product. Witness the awl and their delightfully snarky and bitter suggestion that you should have had sex last night because you won’t tonight and definitely won’t be in the mood tomorrow in your tryptophan haze.
With copy like the following, “Your family is getting in on Wednesday night and nobody is getting laid with in-laws in the other room. Unless you miss the kind of quiet and terrified sex you used to not do very much of in high school”, methinks Pillsbury wasn’t thinking about this kind of content matching when they kicked down some *koff* dough.
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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.
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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 »
October 13th, 2009
Facebook and Twitter Mean the Geeks are Winning
I first started working in Corporate Silicon Valley in the late 90’s after a stint with an Internet Ad Agency, or what is in polite conversation now called a .com or .bomb. What struck me when I first got there, was the series of inane e-mail strings on everything from should it be Mt. View or Mtn. View to what flavor Odwallas were preferred. Yes, this was early(ish) in the development of our new cubicle culture, and yes geeks do enjoy a good zinger now and then, but it was palpably off-putting to see 73 replies in 12 minutes to non-business related topics.
As I sit here in late 2009 and look at the volume of inanity (present company included) that has been surfaced by Facebook and Twitter and the reshaping of the term conversation that has begun in the twittersphere it dawned on me with great clarity that the geeks are winning. And yes, resistance is futile. For Twitter and Facebook are built by people who favor technology as a means of communication over other means of communication such as a phone call or a meeting face-to-face. I won’t try to go all Gladwell on this and draw from the particular to the universal but if you go with this premise, inter-office email fights which are a core part of Silicon Valley life – have now rippled out into the greater public and we are all engaged in one great big Geeky Catfight. Witness the Twitter Story of Today – Miley Cyrus deleted her account.
I’m not saying that Twitter or Facebook do not have value. But I do think that they represent a true benchmark of where culture has shifted, and it’s progenitors come from generations of Silicon Valley nerds. The nerds are winning and the sooner we learn to play by their rules, the better off we will all be. I guess.
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September 27th, 2009
On the Importance of Cojones and Luck and the Interwebs
On Monday of this week I had the good fortune of going to the Finals of the US Open at Arthur Ashe Stadium. This was a joyous occasion for multiple reasons. I was with my gal – @chakwave – which was a treat. It was my first time to the Open, which was great as the only reason we were able to go was due to the rain delay pushing the Men’s Finals from Sunday to Monday and so all the truly hard working stiffs who had schedules they were tied to were not able to attend the Finals but had to be at their desks/in their cars/on their phones. Their loss was our gain.
And of course this could not have happened without something as wonderfully democratic as StubHub that allowed me to find tickets that didn’t cost the proverbial arm and a leg. And the Stubhubbers were doubly awesome as they provided directions to find the tickets when we were lost wandering around Flushing Meadows.
Things were going along plainly enough as Federer was slicing and dicing Del Potro into tiny pieces and it seemed that we would have no problem making our 9:00 reservation at Pastis. But then the magical thing happened – well not so magical but just kind of a remarkable piece of humanity on parade. In the middle of the 2nd set when it could have been the beginning of the end for Del Potro he just clearly did a gut-check and said to himself, “If I’m going to go out, I’m going to go out swinging.”
And he did. He showed that he had the cojones to not only be on the same court as the most acclaimed tennis player of our time and possibly ever, but that he could win. And win going away. The lesson? That if you’re going to play. Play hard. You’ll look better winning or losing.
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