Shift
Three interesting stories that caught my eye in the last few days:
1. From today’s Los Angeles Times - now that Neilsen is for the first time ever measuring ratings not just of TV that people watch when it is broadcast but also the shows that people “time shift” - er, that means use a Digital Video Recorder to record - shows that might otherwise have been a ratings flop and be taken off the screens, might get some good scores because people are watching them later. So it’s like a stay of execution! Cool.
2. From today’s Ad Age - Rio De Janeiro has decided to ban outdoor advertising, as other big Brazilian city Sao Paulo has done, as a way to reduce “visual pollution.” Other cities around the world have taken similar steps and Ad Age asks if this may be the shape of things to come. I sort of hope so.
3. From every media source everywhere last week - Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook.com, is thinking of selling 5% of the social networking website he founded for a price that would value the whole thing at about $10 billion. And Zuckerberg is still in his early 20’s. Wow, he’s my hero: not just for creating a great website that people have been drawn to in their millions, but for not selling to Yahoo! last year for a measly billion dollars.
What do all of these stories have in common, I hear you ask?
Well, clearly the shift from old intrusive media formats to new ones that rely on consumers coming to them and not the other way around, contniues. Old media - like big billboards that shout a simplistic mesage in big letters - are a dying breed. Consumers have the controls and are consuming content when they want it, not when it’s fed to them. DVR’s alow them to watch the TV shows they like when they’re good a ready, not when the broadcasters tell them too. Facebook understands the value of loyal consumers that want to hang out with their friends online.
For people who don’t see one another that often and hate the formality of occasional emails or phone calls, Facebook is a fun and effective ways to stay in touch. For marketers and content creators - for they are one - to succeed they need to recognize thhe shift in power from corporation to consumer and come up with the goods that people want. Sounds obvious, but there’s a whole lot of feet-dragging going on.
