Internet/Inspiration

We already know how much I think the Jetta ad campaign bites. Sadly, they have another round running. And the worst is that I think the commercials are great right up to the impact. This ad campaign literally played a role in me not buying a new Jetta. Which is quite a feat, I think, because I have a ’97 Jetta Trek that I love.

Anyway, now I’m compelled to write about one more ad campaign. Actually, I guess it’s just a commercial. Fortunately, I won’t be subject to this one much longer, because it’s for the Christmas season.

Let me give a little background. There was a lot of hype this last summer about the affect the Internet was having on entertainment and other mass media. I only mention the anti-hype from Snakes on a Plane for one. The world didn’t collapse because a movie had more attention before its release than after. Let's not assume if the SOAP producers had successfully renamed the movie Pacific Flight whatever, it would have had any more or less success. I'm thinking even though the movie didn't perform as some in the press thought it might, it did better overall than it would have without the Internet attention. And in hindsight, I’m kind of amused by the mass media hype that was generated by the Internet Hype. There’s some irony in there I think.

Anyway, the offender I'm choosing to complain about today is a huge beer company (HBC) that I will not mention, mainly because they don’t need it, but also because they don’t deserve it for this particular action (think: great taste, less filling…). For a commercial this Christmas, this HBC grabbed an idea for a commercial directly from a web video of last year: this insane shot of Christmas lights set to music, the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, I believe. This web video came out sometime around Thanksgiving 2005, which makes me think it was actually filmed the year before. It got featured on RocketBoom, and various other Vlogs.

So, this year there are lots of copies on YouTube. Some are decent and they're done by self-funded web monkeys, but one copy is well-funded and professionally shot and choreographed. Come on HBC!! How much did you pay an ad company to copy this web video? And here’s the big question: was it worth it since the original is so much better than your expensive rip-off? I can only guess someone went on vacation, because the man-law commercials are great...

Frankly, this is the worst of modern advertising. If you’re looking for a reason that the Internet is going to ultimately kill TV advertising and entertainment, this is it. To survive, traditional forms of media need to be more creative. Not less. If you really want to show how cool you are by attaching your brand to a web meme, play the actual video from the web.

Buy Yourself a DVR

That's a Digital Video Recorder. If you don’t have one and you watch more than an hour of television a week, get one.

Right now.

I’m serious. Go to Dish Network or Direct TV or Comcast or Cox and buy one.

Today.

Great. Now that we have that out of the way, you can share in one of the very few frustrations I have with them.

Back in the day, I think it was TBS that started everything 5 minutes late. Bewitched reruns were on at 1:35. The Jefferson’s were on at 5:05. This is like 20 years ago, and somewhere along the line TBS stopped this inane practice. I don’t know the reasoning for it then, but all of the sudden, TV networks are doing it again. But now they are doing it irregularly.

Nip/Tuck is starting at 8:10. Rescue Me is running 5 minutes long. So, if I’ve gone through the time to set my DVR to record the season of Rescue Me during its first-run time slot, and FX decides to run it 5 minutes long, my DVR will miss the last five minutes.

Sadly, I’ve spent some time trying to figure out the possible reasons for the networks to do this. I’ve some up with two.

1. Networks are tired of people like me who were enjoying their
good programming but skipping their program-supporting
sponsors’ commercials. So, they just want to mess with me
and cut off the shows climax/cliffhanger.
2. Networks wanted to milk another few minutes of advertising
from the first run of their expensive original shows.

Possible-reason number one is a bit of a stretch, I agree. But I think I’m on to something with number two. Because if I watch an encore presentation (i.e. Rerun) of that same Rescue Me episode the next night, it amazingly fits into the standard one-hour time slot. Partially because of chumps like me who skip all those great commercials anyway, I’m thinking traditional ad revenues aren’t worth as much as they once were at the same time as the shows themselves are costing more and more. So, why not try to score some more ad dollars by inserting more ad minutes in the middle of your most popular shows?

And check this out. My Mom, who has digital cable, called me the other night because she noticed she wasn’t able to skip the commercials on the DVR-recorded TNT show Saved. I’ve not experienced this yet, but it seems threats might be coming to fruition. They are going to force us to watch the commercials.

Just when I come up with a way to watch more TV in less time, they pull me back in. This is not what I wanted!

Future of TV at Home

Just as movies are facing changes to their consumption model, so too is television. What was once three stations offering advertiser sponsored variety shows, game shows and soap operas is now burdened with Digital Video Recorders, satellites, cable, DVDs, cyberspace and, to confuse things more, the end of the analog spectrum in Feb 2009.

As much as TV has changed, it has stayed quite the same. Sitcoms are still sitcoms, except that we don’t have a Seinfeld, Roseanne, Cheers or Friends going on right now. Dramas, like Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy and 24 are taking on more and more cinematic qualities, and in many cases, employ much better writing than most movies.

The 500 channels promised by broadband are consolidating due to less-than-expected ad revenue and lack of audiences. Yet there are still a lot more channels available than there were 10 or 20 years ago. With so many channels, and so many of those channels producing original content, syndication seems to be in trouble. No longer does a show that has survived five seasons have a chance to live on forever in reruns.

So here’s the big question: who is going to pay for television programming?

The advertisers?
I have a DVR from Dish Network. I record my shows and skip the commercials altogether. In fact, in the last six months I’ve watched more TV commercials on YouTube than I have on my TV. And I’m not alone. The only thing I voluntarily watch live is sports, so I see ad rates for football, basketball and other to jump. The rates of others, I’m not so sure. Why pay big bucks to hock your wares during the first run of a Lost episode, when that same episode is available for people to download the next day?

Of course, there is always product placement, which if done well is the solution to this whole deal. But don’t get me started about product placement.

And TiVo has been warning about adding some sort of unskippable commercial breaks added to TV programming. But would this revenue go to TiVo or the production companies?

The watchers?
Essentially, this is the HBO or Showtime model. But even these shows start to run into trouble when stars become huge and demand huge salaries (ie. James “Tony Soprano” Gandolfini).

Sure, people already pay for “regular” TV in the form on Cox, Comcast, DirecTV, Dish Network and others, but this is paying for the vehicle that delivers the signal to your house when you tire of the rabbit-ear quality. The content is mostly still supported by advertising.

But now for network shows you can now buy episodes or subscribe to some shows on iTunes and others. You can also buy most popular TV series on DVD. And not only the latest shows, like 24 and Gilmore Girls, but extensive backlogs like Battlestar Galactica and MASH. So far this has been a little extra butter on the production company’s’ muffin because a vintage show’s costs were paid years ago. But with future TV shows, I’m thinking it’s going to turn into a way to pay the bills.

To those cynics out there, it’s even being said that the movie and TV production industries are up for hyping the new blue laser technology is because they are running out of products to repackage. They are running out of stuff to convince you to buy. So they want to repackage old shows and movies again, and convince you to purchase them… again… to support their salaries and produce new shows.

Just like for movies, keep your eye on cyberspace as the end winner of this game. It’s too easy, convenient and pervasive to ignore.

Oh, Advertising. I Hate You... yet I'm strangely attracted...

I’ve had an unexplainable attachment to M&Ms for most of my life. I don’t remember the attachment initially, but as a child you could push me down on my diaper-covered toddler butt and I'd be fine, but taking away my little bag of M&Ms meant trouble. So I was surprised when Elliot threw down the Reese’s Pieces to coax E.T. out of the bushes. But in hindsight, it’s better to sacrifice your Reese’s Pieces. Save the M&Ms for yourself. Anyway, I gave a lot of thought to this subject. And Reese’s is probably happy about it. Because they paid Spielberg $20,000 to have their product featured in the movie, and their sales jumped 66% overnight. It’s one of the seminole moments in the marketing in movies. Along with Jaws being the first summer blockbuster. Another source of advertising revenue was found. Paid Placement.

As a marketer, I’ve bought magazine ad space. I’ve bought local newspaper ad space. I’ve even arranged for an on-location radio event for a warehouse sale at our headquarters.

But couple those things with my knowledge as a media consumer (ie. I read magazines and watch TV) and I am an expert in my mind.

And advertising is going through some growing pains. To a large degree, advertising dollars are a zero sum game. There are only so many dollars that will be spent on advertising. The dollars get shifted around from format to format. Old forms of advertising die. Types of companies that advertise change.

Take radio. It’s gone from a national advertising medium to a local and regional advertising medium. But it’s still viable for local businesses. TV is giving way to the Internet. The best commercials made for TV never get shown on network TV but become an Internet phenomenon. Ad words and banner placement based on the context of the searches made by browsers is giving way to behavioral advertising over time.

Internet business models have gone from “make money by selling stuff” to “build a killer app that people use and sell advertising to those who want to make money by selling stuff”. That’s a big part of what caused the dot com bubble to burst. There are only so many dollars in the online-ad well. Even still, I am amazed at how many successful companies are still popping up with this model. Though I hear we are on another bubble. And what are the chances that at some point we’ll see Google-Like ads appear somewhere on the screen during your favorite TV shows.

But here’s my product placement vent. When I was reading the Fog, I was amused and engaged when I read that a bottle Ragu was smashed over someone’s head. Because we had a jar of Ragu hanging out in the cupboard. But now, if this were pulled off in a movie, I’d immediately view this as product placement, done for a fee by the movie producers, and call all of my friends to bitch about it.

Sure: TV, movie, music and pc gaming producers and artists need to make money on their product. I get it and support it. If TiVO, disappearing CD sales, slacking box office receipts and online digital media theft are going to eat up their profit, go ahead and make it up on the front end. But remember that if it looks like advertising or smells like advertising, it will look untrustworthy and suspicious. Make your creative people be more creative.

Accidents are a Bad Idea

I think, in general, we can mostly agree on this. Accidents are a bad idea.

So how about this advertising campaign I’ve been seeing from Volkswagen. These commercials start out with a multi-racial assortment of people chatting in a car, being all cute or funny, and then - you see it develop - a car pulls out of nowhere and a startling car wreck happens before your eyes. The next image is of the passengers standing outside the car wreckage - shaken, but not visibly injured.

I own a ’97 Jetta Trek. I love it. I’m shopping for a new car to replace my other car, a 22-year-old Japanese import, and was thinking about another Jetta. But these commercials make me think twice about it. Obviously, VW’s goal is to demonstrate how safe their car is, what with the commercial’s slogan being “Safe Happens”. But I’ve never been a fan of auto makers showing their cars getting demolished in commercials, even in crash testing. I like the Porche one where their engineers can’t bear to watch their masterpieces get crash tested. Or even the passengers who were saved by an air bag. It was emotional and memorable, but in a way that bothered me less (maybe, because ostensibly they weren’t actors). But showing real world wrecks, simulated or not, is different.

Here's what VW has to say in a USA Today article today: "There are mixed reviews but no matter what, the ads make you think that you can be driving along and you can't control what's happening," says Karen Marderosian, director of marketing for Volkswagen of America.

Talk about the safety rating. Let Consumer Reports give its ranking. Go ahead show me the safety features, but show me them in a sanitized form where I could never possibly believe that I will ever actually need them. I want to know I’m safe, but I don’t want to think about the situations in which I might actually need that side curtain airbag to keep my head from shattering the side window.

Here’s a test: come up with some commercials that show airbags deploy in a sudden and extreme yet comical series of situations. Slogan: “Always there” or “Just in case”.

Bathroom + TV = Absolutely, Amazingly Genius

I remember sometime in the early 80s, my Mom threw a huge Superbowl party. As I remember it, it was really fun. But one of the things that made it so was that she arranged to have a TV in every room of the house, including the two bathrooms. Now if I remember correctly, this involved extension cords and a couple of old school 13” black-and-white TVs. To me, as a 10-year-old child, this was an absolutely, amazingly genius addition to the bathroom.

Flash forward to last weekend, and I was out at this little Indian restaurant in Vancouver called Rangoli: great food, cute place. On the way out, I stopped in the restroom to take care of some business. What did I see? A little 6” TV buried in the wall behind the bathroom mirror. It was beautifully positioned so one sitting on the throne is at eye level and able to watch the esoteric music videos of Indian influence the restaurant was showing. I immediately thought of hanging out in the bathroom as a child watching the Superbowl, and as an overly-connected adult, I was stunned at what an absolutely, amazingly genius addition to the bathroom this was.

Now granted, a flat-panel TV hidden in the wall of the bathroom mirror seems like a pretty high-end household accessory, but I’ve made a decision. I’m officially high end. I’ve got a little handy-man skill going for me, so I can set it up myself. And that combined with my meager salary is enough to make me eligible for high-end additions such as this. So we have a pretty serious remodel planned for one of our bathrooms in the next year or so, and this will definitely be part of it.

A little research led me to these three options.
1. Philips MiraVision ($1000 and up)
2. Seura Television Mirrors ($3000-ish)
3. Twowaymirrors.net with this 7” LCD TV from Pyle (total about $250). Hmm. Choices, choices.

Now my morning routine is pretty streamlined. Shower, brush teeth, step out to pick out the clothes for the day, step back in to put some goo in my hair, to make it look like I just don’t care. We share the room with our cats’ food and litterbox, so I don’t just hang out there for fun. But I’m thinking for the combined total of say 15-20 minutes per day, plus the occasional extended visit, I can have background noise of CNN or Jon Stewart to keep me informed. Granted a very big issue to be resolved is coming up with a sanitary way to deal with channel and volume changing. Hmm.

I like the idea of having only one TV in my house. It’s in the media room. If we want to watch TV, we go in there and watch. If we want to not watch TV, we go into one of the other five rooms of the house. And having this TV in the bathroom mirror won’t change my feeling on that. Even though I did spend more time than necessary in the black-and-white TV bathroom of 1982, as an adult the bathroom TV will only serve as ADD-style entertainment, distraction and information that one might get in the car on the way to work. And since my work commute is only 7-10 minutes and I hardly get anything good in that time, I’ll be more informed.

But that sanitary remote control is an issue. I will have to research that.

Keeping Buffy Clean

It doesn't matter what I do. I complain about other people leaving CDs and DVDs all over the place, but I do it too. When I'm tired, in a rush or lazy, occasionally when putting a DVD in the player, I take out the Buffy the Vampire Slayer disc (the TV Show, not the movie) my wife left in there, and leave it on top of the player.



Here is the danger. My wife is a little obsessed with Buffy. Actually "obsessed" is really not the right word. It's not like she carries wooden spikes around with her or stalks Sarah Michelle Gellar. Let's say she is just really, really devoted. When I take one of her Buffy DVDs out of the player and leave out in the open, it's going to get dirty. And the value my wife places on Buffy is a little higher than the food she eats, so the key to household tranquility is a little DVD cleaning.

Allsop has a few different DVD Cleaners that have saved me more than a few times. Whether it was Disc 2 of Buffy season 3, or the copy of Pieces of April I just got from Netflix. The CD and DVD cleaners and DVD scratch repair kits have rescued movie night.