CharlieMoger.com

Marketing and advertising advice for owner-operated businesses

So fifteen minutes from now

Acceptance of my kids’ advanced sense of hip reminds me, life is like those moving sidewalks in the airport: walk or stand still, you’re being carried along–walking the wrong way will only keep you in one place.

My kids call me “so fifteen minutes ago” when I share my understanding of current hipness which they’ve long since digested or spit out. It’s all moving and we’re being carried somewhere…

So, if NOW is so fifteen minutes ago, what is still fifteen minutes AHEAD? Hang on to your carry-ons and grab the Advil, passengers: here comes IPTV.

Heralded as a Trojan Horse to the media fortress, this new technology is going to shake up changes in television we’re still coming to grips with now.

The Hollywood Reporter’s Diane Mermigas says, “Ready or not, dominant gatekeepers — from cable and satellite operators to telephone companies and television networks — are about to confront a new competitor: open-sourced, real-time, stored digital video on handy Internet-connected devices that play by a different set of rules.”

IPTV could do to TV what the Walkman and iPod did for/to music retailing: personalize and decentralize it. As they learned in Troy, walls of a city are more easily torn down from within. When consumers take control of content without regard to what will soon seem a narrow-band channel of distribution, choice will indeed go critical mass.

This end-run will put enormous pressure on your messaging: it has to be relevant, real and compelling. If you think the effectiveness of broadcasting is declining due to fragmentation now—wait fifteen minutes.

 

[Originally published 11 Oct 2005]

Zigging when they’re zagging

Three stories of imposing red brick, McIntyre Elementary School was a small town classic. Towering windows, chalkboards that seemed a mile-long, green walls and black tile floors, it remains the picture that pops in when I hear the word school. Is your school still in you? Are you still in school?

Marketing is the continuing education of observation; labs are campaigns. When the student in you is ready, the lesson always arrives. Today it comes courtesy of Bavarian Motor Works–better known as BMW.

After pioneering the era of “branded entertainment,” BMW has popped the clutch and left it behind. Advantages are always fleeting and seldom is there a better example than this: BMW practically creates a category. Others rush in to copy. Demand explodes. Prices escalate. Value diminishes. BMW exits.

AdAge reports, “The primary reason for BMW’s new backseat approach: Branded entertainment is just getting too expensive. According to executives close to the client and experts in Hollywood, BMW doesn’t have the marketing dollars to ink entertainment deals at a time when integration fees and marketing requests from film or TV partners are escalating.”

Like poker and used cars, knowing when to get out is almost more important than getting in.

Here’s the lesson: Don’t love marketing campaigns that can’t love you back. BMW saw the party was over and moved on. You should too. When advantages diminish, depart. Better yet, when it seems they are about to–be the first one out the door.

Like BMW, you can create just as much buzz ending something as in beginning it–provided you do both boldly and smartly.

There’s another lesson in this story. Go read it now and then click to continue…

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Who is king?

A once-great empire left in his wake, Disney CEO Michael Eisner gave a speech to the Hollywood Radio and Television Society  days before his departure from Mickey’s throne saying, “content isn’t actually king, as the saying goes, but that it’s more of a steadfast queen, the true power behind the throne, who loyally serves whatever king currently holds the distribution scepter.”

Setting aside his dubious legacy at Walt Disney‘s magical world, Eisner has a good point: what good is content if no one sees it. Distribution really is king. Long live the king.

Think of it this way: what you’re selling is content, how you’re found is distribution. And, oh how that is changing…

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If you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em

In what they may consider a bold initiative, major media companies are increasingly fighting audience erosion by trying to out-do what their on line competitors are doing. Proof positive comes in today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required):

Driven by fear of losing advertisers and audience to the Internet, large media conglomerates are spending billions in a spate of acquisitions and aggressive Internet initiatives, and are likely to keep on spending.

Companies like Viacom Inc., News Corp. and Time Warner Inc. worry that they will miss the rapid expansion of Internet advertising while their own, more-traditional sources of revenue growth are slowing. Some hope to directly challenge the giant portals like Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc. — Web sites that serve as gateways to the Internet. Others are transferring some of their most valuable content to online sites, even though that risks alienating their traditional distribution partners.

“Traditional distribution partners.” Like a cross-country runner in cement sneakers, legacy players can see the finish line but can’t seem to get their feet moving that way. Going through the motions and trying to “buy” the channel screams out of old-line thinking isn’t going to get it done. When rules change, your game has to change.

Are you doing the same thing? Remember push vs. pull. (see: They Just Don’t Get It) Denying this shift is akin to lamenting the halcyon days of 50¢ gasoline; it’s a new world. Dig deep, pay up and keep driving.

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