aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, May 07, 2006

Advertisers: try attraction, not coercion!

I don’t get it, what are advertisers thinking? I dabbled in advertising so have some small awareness of the dynamic and how it works. Capturing viewers when they are in ”avoidance mode” is just plain stupid, a waste of time if you ask me.  Annoyed viewers are going to buy your product???

I thought the goal was to attract adherents?

Now the way to do that is to be creative, end clutter, leverage your fan base, and, most significantly, give us the ads we want when we want them.  I have no problem with - in fact, I advocate - making the advertising deal explicit. The problem for the content industry is that we may well find the customer base doesn’t believe the value of that content is quite what the industry believes.

Maybe there should be less of it.

We hear over and over the fallacy that they’re just giving us what we want but it looks to me like we want something different. After all, we’re flocking to YouTube. My well-founded fear is that it is precisely the content companies who are claiming to give us what we want who aim to kill it.

We didn’t ask for hundreds of channels that we don’t watch. We want to watch what we want when we want it and I’m quite confident - as our burgeoning technology-driven entertainment budgets attest - that we are willing to pay for it. The problem is a staid established content industry that wants to (feels entitled to!) make money on what it’s already done rather than coming up with anything genuinely innovative.

Me, I’m looking forward to the first iProgam.

Ted Turner invented cable networks when he put TBS on satellite; HBO invented pay cable when it became the first non-terrestrial broadcast TV network; someone will invent individual series syndication online and become the first non-telecast program. The technology is already in place; my hope is that this time around the content industry won’t kill it first.