Archive for the ‘Strategy’ Category
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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September 18th, 2009
I’m a Happy Shopper
Wow. Nothing makes a fellow happier than a two-in-one. Going back to the days of the Original Saturday Nite Live with the trademark lampoonery of ‘It’s a Floor Wax. It’s a Desert Topping…’ there is something incredibly satisfying about getting two-two-two thingamajigs for the price of one. And well having hated on the iPhone for some time now – as in dropped calls or just the sheer laughableness of trying to use one in Manhattan, it’s nice to spread some pro iPhone love.
And in this case it is for peripherals make Griffin. So while in New York my power ran down nearly every day, which was nice in one sense as I was quite simply not available. I also recently broke my iPhone car lighter charger so I was in the market for a new one and found this – the Griffin PowerJolt Reserve – which is just awesome in so many ways.
The Radness that is the Power Jolt Reserve
-It charges at about 2x the speed of a normal car lighter charger.
-It is a charger AND a battery pack.
-And the part that I found just plain neat – which I’m sure is not that technologically astounding – is that when you plug the battery pack into the iPhone – it not only powers the iPhone but it transfers the power from the Pack into the battery. To wit, if you are in the red with your iPhone but your battery pack is charged, it transfers the juice from the pack into the iPhone. How rad is that?!
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August 24th, 2009
Carol and the Purple Crayon
The Old Laughing Lady, The Bald Man and the Giant Purple Pen
This picture is pretty much representative of everything that is wrong at the Intersection of Capitalism and The Internet.
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August 12th, 2009
The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus
A little overwrought with the backing track but exciting they got it done. And while Colin Farrell does not seem to ‘fit’ with Messrs. Depp, Ledger and Waits – I will gladly take an afternoon and go have a wonderful adventure with this latest Terry Gilliam joint.
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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 »
July 15th, 2009
An Opera Singer Breathes Anew
This past Thursday I flew to San Francisco with Ms. Jacquelyn Richey to see my brother-in-law accept his appointment as a chair in Thoracic Oncology at UCSF. Alongside the professional and personal honorifics bestowed on Dr. Thierry Jahan there was genuine love, admiration and respect all on ample display. And just when a sublime evening seemingly could not get better – the Mezzo-Soprano Zheng Cao came forward to give a surprise performance.
What is remarkable, notable and other-worldly about this performance, aside from it happening to fall on her birthday, is that Ms. Cao’s vocal pyrotechnics were made possible due to her being treated by Dr. David Larson using a technique called the cyberknife, something that is so impossibly sci-fi as to not be believed. But, the point being that between the two of these doctors they saved this woman’s vocal chords. And by saving her vocal chords – we all get to hear this…
Happy Birthday Zheng!
Posted in Music, Strategy, TEKism | No Comments »
July 8th, 2009
The Aaron Spelling of the Congo
I recently had the good fortune of traveling to Washington, DC to see my friend and colleague Ben Olander present, along with his business partner, Tomas Apodaca, their work from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Ben and Tomas had been invited to DC by Bill Strassberger, the Chief of Public Affairs in the Bureau of African Affairs at the State Department.
Having known Ben for years and heard of his work but never quite understood exactly what he was doing, when I heard that he would be presenting I leaped at the chance. And it was well worth it. In addition to meeting one Evagelia Touvalareas who is doing her own powerful work with women in Saudi Arabia seeing Small Power’s work on a big screen with an audience of between 70 to 100 people really drove home the powerful message of their work.
After about 20 to 30 minutes of conversation and a screening of the TV show that smallpower has created, the crowd rushed up to greet Ben and in what has to be one of the great summary lines of all time, the gentleman in this picture applauded my friend by saying, “You are the Aaron Spelling of the Congo.”
But you don’t have to just take my word for it – surf on over to smallpower.org to read the inspirational and fantastic tales of how to create a tv series of warmth and honesty in one of the world’s most horrific (and forgotten) warzones.
An Animated Video Produced in the Congo from Todd Krieger on Vimeo.
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