Insights
Could reality TV replace elections?
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?
Cable system DVR’s are not the future.
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?
Reality TV finally got real
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?
Why I love my iPod and hate it at the same time.
I’m an Apple guy. Started with a 512k “Fat Mac” and an ImageWriter II. (Had a Thunderscan for it too… bet you’re jealous).
When the iPod was introduced, I thought, $400, who would buy one? And look what happened. I got my 2g (that’s Second Generation) 10gig from Target when the 3g’s were introduced for $200. It’s great for listening to music while on a plane or a beach, or running a party mix at a party, but, when it comes to really hearing music, it sucks.
In a former life I sold high end Hi-Fi equipment. If you’ve never heard of Linn, Creek, Naim, Arcam, Music Hall, Conrad Johnson, Wilson Audio, Thiel, Mark Levinson, etc- then you probably don’t know what high end is.
In the day of the CD player, I’d still prefer to listen to music on vinyl, not because of any nostalgia (believe me, cueing records and getting up every 20 minutes to flip a record SUCKS) but because it sounds better.
That’s right, it sounds better.
Music is a bunch of waves in the air, and waves are continuous and very analog. When we digitize music, we cut it up in slices, 44,100 times in the case of a CD and try to pretend that we hear the same way we see. What I mean by that, is when you watch a movie, you see 24 frames per second of still pictures and you get the impression that it’s moving. When we slice music up 44,100 times per second, and expect our ears to fill in the blanks, it doesn’t work quite right. The reason is easiest to understand with very high frequencies, over 16,000 hz (a fancy way of saying cycles per second). Cymbals create sound in this range a lot. So we have a 20,000 cycle wave, and we sample it 44,100 times, picture a wave- with a high point and a low point and a mid-point- if we happen to sample only at the high point and the low point- we get the top and bottom of the wave- and we can cheat it a bit, and tell the components that it isn’t a zig-zag that we have to reproduce, but a wave- but if we sample at the midpoint each time- we get a straight line- and that, is noise.
So- digital sampling already has it’s flaws. That’s why the industry has the next generation of audio formats- DVD audio or SACD, both, with much higher sampling rates. But with higher sampling rates, we end up with even bigger files, and that will take up even more room on our hard drives than regular old Compact Disc audio.
That’s why we’ve been “compressing” music into MP3’s to play on our iPods, to keep the files small, and to be able to carry 10,000 songs in your pocket.
Well, when you start out with a flawed format (CD) and then compress it even more, you end up with audio that is actually a step backward.
With people buying music from the iTunes music store instead of buying the CD , and the model of distribution changing, there will be whole generations that don’t know what music is really supposed to sound like.
Granted, most people don’t have a system in their home that can really give a good CD a good reproduction, but, with an iPod as a source, we’ve got the classic- garbage in, garbage out paradigm in full force.
Typically, technology gives us better quality at a lower price, but that’s not what’s happening in music today. My big worry, is musicians will stop recording at the best quality, and just go straight to MP3, losing the nuances and beauty of what music can sound like when done right.
Even when the imperfect vinyl record was the standard, it was the limiting factor in reproduction as anyone who has heard a 30 inches per second 1” tape master played back on a reference system. The beauty of the performance is only at risk of being lost as the tapes deteriorate over time, but, with digital recording becoming the standard, we may have already lost too much of the waveform to ever be able to re-release something amazing once we get over the idea of the MP3 and the iPod.
Viva Vinyl and higher sampling rates. I love my iPod, but, it’s the fast food of music instead of the steak we should be digesting.
What do you think?