August 7, 2005
proclaiming the long-term viability of big media and advertising
Recently I've noticed a lot of blogging detractors everywhere.
A good example would be this comment on my recent "TV is dead" post:
Wow. How easy to come, jump on the bandwagon and slag TV. Not all of America, or the world for that matter, spends their day eye-locked to a computer monitor, navel-gazing away at how wired they and their blogroll are.Of course the amusing part is, at this point of the curve it is in my long-term interest for as many people as possible in the business to disagree with me.The people who get off on bagging on TV simply don't watch the right stuff. Apart from the utter deluge of bad TV, there's a ton of fascinating stuff on TV. Since, we're likely talking less about TV worth watching and more about TV worth spending your marketing dollar on, I'll note there still a ton of great, targeted places on TV to get eyeballs.
I'd much rather have my competition trying to win awards and sell Superbowl ads, than start doing what I'm doing.
Right now I want as many people as possible proclaiming the long-term viability of big media and advertising for solving marketing problems, so please carry on. And if you can get some of your friends on board, even better.
We live in interesting times.
Posted by hugh macleod at August 7, 2005 12:14 PM | TrackBackPerhaps we're on the same wavelength or something but I wrote a recent post about this as well as another post some time ago regarding the death of mainstream commercial media. I won't repeat myself so here's a link to the most recent post (lord knows I can't search my own blog for the older one).
http://restiffbard.com/archives/2005/08/05/personal-media/
Posted by: Chris at August 7, 2005 1:28 PMWould your detractor, Hugh, care to tell us where all this quality television is supposed to be? Do we need a spiritual medium to detect its signal behind the one the rest of us see? And how all this quality stops us zapping, cueing, TiVo-skipping, and coming up with more present participles?
Chris, excellent post BTW.
TV clearly is not the magic bullet it once was for advertisers. it's been on the wane for quite some time now.
and people's attention is splintering in many different directions. the online world being the biggest beneficiary of BIG TV's demise. no argument there. but as an award-winning superbowl ad writing type, can someone tell me how blogging specifically could help let's say the likes of Budweiser who need to reach a mass audience?
And Jack, there has always been great TV out there if you bothered to look. Try Bit Torrent. the new Ricky Gervais thing "extras" is brilliant for example. The late Gene Roddenberry was once asked why 90% of TV was crap. he replied " 90% of everything is crap". it's just not so noticeably crap. he was right.
Posted by: teeveedubya at August 7, 2005 9:04 PMTeeveedubya, blogging helps on the theory that it blurs the distinction between the corporation and the audience. But with more sceptical audiences, the blog needs to be irreverent in the age of watered-down communications and political correctness, maybe even revealing some truths about the company that it is regularly unwilling to accept. The cynic in me says that this could all be engineered, though for the blogosphere’s sake, In other words, craft an entire campaign around the blog and draw people in. Some people might even make blogs about the blog. Blogovirus. Only thing is: it has to be so clever that no one spots the idiosyncracies within. And Madison Avenue is not that clever.
Was it the LA Times that tried using Wiki technology recently, and wound up turning blog commentary into a pro-war, anti-war shouting match?
A mass audience could be tougher, I’ll grant you that, since the total audience is not huge, and the market goes on segmenting like crazy.
But I’m not sure if mass is where the action is—is it anywhere? That’s why TV is failing. Or at least, Big TV.
As to TV programmes, my statement was made tongue-in-cheek, ‘if you bothered to look’. Bit Torrent isn’t as favoured in some nations that enforce copyright. And how does Bit Torrent help those advertisers again?
Sure. One show. I’ll give you that. Maybe a couple of others. Mr Roddenberry may revise his figure if he was still with us. Few seem to take any real chances any more.
My life is still more interesting than television, now that reality TV has given all of us an over-inflated sense of our own importance.
But television is not dead, if only it were more interactive. I can foresee bloggability on downloadable television, and the ability to upload videoed, streamed comments. Now that opens up markets like crazy.
To quote the esteemed Mr McLeod, ‘My penis is mighty!’
No idea where my paragraphing went. Or the 'a' in MacLeod. Help. My penis is not mighty.
Posted by: Jack Yan at August 8, 2005 10:49 AMjack,
You're right. Bit Torrent doesn't help the advertiser at all. It helps the viewer. And to millions, myself included, the likes of Coronation Street or Desperate Housewives is still perfectly acceptable entertainment. i'm not very discriminating.
But i guess what i'm grappling with is the erosion of the mass audience which makes things really messy for the likes of me. and there's no readily available substitute. the internet provides a mass (worldwide) audience. but they refuse to do what they're told!