Author: Lee Aase

Husband of one, father of six, grandfather of 15. Chancellor Emeritus, SMUG. Emeritus staff of Mayo Clinic. Founder of HELPcare and Administrator for HELPcare Clinic.

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.

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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.

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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.

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Non-Annoying Web Video Ad

An oxymoron like congressional ethics, pretty ugly, criminal justice, only choice, original copy or jumbo shrimp?

No, I discovered it when I was reading Janet Johnson’s article on “type-ins.” I clicked through to the CNNMoney article she referenced, and up came the story, complete with one of the Apple computer personification ads with the sound turned off. It gives the opportunity to click to hear the sound, but otherwise it’s just another graphic on the page.

I’ve seen reports that video advertising is going to be big, but I didn’t know how it could work and not do more damage than good. Rule #1 is not to annoy your potential customers. I’ve seen some sites where the video launches automatically, and it can be jarring and annoying when the car dealer’s commercial comes blaring through.

If the ads are visually distinctive as this one is, I can see this might be a way to have a successful and non-annoying web video advertising campaign that isn’t purely viral.

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‘Type-Ins’ Tipping Point?

Janet Johnson, formerly of Marqui, is back in the blogosphere with a newly designed site and an interesting post on the phenomenon of direct navigation, in which users guess at a URL instead of using Google, Yahoo, Ask or another search engine.

Her advice is that if you are using Google’s AdWords service to buy pay-per-click ads on a term like, for example, Rochester MN jeweler, you should consider buying the domain name rochestermnjeweler.com. That is, if the search term you are buying in AdWords isn’t too obscure.

You can read Janet’s thoughtful analysis here.

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