WITH GREAT POWER COMES GREAT RESPONSIBILITY

One output of the global economic crisis has been the willingness of desperate media owners to approve previously unthinkable media buys. Case in point: A few weeks back the Los Angeles Times allowed the movie Alice in Wonderland to take over the entire front page of the newspaper. Not a cover wrap—the actual news content of the paper for that day was obscured by Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter. This buy makes it pretty clear that if you’ve got the cash, anything goes.

Last year another movie, Star Trek, persuaded ABC to let the Starship Enterprise make a flyby through the opening credits of the TV show Lost. From a traditional buying perspective, sneaking into the opening credits of a show is unheard of. (J.J. Abrams has clout for sure).

GLASS HALF FULL?

So, is this new openness by media owners a good thing? Unfortunately, more often than not it is probably bad for our business. 

At a macro level the encroachment of advertising everywhere has a detrimental effect on people’s liking and trust of advertising. The more surfaces we slap ads on, the more consumers seek to filter out all marketing.

Perhaps more corrosive, though, is the long-term impact on media brands themselves. Harper’s Bazaar magazine recently ran a lavish 40-page story featuring the same four celebrities who were also fronting a major new Estée Lauder campaign. The “story” was indistinguishable from regular Lauder advertising. (Lauder ran ads featuring the same models in the issue as well.)  What does it say about the Harper’s brand and its credibility when its content is so clearly for sale? As the walls between ads and content get ever more porous, the negative sentiment for advertising is dragging down the quality content that attracted advertisers in the first place.

NOT GETTING BETTER

Unfortunately, the push for ever more places to insert ads is not going to let up anytime soon. The media-buying side of the house tends to equate buying a new space with being creative and innovative. The moment a new technology appears, media teams seek to exploit it as an ad medium. (We’ve already had ads on the Kindle, and we would bet a lot of money that a bunch of agencies are now working on how they can insert advertising into the iPad).

Within the Communication Strategy group at GSP, we don’t believe that finding new ways to irritatingly interrupt people’s days is good innovation. Poor disruption only increases negative consumer reaction. If The Los Angeles Times keeps selling its front page as they did last week, the newspaper will lose subscribers.

THE BIG ISSUE

The critical question we need to ask when considering out-of-the-box placements is not can we buy something, but should we? 

We always want to enable positive brand interactions, something that engages and preferably enhances the consumer experience. We also know that consumers are not stupid. If the strategic link, the reason why the brand in question does what it does, is crystal clear and enhances the experience, consumers will welcome it. As ever, we all have to remember that the only opinions that really matter are consumers’.

GOOD INNOVATION

An example of a good disruption/innovation? From the GSP portfolio, for the launch of Wario Land: Shake It! (a Wii game), we achieved a world-first by having the action within our YouTube video spill over into the rest of the YouTube page. Never been done before, surprising and categorically tied to the concept of the game. Consumers loved it. ( http://www.youtube.com/wariolandshakeit2008 )

So, for Alice in Wonderland, what might have been a smarter solution? What if all the front-page stories had, instead of being obscured by Johnny Depp, actually been rewritten by his character of the Mad Hatter? Might that have been entertaining and witty, offering something of value to the reader that they might even share with others?

FINAL WORD

As we generate incredible media ideas, as much as we always want to say “yes we can” to pull them off, we also need to check that consumers will respond with a “glad you did.”

Brad Pitt trims his beard! (Wow).

A while back US Weekly started sending me a daily e-mail update. I think my local rep signed me up for it. Honesty, I an not a big US Weekly guy. Anyway, today I finally made the effort to unsubscribe. I was literally shocked that they thought Brad Pitt trimming his beard was news. I am even more shocked to think that even the most slavish celebrity hound would care either. So, I guess the lesson is either never underestimate people's passions, not matter how dumb they may seem. Or, as a media owner don't devalue your brand with BS. If you've got nothing to say, don't.

There is a chance the headline is a joke. If it is, it is a poor one.

Email to blog

This is a test of a blog post sent from my phone. Ain't tech grand? (When it works).
Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

Hyper Island

I am doing a 3-day training course run by Hyper Island. Hit and miss so far, but a few great sessions. Liked Mark Comerford on the anthropological effects of the digital revolution. You can follow Mark on Twitter as well: http://twitter.com/markmedia

Proud American - dumb brands

Flicking through the latest Portfolio, (one of the few magazines I take the time to read), I came across this hysterical nugget:

"Out of 175 films in wide release this year (2008), Proud American, a tribute to everyday Americans, came in dead last. The movie, financed by Wal-mart, Coca-cola and others grossed just $131,357 on 750 screens and wasn't released overseas".

I would love to be been in the room when the geniuses who green-lit this project at Wal-mart and Coke had to report back on its (lack of) success.

Digital Shake-out

A couple of years ago Google started a program where they tried to sell ads in print media replicating their online search model offline. Today, they killed it. There is a larger story here that I think is worth sharing.

For years now we have all heard about digital killing traditional media, and I am really not going to argue against the momentum Google has over NBC and the NYT. However, something that has not really been focussed on is that, still, most of the online world does not make money. YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace - all are desperately trying to monetize themselves and have thus far failed. In fact, the single biggest revenue generator for MySpace was selling exclusive search rights to Google. That was a $900M windfall for MySpace, but subsequently Google announced they are losing money on the deal in a big way. MySpace are not going to get that windfall again, and selling 30K banners is simply not cutting it for them.

So here is where it gets interesting. If you are the CFO of Google how long do you keep funding the loss making YouTube? YouTube is uploading something like 10 hours of new content a minute. They have to pay for that storage space, running costs and everything else to keep the site up. Google affords it by subsidizing from its search business. In the current recession, if that search golden egg slows down, what do you do with YouTube? It is even tougher for NewCorp who own MySpace. The massive majority of NewsCorp revenue comes from traditional media properties, the Fox network, WSJ, Direct TV etc, all of which are suffering horribly. So unlike Google, NewsCorp does not have a wildly profitable golden egg property to help subsidize the losses at MySpace. At least not without a lot of pain.

Now multiply this problem across the web. While there is still an incredible potential in many digital properties, there is little money, and if YouTube and Facebook with their huge audiences are struggling, how do you think smaller sites are coping? Oh, and another by-product of the credit crunch, venture capital funds have dropped off a cliff. So riding out the storm by tapping your VC may not be an option either.

Of course, there is no way Google are going to let YouTube die, but I think we are heading for a significant shake-out not just in traditional media, but also digital. A lot of VCs, and corporate parents are going to have to make some really tough choices about their still nascent digital vehicles, and as we all know, cutting is easier than investing.

2009: change the website

Happy New Year! 

I checked out two new marketing sites this morning, one for Pepsi's optimism campaign, and one for Burger King, Angry Whopper. The Pepsi site is kind of lame, the Burger King one is done better. Both are boring though. This is becoming an old theme already, but I am over the web! Or at least, I am over the same old web. Upload a picture, send an angry/happy/love-gram, confess something. I am not seeing anything really new or different, and I know it is out there. So her is hoping that in 2009 we start to see some new, original and smarter uses of digital technology.