This morning, NASA successfully crashed a rocket into our one and only moon, with the primary purpose of seeking signs of water. (The secondary purpose was being able to call a crash “successful” for once.)
Some people complained about our space agency defacing the pristine, untouched lunar surface. Those people are silly. Besides, more than 10 years ago Mr. Show predicted far, far worse.
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.
Last night’s episode of AMC’s Mad Men, the best episode ever, was “brought to you by DirecTV.”
DirecTV, which claims to offer “more of your favorite channels in HD than anyone,” does not carry AMC in HD.
Ironic, eh?
In his latest Comedy Central special, Patton Oswalt ponders going back 10 years in time to tell his past self about the wonders of 2009. I’m paraphrasing here:
“What’s that you’re listening to? Oh yeah, our old Walkman. What’s in it?”
“Oh you know, a mix tape with our 25 favorite songs.”
“That was a great tape. I’ll tell you what. Pull out that tape. Break it in half. That’s how big your Walkman is going to be in 2009.”
“Wow. How many songs can that hold?”
“Every song you’ve ever heard, or ever will hear, or will ever be written.”
“What’s that cost? Like a million dollars?”
“No, no, no. They’ll be everywhere. You’ll get them in gift bags and try to re-gift them to your nephew, and even he will be like, ‘Thanks a lot, [expletive].’”
This is more or less how I feel about EA’s TeamBuilder application for NCAA Football 10. I don’t know if I could even describe it to my past-version without him having a full mental breakdown.
When I was a kid, I was a huge football nerd. (OK, I’ve steadfastly failed to mature on this front.) My nerdy pastime was creating fake teams, complete with rosters, stats, uniforms, histories, and mascots. You may ask, “For what purpose, Eric?” And then I would pity you for not have a childhood passion of your own.
Anyway, fast forward 20 years. EA Sports has released NCAA Football 10, which is the first version of the game I’ve bought in years. You’ve always been able to create teams in the game (as well as in the Madden NFL series), but with the TeamBuilder web app, you can now create whole teams from scratch, including uploading custom logos for the helmets.
And I’m majorly geeking out.
San Francisco University Fogcutters. Sutro Tower on the helmet. How awesome is this?
NCAA 10 is also loaded with other shiny things, including deep integration with ESPN and a mode that ties the game to the real-world NCAA football season. This integration isn’t a gimmick; it’s a key value of the game. And my inner 12-year-old couldn’t be more excited about it.
Last night, I had the honor of attending a San Francisco organizing meeting for Repair California, the movement to call for a constitutional convention. It was marvelous to attend an on-topic town hall-type session where nobody demanded to see anyone’s birth certificate.
The utter brokenness of our state government is as obvious a 7.0 earthquake right now. Our state education system ranks near the bottom in student achievement and performance, even when controlling for poverty and demographic factors. Our university system, once the world’s best, is being hollowed out by budget cuts. Our water system is built for a state with half its population, and catastrophe awaits. Our transportation systems have been neglected for 30 years, leaving LA and the Bay Area with America’s #1 and #2 most congested freeways.
And nothing can be done about any of it, because since 1870 our Constitution has been amended 500+ times. Its 75,000 words contain layer upon layer of special interest protection, rendering our elected leaders essentially powerless to change anything. Not that they want to change anything — mercilessly gerrymandered districts and the two-thirds “yes” requirement to pass a budget has led to electoral non-competitiveness, ideological extremism, and utter gridlock.
The problem isn’t the bums in office. The problem is systemic. And the system needs to get blown up. Ergo, a new constitution.
And so it is that concerned Californians from across the ideological spectrum have come together to get the constitutional convention ball rolling. It will require getting two initiatives on the ballot, and working out a lot of details about choosing delegates and limiting the the new document’s scope. (I used my microphone time to suggest that delegates should be chosen randomly by assembly district, and then they would caucus to elect delegates to the state constitutional convention, similar to the way a jury selects a foreperson. One of the movement’s leaders, Jim Wunderman of the Bay Area Council, said this proposal is already under consideration.)
Everyone who lives in California should get on board right now. A new constitution is going to happen — almost everyone accepts that it has to. And it will be up to citizens to make sure that California’s new constitution is of, by, and for the people, and not hijacked by the special interests that dominate the initiative process every election.
Back when I worked on My Yahoo!, one of my projects was to create ad quality standards. Users were generally displeased with seeing an LREC (the standard “large rectangle” ad you see on so many sites) where they used to see their own content, so we had to be sensitive to what users were experiencing in that spot on the screen.
We certainly would not have approved this:
(Click on it to see its gory detail.)
This is the Old Spice campaign currently running on Yahoo! sports. The LREC (which is animated) shows what is supposed to be a very hairy armpit crusted with chunks of antiperspirant residue. (One of the chunks falls and crushes a car, for some reason.) This campaign fails for two very obvious reasons:
I have a pretty strong stomach, but I am repulsed. Is it just me? Or is this an ad standards FAIL?
When I first went to work for Wells Fargo, one of the things that was hard to get used to was what they called their branches: “stores.” In hindsight, it made a lot of sense. Retail banks are called as such for a reason, after all. Most people think of branches as places to transact, but they’re very much retail environments, where brands are established (and refreshed), customers are profiled, and products are sold.
Around the turn of the millennium, the branch looked doom. Online banks with no physical locations were growing fast, and the traditional banks were building out their online capabilities.
Then traditional banks changed tack and doubled-down on meatspace. Major players built thousands of new branches to attract deposits, and some even radically redefined branches entirely. Umpqua’s wi-fi lounges (pictured above) and WaMu’s Occasio were particularly innovative. (Sadly, WaMu’s new Chase overlords are doing away with Occasio.) Commerce Bank grew super-fast with the simple innovation of extending their hours to times that were more convenient for working people.
But now Bank of America is retrenching, shuttering 10% of its branches. Does this mean the end of the store strategy?
Yes and no.
Yes: Retail (consumer and small business) customers are becoming ever more comfortable with online services. As they spend more time interacting with banks online, banks are finding more ways to market and sell through online channels.
No: America is over-retailed in general, and banks are no exception. BofA probably had too many branches to begin with. Other big banks that built out (or acquired) branch networks during the housing boom are probably now looking at their cost structure and finding many unprofitable locations. Shuttering may occur, but people will still want a physical location to transact checks, cash, and the other tangible forms of money that still power our everyday economy.
We can only hope that more of these banks will follow the Umpqua and Commerce models and create a branch experience that its customers don’t hate. Whoever does that will win deposits, and today, that matters more than anything.
Social media is no longer buzzing like a honeybee or a power line. Rather, Social media is roaring, like a chainsaw.
Social media is not just the newest new form of direct marketing. It’s rapidly becoming the primary way that people –- your customers –- seek recommendations and chat with each other about their purchases.
In this environment, every forward-thinking business is already trying to figure out its social media strategy. But the social media ecosystem is so fluid that trial-and-error will only reveal temporary solutions. And trial-and-error is, by itself, not really a strategy.
So what questions should businesses, especially small, local ones, be asking themselves about social media?
1. Do I need a social media strategy? The answer to this question is a universal “yes,” even if your strategy ends up being “do nothing.” But it’s hard to imagine a small business that couldn’t be served by the fastest emerging method of person-to-person communication on earth.
2. What type of interaction would best serve my current business goals? Social media is about multi-party communication. It connects a business with its customers, but more importantly it can connect a business’s customers with each other. To form an effective social media strategy, a business needs to figure out who needs to be interacting with whom, and how that interaction should be taking place.
Some examples:
3. Which platforms would best serve those communication needs? Obviously, “Get me on Twitter and Facebook” is not a social media strategy. But once you’ve decided who you’re targeting and what you want to accomplish, you need to pick your platforms: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, Yelp, Ning, Yola, and other sites each serve some purposes better than others.
4. How should I craft my presence on those platforms? The WSJ reported recently on a Twitter campaign by web site builder Moonfruit which increased its homepage traffic 13-fold and paying customers by 20%. The cost? Ten MacBook Pros. Since the contest ended, MoonFruit has lost more than 1/4 of their new followers, but now they’ve built a list of 34,000 followers to engage. It’s never been so easy to build a list that large, but now MoonFruit has the challenge of maintaining these subscribers’ interest, or they’ll tune out. Which leads to…
5. How much time can I commit to maintain my social presence? Unlike building a website, creating a blog, social network page, or Twitter feed takes ongoing effort. To keep your business from being sucked into the social media black hole, you have to maintain the presence with new interaction (or “feed the beast”). Each social platform requires a minimum frequency of interaction to be effective. Figure out who will own your business’s interactions, and how they’ll commit to keeping the brand alive online.
This last point is crucial. Creating and abandoning a social media platform is like letting dust collect on your store shelves. Thus, if you’re not serious about interacting with your customers online, you should find another method of marketing your business. And good luck finding one that’s more effective.
I had turned off comments for spam reasons. I’ve installed Akismet on this blog now and reopened the comments. Have away.
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.