Television 2.0

Six years ago, in a piece entitled The Web: TV With Its Hat On Backwards, I wrote...

I'm starting to get the feeling that the web's killer app is television.

Then in January of this year in a post called Cloning Television In 2014, I wrote,

I am expecting online advertising to look even more like television advertising this year...video spots will be the 'new' rage.

Well, as usual, The Ad Contrarian is the only ad bozo you can trust. 

The entire digital industry is now rushing headlong into becoming the TV industry.

Yahoo announced this month that they were making a major investment in TV production...oops...I mean "content development." 

They are producing two 30-minute, 8-episode comedy series. They are joining Amazon, Hulu, Microsoft and just about every other web dog you can think of in chasing the tv truck down the street.

Not surprisingly, advertisers are liking the idea of the web evolving into television and are slowly moving money into online video.  

Of course, creating something is a lot easier than creating something good -- a very expensive lesson that Yahoo is about to learn. Or as one TV executive put it...

“It is the pure arrogance of the newly rich and the newly powerful to think content is easy”

But I digress... the big picture here is this: 

The utopian hypotheses behind the web as an advertising medium are spinning madly down the old toilet.

First victim is the "social" theory of web marketing. This has been discredited by Facebook's transmutation into a faux-social media marketing entity that is actually just a traditional advertising machine. Your Facebook page now has more paid advertising on it than a Nascar driver's ass.

Second, as the web morphs into TV 2.0, the idea that the web would be the vehicle by which the traditional "interruption model" of advertising would be replaced by the "permission model" is being exposed as more highfalutin' digi-babble.

While the advertising industry's clueless zombies continue their embarrassing shilling for zillionaire web fat cats, the fat cats know exactly where their bread is buttered.