Where there’s magic, there’s margin. I learned this from Mitch Kurz, the one-time head of measurement-maniacal Wunderman before he left Y&R a wealthy man about a decade ago.
We were talking about technology. The internet was upon us. He recounted how technology innovators command premiums for a moment and then, as the invention gets copied and mass-produced — as the magic wears off — the margins decline.
The great thing about the ad business, he reminded me, is that we can make magic every day. Creativity is eternal.
Ironically, the internet, source of endless innovation, has had a chilling effect on creativity — the kind that helped launch and build our modern brand landscape (and the agencies with them).
Confusing measurable with meaningful.
We’ve been driven to distraction by data and measurability. Click-through rates, interaction rates, open rates, download rates. Cost-per-acquisition, -per-lead, -per-action, -per-thousand. Engagement metrics. Real-time optimization. Dynamic multi-variable testing.
Our decade-long quantitative orgy has born legions of counters, lookers, finders and explainers. Like turn-of-the-(19th)-century engineers with new tools, materials and equations, we don’t see un-crossable gaps anymore; it’s just a matter of figuring out.
But here’s the rub: a big part of what marketers and agencies must do can’t be formulated, modeled, mechanized and analyzed.
We must create desire, and desire lives in the heart not the hard drive. It’s called the “art” of persuasion for a reason. Without desire, there’s little to measure. Declining register receipts will tell us all we need to know.
For illustration, look no farther than the past year’s (day’s/week’s/month’s) headlines, and to your own experience.
Data is where the action is. Demand side platforms. Exchanges. And, of course, search.
A few months ago Google bought Teracent to make “better” advertising on their display network. What does that mean, exactly? In their words: “Teracent maximizes the impact of every impression by seamlessly optimizing performance across user and page data from all available sources (online & offline). Teracent deploys an unlimited number of ad creative combinations…[t]hen, sophisticated machine learning algorithms instantly select the optimal creative elements for each ad impression – based upon a real-time analysis of which items will convert from impressions into sales.”
Does that sound like it comes from someone who can make you actually want a different kind of soap?
Look at the action and investments in the space. The money and attention lavished on measurement, ad targeting and media exchanges/arbitrage dwarf what’s spent to enhance advertising’s desire-creation power.
You already know this.
More telling than headlines, perhaps, is experience. Think about the last time you saw an ad online that actually GOT to you. You know, made you sit up and left you feeling like you actually WANT what you just saw. For that matter, what’s the last banner ad you even remember, period?
Oh, unfair, you say. Banners are just little billboards. That’s too much to ask. OK, open it up to online experiences. Nothing jumping out at you? I can think of a few. Ikea’s online work (a microsite) gave me what I needed (that is, the feeling that their stuff is stylish enough) to brave the store and pick up some cheap furniture. Wendy’s recent online bacon fixation festival has got me thinking about swapping out a Big Mac one of these days.
But these are the exceptions. And, to be fair, I probably wouldn’t have seen either of these efforts were it not for the fact I’m in the biz and always looking for good online work. I wasn’t compelled by any advertising, that’s for sure.
And that’s part of my point. Our lust for numbers has got good ‘ole advertising ducking out of the limelight, awkward where once it was on the marquee. Like it’s unseemly to even try to make someone want you anymore. Or, worse, a waste of time and money compared to watching click-through rates.
Anyone else notice how we softly swallow words like “brand” and “perception” in the big meetings these days, lest we open ourselves up to mockery from the lead-generators and click-counters? “What’s the ROI?” is the new guillotine for work designed to make someone actually desire something.
And so…?
This all begs two questions: why is this happening and what should be done about it?
Responses will vary, from “this isn’t happening (Creativity online is alive and well, you idiot, look at the last few Cannes Cyber Lions award-winners) to “we shouldn’t do anything about it” (It’s long past time we stopped dumping money into things we can’t measure, moron, so don’t send us backwards).
But, more importantly, what are we going to do about this?
Probably nothing, until the pain gets a little more unbearable. Ultimately, it’s pretty simple: we’ll give advertisers what they need to warrant real investment in the space.
The recession sped things up. The people who own the biggest, most-popular, most-visited websites on earth are not making enough money (with one notable exception). There are two ways to solve this problem. They can ask visitors for money directly (subscriptions), or they can ask advertisers to pay for the privilege of communicating with visitors (advertising). Or, a combination of both.
Well, that’s not news. Yes, they need more subscribers and more money from advertising. Let’s save the subscriber talk for another day.
The fact is, we know what advertisers want and we’re not delivering it online, yet.
Advertisers pay a lot, relatively speaking, for the chance to create desire among potential customers.
They don’t pay much to be ignored.
To the chagrin of purists hoping for an endless buffet of great, ad-free, online content, what we really need is more intrusive online advertising. It’s not creativity we lack. We don’t have the right canvas, yet.
I think deep down we all know this. But many of us, addicted to content without commercial interruption, still fantasize out loud about a world where all advertising is so entertaining and engaging that we happily tease it from the corner of our screens or urge its crawl from a banner.
Please.
We basically don’t like watching advertising just like we basically don’t like paying the check at dinner. One is required; the other ought to be. It’s the price we must pay. Some checks are easier to swallow than others. Same for ads.
Until now, sites have all but hidden the ads because they’re too worried about irking visitors. One can defy the laws of economics for only so long, however. If these sites don’t start making money, that problem, along with their employees, servers, offices, and domain names, will go away.
How do I know it’ll work?
Giving advertisers what they need goes beyond just the creative, however. They need proof that it’s worthwhile, and we’ve failed here as well. As such, we also need a better bridge between the un-measurable and sales (and better use of the tools already available).
Marketers need numbers to justify their budgets and employment. We’ve been spending way too much time measuring the wrong things in online advertising. That must change.
Because we can’t measure the immeasurable – the direct effect of desire-creating advertising on individual sales – we approximate it using tools developed over the past fifty years. We use proxies to correlate the link. When advertising makes people remember and recall a brand more, become more likely to recommend it and think of it in better terms, for instance, sales tend to improve.
These proxies don’t exist sufficiently online to persuade marketers to move their money. We need to create them. Firms like Dynamic Logic have tools that can help. We need more of them. More importantly, we need to use these tools a lot more. That creates benchmarks that help marketers understand the impact on sales of their online desire-creating efforts.
With understanding comes trust, and with trust comes money.
The first step, though, is getting advertisers a more compelling (intrusive) platform for their work. Easy-to-ignore banners won’t command the attention, or money, needed.
Let’s get back to the show.
Broadly viewed, we will forever seek to persuade people to buy one brand over another. The internet, as a connected and connecting vehicle, is the most powerful to date and, as such, will be the center of gravity for marketing going forward. The most engaging medium always is.
Until now, we have failed to harness the desire-creating potential of the medium.
Perhaps, a combination of factors puts us on the verge of change. The novelty of measuring everything possible is giving way, ten years later, to real data fatigue. The great recession is emboldening sites to offer more intrusive ad units — forsaking some user experience purity for some cash. And, technology is making a whole lot possible in a relatively small space on websites, enabling advertisers to make new, more powerful connections with audiences.
As we shift our focus and the pendulum swings back from data to desire, we in the ad biz can look forward to creating work with, literally, unimaginable creativity. Work that stops people, actually creates a sensation and, more importantly, gets them to want what we’re selling.
In other words, work that works like magic for our clients’ brands, margins included.
About a thousand of us watched a digital ad presentation recently, giant screen looming behind the speaker featuring that day’s Yahoo! home page. “Who was the advertiser on that page?” the speaker asked as the slide faded a minute later. Dead silence. Nobody had noticed.
Whose fault is that?
I’ve heard it all by now:
The agency sucks — they can’t make ads that are “so compelling people will seek them out.”
Ad networks are to blame — they’ve run so many Disneyworld ads on porn sites that “real” brands (with “real” advertising) are scared away.
Ad servers don’t work — they fail to put “just the right ad in front of just the right person at just the right time” to guarantee notice.
And, of course, my favorite: nobody’s done anything wrong at all — advertising simply doesn’t “belong” on the Internet.
The fact is, there is one person and one person only to blame for the invisibility of banner ads today: the publisher. Yes, the same folks who lament the banner ad revenue free-fall that’s got everyone strategizing about, grandstanding over and, in Murdoch’s case, just plain erecting — paywalls, subscription models and other make-money-without-advertising schemes.
Here’s an idea: MAKE THE ADS BIGGER!
I was at a different conference last week. The VCs were presenting. Money was the topic, naturally.
They’ve noticed that most of the $25 billion or so spent on American online advertising is the search and direct response kind. That’s odd, they reckon, because on TV and in magazines and what not, there are gazillions spent on BRAND advertising. But not on the Internet.
Hmmm. Smells like an opportunity. Why, they wondered, aren’t brand dollars flooding the Internet like so much Bud money on a football game? They had a few reasons, including those already noted. And they took the obligatory swipe at weak measurement and analytics — like it’s the turnstile’s fault people don’t use an invisible subway stop.
But they didn’t say this: the basic online ad unit — the banner — isn’t worth buying if you’re trying to build a brand. Other than those little odd-sized ads in the lower margins of the newspaper, banner ads must be the most invisible ads on earth.
This is great news for the masses. It’s like listening to the radio all day long, but you don’t even have to reach out and change the station every time there’s an ad. Banner ads are so easy to miss it’s like they’re not there.
It’s Internet nirvana. Online Utopia.
And it’s time for that nonsense to end. Past time, really.
Publishers, you can do it. You have been held hostage for long enough. That pristine, ad-free, entitled experience we all expected 10 years ago is fading. And, anyway, you’re going broke. What choice do you have?
Give brands something worth buying — something they can actually use to build and strengthen their brands — and they’ll pay you good money. Your visitors will understand. They won’t abandon you, though they may run into the kitchen for a sec. And, on the bright side, there’s no TIVO online. Yet.
It’s nice to know when your birthday is, what diner you frequent, what you’re reading, whom you’ve seen and what you think about this and that.
There’s just one problem. It’s all about YOU.
The next phase of social media will turn the tables. It’ll put you to work for me, in real time and in the natural stream of my daily life — a ubiquitous, always-on presence of the people I care about and admire most to help guide, assist, encourage and advise me.
Remember the Phone-a-Friend option on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” Imagine the phone is always on and your entire social/business network is on hand constantly, available at any keystroke, to lend their knowledge, experience, opinion and insight as it relates to what you’re doing at that moment.
In other words, as I’m trying to decide where to go, what to read, what to buy, with whom to speak, and what to see and do, my friends, fans and followers will be right there to help me.
The biggest difference between now and what’s coming is that I won’t have to go to Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter (or all of them!) to ask everyone I know a question, and await response. Instead, they’ll all be where I am and everything they’ve noted on the topic/person/place/item at hand will be there for me to access. And it’ll happen on my living room TV, too.
This is starting to happen now. But it’s CLUNK-y, with a capital clunk.
To the videotape!
Search is the obvious playground for this next phase. Right now, we enter a query and Google tells us what we should see. How great would it be if, in addition to what Google thinks, my friends and colleagues weigh in?
Oh, wait, this already exists, kind of. It’s called Google Social Search. Here’s an example: when I search for “San Francisco” I see Google’s top-ranked results. Then, IF I’VE REGISTERED AND FILLED OUT A GOOGLE PROFILE, I can also see what people in my network have to contribute to the topic. OOOPS, that’s not entirely right either. I can see what people in my network who have REGISTERED AND FILLED OUT A GOOGLE PROFILE have to say about “San Francisco.” And, that assumes I’ve turned on all the right buttons and am one of those (six or seven) people who scroll down the results page to find something that’s not “above the fold” on my results screen. The social search results are down toward the bottom of the page. Or at least they were for me. Here are the screen grabs:
The result of my search on “San Francisco” (above)
The result, much farther down the page, showing a notation from one member of my “social circle” on the same search term (above)
Augmented reality on our camera-equipped smart phones offers another chance for social media to add value to our lives in real time. Currently, augmented reality experiences and apps are created mostly by developers who plug in or access information, data and visuals based primarily on locations.
The phone knows where you are and the developer does something cool and useful with that information, like Acrossair has done with subway stations in major cities like NYC. If you haven’t seen the demo in earlier postings or elsewhere, it’s worth checking out:
Other apps are emerging that let you scope out your surroundings in different ways. You can see nearby real estate listings, get user reviews of local stores and read about historical landmarks.
But now, imagine you want to eat nearby. Rather than see what a bunch of strangers think about the nearest eateries, what if you could see in your viewer what your friends think, without having to ask them?
That’s the notion behind this new augmented reality app. It lets people in your network comment and create tags that are applied to spaces, via geolocation. Sort of. The big problem here, like with Google’s social search, is you have to become part of YET ANOTHER social network for any of this work. And the process of entering tags is cumbersome. But still, it’s a great start from an outfit called TagWhat. Have a look:
One day before too long comments from our full social network will seamlessly populate our augmented reality viewer. We won’t need to sign up with some new network we’ve never heard of and to which none of our friends and colleagues belongs.
The last example for this post is about basic TV. Currently, the degree to which social media and TV intersect is defined mostly by how much space you have in your living room and which of your friends is in it when you watch programming together.
Soon, our entire social network will be watching right along with us, commenting, participating, voting, and recommending. We’re starting to experience this with things like the Facebook/CNN collaboration, but that requires you to GO, once again, to Facebook for the experience. Yahoo! recently moved into TV with a widget-based module. It’s a start:
These three examples (Google social search, TagWhat augmented reality and Yahoo TV) point to the next phase of social media. They all fall short, mostly by forcing us to create new networks instead of tapping the ones we already have, but it’s enough to get a picture of where we’re headed.
Social media may not be entirely full-grown, but it’s old enough to start paying its way.
When novel marketing practices emerge, they get funded by a sliver of the progressive marketing realm seeking first-mover competitive and publicity advantage. These renegades forego basic metrics, conveniently, since they often don’t exist at birth.
When the Business Week (oops, I mean Bloomberg Business Week) cover story hits, the first lucky few run victory laps around the Twitter deck. The rest of us gripe about slow-moving, scaredy-cat executives. A year later, we find out what we really missed: a bonanza (like Facebook), or a bullet (cough– Second Life).
Social media is here to stay. Sort of like talking isn’t going anywhere, either. We’re social creatures. Please.
So I recently dug into the state of ROI in social media. That’s what marketers (I call them clients) are interested in now. What I found was pretty disappointing. Nearly all the information, data, quotes, videos, powerpoint decks and case studies said, basically, “wow, it’s really tough to measure the ROI on social media” and then listed a slew of reasons why. Instead of measuring returns in terms of, umm, money, I was urged to consider dozens of alternatives (buzz, mentions, site visits, brand value — to name just a few).
I don’t know about you, but I hate talking to CEOs (my clients call them bosses) and not talking about money.
But if we want budgets to improve, that’s exactly what we’d better start talking about. I’ve done some legwork. I don’t have a clever, animated video to go viral, yet, but if anything here helps you make a money case for social media ROI, please have at it!
Here are those links from the last slide since I know they’re not clickable in the format presented:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/931365801
http://www.youtube.com/user/Socialnomics09
http://www.topwebhosts2010.com/web-hosting-blog/how-to-measure-social-media-roi/2010/03/
http://www.socialtimes.com/2010/02/social-media-metrics/
http://www.brandweek.com/bw/content_display/news-and-features/direct/e3i15f690d9bb7df956a2d4c207f1c24e2b (value of a Facebook fan)
http://blog.360i.com/social-media/100-ways-measure-social-media
(CW Network announces they’ll double their online ad load)
At the OMMA Global conference in San Francisco last week I saw a panel debate the “free vs paid” content model for big media. The platform gave voice to a growing chorus singing the death of an ad-supported online content model.
But the conclusion rests on at least one unproven assumption: that people won’t watch as many commercials on Internet-delivered programming as on TV.
Everyone agrees Web content producers are getting hosed. Advertising rates are too low. Publishers and sites can’t make enough to cover the cost and value of their content. So, the chorus concludes, the ad model is failing.
The average one-hour TV program contains 16 minutes of commercial interruption, according to an expert on the panel. When you move the same program online, however, networks lose 75% of the ad time. Internet-delivered programming “can only handle 4 minutes because consumers won’t sit through 16 minutes of advertising” online, according to this expert.
How do we know this?
Well, because when researchers ask people what they’ll tolerate, that’s what they tell us.
I learned long ago people say one thing and do something else entirely. During the last environmental movement moms who heard juice boxes were tough to recycle swore they’d stop buying them for the kids. The supermarket cash registers said something in utter contradiction.
As for online advertising, we don’t have real behavioral data because nobody has actually tried exposing people to the TV-equivalent dose of advertising, until now! The CW Network (which airs the Gossip Girl among other popular shows) just announced it’ll double its online ad load and start “putting as many ads in Web versions of its shows as it airs on TV,” according to today’s Wall Street Journal.
You think Gossip Girl fans will just go without the show now that they have to watch the same number of commercials online as on TV? Me neither.
As more and more content shifts to video, this bodes well for sites, publishers and networks.
For your basic site content and experiences, however, where intrusive video ad formats don’t apply, sites continue to watch ad revenues decline on a cost-per-thousand viewer (CPM) basis. I believe that’s because the basic banner ad unit is so easy to miss that sites are getting exactly what they’re worth for them: very little.
Advertisers won’t pay much to be ignored, and rightly so.
Why don’t we see more intrusive ad formats on websites?
Yup: when we ask people, they tell us they don’t like disruptive ads and that they’ll go elsewhere if subjected to them. Time to put that research to the cash-register test.
Rather than giving up on the ad model, let’s trash the untested assumptions standing in our way. And the basic banner unit, while we’re at it.
Before digital, newspapers were in two businesses: content creation (news) and distribution (paper).
Maybe now would be a good time to consider exiting the distribution business.
This would have been impossible to imagine in print. But in digital, it’s pretty simple.
The current model is something like this: write a bunch of stories, put them on the newspaper website, get as many people to the website as possible, charge advertisers to reach the audience as they pass through.
In essence, the paper sells its content, but only at ITS OWN storefront.
Now, imagine newspaper (or magazine) content were untethered — available “for purchase” everywhere. Any story, any piece of content, could be linked to any other. Reading the latest Sports Illustrated (SI) piece on Bode Miller? Linked to it could be a Boston Globe story about Bode’s New Hampshire upbringing. Click on the link and read the Boston Globe story. There’s an ad on that story. The Boston Globe gets paid when you read their story (they have to share the revenue with Sports Illustrated, of course). It’s like selling Boston Globe content at the Sports Illustrated store.
(OK, let’s go: WHAT??!! Are you nuts? Why would Sports Illustrated agree to do THAT? Take people OFF the SI site? And the Boston Globe isn’t going to get all it could from the advertiser because SI will get their piece. Why would they go for that?)
First things first. No, the reader need not exit the “originating” or “host” site, in this case, sportsillustrated.com. The Boston Globe content could be served within the SI framework.
As to why, the answer is simple: money.
Publishers need to make more money from their content. The formula is simple: more eyeballs = more money. The wider your distribution, the more eyeballs, the more money you get for your content.
I’m trying to think of other dopes and dimwits who may have tried something similar. Apple comes to mind. You can buy an iTouch at apple.com and at one of the few Apple stores around the country, AND at BestBuy and RadioShack. They make less per sale at BestBuy. I reckon they’ve done the math and it works for them.
I admit, it’s slightly more complicated — emotionally, at least — to see competitors collaborate in the content business like this new model suggests. Complicated, though, is a solvable problem. Dead, less so.
Considering two very different responses to the opportunities digital presents publishers, the disruption in our midst may reshuffle the power, popularity and, possibly, the very presence, of some of our most cherished media brands and institutions.
Imagine your partner has fallen deeply in love with two or three of your most prominent, defining traits. Now, consider having to shed them to POSSIBLY save the relationship. Were it a certainty, the decision would be easier. But we’re talking about the future here. There are no guarantees.
Now, take a look at how the The New York Times (born in 1851) presents its iPad story compared to Penguin Books (born in 1935).
The Times highlights the “superior reading experience” and “the essence of reading the newspaper,” while extolling — a little breathlessly — the “exquisite typography, images and content” porting over to the digital experience. Here’s the clip:
Meanwhile, Penguin Books leads with animal noises and kids actually playing with their iPad version of, well, a book. Gaming, communing, interacting, manipulating, mapping, sharing, pointing-at-the-sky-to-see-what-stars-are-up-there. That’s where Penguin’s headed, as you can see from this clip:
“We will be embedding and streaming audio, video and gaming into everything that we do,” says the Penguin Book’s CEO about their future. As PaidContent’s Robert Andrews reports: “Many of Penguin’s iPad books seem hardly to resemble ‘books’ at all, but rather very interactive learning experiences, from its Dorling Kindersley and kids imprints – the Vampire Academy ‘book is ‘an online community for vampire lovers’ with live chat between readers, and the Paris travel guide switches to street map view when placed on a table.”
No mention of typeface in the Penguin bit.
Who wins here: the full arsenal of digital capability, or exquisite typography?
OK OK. Yes, the book guys have a huge advantage. Namely, time. They don’t have to create a whole NEW digital, interactive experience everyday or, worse, on an ongoing, dynamic, real-time basis.
If you’re in the news business, though, perhaps figuring out HOW to do just that beats dwelling on disadvantages. You know it’s going to happen. The question is: who’s going to do it?
The answer will come from people focusing on the solution, even if it means getting rid of things we once loved about them.
This reminds me of learning to ride a motorcycle. My instructor constantly warned us not to fixate on the obstacle because you tend to go where your eyes aim.
More to the point, he’d just say, “Look down. Go down.”
Words to live by. On a bike. And in the publishing biz.
You know how sometimes you come across something that grabs you even if you don’t quite get it? It’s right for something and you want it but can’t figure out why you need it or what you would do with it? A couple sport coats waiting for their break-out moment from my closet can relate. Apple’s about-to-launch iPad is in the same company (though, sadly, not the closet). And, in fact, Twitter struck me the same way at first.
So, perhaps it’s no coincidence Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has touched the same nerve for me again with his latest invention.
It’s called Square. It basically turns your cell phone into a cash register. Or, put another way, it turns you into a business. All you do is stick a little plastic square into the phone’s audio jack and then you can accept credit card payments and issue receipts.
I knew this was powerful when it launched a couple months ago but couldn’t get my head around the hugeness of it until yesterday when I met with the head of digital marketing from a major consumer brand.
He got me thinking: what stands between the folks who make all the stuff we buy, and us, the folks who buy it?
Retailers.
And for whom, exactly, is that good? You think brands like handing over all that control, and dough? Are you in love with schlepping, shopping carts and checkout lines?
But, what’s the alternative? Online shopping will continue growing, for sure. But shipping costs suck. And, as awful as it is to return something to most stores, boxing, packing, labeling, taping and shipping ain’t exactly in the family wheelhouse.
Now for the leap.
Ever since social media hit, we marketers have been drooling over online “brand ambassadors.” These are the people who, without getting paid, spread the good word about our brands to their friends.
I’m thinking brands may have another use for these folks soon, and it’ll go well beyond statesmanship.
As in: salesmanship.
You love our brand? Here’s an idea: buy a few extra cases at wholesale, sell some to your friends and, if you want to charge a little more than you paid, keep the difference.
Used to be all you needed was a business card and a bank account to start a business. Now, looks like you’re good with a Square and some extra space. (And, thanks to FedEx et al, you can go light on the space.)
Seriously? Mary Kay and Tupperware had it right all along?
I know. It’s easy to dismiss. Kind of like we did when this new way of keeping up with “friends” launched, or this new way of talking to people in 140 characters or less hit the scene.
Without doubt, we’re seeing the power of connections today. Add money and you might call the intensified experience social media, Squared.
(Check out this video. It makes you want to start selling something just so you can use this thing.)
Imagine selecting the 18 items you want at the grocery story and, at checkout, someone dumps 112 things you don’t want on the belt AND forces you to buy them.
You’d call the police.
Now, let’s talk about cable TV.
The average American household watched 18 channels out of the 130 they received each month in 2008, according to Nielsen and reported by Martin Peers in today’s Wall Street Journal (@WSJHeard)
Why do cable companies do this?
Because they can.
This reminds me of record albums, and then CDs. I had to buy the whole thing even though I didn’t want, or even like, all the songs on it. But, I had no compelling alternative.
Until the iPod/iTunes combo came along.
Now, I buy by-the-song. If I want a whole album, great, I can buy that, too. But the choice is MINE, not the label’s. This has not worked out well for people who sell pre-bundled packages of content I don’t want (aka CDs) for a living:
This recent report from Forrester (above) presented by readwriteweb.com last month shows the continuing decline of U.S. “physical” music sales (CDs) and the continuing rise of “digital” music sales. In other words, people are buying less of what’s forced on them (bundles of songs, called CDs) and more of what they want (songs).
The whole pie shrinks, too. Makes sense. People aren’t buying stuff they don’t want anymore, because they don’t have to.
Now, back to cable TV. I smell trouble.
Once we’re able to pay for what we want (18 channels) instead of being forced to pay for 6 TIMES more of what we don’t want (the other 112 channels), I’m going out on a limb and betting that’s EXACTLY what we’ll do.
When will that time come?
Never, if the cable companies can prevent it. Happily, they can’t. We just need an alternative.
Oh! Anyone see Apple’s introduction of a new gadget earlier this month?
Can you imagine a day when you only pay for the actual piece of content you watch? If you use an iPod, you can.
At home we pay over $1,400 a year to Time Warner to NOT WATCH thousands and thousands of programs and hundreds of channels. I bet you there’s a model that allows me to pay by-the-show that works. It just won’t work for the people who sell pre-bundled packages of content I don’t want (in this case, cable companies).
Like Benjamin Franklin practically said: Apple helps people who help themselves. (They crush people who don’t, by the way.)
All the talk of iPad-as-savior reminds me of those commercials promising weight loss without proper diet and exercise. It’s a fantasy.
The iPad isn’t a pill publishers can take and, presto, become attractive. It’s going to take WORK. Lots of it — the painful, sacrificing, work-up-a-sweat kind.
Why do you think the iPad will succeed, (or might succeed, if you’re not there, yet)? So people can read text and look at pictures? No way. It’s too big and expensive for such narrow utility. Remember, this thing doesn’t tuck into your pocket. We have to haul it around.
Unfortunately for publishers, the text and pictures business is precisely the one they’re in today.
Nope, the iPad will live or die on one fundamental thing: video. Watching video on a phone sucks. It’s too small. Watching video on a laptop is OK, but kind of a pain.
Apple mints money off of “kind of a pain.” They turn “kind of a pain” into “wow!”
Downloading music off the internet and getting it onto an MP3 player used to be kind of a pain. Get the picture?
Yes, the iPad will do lots of other things, and publishers must leverage the connectivity, networkability, shareability, and whatever-ability that Apple and its legions of app developers dream up and plow into this new device. But the reason we’ll schlep this new thing around, if we do, is because it does something our iPhone just can’t. Quadrupling the iPhone’s screen size so we can enjoy video? There’s not an app for that. There will be an iPad for that.
Which gets us back to the publishers. If they think they can just port their words and pictures over to the iPad and call it a day, I’ve got a vibrating, guaranteed weight-loss machine I’d like to sell them. They must actually CHANGE their product, and it must include video. Man. I know. I get tired just thinking about all the work involved trying to deal with that.
The iPad isn’t a pill for publishers. It’s a trainer. A dare. A goal. An opportunity to get healthy again. But the work must be done. There are no short cuts.
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