Saturday night’s American Cinema Foundation panel at the American Film Institute in LA, moderated by media critic Cathy Seipp, was fascinating on several levels.
The theme of the event was “Mass market, smart content,” and featured four TV writers/producers/directors: Paul Feig (creator and executive producer: “Freaks & Geeks;” director: “Arrested Development;” director and writer, the feature film “I Am David;” author: “Kick Me: Adventures In Adolescence” and the upcoming “Superstud: How I Became a 24-Year-Old Virgin”), Scott Kaufer (executive producer: “Boston Legal;” writer: “Gilmore Girls,” “Chris Isaak Show,” “Murphy Brown”), Rob Long (co-creator and excecutive producer: “Men, Women & Dogs,” “Love & Money,” “George & Leo;” executive producer: “Cheers”) and Tim Minear (executive produer: “The Inside,” “Wonderfalls,” “Angel,” “Firefly”). Together, they tackled the issue of how successful television writers manage to keep their distinct viewpoints when writing for the mass market.
I believe wholeheartedly that there is no such thing as ‘the mainstream,’ and that the mass market is dead, and being replaced by a mass of niches. I also believe that the mass media is not being destroyed, merely altered radically, and individuals are being liberated from the mass by the unprecedented choice of personal relevance that (thanks to things like blogs, mp3s, TV on DVD, podcasting, and TiVo) they have today – and that choice of personal relevance is increasing exponentially at a rapid rate. So the topic of the panel was extremely appealing to me as a total geek on the social ramifications of emergent technology tip.
I guess I forgot that these guys write some funny stuff, and that they were going to make me laugh – which they did, in a big way. Some of my favourite exchanges and lines:
CATHY SEIPP: How do you react to people who say they never watch TV?
TIM MINEAR: I run them over with my Mercedes.SCOTT KAUFER: After seeing [the movie] JFK, I thought, “Why don’t I make a movie called Oliver Stone, and just invent shit?
ROB LONG: What would you have to invent?!
PAUL FEIG: That he’s nice, he’s respectful of women…TIM MINEAR (on not being allowed to have a serial killer character use the word retard): The network thought the serial killer was being awfully insensitive.
I did not want to hit the guys over the head with the beliefs I laid out above, so I asked them if they thought that TV series on DVD (which they all seemed to agree was the best thing to happen to TV in a long time, even if the lack of leadership in the Writers’ Guild means that they get screwed out of decent earnings, receiving only 2 or 4 pennies per DVD sale), TiVo, and that greater choice of personal relevance is going to affect what they do in any significant way. Every panel member had something to say about that, but the most interesting answer came from Paul Feig, who said that the bottom line is that the show that draws the most advertising revenue wins, and it will always be that way.
Except I am sure that it will not always be that way, and that the advances in emergent technologies and the rebirth of niche will bring about that dramatic shift a lot sooner than we may think. The business model of broadcast must change if it is not to die (and with only 12 per cent of US viewers getting their TV via antenna these days anyway, ripping it down is not a bad idea). As viewers (read: customers) get used to having that personal choice of relevance, they will throw their attention (read: value) to the places where they can get it: cable, satellite, and the internet. And if you think advertisers will not pick up on that and move their ad spend accordingly, I have some stock in broadcast that I would just love to sell you.
The kicker being, I do not believe that advertising revenue is going to be the bread and butter of TV on cable, satellite, and the internet. Sure, there will be ads in the world as long as there are lazy, clueless companies who believe in “just in case” marketing. But the costs of that kind of marketing are rising, the effectiveness declining, and profits down as a result.
Which brings us to my point: This drive to niche dovetails very nicely with the need of companies to put customers at the beginning of the value chain instead of at the end of it. The increasing emphasis on the individual also means a move from push marketing to engagement marketing. So instead of wasting a great deal of money on a TV ad, a company can spend a fraction of that on, say, developing great blogs to provide value and engage the niche they are targetting. (They can throw some podcasts up there while they are at it.)
So here is the question I really wish I had asked the panel: Ten years from now, who exactly is going to be spending the kind of money on network TV ads that they need to maintain this broken system? And if that money isn’t there, will you be running over non-TV-watching freaks with your Kia instead of your Mercedes?
“Sure, there will be ads in the world as long as there are lazy, clueless companies who believe in “just in case” marketing.”
That’s not really how advertising works, and I’m somewhat perplexed at the point you are trying to make here. Are you really trying to seriously suggest that instead of a multi-million dollar advertising campaign that a corporation should try and launch a new product via a weblog?
My grandmother had a saying for that .. “awa wi’ the faeries”.
I just live in fear of the day that advertisers realise that a lot of people don’t buy their crap, no matter how ‘clever’ the advert is. Whatever will i do when I am not allowed to watch the shows sponsored by corps i don’t patronise?
I’d divide advertising into 4 groups
1. new stuff everybody might care about
2. new stuff in a niche
3. tweaks on existing stuff (eg: a sale or 2 for 1 offer)
4. content-free blather, free-floating “branding”, and suchlike nonsense
My projections:
1 blends into regular news or runs on popular all-advert channels, probably backed up by the company’s own site and astroturf campaigns via blogs. The character of these adverts changes from being mindless glitz at present, to being far more in depth, personal, and informational. Example: I wouldn’t be suprised to see a product launch site posting interviews and a public Q&A with the product’s designer.
2 moves entirely to channels catering for that niche.
3 becomes the purview of automated bargain-seeking aggregators, rather than advertising direct to the public. There’s absolutely no point trumpeting a sale if customers routinely check prices online and discover your opposition is marginally cheaper.
4 continues as various inventive forms of spam, but is strangled out of major media.
I think blogs will only work in cases where the target market is very on-line literate and where they can be convinced its a genuine blog rather than merely another marketing tool written by some PR flunky. I have seen several corporate blogs (two of which are movie based) that just don’t seem real. Band “diaries” (which are blogs by another name and have been around as long) on the other hand seem to be very popular with fans of bands and makes them feel closer to those whom they admire.
Normal advertising is going to be around for a long time to come in its present forms. New technologies will add another string to their bows but that does not mean they will chuck away the entire quiver.
Now don’t change that channel, – we will be back in two minutes, right after we bring you this message from our sponsor….
Check out the blogs by Seth Godin, Steve Rubel, Johnnie Moore, SMLXL, Doc Searls and other marketing visionaries – it’s not quite as simple as that, Julian. And it’s not just blogs, but a whole stable of engagement marketing. The shift has already begun.
Certainly corporate blogs must be the real deal – the bullshit detectors in the blogosphere are far too highly tuned to get away with anything less (as Dr Pepper found out in the “Raging Cow” incident). But check out the success of Tinbasher(Link), a sheet metal blog by a four-person company in deepest Lancashire – very few people in their own industry are internet savvy (indeed, they are still hostile even towards ordering from Amazon), but that doesn’t matter. The waves of influence of the blogosphere mean that – as in the case with Tinbasher – the people who read the blog spread the message all the way to those who may not even have heard of the internet. For example, Tinbasher caught the attention of people who linked to it, and those peoples’ audiences included someone from a major gardening magazine, who got in touch with the sheet metal company and asked to feature its stainless steel planters in their magazine. That’s just one example of what’s happened for what is a very niche business with a very internet-illiterate target audience – and their enquiries and sales are up, with the blog as the core of their business now.
There are hundreds of blogs out there where experts in this stuff are conversing about it, and after following the conversation for a couple of years now, they have been proved right at every turn. It makes for very interesting reading for anyone who reads blogs but has only the faintest clue what the implications of choice of personal relevance and the development of emergent technologies mean for marketing – I’d recommend reading up on the above-named blogs if you’re interested in learning more.
Ten years from now, who exactly is going to be spending the kind of money on network TV ads that they need to maintain this broken system? And if that money isn’t there, will you be running over non-TV-watching freaks with your Kia instead of your Mercedes?
Depends on how the relative value trends for Kia and Mercedes continue, doesn’t it?
Are you really trying to seriously suggest that instead of a multi-million dollar advertising campaign that a corporation should try and launch a new product via a weblog?
Julian, if you were planning to introduce a new product to the high end shoe market, where, other than the Manalo would you go to reach the trendsetters, and what would the relative cost be?
Julian, what Jackie said, plus what Doc sayz(Link):
Just a quick note – on the drive from LA to SF, I was thinking about this, and am eager to add: Engagement doesn’t just mean blogs. It might mean something like Tesco’s loyalty card scheme, or their baby club. In Britain, 72 per cent of all expectant mothers sign up for Tesco’s baby club. Tesco have found a way to make their stores, products, and services relevant to peoples’ everyday lives. Someone who doesn’t see the value in niches would say, “Well, expectant mothers are only a fraction of the population – we need something more mainstream.” And that person would be smoking some fine crack.
One word … “reach”. You do not engage upon a multimillion dollar advertising campaign for the new Dodge Charger without knowing in advance a realistic figure of how many people will see the advert, you trust upon the audited audience figures that NBC, CBS, Fox etc. will provide. With a weblog system you just don’t have the hits that would generate sufficient product interest – do you really think that even with a successful weblog like the Garden State movie blog you are going to, in any way at all, generate the viewing figures that a show like Angel or Firefly would generate, let alone the selective targeting that television advertising permits with its diversity in content? To give you credit it is certainly feasible that one day a weblog *might* be in a position to attract mainstream 20 second full page advertising, but its still a very long way off.
Personally speaking, the most annoying advertising I have yet encountered is the combination ‘movie trailers and popcorn’ system that is now being introduced at the start of DVDs – in the VOB file section that does not permit you to jump ahead to the start of the movie.
Gordon Bennet, now I have to watch out for Mercs AND Kias? This is one of the reasons I drive a Land Rover…
There are “interesting” developments afoot with Digital Rights Management – in theory, it allows only those entitled to view content; in practice, there are already what I regard as abuses of it going on. It will be trivial to make it a condition of the licence that the viewer must first consume x minutes of advertising; it will be made singularly difficult to work around the systems. Heck, you could even insist upon viewer interaction during the advertising to make sure they haven’t wandered off…
And people wonder why I don’t watch television???
When I was in the advertising business, we used to call this approach of Jackie’s “macro-niching” — find the relevant niches of customers who are the best (or most likely) users and purchasers of your product, and then pound away with targeted media.
Didn’t work.
Or rather, it didn’t work as well as a simple broadcast TV ad.
If your product has only specialized appeal — eg. a new PS2 videogame, then you go where the game dorks are, and niche marketing works wonderfully. But if you’re advertising Tide / Folgers, nothing works like a big, fatass broadcast TV ad with the 2CK formula (“2CK” = two chicks in a kitchen). Sad, but true.
Also, macro-niching, while efficient in its application, is expensive to set up — and you still don’t get the reach of an ad sent through a mainstream TV show like Friends or Seinfeld. Lotta work for not much result — and definitely not much sales result, which, lest we forget, is the point of the whole thing.
Yes, broadcast media is wasteful — only about 50% of it ever works — but even with that 50% wastage, it works better for a mainstream product than flooding the niche media.
Targeted advertising works really well in mainstream media — eg. Accenture sponsoring the World Cup of Golf tournament, because CEOs, CFOs and COOs watch golf on TV. But Accenture would never get anything like the same result if they only advertised on http://www.consultants-R-us.com.
Kim du Toit
former Director, Micro-Marketing
Leo Burnett U.S.A.
Hi Jackie,
I was at the ACF chat the other night. Great time.
What I found most fascinating re: your question & Paul’s answer, was when he said (and I paraphrase): It’s like this long line of niches with one huge mass.
This is, essentially, The Long Tail. And I thought it interesting he would arrive at The Long Tail from a creator’s p.o.v, as opposed to Chris Anderson’s perspective as a (more detached) economist.
The question I’m interested in revolves around the issue Paul raised – How does one successful with a niche expand that audience? Or, put another way, does the explosion of niches mean a creator like Paul Feig can never address a mass audience?
But certainly this is better than the old way, where a voice like Paul’s would be shut out.
Thoughts?