by Next Wave Team | Apr 4, 2005 | Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Future of TV
The last Dayton Mayoral election cost over $700,000, the one before that was $500,000. What sane person spends that much money to run for a job that pays $36,000 a year? Candidates tell you that they the are best choice to manage our City’s limited budget, I say it’s time to put their money where their mouth’s are.
I challenge the candidates to each limit spending to a maximum of $36,000, raised in no more than $100 donations from any household.
No PAC or party money. No smear campaigns from special interest groups. Just straight talking, old fashioned debating, in moderated forums and utilizing grassroots movements.
If the candidates truly care about this city, and have the vision to improve our city through shrewd financial discipline, they should be the first to welcome this opportunity. This could put Dayton on the map as innovators in campaign finance reform, much as we were on the forefront of the City Manager form of government 100 years ago.
I offer my services to build a coalition to moderate, and help promote both candidates in a non-partisan, fair forum, supplying a website to provide news and a forum for discussion of ideas in the mayoral race.
Or maybe it’s time to skip elections all together? We could create a local reality TV show, like “The Apprentice” to challenge the candidates to come up with solutions to local problems and use call in numbers like American Idol to choose our next Mayor. We could even sell TV commercials to refill the city coffers.
The next step is up to the candidates to contact me, or pick a moderator of their choosing.
In the mean time, it’s up to the voters to ask the candidates why they haven’t accepted this challenge. This should be easy compared to running our city.
What do you think?
by Next Wave Team | Apr 3, 2005 | Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Future of TV
I just read an article in Mediaweek- “Next Wave: Network DVRs”, March 28 2005, that proves people are missing the point of the Digital Video Recorders (TiVo) and VOD (Video on Demand).
Much of this harks back to the misunderstanding many people have about what the difference is between an ISP, AOL, Internet access, Internet hosting and what being “online” means. Cable companies are not content providers, just the deliverymen. Networks aren’t creating programming- they are just a vehicle for delivery of an advertising message. And a DVR is nothing but a library of programming personalized for your viewing pleasure.
Where that library of programming resides will change dramatically in the next 5 years. The entire “Network” model, be it broadcast or cable, should already be a relic. Since viewers don’t watch programming 24 hours a day, why should anyone be trying to fill 24 hours a day? The successful model of the future is being able to get at least 30 minutes a day, of the largest very definable audience on a guaranteed basis.
For example: How valuable would 30 seconds be if I could deliver the eyes and ears of every person in the country who is going to buy lunch at a fast food restaurant today if I’m McDonalds and I want to promote a new burger, the Big Ronald, for 59 cents today only? The question wouldn’t be how much those :30 seconds are worth- but how would they deal with the mad frenzy at every store in the country?
Or more realistically, if I could sell :30 seconds every day to reach every single video gamer in the country?
The secret is not in how the channels of programming distribution work, or who owns the shows, or what time the viewer watches- it’s the delivery of guaranteed highly targeted eyeballs, nothing more, nothing less.
And the cable companies are just unnecessary middlemen who don’t know it yet, as are the networks. The “network DVR” will appear, but it will be owned by the content owner, who will get paid based on the delivery of a message to the most eyeballs necessary.
The winner in all this will be the company that delivers the technology to bill the advertiser for each eyeball, and that figures out who the ideal viewers of the message are.
For example: I love 2 HBO shows- Deadwood and The Sopranos. Everything else on HBO I can get from Netflix, albeit in not quite HD quality (yet). To get those 2 shows, I have to subscribe to basic cable, and then to HBO as a premium. At $2 each a show, I spend $8 a month, and am well ahead of my $70 VOOM bill. Now if there were more TV viewers in my household, this starts to erode the numbers. But, if I’m willing to be profiled for marketing preferences, and willing to watch 6 highly targeted commercials (no feminine hygiene products or ED drugs) and get the show for $1 each, you bet I’m going to watch the spots.
This is the future of television and advertising, with advertising actually hitting people who are 100% probable customers instead of John Wanamaker’s famous “I know half of my advertising budget is wasted, I just don’t know which half” paradigm.
Taking the stress out of delivering around the clock programming to be a “Network” and the absurdity of Nielsen measurements of the “Mass market” appeal of programming to measure advertising effectiveness, will allow a new creativity to programming and a much more effective and elegant advertising solution.
Programmers will make programming that finds desired eyeballs, media buying companies will deliver the correct mix of eyeballs for the message, and advertising agencies will get back to how to sell on a one-to-one basis, with messages tailored for each type of buyer. Viewers will get the programming they want, when they want it, for a reasonable price, and will grow to love advertising because it is all relevant, helpful and it saves them money, and all will be right with the world.
Be warned, the path to this solution will be painful for many of the major players, and the resistance will be great and the casualties many, so it may not happen the way that any of us can predict, but it will happen.
Two companies that merit watching of this are Apple for their iTunes music store, which could become the next video content store, (see article:”could a multimedia iPod allow Apple to dominater movie and TV online sales“)Google with their adsense driven insertion systems and Amazon who understands the power of suggestive selling based on customer data. There are doubtlessly countless others who will benefit from this change, but there are twice as many who will fight it and end up off the playing field all together.
What do you think?
by Next Wave Team | Mar 19, 2005 | Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Future of TV
While I admit to watching “The Apprentice” because I felt it reminded me of how people think they should do advertising: here’s a problem, solve it in 48 hours without the right tools or budget, in general, reality TV wasn’t my thing.
The standard formula is to take a person, or a group of people, and throw them in an unfamiliar world, and watch them go gladiator on each other. It may be entertaining, but it’s typically not pretty. Even The Apprentice had a woman dropping her skirt for $20 on Wall Street.
So, when “The Contender” came out, I detected a slight change in the landscape that may justify watching- here the participants were all pros, playing in their field, but being given BETTER tools than they had before. I like this idea. Take the best, and see if we can make them better.
Boxing is not a team sport, and this is the one spot where is gets a little iffy, after a team wins a challenge, they pick who boxes and they get to pick who they get to fight on the other team, which leaves the rest of them totally off the hook. The funny thing is, so far, three under dogs have chosen not the weakest members of the other team, but the strongest- and won each time. Big ad for heart beats skills, makes me love the show even more.
Instead of Donald Trump being the deciding factor in who leaves the show, it’s pure mano a mano, pugilistic mayhem, edited for effect of course. Now, part of me says unless it’s a KO, boxing scores can be as funky as Olympic figure skating ones, but the fall back here is there are the contestants watching, and if it was really off, they would probably pipe up.
I’m not a huge fan of boxing, but it’s like rubber neckers at the scene of a car wreck, you almost have to look. The one part of the Contender that makes things uncomfortable is that typically, boxers don’t train where their opponents can see each other, or live under the same roof. It will be interesting when “team mates” who have been working together, might have to face each other. Boxing is a metaphor for war, and it’s always been said it’s easier to kill your enemy when you don’t know him personally.
This show could have a huge impact on these young men’s lives, and on boxing that were totally unpredicted. Only time will tell.
In the mean time, it’s my choice for the best in reality TV.
What do you think?
by Next Wave Team | Feb 27, 2005 | Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Future of TV, Marketing & the Web
Quick, who’s your agent? Don’t have one? Not an actor or a pro sports jock? Don’t worry, we don’t call them that yet, and it may not be the term du jour, but it’s one that will be critical in the next ten years.
An agent is going to filter content for you, and hopefully just you. Current examples are when you shop at Amazon and you get all those suggestions- “people who bought “Potato chip collecting for dummies” also bought… or when my TiVo selects shows I may like based on what I watch. Mass marketers feared the 500 channel universe because audiences would fragment making it increasingly to introduce new products like the square potato chip, while niche marketers were celebrating the advent of the potato chip network, which featured chips, chips and more chips, 24 hours a day.
If there is one problem that hasn’t been solved yet for the coming TV over IP, it’s how to let audiences know what shows are worth buying and what isn’t. The great thing is, we will no longer have to have an assigned date and time to watch the first episode of “The Potato Chip masters,” it will be available on demand, any time we want, for as long as we want.
Agents will make all the difference. Radio used to be the primary agent for the music industry, you’d hear a song, like it, and go buy it. The second level agents were your friends, the guy at the record store and music magazines. Now, with idiots like Clear Channel homogenizing radio nationwide, local record stores a dying industry, you are left with friends. These days communities of like minded connoisseurs are getting together on the web and invariably, a few people become the influencer of the group- these are the new “agents” of influence, and over the next 10 years they will become more and more important to anyone selling anything.
You will need a network of agents and communities for them to infiltrate. You will also need agents to steer you to the communities, but these already exist, to an extent in search engines. If you search, and the community is solid, it should show up in the first 10 screens of your search. Communities are still learning their way to build themselves. We have yahoo groups to join, and there are peer networks like myspace, tribe and friendster, and specialty sites that focus on topics like Slashdot that bring people interested in the same thing together, over time, these will become your filters for your personal information system, through RSS feeds and AI agents that sort and aggregate content based on your interests- think of it as askjeeves meets a real butler/friend/teacher type.
If there is one-reason newspapers are having such a hard time keeping subscribers it’s because they never really understood their role as agents for a local community. They were supposed to be the one stop agent for their community first, regional second and national and global third. It was up to them to make the regional up to global relevant to their local community, and to be the leader in pollinating the local leaders.
This brings up something; all agents have ranks. Sort of like the military, only different. It’s not the number of people that you influence and direct that is most important, it’s the number of other agents. The agent system is viral in nature, and the number of nodes of influence you reach are critical to the rank you will achieve.
Explaining viral marketing is a subject for another entry. But for now, take a look around and think- who ARE your agents, and what are they doing for you?
I’d love to hear what you think.
by Next Wave Team | Feb 23, 2005 | Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Future of TV
Rumors. Apple rumors in particular, so juicy. Let’s hope I don’t get sued like the poor Harvard student with his thinksecret site.
I have no inside source- just read on Macnn.com that Apple may be buying TiVo- and this makes me happy and a little worried.
Happy because TiVo is too good to go the way of the BetaMax, or to lose out to cable companies and satellite companies selling DVR’s to their customers. Time Warner has a DVR that records hi-def, but the interface is pathetic compared to my beloved lo-def TiVo. Apple in their latest releases of software have said- this is the year of High def- even adding hi-def capability to the free with every Mac editing software iMovie. They had Sony’s chairman out on stage with Steve Jobs bragging about the new HDV camera during MacWorld. (I’m lusting for the HVR-Z1U camera- $5K). Apple buying TiVo would bring HD to my TiVo fast. Yeah.
The fact is, a TiVo box is just a little Linux computer with a hard drive (always too small a hard drive too), Apple OSX is the best version of Unix out there- it would be easy to port the TiVo functionality onto a Mac.
TiVo isn’t really a hardware company (they are now practically giving away the box) anyway- they are a software and subscription company. They sell an interface to your TV programming, and a data feed of what that programming is. That is what I love and pay for- not the box.
Apple could take TiVo to the next level by taking that data- like I want every show with Kelly McGillis in it, and record it, and use it as an iTunes music store for TV. Think about it- you miss tonight’s episode of “Lost” because you are on a blind date- you go home, click on your Apple iTelevision link and buy the show as a download to your Apple TiVo- and it delivers in HD via a bit torrent type download. This is the future of programming.
The worry I have is that Apple doesn’t have great luck at running a subscription business. E-world was a flop, and I constantly read about problems with .Mac Apple may not be ready to keep TiVo as it is and that would be a mistake.
Time will tell. Apple is usually good about keeping secrets, so we should know if this is true in the next 2 weeks.
by Next Wave Team | Feb 7, 2005 | Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Future of TV, VW advertising
Super Bowl. It’s supposed to be the world championship of advertising. Apple set the standard for excellence with its million-dollar ad launching the Macintosh in 1984. This year, we saw the most mundane, weak, el-crapo advertising ever.
Particularly bad were the car ads. Ford, three times the same ad for a car I can’t buy today. I kept waiting for a different ending, nope. Same stupid grin on the frozen idiot who drove his new Mustang convertible with the top down in a blizzard. The other ad, carried on the “scary biker” stereotype (recycled concept from a Mercedes ad- and others) with a pack of bikers being scared off by a row of “Tough trucks.” Excuse me, but, in case no one in Detroit has noticed, the people buying motorcycles today, the Harley’s they drop $8-$30K on, they don’t look like that or dress like that. They also buy trucks, just probably not Fords, anymore.
How about telling us about what makes a Ford truck a good value? Make the product a hero, while describing what differentiates it from a Chevy, or a Dodge.
Or a Honda, another vehicle I can’t buy today. The Ridgeline is a nice truck I’m sure, but, it looks like a Matchbox toy truck- tell me, calling it a 1 ton truck, with a bed that looks like it’s 3.5 feet long, doesn’t instill confidence. How about comparing it to something I might know- especially, since I can’t go out and drive one.
Same thing for Cadillac. Three new fast cars, that I can’t buy yet. Wasn’t “we build excitement” the line for Pontiac? Build excitement about a car I can buy.
Let’s just call this automotive flirtation, not advertising. One of my cardinal rules of marketing is don’t tease when you could deliver. It’s about wasting the consumer’s time. They value it, you should too.
Volvo offered to take me into space, but wasn’t that an ad for Virgin Galactic, not the Volvo- wait, it was Volvo wasn’t it? I don’t remember.
Toyota is still bragging about the Prius, using cool effects, but, do the crunchy granola types watch the Superbowl?
Car advertisers all fail.
But then again, how many good car ads are there?
How many car brands out there really get the connection to their intended market?
Mercedes got it for a while, but then because of mega agency mergers, they had to switch agencies, no matter how good the work was.
Mini, of course has gotten it, all on a budget for less that what Ford spent for their 4 ads- well maybe a little more. An Agency that has ideas, there is a good start.
VW had it too for a while, but that was only because they were the first to tie in trippy indy music with trippy indy cars, at least that’s what all the young yuppies thought when they bought the first German cars that proved that Germans don’t always get the engineering right.
Car brands have to take a look at Harley Davidson. Here’s a company that has a brand that works. Here’s a company that builds motorcycles almost as poorly as the American car companies build cars, yet sells them all. HD makes more money off licensing than from selling bikes these days. There was a day when the Chevy Bowtie had that kind of power, but it’s long gone now.
US car companies tried to trick the consumer offering cars that were the same, only different- Firebird/Camaro etc. It didn’t work.
Another cardinal rule of advertising- don’t fake it, keep it real.
Real differentiation, real reasons to buy one instead of the other. Substance over style.
So, take note. Next year, if you want to sell cars on the Superbowl, remember:
Don’t tease.
Don’t fake it.
Deliver real differentiation, and a way I can relate to owning that car.
The Super Bowl is the wrong place to play with selling cars.
