Manhattan Marketing Maven

Will Big Brother Make TV Better?

Cable companies are testing software to target commercials based on what they know or intuit about you. Could Big Brother make watching TV better for you?

Technology exists to track what you watch. Data mining techniques exist to discover who you are and what you like. What if the two were married together and harnessed to a rules engine that served up messages deemed “relevant” to you. Would you sit through a commercial pod? Be less inclined to channel surf? Or actually be interested in the stuff they were sending you?

Naturally “relevance” would be a function of how sophisticated the data models were. But assuming they got it right or gave you a say in what was served up to you, advertisers could target not only by household but by set-top box. They’d know which set the kids watch and which one you watch and send different spots to each TV, even though they might be no more than 25 feet apart.

This could actually make advertising more valuable and useful to the average viewer and create a bonanza for cable companies, who could sell much more inventory in smaller discretely targeted batches. At this point the gating factor seems to be cost to cable operators and proof of technical accuracy.

Radio on the Rocks?

There’s something magical about radio. Everybody has two or three favorite stations. Radio is comfortable. Radio is convenient. Radio does it for you even though every so often you have to endure a track you don’t like.

Many of us have a genuine friendship with or a genuine animosity toward Howard, Imus, Rush and other personalities we’ve come to know through repeated daily encounters. Most of us have radio sound tracks embedded in our memories and rely on the radio as a free, mood-enhancing utility.

Yet radio is and has been the Rodney Dangerfield of media for sixty years.

Every new thing seems better than radio. Every new media grabs dollars from radio. Every new device will kill off radio.

The latest radio killers are satellite radio and podcasting. Both have generated huge hype. Though neither has yet collected significant or measurable audiences to threaten radio’s revenues. Plus the real benefit of both is the availability of niche programming and the absence of commercials.

But with almost predictable regularity the radio industry feels compelled to defend itself. And so the Radio Advertising Bureau (www.rab.com) , where I worked as CMO for five years, just put out a “Quick Guide to Dispelling the 8 Major Myths About Radio.”

Confronting “allegations” about commercial clutter, interactivity, reach among youth, creativity, branding, listenership and business practices, these two sheets make the case for radio using all kinds of data, some of which is ancient but still true. It reads like a desperate defense. And while the conglomerates that own the majority of radio stations won’t win any popularity contests, the medium is much more entrenched and enduring than you might otherwise think.

If this crisis runs like every other one, radio stations will adapt, convert and subsume the latest trends and hottest technologies. Some have already introduced podcasting formats. For addicts, paying for Howard, will be well worth it for others it will be a blessing to get him off the public airwaves.

And radio will go on loved but underappreciated.

Heckling the Upfront TV Market

Have you seen the VidLit about the Upfront Media Market?

It represents a confluence of two cool things – a book on how out of whack the value of TV advertising is and a use of online video that is very powerful.

You don’t have to know anything about advertising to agree with Joe Jaffe’s premise that the upfront is an anachronism. TV audiences are fragmented and declining while prices for TV spots, that increasing numbers of viewers zap, are soaring.

Reliance on 30-second spots are the last gasp by ad agencies and clients who really don’t know how to address the impact of the internet and who can’t get ahead of the curve on how real people have taken control of the media and the message. These big marketing dinosaurs mostly hope things could go back to the way they always were.

In contrast www.vidlit.com is an innovative use of short videos on the web. Founded by Liz Dubelman to publicize books, she’s created a bunch of very funny and effective marketing pieces that can be viewed on her site. Is it ironic that online video would be used to highlight the shortcomings of broadcast advertising?

The "So What?" of Social Networking

My dad used to tell me "Its not what you know but who you know." The online social networking phenomenon threatens to use technology not only to facilitate digital schmoozing but potentially to leverage my friends contacts' and connections and their friends' networks as well. Though frankly my friends are hardly that generous.

As a marketer the proliferation of social networking sites like Zero Borders, Spoke, Friendster and Linked In or the addressbook sites, like Plaxo and Ringo, who have the 1-click ability to quickly sweep your contact list into the maelstrom, might be very credible word-of-mouth communication channels both for personal and brand messages. I guess the value of the channel will be determined by what you want to do with it.

So far without all these guys (by simple batch e-mail) I'm able to convince a bunch of my contacts to sponsor my sorry ass in the annual AIDS WALK. I'm not sure if its the cause, the modest request of $25 bucks or the perverse pleasure of imagining me and my dog actually walking 10k that persuades them. I doubt the media vehicle -- e-mail -- counts much in their decision to help or not. I doubt my yield would double if I asked my friends to ask their friends.

I signed up on all these sites. I guess I'm not much of a connection. So far, I've been asked to make 1 job introduction for my friend's b-school buddy from Texas, updated my address a dozen times and had 2 headhunters track me down. I'm not giving out much and getting nothing in return, probably par for the course in relationship land.

Jim Dickie of CSO Insights tells a different story in DestinationCRM magazine. He says that on Linked In his 54 contacts knew 500 sales VPs. He selected 30 and asked them to make an intro for him. 29 complied and of those 23 actually made the connection from which 18 participated in his questionaire. Jim is scoring it as a 60% response rate, which even if you quibble, is significantly better than if he'd had cold called the target group.

That's the potential. People sign up knowing they might be contacted. They trade who they know for who you know in the hope that somebody knows somebody who will open a door, make a connection, take your call or give you a break. I'd like to give it a whirl.