Tag: media marketing

By Paritosh Joshi

 

In my early days in broadcasting, I would frequently wonder about this very question, mainly because I saw plenty of media weight put behind individual shows and nearly nothing on the channels that housed them. This may not have been strange by itself but for the suggestion I heard frequently about how shows would perform differently depending upon the ‘platform’ on which they ran, said platform connoting the channel.

 

The issue came back earlier today when I read about the sale of advertising inventory for Super Bowl XLVII topping $ 225 million. Small explanatory note for those not particularly interested in American sporting traditions. The Super Bowl is the Championship game of the American Football tournament conducted by the NFL, the National Football League. The 47th finals will be played on February 3, 2013 in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, New Orleans, Lousiana. It is the biggest sports event by far of the US sports calendar and attracts major advertising campaign launches including the legendary launch commercial for Apple’s Macintosh computer during Super Bowl XVIII, January 22, 1984. (Stop already. The punters are getting impatient).

 

Here’s the interesting twist. The event does not belong to a single broadcaster but, since 2008 when Fox carried it, actually rotates between Fox, NBC and CBS in a three-year cycle. XLVI was NBC, XLVII will be CBS and with XLVIII, it will be back at Fox. None of this rotation makes the smallest whit of a difference to Super Bowl.

 

Cast your mind elsewhere. KBC has run on two major networks. “Friends” and a number of other marquee shows have sometimes been on two networks at the same time albeit with different seasons. Audiences have supported these shows with consistent enthusiasm. There may be a small ‘platform’ effect but in the main, these shows seem to be agnostic to it.

 

In the meanwhile, another phenomenon is playing out in the world of television, the effective disaggregation of channel content. DVRs are an important spur to this but even sans recorders, consumers also enjoy access to their favourite content online. Piracy it undoubtedly is, but try saying that to a consumer who searches Google for Balika Vadhu Episodes and finds over 4 million results on YouTube.

 

So how do channels remain brands in the future? Give up the obsession with “General” anything. Brands are about a single-minded commitment to delivering a particular consumer benefit. If you are a comedy channel, well then, deliver comedy. Golf? Cooking? Action? You get the point. These are the kind of brands where the viewer can return to time after time with certainty of finding a particular type of content that she is looking for. Not to mention that these channels don’t need to depend excessively on high cost, big brand shows so long as the content delivers the goods.

 

The entire evolution of Cable TV in the US, in massive contrast to the legacy Networks: ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox; is in how they have moved to carving up the market along ever tighter benefit propositions. I am particularly fond of a Fox Sports specialized channel, Fuel TV. It does content on only seven extreme sports: Skateboarding, Snowboarding, Wakeboarding, Motocross, Surfing, BMX Biking and UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship). None particularly expensive to source, all with small, committed and substantially overlapping audiences. Just the kind of audience-content combination that can build a tight brand-consumer relationship. And what a wonderful job Fuel TV has done to achieve just that.

 

So why do we still persist in thinking that channel brands can be all things to all people?

 

Paritosh Joshi has been a marketer, a mediaperson and a key officebearer on industry bodies. He is developing an independent media advisory practice. He can reached via his Twitter handle @paritoshZero

 

By Paritosh Joshi

 

I advise a startup in the Personal Finance space. Like many businesses at a similar stage, their ambitions are running ahead of their resources. An area of particular antsyness is the inability to advertise their service.

 

It is time to stop complaining and start acting. I mean that literally.

 

act·ing/ˈaktiNG/ noun: The art or occupation of performing in plays, movies, or television productions.

 

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Back up a bit then.

 

On more than one occasion this column has spoken of bought, earned and owned media. Indeed, just last week, you read about what Felix Baumgartner was really doing – creating a large, owned media opportunity for Red Bull.

 

Now it is one thing for a large and successful multinational to stage such an expensive production so that it can communicate its brand story to millions of current and potential customers but that is clearly not what the wee business I advise can do. Which shouldn’t come in the way of building the audience it needs.

 

There’s this thing called the internet. Um, I almost forgot. You are reading this on that very thing, aren’t you? And Mr. Rajan Anandan told us last year that we are on course to have 300 million Internet users in India by 2014, up from 100 million when he made his prediction in September 2011. Tens of millions of these users regularly access YouTube and Facebook. Use them right and you have all sorts of possibilities staring at you right there.

 

Thanks to my kids, one of my regular destinations on YouTube is Smosh. Get this. The boys who started it in 2005 were 18 years old at the time. At 25, they run a channel with 5.6 million subscribers and 1.8 BILLION video views to date. For comparison, Lady Gaga’s channel has a mere 1.8 million subscribers. Difference? Smosh wasn’t built on the back of the financial and marketing budgets available to a Universal Music imprint called Interscope.

 

Now it is true that from their very first parody take on Pokémon, Smosh was making some rather impressive video but the real secret of their success was the endless amplifying power of the meme. Cultural anthropology is, if grudgingly, accepting memes into mainstream thinking. On dictionary.com, a meme is defined thus: “a cultural item that is transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes”.  How many years have they been around? For as long as human civilization has, it would be fair to say but with the caveat that, thanks to the internet, their speed and power are at levels impossible to imagine even 10 years ago. A meme is a contagion. Unlike biological contagions that need physical transmission of a vector via a host to a recipient, memes leap from mind to mind via digital connections at the speed of light.

 

So you are not Smosh. Do you still have a chance at doing this meme thing? Let me introduce to you the ‘long tail’. For long, the world had to live with only a few options and a lot of people being compelled to make all sorts of accommodations to adjust to these compromises. No longer. Producers accept and even embrace the endless variations in the tapestry called humanity. On its part, the great god Google fulfils the obscurest wish by putting supply and demand together.

 

Back to YouTube and amateur video. If there is one common theme that I find running through compelling amateur video it is this: authenticity. If you have an idea that will make sense to someone, express it clearly. Pat Condell is, depending upon your position, a venomous racist or brutally candid, but armed with nothing more than a simple video camera and with a blank white wall for a backdrop, he has scored over 43 million views- and counting. (You’ll find an extreme example of authenticity here: Jazz for Cows).

 

Happily, the power of authenticity does not stop just with getting the initial viewers for such content. Social media, or at least Twitter, are informed by the same extensive use of authenticometer. Honest content carries a warm aroma of being authentic. Generate an honest video. Upload to YouTube. Tweet and ask, humbly, for retweets. And be prepared to be pleasantly surprised. After that, of course, it is the power of the idea and if it will become a meme, at least for the precise audience to which it is addressed.

 

Which is why I said, stop complaining and start acting.