Archive for the 'Pop Culture' Category

Here is an editorial written by a college student who is one of four winners of this Fall Semester’s Weekender College Edition contest, and which brilliantly encapsulates what it means to be a young adult consumer in the new media lansape. This and the other three winning entrants can be seen on www.cynopsis.com

“An Open Letter From The On-Demand Generation:
by Michael Krepack, Senior/New York University, Major: Entertainment, Media & Technology

We, the On-Demand Generation, would like to respectfully inform you that the future of TV is here. No longer will we be bullied into watching TV on your time. Welcome to a new era: “Appointment TV” is now “Instant TV.”

We’re well aware that today’s media landscape is rapidly changing, but for those of us in the On-Demand Generation our lifeblood necessitates consuming content in myriad platforms. We read The New York Times online; we scan YouTube for the latest viral videos; we download music from the iTunes Store. We require one thing: instant gratification.

Yet, you insist on distributing content the old fashion way (especially you, the five major broadcasting networks, you’re on notice). Granted, you have begun to embrace new media (mobisodes anyone?) and made some inroads in distributing your TV shows online (and, from what we garner from the WGA strike, at a financial loss), but you’re selling us short.

While you toil developing the right platform to deliver your content (as if there has to be one correct method), the era of “Primetime TV” has vanished just as fast as Viva Laughlin! Until we take over as gatekeepers, we request you give us what we want, when we want it. How about embracing, instead of admonishing time-shifted viewing?

As we shy further away from the TV dinner programming schedule, take a page out of the Pay-TV playbook - repurpose your shows on an on-demand platform. Create a world where each broadcast channel has its own on-demand channel where full episodes of shows appear alongside made-for-demand programming.

In terms of a revenue source, why not charge a monthly premium for subscribers? Then again, you could make it free and tack-on commercials in the same vain you do now for shows online (just air them in HD, please).

This new interactive TV connects you with us. Directly. Adapt or lose. The On-Demand Generation is here to stay. Armed with our DVRs, iPods and Slingboxes we are loud, proud and always tuned on.

Sincerely Yours,
The On-Demand Generation
Sent Via iPhone, while watching TV on the iPhone”

Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe must be pretty upset today. The two founders of monster social networking site MySpace had sold it lock stock and barrel to NewsCorp for $580million in 2005. Just a few months later all of that investment and more ($900million to be precise) was recouped through a deal with Google in which it would became search engine partner for MySpace. And now Rupert Murdoch is considering swapping it for a 25% stake in Yahoo!

At the time, the deal seemed sweet: so sweet, in fact, that many observers thought Murdoch must have lost his wrinkled mind to pay that sum of money for MySpace. But then, in early 2006, Google (yes, THEM again) snapped up upstart online video site, YouTube, for $1.6billion, and its two founders, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, found themselves a few hundred million dollars richer.

The MySpace duo fumed.

No wonder they took umbrage and started to think they’d been ripped off by wily old Aussie, Murdoch. MySpace had far higher numbers of subscribers than that Johnny-come-lately YouTube and a business model that was bringing in real cash, not just column inches. So, in June this year, Anderson and DeWolfe decided to ask Rupert for more cash in compensation - to the (name that) tune of $12.5million a year each - to stay on after their contracts expired! Murdoch has counter-offered with $7.5million each for two years and, as far as I know, the discussions are still going on.

But, hot off the press (and long awaited) news about a deal between Microsoft Corp and Facebook must be making the two MySpace founders more bitter still. Today Microsoft said it was paying $240million for a 1.6% stake in Facebook - a site a mere four years old that again has way fewer users than MySpace - valuing it at around $15billion (or 25 times the amount MySpace was sold for). Grrr! And Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year old founder of Facebook, frees up some cash for a bit of money for pocket money (to buy a Lear Jet, for instance) while staying firmly in control. GRRRRRRR!!!!

The moral of the tale? There is none. Murdoch is a shrewd dude who saw the potential of MySpace and snapped it up as the, what now looks to be, bargain of the century. Mark Zuckerberg is half a century (53 years!) younger and is every bit as savvy. And DeWolfe and Anderson made it big, but perhaps sold out too early (easy to say in hindsight). So, sorry Tom and Chris. Buy me some Cristal and I’ll help you commiserate.

Or….Sumner Whine.

Today old man Sumner Redstone’s Viacom announced it was suing Google for $1billion for copyright infringement because of the 160,000 video clips posted “illegally” on YouTube, including shows from Viacom’s VH1, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central. According to Viacom’s legal claim, in the last six weeks since they asked YouTube to remove the more than 100,000 illegal clips of Viacom shows, over 50,000 more have popped up. Oops.

If this ever goes to court - Redstone is a grumpy old man with a big ego money to burn, so it just might - Google will be using the “safe harbor” defense from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 that basically says if users stick up content illegally and the company takes them down when asked, all is sweet. One commentator has likened the current law to “head shops” getting away with selling weird-shaped smoking pipes because, they say, they didn’t realize that the pipes might be used for smoking illicit substances (”Oh, that’s why the kids with funny beards bought them!”)

Of course it’s really about the fight of Old versus New. Old media conglomerates like Vicaom have been losing the battle for the teen and young adult audience, while those pesky upstarts like MySpace (Redstone is still bitter he missed out on buying that one to his much more tech-savvy rival Rupert Murdoch) and YouTube. Print publishers and authors have also been upset at Google’s quest to put all the information up on the web for free when it’s their content that is being put up there. And who can blame them. TV networks and writers (hell, I’m one!) spend time and money creating content and then Google lets people put it up there for all to see without paying for it.

The question that companies including Viacom have been wrestling with is whether it’s better to let YouTube show bits of its content for free and hope they benefit from the potential increase in viewers to the show it came from on the box; or, whether they the should retain complete control and make people come to the their own sites if they want to see stuff like South Park. There’s no easy answer. In fact since Viacom told youTube to pull all its content from YouTube a few weeks ago indications are that traffic to its own websites, showing clips of Jon Stewart’s show on Comedy Central for instance, have increased.

Not that Google’s made any money from having the illegal clips up on YouTube. But every one of the big media companies know that that will soon change. Google paid such a hefty price for YT last November ($1.65billion) because they saw where the eyeballs were going - to short online video clips - and know they should be able to monetize that interest through sponsored searches, the method that has made them the giant they now are.

There’s no telling how the battle will pan out. For sure Google will tighten up its technology so it’s easier for them and the media companies to track illegally posted content and pull it down. Meanwhile the big G will be scrambling to do some big deals with content owners before they, seeing Viacom’s move today, build their own sites to compete with YouTube.

But the end result will not be determined by big media deals and court cases, but by the consumers. They will seek out the content they want, and turn on companies - Google, Viacom or whoever - who don’t give it to them in the form they want it. The winners will be those that work out how to do this in the least bullshit way.

Meanwhile, I bet Chad Hurley and Steve Chen - the founders of YouTube - are glad they sold when they did, before the law suits started flooding in. Here’s to ya, boys!

The Super Bowl represents the last watercooler moment for TV advertising. With the splintering of the media into a million different pieces across the airwaves, online, in games (video, that is) and everywhere else that will sell space to marketers, the Bowl is still a place where millions of young guys gather around their 70 inch plasmas and LCDs to share an entertainment experience. And advertisers know they have a chance to reach this precious demographic with gold old-fashioned TV commercials. Who can say TV advertsing is dead when an advertiser like Anheuser-Busch spends $25 million on Super Bowl commercials? Right? Right…?

And the agencies had better come up with the goods to prove that they can still woo the consumers with their fare.

Over the last 10 or 15 years the big lumbering agencies have become specialists in creating big lumbering TV-centric campaigns and are smarting from the blasphemy spoken by many with data to back it up that commercials are no longer reaching the people they need to reach, and those that they do reach, fast forward through them on TiVo or their cable operators own brand of DVR.

The Super Bowl is the agencies’ chance to prove that TV advertising can be great, that sponsored online search, branded entertainment, viral marketing and the like are no more than flashes in the pan and will crawol back from whence they came before too long.

But even this one last great advertising showcase - the Super Bowl - shows the case for TV comercials is far from proven. The advertising on display in the multiple breaks is not uninimously great. In fact, for the most part, the fare served up for the 41st Bowl was pretty damned poor given what’s at stake.

For one, there was an unhealthy a celebration of violence as a mode of humor. Not just slapstick, although there was plenty of that too, but people hitting each other or fighting or committing mass suicide. Isn’t the Super Bowl supposed to be a family show? I mean wasn’t that the problem with Janet Jackson’s nipple popping out a couple of years ago? But I guess violence is OK for young kids to see (my son is three and I had to turn the TV off when the ads came on) and to model their behavior on. Nice example Mad Ave.

And then there were the “consumer-generated ads” from Chevy, Doritos and the NFL. The Chevy one had a bunch of guys in the street taking their clothes of because they couldn’t resist the new Chevy car SUV hybrid thing in vile orange. It was lame. The Doritos one had a guy driving a car and a girl passerby smacking their heads because they were (a)distraced by Doritos, and (b)nerds. Lame AND violent. The NFL one was a great concept about the end of the season, poorly executed by the ad agency (and shot by commercial director legend Joe Pytca). But the idea actually came from an ad guy, Gino Bona, who works in a New England ad agency (Garrand Marketing Communications), just not from one working at Doritos agency of record, Omnicom Group’s Goodby Silverstein and Partners. Goodby must have hated having to produce an ad wriiten by a guy from another agency. Maybe that’s why they screwed it up. But, the point is, it ain’t really consumer-geberated if the consumer works in advertising. Right?

There was some great work, demonstating a good strategy and a big creative idea well-executed (and that, after all, is all advertising can hope to be), notably from E*trade, Revlon, Emerald Nuts and Toyota. They each showed that TV advertsing can still be a powerful way of getting a point about a product across.

But my award for the best commercials of the Bowl goes to Coca-Cola for two excellent ads from the “Welcome to the Coke Side of Life” campaign, created by Wieden and Kennedy. Coca-Cola has not been known for great ads in the past few years, producing a bunch of vapid, happy, slappy, crappy commercials that offended no-one and appealed to exactly the same number, but it really seems to have turned the corner with this work and I tip my caps to the marketer and its agency. W+K remain one of the great agencies around, developing stellar work consistently across their clients.