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.
Looks like I'll have more ad skipping to do.
ReplyDeleteYou'd think the fools would learn from the experiments done currently in existing online video sites like HULU, Crackle, and a few others.
ReplyDeleteI guess they want to avoid the fact that the HULU/Chipotle sponsored show "Farmed and Dangerous" apparently fell on its face in the way of producing super results for Chipotle. The one sponsor per TV show is a format that doesn't come close to returning the same results today as it did in the 50's--especially when the show is completely unbranded like that was.
You called it right, Bob. Trying to stand out from the sauce of a thousand video outlets with an outdated model is idiocy. They're driving around an Edsel in a sea of Teslas. Good luck with that.
Yahoo getting into this mix is just more proof of how fast Marissa Mayer can blow thru Yahoo's bank account. At least she'll soon have all those Alibaba stock shares to sell when she need to keep Yahoo TV afloat.
It will be interesting to see if treating the web like TV produces profits for anyone other than agencies and digital sites. Truth is that this may be just one more peripatetic shift in the search by the digerati to find a place where they can make enough money from advertising.
ReplyDeleteI mean... Banner ads weren't working, so they leapt at content. Then they leapt at social media. Now, they're leaping at mobile (which is really just the same old thing re-packaged).
Will video be any different? I doubt it. People go to the web for one primary reason: to do seek out what they are seeking - including specific programs. People turn on the television to be entertained and satisfy that need by watching in an entirely different way than they do on the web.
You've nailed what's going on. But there's no reason to think this will be the magic solution to advertising online.
Before you know it they will be making a large screen that a whole family at once can watch whilst sitting in the living rooms being social.
ReplyDeleteThey'll show interesting, entertaining emotional stories, factual and sporting content sometimes even live streaming.
They'll break their content up with branded content to fund the making of the shows.
Different branded content providers will have to decide where they put their content some between sports content and others during fictional engaging story-telling content.
Specialised agencies will appear to make this content on behalf of brands. Other to help them work out where best to put it. All In the hope that the better their branded content the more likely people will consumer buying their stuff in shops or on-line, so solving some of their business problems.
It is going to be a new connected future, it's about people being social!
What's going to be even more hilarious is when those same ad industry zombies start citing the advertising dollars attracted to online TV shows as "proof" that the Web is disrupting the TV advertising model.
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