Unbundled Archives
NBC is making a short-sighted mistake by forcing YouTube to remove an SNL video.
Just last week I talked about the popularity of short video clips and how they can contribute to the success of a television show. I quoted Matt Haughey who wrote:
Like Napster, there are positive sides to this kind of loose fair use/infringement. It's only because things are so lax that everyone and their brother saw the Chronicles of Narnia SNL spoof video, and SNL ratings definitely saw a spike in the shows that followed (and I noticed SNL tried to capitalize on this by putting Andy Samberg in more skits and letting cast members do funny little videos for the two following episodes).
Well, it seems as if NBC read my entry and did the exact opposite. I suggested that "Maybe unlike the music industry, television networks will think a little bit before they fight a battle they can't win. Don't just cry foul and whine about people stealing your content: do something about it! Think about how you can change with people, not fight against them." Well, thanks to Boing Boing I've learned that NBC has asked YouTube to remove the video. YouTube has since confirmed it on their blog (which has no permalinks by the way), stating, "We know how popular that video is but YouTube respects the rights of copyright holders."
Now of course the video has not completely disappeared, NBC still streams it on their site or you could buy it for $2 from iTunes. The thing is, the NBC site is for Windows users only and iTunes is not free and DRM-crippled (I believe), a serious downer. Now why would NBC do such a stupid thing when this video is the only reason I (and I'm sure many others) have tuned into Saturday Night Live again (only to be disappointed I might add)? It's because they don't get it. Plain and simple.
It's a perfect opportunity to bring up unbundling again. Media outlets that believe that they're going to survive on their current path are sorely mistaken. Things have changed, access to information is available anytime and anywhere. Your little television show, magazine or newspaper just isn't as valuable as it once was. A media outlet's value is no longer in its ability to bundle everything together. I can staple together my printouts myself, thank you! It's time to start considering what everyone championship sports team past its prime as to consider: Is it time to blow it up?
What needs to happen first is an inventory. What pieces are held and what value do they have. This is a general inventory, like ticking off TV station in New York, newspaper in Chicago. This is a specific inventory: Sports writer in Chicago, prime time show in New York. It's about finding the smallest pieces of value. After an inventory it's time to start assigning values and considering alternate forms of distribution. That's sports writer may hold value in more arenas than just his daily newspaper column. What other ways can you leverage his expertise to add revenue. Is it a text-message service for sports fans? A fantasy football consultation service? Media doesn't mean newspaper/magazine/television/radio anymore: It's any information/communication vehicle.
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With the commoditization of content, relationships are all that media companies really have left.
[Editor's Note: This is kind of part three in a series on unbundled media (see part one and part two). Here I take a step back and try to explain the unbundling process on a media-wide level.]
"Revenue isn't the problem; audience is the problem." At least according to Terry Heatona it is. He of unbundled media fame claims that it's the number one thing he tells his clients. It's not that surprising to read Jeff Jarvis echoing the same sentiments in his amazing epitaph for the newspaper industry. In the piece, Jarvis quotes Herbert Burda, a German media mogul a bit more in touch with digital technology than your average publisher. "Printing will not go away, but I do not plan to open a single new printing plant," Burda said. "We now concentrate on using social software to build closer relations with the communities of readers around our magazines."
To which Jarvis replied, "I’ll say it again: Distribution is not king. Content is not king. Conversation is the kingdom. It’s about relationships." His emphatic reply not only summarizes the state of the newspaper industry, but also offers a glimpse to the state of big media in general. The game is changing. Newspapers ruled the roost because they were an incredibly efficient way to distribute a great deal of news daily. Just think about how cheap the paper is: the ink rubs off onto your fingers for goodness sake! Television and radio came along, but neither were direct competitors as it's generally easier to deeply comprehend something when we read it. But then the internet came along, and all of a sudden the newspaper industry's monopoly over the quickly delivered written word came to a screeching halt.
Instead of accepting their shortcomings, however, newspapers have tried to keep stuffing the same product down customers' throats: in the process missing larger trends that were happening. Yeah, people were reading fewer newspapers, but at the same time they were reading more news. They happened to be doing it on via screen rather than an unwieldy gray thing, but they were reading it nonetheless. Those that have embraced the net have seen it help shape their fortunes. The Washington Post, for example, has embraced the web, a factor Jay Rosen cited when he explained, "The New York Times is not any longer--in my mind--the greatest newspaper in the land. Nor is it the base line for the public narrative that it once was. Some time in the last year or so I moved the Washington Post into that position..." In our digital world, where competition is feverish, relationships are all the more important. By avoiding things like TimesSelect, the Washington Post is building relationships that could last a lifetime. The same lifetime, I might add, that could very well see the end of the broadsheet daily and the prestige that comes along with it. At that point, what will The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal be left with?
If I'm a newspaper publisher at this point I'm asking, "what should I do about it?" Well, start by reading Jarvis' article and following his advice, he ends it with thoughts on how to save the newspaper industry piece by piece. Beyond that, though, it's important to think about how you can add value to the consumer. With the net at their fingertips, they're in the driver's seat, not you. Burda explains further, "News has now become a commodity, thanks to the Internet, so we must differentiate ourselves in other ways," Burda said. "Content alone can no longer win. You must build and interact with audiences." That message goes to the media industry in general and brings us back around to Terry Heaton's quote which opened this article, "Revenue isn't the problem; audience is the problem." In a Field of Dreams sort of way, if you build the audience, the revenue will come. So figure it out.
Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson suggests following this four-step process:
1 - Microchunk it - Reduce the content to its simplest form.
2 - Free it - Put it out there without walls around it or strings on it.
3 - Syndicate it - Let anyone take it and run with it.
4 - Monetize it - Put the monetization and tracking systems into the microchunk.
I mentioned it last time, but it seems even more appropriate now to talk about the Washington Post Remix blog, which features other people's mash ups using Post content. In the introduction to the blog, they write: "Why are we doing this? Because we want to foster innovation, and because we want to see your ideas about new ways of displaying news and information on the Web."
You're not going to beat the technology, so you might as well embrace it and start developing some real relationships with your customers. Because otherwise, they're just going to find the next guy who will.
Questions to answer in the next installment: Where are the marketing opportunities in all this? Do they lay more on the media or advertiser side? Where does TV and the thirty-second spot fall in? What about online advertising? And I'm sure there are more . . .
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It's time for the next generation of marketing.
[Editor's Note: This is a continuation of a piece I wrote about a week ago on unbundled media. Unbundled media is a trend we will increasingly see where people consume media in bite-sized chunks rather than the 30-minute show or album that once supported big media companies.]
The effect of unbundling is being felt far and wide, both inside advertising and out. With the help of blogs, the fundamental unit of the web has officially moved to the article/entry, passing both "the individual page" as well as "the site" in terms of importance. The permalinks of blogs have created an atmosphere where it's completely possible to bypass homepages all together, connecting directly with the desired content. Throw in RSS feeds and the whole idea of a website changes from destination to synidcation.
In the olden days, the only aggregators were the media networks. They put together the programming lineup. They syndicated their content across the country and they reaped the rewards in the form of commercials. All that is changing. As Joshua Porter eloquently put in a Digital Web Magazine article from last year:
Aggregators are promoting a shift in the control of content. They’re challenging the idea . . . that users must view things in the way we prescribe, and that our hierarchy is best to present our content. This change is also suggesting that we need the help of others to market our own ideas. It is plausible that another’s approach to our information may be working better than our own.
Now that there are so many aggregators out there, from sites like IFILM to the million of blogs around the world and increasingly to individual bookmarkers on sites like del.icio.us, publishers can no longer trust that consumers are receiving their content just how they planned it. Whether it's newspaper articles republished on blogs or television shows downloaded with BitTorrent, the perfect little bundle is being unraveled and it's going to have big effects on media companies and the advertisers that pay their bills.
But, as Yoda would have said if he were an account planner, "with great change, comes great opportunity." Digital technology changes the economic model we've grown accustomed to. The long tail is in full effect on sites like Amazon, where the bottom 80 reaps great rewards. By building in feedback mechanisms, Amazon has turned what was once a valley of niches into a mountain of money. As Umair Haque explains on Bubblegeneration, "It's about the fact that consumption is connected - in a networked world, when you consume something, your consumption has an externality: I generally know how much satisfaction you got. As enough of this info is aggregated, demand within the niche increases for high-quality goods (and decreases correspondingly for low-quality goods)." The better the quality, the more people are exposed to your product, the more people buy your product, the more people are exposed to your product, and so on and so forth.
In a situation like that it's not the mass media driving your product, it's the individuals. In essence, with the help of distributors you've allowed people to become both active and inactive co-marketers. They can add reviews and blog about your product on the active side, while on the inactive, collaborative filtering does most of the heavy lifting. Essentially, it's all about ceding control. Things like APIs allow you to extend your brand beyond its normal boundaries, exposing it to individuals who might not otherwise be exposed. Of course, that doesn't come without a catch, because you have no control of the look and feel of that content those people are seeing.
However, big risks can reap big rewards, just ask Google who entered a marketplace saturated by Mapquest and garnered the admiration of the developer community by opening up their map API. At this point, who hasn't heard of a Google Map Mashup? Or ask the Washington Post who opened up a blog recently that highlights Washington Post mashups. Rather than sending cease and desist letters, they're sending traffic. What do they get in return? Good geek cred and a better liklihood that people will use their content rather than the New York Times' in their next web application.
After that semi-tangent, let me get back to the larger point at hand. What all of this shows is that unbundled media is here to stay and marketers will need to embrace this fact as well as publishers. Technology like Tivo is only accelerating a trend we've been seeing over the last thirty years away from blockbusters. As Terry Heaton writes, we need to unbundle our mass media products and send the pieces on their merry way. As marketers we need to look at these unbundled pieces and see where they can add value to our clients.
It's going to be about working directly with the creators and attaching advertising directly to video content, rather than running it as a pre-roll on a website. It's going to be about finding the connectors (maybe with the help of AttentionTrust) and getting the products in their hands for them to blog about. It's going to be about providing a destination site that adds value to customers by acting as an aggregator of news and content (even if it comes from your competitor). It's going to be about getting a voice into the community that speaks their language and can be trusted. It's going to be about being inventive, innovative, exciting and most of all, fast.
Like Yoda said, "with great change, comes great opportunity."
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While the shift towards unbundled media may seem scary to some, it offers big opportunities to the little guys.
[Editor's Note: I'm thinking about shopping an article around about unbundled media, here's a kind of pitch for it. I'd love to get some feedback.]
The move to unbundled media will be scary for many in the advertising world, as those used to the status quo are forced to find new innovative ways to reach consumers. But Influx Insights does a good job of reminding that it offers huge opportunities to agencies accepting of change. "Many agencies may be wondering how to cope and adjust," they explain. "But you could easily take the opposite point-of-view, that there's never have been a more exciting time to be in the ad business. It's a great opportunity for the brave and imaginative, that can think beyond the 30-second spot and collaborate to create new forms of content and distribution."
It's true. There are huge opportunities to break new and exciting ground as media becomes consumed in this new way. While the 30-second spot is by no means dead, it too has become unbundled, being featured or continued on microsites and across the web in places like IFILM. While on one hand RSS takes the content out of the perfect little site you've created, it offers new and exciting ways to connect with consumers on their own terms.
I really think this is where the biggest opportunities are for unbundled media. Marketers can actually add value as the media becomes unbundled by doing things like helping to aggregate content, subsidizing cost or even by becoming media creators in their own right. While it's probably a bit scary for the big guys who have spent their entire careers working in 30-second chunks, it offers huge opportunities to those who can move quickly and embraced the unbundledness.
Update (11/18/05): David Card found this quote: "Advertising revenue at NBC, CBS and ABC declined 21.5% to $2.2 billion in the third quarter, with much of the drop stemming from the absence of Summer Olympics ads that bolstered the year-ago period."
Update (11/19/05): Mark Lewis comments on the programming @radical is creating for ESPN, MTV and Nike: "But what is to stop them hiring a few planners and just becoming a new kind of creative/strategic hotshop - one producing cool content which is truly relevant. Another production company, Dogmatic has already hired someone super smart to help do just that."
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It's not just media becoming unbundled online, it's also our identities.
I've talked lots in the past about the fragmentation of traditional media because of digital technology. With everything in bits instead of old-fashioned analog signals, we can now do things like cut out the junk with our Tivo. The interesting thing about the fragmentation, however, was that it was primarily happening on the consumer side. If the TV networks and radio stations had it their way, we wouldn't be able to cut out the commercials or download podcasts. On the contrary, in their perfect little world they own all the channels we watch, controlling the content and charging top dollars to advertisers for our impressions. Thank goodness the world isn't perfect.
Instead, the media landscape is being forced to pull apart it's perfect little packages. New technology is making them consider offering some of their packages unbundled: TV shows sans commercials or even pieces of shows, individual songs and radio show segments to name a few. As part of his TV News in a Postmodern World series, Terry Heaton examines some "The Remarkable Opportunities of Unbundled Media" in his new essay.
Remarkable they are, if they're willing to let go of control. Heaton covers everything from the boring "put ads in or around the items" to the more interesting "help users rebundle," citing things like the Los Angeles Times' branded RSS aggregator. Media companies have huge opportunities to cash in on this unbundled media revolution if they're willing to take a huge leap and actually cede some control to the user.
It's not just the media implications I'm interested in relation to unbundled media, however. I think Heaton has hit on something that extends beyond just the mediascape. Unbundled is a great term for what's happening all over the place, as digital technology both continues to move into every sphere of our physical world as well as having a huge impact on our culture as a whole.
As the web continues to become a more and more social place, increasingly our identities are becoming unbundled. As opposed to meeting me in person, for example, where I am obviously a person made up of many interests, online it is possible to see my interests individually and then find out about the person. Or, not know of the person at all.
Let me explain (because I'm pretty sure I'm not making any sense): You could be visiting Flickr and find my photos. At that point, I am little more than a set of photographs which you can try to piece together to form some cohesive picture of my personality. The same for del.icio.us, where you can see what I bookmark and try to understand who I am, but not get the full picture. Even those of you that read this blog don't truly know me (although you're probably the closest). My point is that, before digital technology, regular people were not unbundled like this. We generally traveled as a whole. Yeah, we were different people in different environments, there would have been work Noah, brother Noah, friend Noah, etc., but still there was a physical presence anchoring everything. But now, it's like we're all media personalities, who have always been unbundled in one way or another. (An actor, for instance, plays a part from which you could try to glean some insights into their personality, but you would be hard pressed to truly understand who they are.)
It's a fascinating shift and brings me back to the idea of a digital lifestyle aggregator, which would essentially bring together these elements of you and help you construct a more holistic digital identity. What's even bigger, though, is what happens when people take this shift offline. I'm not sure I can comprehend this fully at the moment (I'm feeling pretty sick and out of it to be honest), but I think it could extend to something like wearable computing which contains some record of our interests and specializations and communicates that to other users (and idea I discussed with the other Noah last week).
I'm sure there's more, but until this fever passes, I'm going to have to turn to all of you for input.
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