Ear to the Track

This week, the broadcast TV networks pitched their upcoming schedules to advertisers in an annual television industry ritual known as “the upfronts.” Back in the what both sides now must think of as the Good Old Days of linear TV before TiVo and YouTube, the networks extolled the strengths, not just of individual shows, but of an entire evening’s prime-time lineup.

But according to an article in last Monday’s NY Times, the days of the “lineup” may be numbered. Recent Neilsen ratings report that prime-time viewership of the 4 broadcast networks is down by 6 million viewers compared to a year ago.

A major reason appears to be the increasing popularity of time-shifted consumption — one of the primary benefits of podcasting. Viewer are recording on DVRs, using cable on-demand services, purchasing TV episodes on iTunes and going to advertising- supported streaming sites such as Hulu and Fancast.

DRVs are the most popular time-shifting technology, with one in four households using them, a 10% increase in the past year. The DVR has forced the networks and Neilsen to revise the traditional ratings metrics to include shows watched within three days of being originally broadcast, which has boosted the ratings of some prime-time shows by as much as 25%

The articles quotes Alan Wutzel, the head of research for NBC as saying that “he DVR is both a friend and an enemy for the networks, “the classic frenemy.” The good news is that time-shifting is enabling viewers to watch more television because they can watch at their convenience. They bad news is that, on average, DVR viewers skip about half of the commercials that make those shows possible.

For advertisers, television continues to offer the greatest immediacy, persuasive impact and broadest potential audience. Measuring the effect and value of advertising has always been a black art (“I know that half of my advertising is working, I just don’t know which half,” is the classic connundrum), and it now seems trickier than ever.

Personally, after using TiVo for the past six months, I rarely watch a program at the time of broadcast even when I can. If there’s something on at 8 PM tonight that I’ll want to talk about at the watercooler tomorrow morning, I’ll set it to record, and start watching it at 8:15, just so I can skip the commercials.

No wonder advertisers are buying space on airplane overhead compartments, urinal deoderant cakes and bald heads.

This is a follow-up to last week’s class discussion, and my last post, on Mitch Joel’s hypothetical question: “What If Everything We Knew About Marketing and Advertising Until Now Was An Anomaly?”

The Television Bureau of Advertising (TAB) last week released results of a survey on adult consumer media habits that support my contention that traditional media remain far more influential for marketing communications than the internet — at least with adults, who were found to spend more than half of their media-consumption hours per day watching television.

The survey of 1246 adults aged 25 to 54 was commissioned by the TBA and conducted by Nielsen Media Research in January 2008.  Among the findings:

•    53% of total daily media hours are spent with TV, more than all other mediums combined

•    90% reported watching TV in the previous 24 hours, compared to 80% for radio, 72.1% for the internet, 58.9% for newspapers and 48.3% for magazines

•    The time spent with TV in the same 24-hour period was also significantly higher (222.7 minutes) when compared with radio (106.5), the internet (99.7), newspapers (22.1) and magazines (15.1)

•    TV advertising remains the most influential with 81.4% of the 25-54 adult segment, compared with advertising on the internet (6.5%), newspapers (5.8%), radio (3.9%) and magazines (2.3%)

•    Respondents said TV had the most persuasive advertising (69.9%), compared to 9.5% for newspapers, 7.5% for radio and 8.1% for magazines.

•    Among all media, the internet scored lowest in persuasive advertising, at 5.1%.

•    55% said they were more likely to learn about products and brands they might like to try and buy on TV, trailed by the internet at 18.7%, magazines at 14.6%, newspapers at 7.1% and radio coming in last at 4.5%.

While this survey suggests that online advertising has questionable persuasive power, Advertising Age’s annual revenue survey of U.S. agencies, also released last week, attributed an overall revenue increase of 8.6% primarily to the growth of digital advertising revenue.
Granted, the survey did not include adult usage of internet social media. But the dominance of TV over the internet in total hours of consumption, influence and persuasiveness are dramatic. Clearly, anyone who thinks traditional marketing communications will be rendered anomalous anytime soon needs to turn off the computer and get some air.

In “What If Everything We Knew About Marketing and Advertising Until Now Was An Anomaly?” Mitch Joel speculates, “Maybe Web 2.0 and Social Media is ushering in not only a new way for Marketers to think about how Consumers engage with Advertising, but it is the beginning of the “real” way in which businesses will connect with their Consumers.”

I think this is a simplistic view of the current chapter in the evolution of marketing communications (marcom). Granted, consumers can now have a more prominent voice than ever in the making or breaking of a brand, but all the blogging, online customer reviews and amateur commercials on YouTube only amount to a greater volume of one type of marcom known as “word-of-mouth.”

Word-of-mouth has always been part of a successful marcom mix, and the fact that there’s now more of it, and more dialog between company and customer, doesn’t signify that traditional forms of marcom, from Super Bowl ads to junk mail, are going away anytime soon.

Ad spending is certainly shifting, but spending on “one-way” media — print, radio, TV and direct mail — is showing no signs of dropping off as Web 2.0 activity picks up. That’s because the audience is still there and traditional marcom is still far more effective than social media during two critical phases of the marketing persuasion process: getting the attention of and generating interest among the greatest numbers of prospects. This is the specific function of advertising, and why many successful campaigns are known more for their entertainment value than their factual content.

Traditional media also packs far more impact, in a “medium is the message” way. If Move-On.org’s full page “General Betray Us” ad in the NY Times (dreadful as it was) had instead been a front-page blog on the Huffington Post, it would only have received the attention of other bloggers. Ho hum.

Mitch is overly exuberant when he says: “In watching Consumers leverage real power to share their insights, voice and passions, I can’t help but feel like this is just beginning and we’re entering into - what will become - how Marketing, Advertising and Communications was truly meant to connect.”

In fact, consumers have always had the ultimate power over marketers by voting with their pocketbooks. One of the principles advertisers live by is that the most a great ad campaign can do for a bad product is to get people to try it once.

And then they tell their friends…

As mentioned in a post last week, I’ve been considering recommending to one of my clients that they produce a podcast, but have refrained from doing so until I convince myself that a podcast would be a practical and beneficial undertaking for this company. I floated the idea past the marketing consultant who directs the company’s marketing communications efforts and she was unreservedly enthusiastic. She has a general and vague idea of what a podcast is, but at least knows that its one of those Web 2.0 things that’s getting a lot of buzz these days. What’s not to like? she seemed to say. She wants to see a proposal.

Her reaction reaffirms what I believe is one of the most appealing aspects of podcasting as a marketing communications “product:” It’s one of those things, like blogging and web video, that businesses think they ought to be doing to be “cutting edge.” And since I am ultimately in the business of selling and manufacturing marketing communications products — print, broadcast and online ads, web content, video, etc.— adding podcast production to my list of services has great appeal, because:

• It seems relatively easy to get clients excited about podcasting. Even if they don’t know what podcasting is, they like the sound of it. And it sounds more affordable than video.

• Podcasts are far simpler to produce than other “cutting edge” assets, such as web video, and seem less cumbersome to business executives than doing their own blog. As a sole proprietor, I like that I could realistically produce a client’s podcast without enlisting outside resources. I can’t do that with video. I wouldn’t even attempt to create a web page for a client without a graphic designer.

• Podcasts have higher perceived value than, say, a comparable amount of content on a web page or in a brochure. And they are far less of a commodity than other marcom tools, and so potentially more profitable.

I’ve talked myself into doing the proposal.

I’ve recently taken on a project to create a personal profile page for the hero of a popular video game that will be posted on social networking sites. I probably haven’t logged more than two hours total gaming time in my life.  Publicly, I follow the game industry for professional and academic reasons. Privately, I’m one of those old pharts who just doesn’t get it.

But thanks to my new assignment, and my perpetual fear that I’m going to wake up tomorrow morning and be declared professionally obsolete, I’m going to force myself across this generational digital divide by playing Grand Theft Auto 4.

Grand Theft Auto 4, (GTA 4) one of the most successful and controversial video games to date, went on sale at midnight and is expected to ka-ching over $400 million in sales this week.  Previous versions of the game raised alarm from content watchdogs about the story line, in which players take the role of a East European immigrant who steals cars, shoots cops and beats up prostitutes.

GTA 4 sells for $60 and its success is more evidence of the paradigm shift in the entertainment industry.  Only 7 movies have grossed more than $400 million, and none of them in the first week of release.  Game software sales are up 63 percent and game console sales up 46 percent over this time last year. Hollywood is looking on with envy.

Today’s NY Times quotes males in the game’s core demographic of mid-teens to mid-twenties as saying that, if it came down to choosing priorities, they’d sooner give up their cell phones than forego GTA.   For them, it’s not a question of  ‘Can I afford it?’ but of “How soon can I get it?’

It’s hard to imagine even the most hard core Star Wars fan making a comparable sacrifice to buy a movie ticket.  The article also quotes  game industry analysts and business school professors as saying that the game industry seems to be recession proof, and speculating that it’s thriving in hard times because of the escapist, and addictive, nature of the gaming experience.

My sons, ages 18 and 22 are life-long gamers and have tried many times, in vain, to get me engaged.  Despite my natural escapist, addictive tendencies, I’ve never come close to playing any game a second time. They will surely score a copy of GTA 4 this week, and I’m giving myself the assignment of spending at least several hours playing it.

If I have to shoot a cop and beat up a prostitute to stay current, well, it’s a living.

I play acoustic guitar and have been thinking about how to incorporate music into podcasts in more integral ways than the catchy intro and exit stings we lift from Garageband. The first result to turn up under a search for “acoustic music podcasts” was a winner called “The Acoustic Version of the Hits, the Unknowns, the Covers, and the Originals.” t’s like a podcasting version of MTV’s “Unplugged.”

The home page offers a menu of four categories: Originals, Covers, Humor and Lessons. The format includes text previews of featured performances along with the YouTube videos. I give it high marks for offering a variety of styles and artists in a format that’s easy to surf and sample. One of the headaches, or should I say ear-aches, of surfing music performances on YouTube is that there’s usually no way of telling if a video is going to be of listenable quality until you invest at least 30 seconds in it. More often than not, even videos of well-known artists turn out to be crap shot on a fan’s cell phone.

One of the great things about The Acoustic Version is that they’ve addressed the crap problem by being an old-fashioned gatekeeper. They’ve done us the great favor of weeding out the crap. The quality of the videos I sampled were perfectly adequate, which passes for excellent by Internet standards. The Goggle ads are relevant to musicians. Even the guitar lesson on how to play George Harrison’s arrangement of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” was good instruction that even beginners could follow.

The podcast part of this package consists entirely of the music performances, and, alas, the audio of these do not appear to be downloadable for obvious copyright challenges, since many of the videos are covers of published songs. Which raises the question: does podcast audio have to be transferable to a device other than my computer for the content to be technically be a podcast?

Blog: The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs
http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/

A parody of what Steve would blog about if Steve blogged. I didn’t laugh once, but I am impressed that it’s become “a Forbes.com Site, and features advertising from Canon.

Blog: Breaking News and Opinion on the Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-blog

Technorati listed this as the current “most popular blog” so I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I counted 19 blogs posted on one day, covering all the topics you’d expect from a Huffington blog roundup. The writing here seems a notch above typical blog quality. This would be a good first stop for left-leaning readers who want to arm themselves daily for anything that might come up around the water cooler.

Podcast: Free Talk Live
http://freetalklive.com/netcast.xml

You can take control of the airwaves - just call the toll-free number. This is a libertarian podcast with two co-hosts who do a good job of letting the callers drive the show. I like how they’ve hit upon filling a very distinctive niche - providing a forum for Libertarians, who typically get cut off after 30 seconds on mainstream radio call-in shows, to go on at length.

Podcast: Diggnation
http://digg.com/podcasts/Diggnation/954839

Ranked at the current most popular podcast on Digg. I’d heard of these guys as the big podcasting success story. Production quality in the current episode is surprisingly poor, with one guy sounding like he’s inside a 55-gallon drum. They spent the first two minutes yammering that they’ve been nominated for a Webby. Banal banter, wit-free opinions and obnoxious sound effects. If this is all it takes to make a podcasting hit, excuse me while I quit my day job and find a kazoo.

Blogs: Wall Street Fighter <http://www.wallstreetfighter.com/>

The taglines for this blog is “Insider News From the Outside.” and “The Funny Side of Trading.” I found it doing in a search for “Humor in Business,” to see if there are any other blogs or podcasts attempting to be funny about business and finance (so far, this is one of the few blogs and I’ve found no podcasts with an approach similar to my concept for “Where’d the Money Go?”)

Advertising Age: Garfield, the Blog <http://adage.com/garfieldtheblog/>

Bob Garfield is a venerable critic for Advertising Age magazine and is co-host of NPR’s On the Media. I have a bad habit of letting weeks go buy without paying close attention to what is happening in what is still my fundamental profession — advertising — and I can count on Garfield to keep me current.

Podcasts:

Diary of a Shameless Self-Promoter for all self-promoters, from the timid to the fearless.”

The tagline is “Zen marketing for all self-promoters, from the timid to the fearless. Heidi Miller, a successful small-business guru/public speaker has been producing this podcast for 4 years. She seems to do a comprehensive job of giving sound advice to small businesses on how to leverage new media.

Slate Culture Gabfest

Steven Metcalf, Slate’s Critic-at-Large, Julia Turner, Slate’s Culture Editor, Dana Stevens, Slate’s Film Critic had an interesting, civilized discussion on “The viability of personal virtue” relevant in recent news stories on global warming, ethics failures in the travel writing industry, and Errol Morris’s latest documentary about Abu Gharaib prison. I liked that the show had an umbrella theme and managed to cover diverse and current cultural ground while staying under it. They made me want to tune in to hear what they take on next.

An expected side-effect of taking the Podcasting in Business class is that I’m more keenly than ever on the lookout for opportunities to propose to my clients that they launch a business-related podcast. Fortunately, I’ve learned to restrain my tendency to get excited about new technology-enabled marketing tactics and recommend them to everyone I meet — an impulse I think of as “when you have a shiny new hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

I leaned my lesson about a year ago while developing branding and web content for a company which shall go nameless, which provides market intelligence to government contractors, including bid announcements, competitor activity, and contact information on the decision makers. One project was to write series of educational web pages to help new and inexperienced contractors get started on the “How-To’s” of bidding and winning government contracts.

My source for this information was to be one of the company founders, whom I’ll call Fred. To download the info from Fred’s brain, I proposed that I record a series of interviews with him. Here’s where my enthusiasm got ahead of me:

Hey, since I’m recording these interviews, I reasoned, why no do it with an eye to slicing and dicing them up into podcasts? The client liked my argument that contractors will appreciate being able to get the content without have to sit still long enough to read it. They especially loved the idea of “multi-purposing” the interviews, which I said, would give them better ROI on the cost of Fred and I having these conversations.

I was about to produce my first podcast! I bought a few lapel mics and a small mixing device to enable me to record the interviews into Garage Band through my Mac laptop. My business is ahead of the curve, I thought. I imagined having a lucrative Podcast Division within months. Then I had my first interview with Fred.

It was in a company conference room with a loud fan. The first topic was, “Completing the necessary registration to qualify to bid on government jobs.” Fred had a monotone that could stop a runaway locomotive. Listening to the recording of our interview, the only sign of life I could detect was the edge of desperation in my voice as I tried in vain to get Fred to lighten up, get off the company script and convey some excitement to “our listeners” about the opportunities that lay beyond the process of filling out all the paperwork he was talking about. Fred did digress from the company line a few times, but only to tell mildly sexist jokes. In a monotone.

Lesson learned: Before you get a client, and yourself, all excited about having a podcast, make sure that you have something interesting to say and interesting people to say it. And no loud fans. I’m now considering proposing a podcast to a client that makes an email archiving solution, but before I say a word, I’m putting thought into topics, talent, production logistics, promotion tactics and budget. To be continued, I hope.

Today’s title is potentially that of weekly entertainment podcast, a kind of “Daily Show” or SNL “Weekend Update” news spoof that focuses on issues of business and personal finance. The intro might go like this:

“What’s in your wallet? If your answer is ‘Nothing!’ then join us for ‘Where’d the Money Go?’ a weekly roundup of business news from the front lines of the Bush economy.”

The biggest challenge of executing this concept is obvious: coming up with enough funny material to fill at least five minutes a week. This material could be standard news fare delivered by the shows anchorperson, me most likely. News items such as:

“With the price of rice tripling over the past year, Kellogg today announced the layoffs of two of its most venerable employees, Snap and Crackle. Upon learning that Rice Krispies would now only make the sound of ‘Pop,’ nervous principals across the country immediately banned the cereal from school cafeterias.”

“The student loan industry is feeling the squeeze of the current credit crunch, and many students are scrambling to find money for tuition. The White House came to the rescue today with a proposal to provide low-interest loans to students who agree to work in low-paying public service jobs for two years after graduating. Students who qualify could borrow up to $50,000 over four years. Upon graduation they will work as housekeepers, gardeners, chauffeurs and nannies for strapped hedge-fund managers who have been forced to cut back as a result of the subprime mortgage crisis.”

The other staple feature of this format would be interviews with real or fictional business news makers and personal finance gurus. If anyone knows of this concept being executed elsewhere please point me to it.