Free Rise

Conan O’Brien, last night: “NBC announced they plan to lose $200 million on the Winter Olympics next month. Folks, is it just me, or is that story hilarious?”

NBC’s talk show lineup was doomed from the start. Its failure was less of a surprise than AOL-Time Warner, Terrell Owens’ tenure with the Cowboys, or Olestra anal-leakage potato chips. And the disaster is unrelenting for NBC, now with every personality on NBC — and CBS — taking shots at the cellar-dweller of the legacy broadcast network division.

This isn’t just a FAIL. It’s an EPIC FAIL. Let’s count the individual failures at work, and see what we can learn.

1. A failure of imagination. For its supposedly radical yet retro concept (a nightly talk show in prime time), The Jay Leno Show concept was shockingly conservative.  It assumed that America wanted to sit back and watch the same guy do a show every night, because that was the late night model for the prior 50 years. Now as NBC tries to fix its mess, it’s sticking with this conceptual model. How about moving Leno back to The Tonight Show and letting Conan host a prime-time variety/sketch show two nights a week? How about trying out something — anything – that’s really different? The times demand innovation.

2. A failure to think about competition. At 11:30pm, a talk show has traditionally competed with other, similar talk shows, news, and syndicated reruns. The 500-channel environment and DVRs didn’t change that so much. But 10pm is still called “prime time” for a reason. It’s a place to showcase top-quality content that grown-ups watch on their couches, and against that, Leno interviewing sit-com actresses looked like piffle.

3. A failure to understand the customer. The ratings at the end of a late-night talk show is a fraction of that of the beginning of a show. After the initial monologue and comedy bits, people tend to bail out, flip around, or just turn it off and go to bed. At 10pm, audience retention is critical, since affiliates make all their money at 11 on the local news. And the real reason why Leno is being kicked out of the 10pm slot is because his show’s format didn’t retain its audience, thus killing NBC affiliates’ 11pm news ratings.

4. A failure to consider revenue. Tina Fey declared a few years ago that working in broadcast in the ’00s was like working in vaudeville in the 1960s. The old model has been disrupted by technology and choice — four networks, replaced by hundreds of networks plus iTunes plus web video plus DVDs plus on-demand, ad infinitum –  but the new models produce revenue, too. An hour-long drama can cost millions per episode, and failure is expensive. But success is also richly rewarded via syndication, DVD sales, and international rights. The Jay Leno Show is cheap but low-margin, and most episodes are nearly worthless the minute after it airs.

5. A failure to think downstream. The Leno-to-10pm move was in part a move to retain Conan O’Brien, who had toiled for more than 15 years at 12:35am. But with Leno sucking up the A-list in prime time, Conan got left with the B-list. A Friday episode of The Tonight Show used to mean a top draw. But a few weeks ago, their Friday lead guest was Jeff Garlin, a funny guy but not at the level you’d want in that slot.

6. A failure to plan for failure. The current ad-libbing on the part of NBC execs reveals that they never considered what to do next if Leno’s show were to underperform. It’s easy to cancel Knight Rider and find something else to fill its slot for a few weeks. But Leno occupies five hours of prime time, and even after returning from Winter Olympics programming next month, NBC simply won’t have enough content in the pipeline to deliver an audience to advertisers. Meanwhile, the treatment of O’Brien (and his Late Nite replacement Jimmy Fallon) makes NBC look like a network that doesn’t know how to handle its talent. Now who would choose to run a show there, over another network?

A year from now, this controversy will seem distant. Leno will be on at 11:35. Conan may be on at 12:05, or he may be launching the Late Night division at Fox.

But NBC will still be in fourth place.

It’s not exactly a thought piece, but the Wall Street Journal published my letter to the editor today.

The letter is a radical moderate’s response to a particularly offensive op-ed by the Hoover Institution’s Shelby Steele (”Obama and Our Post-Modern Race Problem“) last week. His thesis was that those who supported Obama’s candidacy in 2008 (and 2007) were gullible victims of a race-redemption narrative, and since the election Obama has proved his cluelessness and worthlessness by enacting policies that are not consistent with the Hoover Institution’s preferences.

Here’s the edited and abridged version of my letter as they published it:

It’s appropriate that Mr. Steele focuses on the old scourge of political correctness, as his op-ed offends me deeply. Simply, I don’t like being called stupid. On behalf of the tens of millions of independents and moderates who supported Barack Obama for president in 2008, may I invite Mr. Steele to demonstrate a little respect for our judgment? We knew what we were doing.

The 2000s were a lost decade of underplanned, unbudgeted, and disastrously executed wars that may never end, and debt-fueled economic activity that proved illusory when the bills came due. Median wages declined, health-care costs soared, and trade and budget deficits became unsustainably large. We Obama voters understood that the next decade would require a radical change of direction. No other candidate for president demonstrated such a predilection for change. We had two years of non-stop exposure to make up our minds about this.

Mr. Steele laments that Mr. Obama is not Ronald Reagan, whose “principled” and “individuated” legacy includes massive government expansion, an unpaid for military buildup, and cementing a culture of spending far above what taxes brought in. George W. Bush, whether he followed President Reagan’s principles or not, got similar results without any meaningful economic progress.

Certainly, those of us who voted for and continue to support President Obama disagree with some of his policy choices to date. But I don’t suppose that Mr, Steele accepts that we’re capable of such nuanced thought.

Eric Meyerson

San Francisco

It’s a lousy time to be in the world of television. Until the broadband video boom of the mid-2000s, TV was the primary entertainment, information, and infotainment medium in the world. Now? It seems a bit like a low-function technological relic, like a cassette player.

Live TV depends on two revenue streams to support itself: commercials and subscriber fees. The former is threatened by time-shifting (Tivo and DVRs), the latter by DVDs. And both are being eaten by web video. Granted, the networks earn revenue off authorized web streams and DVDs, but at returns that define cannibalization.

Imagine you’re the head of programming for a network. How would you compete? If you’re NBC, you plan for a leaner future and perform the equivalent of downsizing, replacing your 10pm drama hour with a cheap talk show. You’re in fourth place, after all, and a whole generation of young adults came of age in a time when “broadcast” meant nothing more than “the low-number channels on cable.” You gotta do what you gotta do to get more eyeballs on your channel, no matter whose eyeballs they may be.

But if you’re running a nichey cable network, your goals are different. Take FX, which runs edgy, young-adult-oriented dramas and comedies. Much of their audience has probably moved most of their video viewing to their laptops, and many of the remaining TV viewers (such as yours truly) watch their programs on DVR and skip commercials.

How does FX fight this? They tease. And they compete.

This is a quick snapshot of a promo FX ran last night during the season premiere of its dark sitcom It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. It promotes a “COVERT SCREENING” of something that’s unavailable on web video outlets. Later promos teased about sexual and violent content, and also promised “you only get to see it once.”

Since I was watching Sunny on DVR, I only caught the first 30 seconds. It’s some kind of anime show. Tivo called it “To Be Announced,” and you know what? It only showed once.

So FX created an event that only people who watched Sunny live could enjoy. It’s all Gabbo-style hype, but it’s an also a direct admission that television is desperately trying to bring people back into their living rooms, by any tactics necessary. Good luck with that.

Is Twitter really for old people? Do most kids really prefer watching pirated DVDs to going to movies, and do they really mostly talk to their friends over their XBox 360s?

My friends who happen to be marketing types have been asking themselves these questions this week, as the Internet went all a-titter about the recent thoughts of Matthew Robson, a 15-year-old boy with a summer internship at Morgan Stanley in London. The venerable investment house for some reason decided to publish Robson’s anecdotal report How Teenagers Consume Media as “research.” (How many of us have relied on the summer intern to tell us what the kids are up to?)

OMG! Everyone is on Facebook, nobody listens to the radio, Twitter is pointless, and banner ads are teh sux. Quick, everyone revise your youth marketing plans!

Oh wait. What about the 99.9% of British teens who aren’t friends with Matthew Robson? (And what about the 65% of Twitter users under 25?)

In this context, it’s worth reading (or revisiting) danah boyd’s remarkable “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online,” a talk she delivered to the Personal Democracy Forum in New York.

In this talk, Boyd (sorry, the lower-case name drives me bonkers) asserted that Facebook and MySpace drew similar size audiences in America. But when she polled her “primarily American, primarily liberal-leaning, primarily white, and primarily involved professionally in politics” audience, she found that almost all of them used Facebook, but almost none of them used MySpace.

It’s more than obvious that online social networks, like all networks, are class stratified and homophilic. As Facebook opened up beyond college kids, many MySpace users chose to jump ship. But just as many stayed put. So, who bailed? Boyd’s research of young people led to a complicated conclusion:

It wasn’t just anyone who left MySpace to go to Facebook. In fact, if we want to get to the crux of what unfolded, we might as well face an uncomfortable reality… What happened was modern day “white flight.” Whites were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. The educated were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those from wealthier backgrounds were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those from the suburbs were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those who deserted MySpace did so by “choice” but their decision to do so was wrapped up in their connections to others, in their belief that a more peaceful, quiet, less-public space would be more idyllic.

Even within Facebook, the social divisions remain extreme. If Morgan Stanley were to ask me what Facebook users were like, I’d tell them they’re iPhone-using, gourmet-cooking, Democratic-voting, Daily Show-watching, mid-career professionals. What I’d really be reporting are the psychographic profiles of Jewish kids who grew up in Miami in the ‘80s, mid-‘90s Wesleyan alums, and Bay Area MBAs. (My wife, who has lots of friends from her tiny southern hometown, gets a somewhat different picture.) Your experience probably varies. Same deal with Twitter – I’m following 200-odd feeds, and none are of the “My cat is sleeping on my lap” variety. Your experience again probably varies.

The California tech community, which chatters at itself continuously via Facebook, blogs, and Twitter, has an understandably warped view of the pervasiveness of certain tech brands, and the use of technology in general. In our little world, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Google/GMail/YouTube, Skype, and Firefox dominate. Meanwhile, the hundreds of millions of global citizens on MySpace, Yahoo!, AOL, MSN/Hotmail, and Windows PCs are ignored or disparaged, to say nothing of all those still listening to the radio or reading dead-tree periodicals.

It’s easy to get wrapped up in a world where “teenagers do X,” but some of us still remember high school. If Morgan Stanley came calling, I probably couldn’t find a damn thing that even a solid plurality of my classmates were into. My crowd liked the Dolphins, Led Zeppelin, getting good grades, hating George H.W. Bush, and being scared of girls. They were generally affluent enough to have cable TV, but not enough to have new cars. That’s how my report on the American teen would have read.

Fast forward 20 years. Twitter isn’t for everyone. Nor is anything else. Teenagers’ technology habits will evolve as technology itself does, but also as those teenagers go off to college, or the workforce, or the Army, or all the other places they can go. As marketers and citizens, we should never mistake one boy’s friends or our own experiences for those of the world. Or as Boyd puts it:

If you are trying to connect with the public, where you go online matters. If you choose to make Facebook your platform for civic activity, you are implicitly suggesting that a specific class of people is more worth your time and attention than others. Of course, splitting your attention can also be costly and doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll be reaching everyone anyhow. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. The key to developing a social media strategy is to understand who you’re reaching and who you’re not and make certain that your perspective is accounting for said choices. Understand your biases and work to counter them.

That last line is great advice for life, too.

Media isn’t magic.

Oh, it used to be. Magazines, television, movies – these were immensely complicated endeavors crafted by brilliant alchemists in Hollywood and New York.

Today, the product is still great, but the magic is gone. A program about LA doctors may be shot in Vancouver, edited in Korea, promoted on MySpace, and distributed over Hulu. We don’t watch the news; we watch Jon Stewart complain about the news. And because seeming half of all media is dedicated to reporting on the half, we know there’s always a man (or Oprah) behind the curtain, even if we can’t see them.

It wasn’t always such. Check out this clip from WCIX (Miami’s channel 6) in 1984.

Besides the quaintness of the reportage and the nostalgia for radio’s not-quite-golden age, what’s most astonishing is the assumed naivete of the audience about the media business:

“Your ratings are what determine the amount of money you can charge an advertiser for being on your radio station. Obviously the more popular your station is, the more expensive it’s going to be for the advertiser.”

Got that?

Today’s teenager is probably more media savvy than 1984’s college graduate. And that savvy, compounded with an unfathomable choice of media platforms -– from YouTube to IMAX to On Demand to NetFlix to Xbox Live to… um, books? –- has made all of us more demanding, less loyal, and more skeptical. After all, if we don’t like what’s on the screen, we can make our own show. The long tail isn’t just getting longer, but it’s getting hard to distinguish the head.

And now, we’re all in on the joke.

Two weeks later, almost everybody still hates Facebook’s redesign, which tossed aside algorithmic relevance in favor of immediacy. Even Facebook employees reportedly don’t like it. Many of my Facebook contacts have said or implied they’re visiting less.

Relax, says Slate’s Farhad Manjoo. Users hate every site redesign. And then they get used to it. And then they forget how the site used to look.

That’s usually true. But sometimes sites redesign themselves out of relevance. (See UrbanBaby for a recent example.)

I don’t think Facebook’s redesign has doomed them. It’s still a fun and useful utility with impressive network effects, and high switching costs (the prospect of re-setting your network on another service). To their credit, they’ve demonstrated nimble action on user revulsion towards past initiatives (Beacon, or their recent ToS changes). And they’re demonstrating again that they’re going to restore some of what this last redesign destroyed.

But what’s most galling about this Facebook redesign – as well as the Beacon and ToS fiascos – is what it says about the immaturity of Facebook the company. In spite of 175 million users, it acts like a trailer-based startup. It doesn’t understand that its every move has consequences, and recreating its primary product is serious business.

Did they do any bucket testing? Did they get feedback from their power users? Did they revise, re-test, try to make sense of how their changes would impact user behavior? Or did they just feel some Twitter heat and decide they want to be like that?

At this point, the evidence strongly favors the last conclusion above. CEO Zuckerburg now famously told his employees that “disruptive companies don’t listen to their customers,” which is such a wildly false assertion that his board (he has a board, right?) should give him a little ass kicking.

For the record, I don’t hate the new Twitterish look of Facebook, although I find it less useful than the version that preceded it. And Twitter feels clunky and faddish. Nobody should be in a rush to copy it; they should be in a rush to improve it radically. (Wouldn’t be hard.)

Mostly, I’m just shocked how Facebook treats its product like it’s still in alpha, and its customers like they just need to shut up and go along for the ride. This is how you kill the goose before it even goes golden.

I’m tweeting like an angry canary these days, mostly with links to the most interesting stuff I’m reading.

Check out my Twitter feed, if you dare.

Oh, Radar. You were my favorite dead-tree magazine.

And now you’re dead. For the third time.

Magazines die all the time. Most have the lifespans of fruit flies. But print is suffering an undeniable environmental sickness, and many great ones will disappear forever.

This isn’t the mere result of economic recession. It’s because of a broad revolution in how content and advertising are consumed.

How many great print mags will even exist in five years? Who would even dare to start up a new one?

Radar, RIP

Eighteen words.

That’s the total copy that the NY Post could accommodate above the fold.

Can you spot the article?

It’s been years since the Smurfs babysat kids while their parents slept in, but this hurts all the same. Fox is cancelling its Saturday morning cartoon lineup and selling off the time for infomercials.

Fox executives said that children’s programming was simply no longer viable on network television — mainly because of competition from cable channels.

Of course, competition from pay-TV is just the tip of the programming iceberg.

My wife was a little sad that our kids won’t grow up watching Saturday morning cartoons. Indeed, those days are long gone, and Saturday morning programming has for the last 15 years or so been a weird mix of animation, peewee reality shows, game shows, sit-coms, and infomercials. Saved by the Bell, anyone?

But the more significant change is that our kids will grow up not knowing “programming” — the placement and scheduling of content — at all. As it happens, she watches Sesame Street whenever we feel like launching it on the Tivo or DVD player or YouTube or SesameStreet.com. She says, “Now let’s watch Elmo,” and we do. Even we don’t know when Sesame Street is really “on.”

When I was a kid, everyone I knew watched the nightly network news in their house, and the only question was whether your parents preferred Brokaw, Jennings, or Rather. (It makes me feel especially old when I remember how big a deal it was when Cronkite retired from his anchor chair.) The nightly news is now an anachronism with a dying customer base, like TV Guide or video rental stores. Everyone saw Katie Couric interview Sarah Palin, but nobody saw it at 6:11pm on their local CBS affiliate.

What we’re watching happen now is an irreversible shift toward self-programming. When our kid is a grown-up — hell, when she’s 10 — “television” is going to be nearly indistinguishable from “the Internet” because none of us will tolerate abiding by some predetermined network schedule.

That is, except for football.