August 7, 2005
proclaiming the long-term viability of big media and advertising
Recently I’ve noticed a lot of blogging detractors everywhere.
A good example would be this comment on my recent “TV is dead” post:
Wow. How easy to come, jump on the bandwagon and slag TV. Not all of America, or the world for that matter, spends their day eye-locked to a computer monitor, navel-gazing away at how wired they and their blogroll are.
The people who get off on bagging on TV simply don’t watch the right stuff. Apart from the utter deluge of bad TV, there’s a ton of fascinating stuff on TV. Since, we’re likely talking less about TV worth watching and more about TV worth spending your marketing dollar on, I’ll note there still a ton of great, targeted places on TV to get eyeballs.
Of course the amusing part is, at this point of the curve it is in my long-term interest for as many people as possible in the business to disagree with me.
I’d much rather have my competition trying to win awards and sell Superbowl ads, than start doing what I’m doing.
Right now I want as many people as possible proclaiming the long-term viability of big media and advertising for solving marketing problems, so please carry on. And if you can get some of your friends on board, even better.
We live in interesting times.
Perhaps we’re on the same wavelength or something but I wrote a recent post about this as well as another post some time ago regarding the death of mainstream commercial media. I won’t repeat myself so here’s a link to the most recent post (lord knows I can’t search my own blog for the older one).
http://restiffbard.com/archives/2005/08/05/personal-media/
Would your detractor, Hugh, care to tell us where all this quality television is supposed to be? Do we need a spiritual medium to detect its signal behind the one the rest of us see? And how all this quality stops us zapping, cueing, TiVo-skipping, and coming up with more present participles?
Chris, excellent post BTW.
TV clearly is not the magic bullet it once was for advertisers. it’s been on the wane for quite some time now.
and people’s attention is splintering in many different directions. the online world being the biggest beneficiary of BIG TV’s demise. no argument there. but as an award-winning superbowl ad writing type, can someone tell me how blogging specifically could help let’s say the likes of Budweiser who need to reach a mass audience?
And Jack, there has always been great TV out there if you bothered to look. Try Bit Torrent. the new Ricky Gervais thing “extras” is brilliant for example. The late Gene Roddenberry was once asked why 90% of TV was crap. he replied ” 90% of everything is crap”. it’s just not so noticeably crap. he was right.
Teeveedubya, blogging helps on the theory that it blurs the distinction between the corporation and the audience. But with more sceptical audiences, the blog needs to be irreverent in the age of watered-down communications and political correctness, maybe even revealing some truths about the company that it is regularly unwilling to accept. The cynic in me says that this could all be engineered, though for the blogosphere
No idea where my paragraphing went. Or the ‘a’ in MacLeod. Help. My penis is not mighty.
TV Ads are dead?
Hugh again challenges traditional marketing for big brands, but instead of suggesting ‘new media’ as an alterntive thinks there is no hope for such brands. In the multi-billion dollar suicide pact between clients and television and the earlier post abo…
jack,
You’re right. Bit Torrent doesn’t help the advertiser at all. It helps the viewer. And to millions, myself included, the likes of Coronation Street or Desperate Housewives is still perfectly acceptable entertainment. i’m not very discriminating.
But i guess what i’m grappling with is the erosion of the mass audience which makes things really messy for the likes of me. and there’s no readily available substitute. the internet provides a mass (worldwide) audience. but they refuse to do what they’re told!