Last Thursday in San Francisco, as I was walking back to my hotel, I came across a panhandler whose hand-lettered sign appealing for funds at least had the virtue of candor:
Why lie? It’s for beer.
Technorati: Advertising
Month: October 2006
Bob Dylan and Media Convergence
Today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune (registration required) has an article on Bob Dylan’s concert tour and his appeal to youth. It highlights the powerful team of new media and traditional media:
At 65, Dylan is drawing a broad audience partly because of his iconic status and historical importance, but also because he has been exploring new media — via a weekly show on XM satellite radio and a commercial for iTunes. He’s also opened up about his life, with a best-selling memoir, “Chronicles Vol. 1,” and the PBS documentary “No Direction Home,” while granting interviews to the likes of “60 Minutes” and Newsweek magazine.
Combine that kind of exposure with a surprising willingness to demystify himself and it’s no surprise that his new CD, “Modern Times,” released in late August, became his first No. 1 album in 30 years.
And iTunes made a difference: about 10 percent of the opening-week sales came from digital downloads — twice the industry average, according to Billboard.
“He has newfound respect,” said Lee Abrams, XM radio’s chief creative officer. “Five years ago, he was lumped in with stars of the ’60s. Now, he’s gone from being a classic-rock artist to somebody beyond definition — like the Beatles.”
The traditional media are unsurpassed at creating broad awareness. The new media enable users to get exactly what they want immediately. Instant gratification. Put them together, and they’re a powerful combination.
And, in keeping with Debbie Weil’s advice about using lists in blogs, here’s the Star Tribune’s 7 reasons kids still dig Dylan.
Technorati: iTunes, XM, Satellite Radio, Bob Dylan
Demographics Don’t Matter
Of course, for traditional media, demographics are extremely important. If you want to reach a particular kind of audience through TV ads, for example, you need to pick programs that are watched by a sufficiently large group of your audience of likely consumers (probably not advertising Flomax on the Cartoon Network, for instance.)
New media, particularly podcasts, blogs and vlogs, are different entirely. Here’s why:
Search. With over 80 percent of internet users using search engines (scores of millions of users, if not more than 100 million) to find what they need on the web, if your content is out there and searchable, many of your potential customers will find it, wherever you are housing the video or audio files.
In other words, it doesn’t matter if a particular niche within the web is mostly inhabited by people outside your target demographic. For example, if YouTube’s audience is mostly younger, and your target audience is mostly older, that doesn’t stop your audience from finding your content…particularly if you have included it within your own web site or blog.
You can take advantage of the free service to add your video clip to the 100 million or more in the YouTube inventory. The teenagers won’t be looking for it and won’t find it. But by embedding it in your web site or blog and tagging appropriately, people who are looking for your kind of product or service can find it. And since you paid nothing (beyond the time to upload the clip) to add it, your cost per thousand impressions is….? And how does that compare to the TV ad?
The audience may not be large enough to carry your business, and you may still need to use traditional media, too. But if you’re paying for TV, why would you not take advantage of distribution that is essentially free? Especially since those people who have searched for a term that leads them to your content are likely your best potential customers?
New Media Growth. With 67 million iPods sold to date (and likely another 20-25 million hard-drive based mp3 players of all other brands), the audience is getting sufficiently large that it can’t be just the teenagers anymore. And of course the files can be played or viewed on computers as well, which makes for an even broader audience.
For media that are walled off from the broader internet (e.g. cell phones and cable VOD), my first point above is less relevant. You still need to consider the audience for that channel and whether it is large enough and has enough of “your” kind of people to be viable.
I discussed the underlying concept of the Economics of Abundance and linked to some other relevant articles here.
Technorati: iPod, YouTube, podcast, vlog, blog, New Media, demographics, TV, advertising
The Long Tail and the Economics of Abundance
Chris Anderson’s best-selling book, The Long Tail, is predicated in large part on the assumption that as inventory and delivery costs approach zero, and with highly sophisticated search able to help people find what people want, choice becomes practically unlimited and niche content becomes economically viable.
He goes into this concept in more depth in a new post on his blog entitled “The Economics of Abundance,” in which he reviews (and links to reviews of) a presentation he made on the topic. The review by David Hornik has a particularly appropriate paragraph:
The same businesses that are the poster children for the Long Tail, are the poster children for the Economy of Abundance. And the same businesses that are the victims of the Long Tail are the poster children for the Economy of Scarcity. With bandwidth and storage approaching free, iTunes can offer three million songs (P2P offers nine million). In contrast, with limited shelf space, Tower Records can only offer fifty- or sixty-thousand tracks. The end result, consumer choose abundance over scarcity (something for everyone) — Tower Records gets liquidated while iTunes grows dramatically. Television is undergoing a similar transformation, from scarcity to abundance. TV initially consisted of only the major networks. Consumers were limited to 3 choices in any given time slot. With cable the number of channels was dramatically increased and a broader range of content became available (Food Channel, Discovery Channel, ESPN, CNN, etc.). To many, 250 channels may constitute sufficient abundance as to approach infinite choice in their minds. But the true television of abundance is YouTube. With unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage, television is subject to microprogramming — millions of shows, viewable on demand at any time. Now not only should NBC be worried, so too should be Comcast.
I highly recommend both the post by Chris and those to which he links. I also would add that there is a point at which content creation costs (not just storage and distribution) approach zero. When content is being created for TV, for instance, putting it on YouTube, or creating a video Podcast, is almost free. And instead of being time-bound and limited to scarce airwaves and cable channels, it can be available as long as you want it to be…and as long as potential viewers want to see it.
Technorati: Long Tail, NBC, Comcast, Podcasting, Video
My Ragan Conference Presentation
Jeremiah Owyang, a social media/web strategist from the Bay Area, attended the Ragan Strategic PR conference in Chicago where I presented in September, and blogged about the conference here. His site looks to be a good resource for learning about social media, and his is one of the feeds I’ll be reading.
Technorati: Ragan, PR, Social Media