Advertising Ourselves to Death

TiVo delivers the death blow

[by Todd] This short item in the WSJ today will hit like a bomb in the halls of television and cable networks:

TiVo Inc. announced a new service that will let marketers place ads at the end of recorded programs and track how many people watch them. The company, which makes digital video recorders, said Tuesday it would insert the ads after a television show has played, when there is nothing left to fast-forward, offering a way for advertisers to reach audiences who record shows and are more likely to skip through traditional commercials.

Can you hear the shrieks yet? Don't want to pay a couple hundred grand for a spot on Lost? For a lot less TiVo will tag your commercial at the end. Then again, why drop in a commercial at all?

Suddenly every creative director who was claiming the 30-second spot still has legs will be pitching long-form messages to clients. And why not? Based on the show it will be easy to understand the psychographics are of any given audience, so why not offer them extended content to present your client's product?

Then there was this little tidbit:

TiVo said it will give marketers in the new program access to its audience measurement data, so they'll be able to track how many viewers play the ads at the end of the program.

Longer messages? Verified viewership? Provided the networks don't pull off some legal maneuver to kill the program, you can mark this day as the point where 30-second spots went on life support.

One size fits none

[by Nancy] (YES, Life interfering with blogging... blah, blah, blah. It is now my mission to post more often than Sunni. Get ready, people.)

Many thanks to Todd for calling my attention to this week's L.A. Times series inspired by a recent poll (conducted by the Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg) on the entertainment consumption habits of teens and young adults. To me, the two most interesting of these articles ("No Big Demand for the Small Screen" and "Far Removed from the Multiplex") concerned not necessarily the specific influences of entertainment media on the young 'uns, but the ways in which they access their entertainment.

Movie exbihibition has been a hot topic of late, with people like Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner proposing monumental changes to a business that has functioned in a relatively steady state for decades, and theater owners struggling to keep established film distribution windows in place (and patrons in their theaters) for as long as possible.

Being something of a film purist myself (and, thus, still completely in love with the idea of sitting in a darkened theater with strangers, experiencing the interaction of light with sound, audience with movie, and peanut butter M&M's with buttered popcorn and diet Coke), I have to access the argument from an economic standpoint in order to be truly fair. And thinking about it from that perspective (while talking the point to death with all sorts of people), I've prepared myself for the fact that, like it or not, the system is poised for a massive change. It has simply become infeasible from a business perspective for the large film studios to agree to keep distribution windows in place.

Reading both of the L.A. Times articles reinforced the notion that film exhibition is about to look vastly different. One of the primary reasons is that the theatrical experince holds very little value for most of the filmgoing public. This is not surprising, of course, but actually hearing these sentiments from a representative sampling of Hollywood's most coveted demographic is sobering.  Case in point:

"The poll found that many teens and young adults would be happy if that window were eliminated altogether. Asked where they'd prefer to watch a new movie if it were simultaneously available at home and in theaters, about a third said they would choose to stay at home, and another third said it depended on the movie. Going to movies at theaters still has appeal, particularly for younger teens, but among respondents ages 21 to 24, 56% said they wanted to see the new movie at home, and only 9% said they would rather travel to a theater."

Wow. 9% would rather not have to go to a theater to see a new movie. So, basically, keeping distribution windows in place makes little sense economically for film distributors and it runs completely counter to what customers in the target demographic want. Sounds like a GREAT way of doing business to me.

Purist that I am, I was happy to see that most in this sampling are not at present terribly interested in watching full-length televison shows or films on wireless devices or video iPods. And I don't blame them. I could never watch anything requiring an attention span longer than a couple of minutes on a screen that small. Then again, I am the daughter of a man who bought a large-screen televison, got it home, realized it was TOO large for the living room when the rest of the family got motion sickness from watching it, and remedied the situation by knocking out living room wall so that the space could be expanded by a few feet to accommodate his new toy. So I may not be the best person to ask about this one.

Interesting to note, however, were this group's reasons for shunning the small-est screen:

"Many young people said they were intrigued by the notion of getting their entertainment on devices such as cellphones and iPods. But two major obstacles have so far dampened their enthusiasm: the cost and the uneven quality of the experience."

With time, both of these issues will be handled -- prices will decrease while quality improves. And I imagine that convenience and accessibility (being able to watch what you want, where you want, when you want) will trump screen size in the end. Even now, according to the poll, over 40% of this group would rather watch movies on their PCs, many of which are portable and all of which offer users the opportunity to access their entertainment in personal, highly customizable way. Clearly, one screen size no longer fits all.

So where does that leave the current state of film exhibition? Looking...ummm...not so current, if you ask me.

Channeling Al Franken

[by Todd] It's been another round of compulsory CNN viewing the past few days, thanking the travel gods I wasn't on the road when all this went down. As I watched the same empty report for the fourth or fifth time, I realized how hard they were pimping their viewer video submission tool. Armed with my video phone, or a camcorder, I was teased with the lure of becoming an I-reporter for CNN.

Somewhere Al Franken must be laughing his butt off.

Back in the 80s SNL did this recurring gig during the news section. Al was "The One-Man Mobile Uplink," covering the presidential campaign from the god-forsaken wasteland of politics. The humor was that he wore this bizarre rig that had a satellite up-link on his helmet and a camera mounted on a big harness. By orientating himself to the skies just so, Al could banter with Dennis Miller.

Watching TV and skimming all the sites the past few days it became clear that Al was a visionary. For that matter, so was Matt Frewer and his alterego Max Headroom. He too was a one-man news crew.

Here we are 20 years later and it doesn't take a satellite dish on your head to be a one-man news crew. Any more it's not a big deal to have video of a big story unfolding. With umpteen million digital cameras, and YouTube sites popping up like weeds, the only surprise is if the video airs first on TV.

Of course CNN, and all the other networks, not to mention the local stations, are anxious for you to upload your video. They probably don't want to talk about having to pay you for it, but they will if push comes to shove, and it's good stuff.

So what does this have to do with advertising?

How much do you figure companies spend on marketing events, sports sponsorships, street marketing? And how many people attending those events, especially the cool ones, are likely snapping pictures and shooting digital video?

Every one of those customers should be encourage, nay rewarded, if they share that image or video online. Become your own news channel, with programming focused just on your brand. Rather than trying to create some lame video you hope will go viral, encourage your customers to go nuts at the next function.

Or, better yet, create your own coverage. Last summer, about this very time, our own Sunni Thompson (she of seldom posting, although more than Nancy, fame) was camping in broom closet at The Rio in Las Vegas. She was busy running a news operation dedicated to the 2005 World Series of Poker on behalf of a client, Harrah's.

Over the course of the climactic week, Sunni and her crew of three (including a team from Snippies) shot, edited and posted video updates every day. Their job was covering the story behind the story that airs on ESPN. And they had no shortage of content, from celebrities to people waiting in lines. Only a couple years earlier such an operation would have been logistically impossible.

The payoff for Harrah's was a massive extension of the event. Without a single ad about the videos, we were flooded with viewers. Our host moved quickly to opened up huge pipes and people filled them just as quickly.

So take a look around the next time your planning some marketing event. And ask yourself, What Would Al Do?

Damn, I said that out loud, didn't I?

[by Todd] Let me share with you a lovely quote, we'll discuss on the backside who it came from.

"I would love it if the MSOs (multi-system operators), during the deployment of the new DVRs they're putting out there, would disable the fast-forward (button)... I'm not so sure that the whole issue really is one of commercial avoidance. It really is a matter of convenience -- so you don't miss your favorite show... People can understand in order to have convenience and on-demand (options), that you can't skip commercials"

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mike Shaw, ABC president of advertising sales, as reported by C|Net. He is pretty sure you don't WANT to skip commercials. Of course that view is in no way influenced by his desperate need for you NOT to skip his commercials.

Let's break down the last comment of his a bit further. People can understand in order to have convenience and on-demand options, you can't skip commercials. If that's the case, then what is so convenient or on-demand about it?

Anyone want to bet that Mr. Shaw had a key hand in ABC's online offerings where you cannot skip commercials? Ah the joys of being old-school in a time of transition.

The You Tube cable network

[by Todd] So NBC has broken ranks with its dinosaur brethren and struck a deal with You Tube to post its content on the burgeoning flea market of all things viral. (Here's great background on the deal.)And somewhere in the back halls of the G.E. mother ship someone is kicking themselves for missing the boat. Again.

Think about it, You Tube should not exist. The spot they occupy should be owned by one of the major broadcast networks, or one of the entertainment companies, or one of the cable companies. The list is endless. But that didn't happen for one reason, none of those companies were willing to wrap their heads around a business were the customers are also the suppliers. The logic is so antiquated, "we deliver, they consume."

Enter You Tube, iFilm, Google Video and who know how many others. And now NBC is going to try to make piece with the riff-raff. How long until local affiliates throw a fit because I don't have to watch shows on their schedule? How long until advertisers decide they'd rather use pinpoint delivery of their ads on You Tube rather than the blunt edge of broadcast?

How long until traditional media businesses wake up and get that change is at their doorstep?

Going for viral, and just getting ill

[by Todd] I propose to ban the phrase "viral video" from any brainstorming session that occurs at an agency of more than 10 people. Trust me guys, it's for your own good.

Anything produced by an agency will, by definition, have to pass under the review of creative directors, executive creative directors, account directors, account planners, clients, and eventually the client's lawyers. What emerges is ultimately  uncool, made even more so by the desperate attempt to make it look like you didn't care.

But don't take this just as a rip by a frustrated interactive guy. Instead enjoy the cautionary tale of two writers at Entertainment Weekly.

"I Want to Be A Viral Video Star" builds an iron-clad case for letting the amateurs handle creating and spreading viral videos. Jason Adams and Scott Brown should have been guaranteed success, after all they had the advice of experts ranging from comedy writers to the heads of the video services.

But it never happened. They even enlisted the help of a marketing firm that "specializes" in viral. When it was all said and done, they had only 7,000 views of their film entitled, alternately, Cheater/Who's Leg Is This?

Along the way they did develop a couple great rules for those intent on working hard to make a video look like it was an afterthought.

• Have a hook, and make sure it's in the first 10 to 15 seconds.
• ''If you're going to make a fake viral video that's made to look low-budget, make it with no budget.''
• Agencies and clients can't disregard copyright laws like 14-year-olds armed with dad's camera.
• Mannequins, even those with MySpace pages, don't assure success.

The guys pick apart their failure quite well. But nothing else sums up their shortcomings, along with those of so many other efforts, as pointedly as a comment from Ricky Van Veen at CollegeHumor.

''I don't think the video you made has viral potential... It reeks of effort.''

Still celebrating cluelessness Baseball, babies and busses

[by Todd] When people say something really dumb do they know it?

Is there some part of their sad little brains that let them believe that saying it with enough authority will make it so? Consider those questions as you think about these pearls.

Clueless Example 1 -- Major League Baseball

Seems the big boys of summer don't want you using a Slingbox to follow your favorite teams on the road. At the Digital Media Summit an MLB official squared off against a VP from Sling Media.

According to George Kliavkoff, executive vice president of  MLB Advanced Media, it is a crime to use your laptop while on the road to watch the game airing on your TV back home. If you aren't watching it on the TV wherever you are, then you won't see the local ads, and therefore you deprive the local cable operator. Scratching your head yet?

Let's try to follow this logic. You are enough of a baseball fan that you don't want to miss your team's broadcasts, even while away from home. So you invest $200 for a box to tie your cable into the Net, then pay again for a broadband connection from the road.

A bit on the geeky side, to be sure. But isn't this the kind of hard-core fan MLB should be salivating over? By all means, lets brand these people thieves and talk about them "violating the scope of their user agreements."

(Full disclosure, I own a Slingbox, but have never used it to watch baseball. So I'm not a thief, right?)

Clueless Example 2 -- People and their baby pictures

Moving on, we have the madness swirling around the "exclusive" pictures of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie with their baby, Shiloh. (Truly I have descended into the rings of hell when I am writing about celebrity babies.)

For those who missed the mayhem, British Hello! magazine, and People magazine went nuts mid-week when an image leaked online of the Hello! cover. It showed the blissful parents looking over their million dollar baby. The two publications had paid a combined $7 million for the shots with an embargo date of June 9th.

Lawyers descended on websites such as Gawker and Jossip for running the Hello! cover. Their logic, the unauthorized distribution diminished the value of their purchase. Then, in a move of ultimate hypocrisy, People allowed the New York Post to run it's cover a day early.

Matt Lauer on the Today Show found the approved leak somewhat hypocritical in light of the legal barrage, but People's managing editor, Larry Hackett, had a ready explanation.

“If you go to a restaurant and have an appetizer, you have dinner afterwards.”

Wow, it's pretty obvious why he's the managing editor and I'm not.

What's more pathetic, magazines paying $7 million for baby pictures, or customers who will actually buy a magazine just to see a $7 million baby picture? Then again, isn't it even more pathetic that in this day and age any media executive would believe a $7 million baby picture isn't going to spread online in an instant?

Clueless Example 3 -- Morons at the back of the bus

And lastly, we have the drive to launch BusRadio. Here's a company that swears it's offering a public service by trying to have schools install their radio broadcasts, complete with commercials, on every school bus. Just try to read this intro from their site with a straight face:

This free program is designed specifically to improve bus safety while providing the students with both age appropriate content and an entertaining ride to and from school.

Tell me there weren't high-fives around the conference room when someone came up with that line. The logic (ahem) is that the kids will be too busy listening to hip programming to be rowdy. By that way of thinking, I suggest we dose kids with Benadryl, then drive around until they fall asleep.

Of course the BusRadio pitch to advertisers is a less about public service. AdRants reported this interesting found in BusRadio's media materials.

"BusRadio will take targeted student marketing to the next level." Advertisers will get "a unique and effective way to reach the highly sought after teen and tween market."

Here's a thought. If you want to make school buses safer, try installing seat belts.

$6 billion all dressed up and nowhere to go Or, let's start an agency

[by Todd] The 30-second spot is under assault, right? Agencies and advertisers are all worrying about what's next when you tune out their nightly blitz of messages.

But what if tonight, from your comfy chair, you could see television ads that are targeted to your tastes? No longer are you going to see the same commercial as people hundreds of miles away with vastly different interests. Instead every ad is tweaked to speak to your wants and needs.

Telcos and cable companies have invested more than $6 billion in projects like FiOS and U-verse to make it all possible. Study after study says relevance can overcome the resistance to marketing. It seems like the perfect solution.

"Of all the things I see, and I look at new TV technologies all day long, addressable advertising is the biggest opportunity, bar none," Tracey Scheppach, vice president video innovation at Starcom MediaVest Group told MediaPost.

So why aren't these laser-guided messages saving the day for beleaguered advertising? According to the experts in the MediaPost article it's just too darn hard to negotiate the deals. So no one does.

I have another theory. Brand agencies and media companies are too damn lazy.

It's not for lack of desire that these deals aren't happening. It just takes a willingness to do the work. I'm sure there's no "Form 1859" someone fills out to take over Times Square for a product launch. But it happens nonetheless, because its big, and glamorous.

Things like addressable television strip away much of that glitz. No longer are creative directors pseudo Hollywood directors crafting 30-second epics. Instead creative talents have to think in three dimensions, crafting a message that can be varied for a myriad of recipients, in an expanding realm of formats.

In short, they have to think like a direct-marketing agency. Oh the irony! After years be being the butt-end of brand agency score, dismissed as below-the-line, database marketers, or mail houses, now creatives at direct response agencies are laughing as technology delivers brands to their doors.

Think the big mega agencies are too smart to let it all slip away? Let me take you back a decade, when Internet advertising first emerged. Remember how big brand agencies tried to dismiss it as just billboards on a computer, or tried to make it like radio through a modem? What a nightmare it was when creatives were confronted with file-size restrictions, let alone the onslaught of programmers in their hallowed halls.

Today the landscape if littered with interactive agencies, many owned by the big agencies, but ghettos nonetheless for people who saw something more than big print ads in the future. Confronted with the reality that interactive is a discipline that is only growing in importance, how many agencies have integrated that talent into the mainstream, required all their teams to learn the nuances of this new approach?

Now technology is bringing a wrecking ball to television, the beloved darling of the brand agencies. Advertisers are pulling money out of firehose-advertising and, when they do spend, demanding ROI, hard numbers. But once again brand agencies are dismissing the knock at the door as just another door-to-door salesman.

I suggest those of us who are willing to rethink how the pieces work owe it to ourselves to answer the call. Remake the face of the agencies you're at, if you can. If not, step out and start your own. Seize the moment. I'm more than willing to help.

Anyone interested? Seriously, anyone?

Treating brands like children

[by Todd] Who created the concept of brand personality? Seriously, I'd like to know.

For years now advertisers have assigned personality traits to their brands like parents watching a children come into their own. But while kids naturally grow, and hopefully mature, we seem intent on hold brands back in kindergarten year after year. How else do you account for the rote processes agencies have developed for advertising?

I kept coming back to brand personality while talking to Larry O'Flahavan over at Boxer Films. Boxer Films worked with Team One Advertising, on extending the Lexus ES 350 campaign, "Is it possible to engineer desire?"

Rather than asking for a series of films hyping the car's bells and whistles, Team One and Boxer Films explored where that question might naturally lead. What emerged was a brilliantly simply series of two-minute videos focusing on fine chocolate, champagne and fragrance. They called it the Science of Desire, and offered it as a viewer showcase on TiVo. (You can find them on BoxerFilms.net under Jeff DeChausse's director's page.) Odds are you haven't seen the end of this content.

But the Lexus showcase is far more than a few extended-format videos. It was built around the understanding that the videos weren't for a commercial. They were shot with an understanding that consumers may ultimately play them on a cellphone, or years from now in Google's video player.

And that's where brand personality steps in. These aren't some over-the-top exploit like we've come to expect from CP+B. Instead this is a body of work that will speak as much to the value of Lexus five years from now as it does today. How many so-called viral videos will be worth the bandwidth six months from now, let alone six years?

Not that every brand can support doing work like this. But far too many will never consider it. As Larry pointed out,

"We've all become very good at pounding out the 30-second commercial, in part because we know what the box looks like. To do work like this you have to reconfigure your thinking. What will it look like on a computer, on a cell phone, what about PSP? It changes everything about how you shoot."

It would be a safe bet to blame weak creatives for the pablum we see. But Larry suggests the directors, who have made small fortunes doing television commercials, are as much to blame.

Sooner or later someone has to break the chain of co-dependence. And it ultimately may fall on the clients, Larry said.

"Agencies are scared, production houses are scared. They know they aren't offering what the client needs. But they have no idea how to do anything else."

There are some examples of other brands taking similar steps. Coke has embraced the lifestyle approach with it's music and blogs content at MyCoke.com. But the examples are few and far in between.

Which makes you wonder, how many brands, years from now, will look back and wonder what they could have been, if only...

Tip of the hat, or a Bronx cheer part v

[by Todd] Oh, so much to talk about. So many weighty topics.

But who wants to mess with that on a Friday? Let's play our game instead.

A tip of the hat to Darryl at BrandFlakesForBreakfast for the the best disclaimer line in a long time. "I only know enough to make promises to clients."

A Bronx cheer to Pabst Blue Ribbon and NPR for a sponsorship deal that cheapens both. For Pabst to contend it is sponsoring "All Songs Considered" as a means of reaching college youth is disingenuous. Neither brand can honestly say the partnership is relevant to their users. (Via AdFreak)

A tip of the hat to whatever agency came up with these ingenious ads for The Torture Museum in Prague. They grab your attention with brutal reality that not only makes the point about not littering (others warn about shoplifting), but make the point how brutally people have been treated.

A Bronx cheer to Google for its promotion tie-in with the new film The Break Up. Users are encouraged to upload their own break up video. Prime time does a fine job of showing how far people will lower themselves for 15 minutes of fame. Somehow I thought Google would have aimed higher.

A tip of the hat to Guy Gorma, a hapless Brit trying to apply for an IT job at the BBC, but instead put on air by mistake as a expert on music downloads. Talk about cool under pressure, the interviewer kept firing questions and he kept coming up with answers. Like they say, fake it 'til you make it. See it all here. In true pop-culture form, Gorma is now being asked for his opinions on all sorts of world matters.

A tip of the hat to the brilliant parents of this articulate, opinionated blogger. Girl, your time has come.