Wow!  For over 23 years and $140MM Pepsi has been investing in high profile Super Bowl ads.  Not this year.  Pepsi is moving it’s spend to Online Social Media buys.  Is this a good move?  I don’t know — but definitely will keep an eye on this to see how it pans out.  For those that read my posts you know that I favor interactive media that creates a dialog with your audience over mass communication.   I’d rather pay for a consumer relationship than an impression.  It looks like someone at Pepsi may share in that view.

Is this another nail in mass media’s coffin?  No,  there will always be a need for making the first impression and TV is still the best option to make that first impression.  However,  expect TV to radically change over the next 5 years.  Necessity drives innovation and with more dollars moving away from TV expect TV to quickly innovate.  TV will become more socially enables.  Allowing for brands to create relationships with the consumer over the TV.

The World Stops Turning

This week ABC announced the end of the run after 56 years for the soap “As the World Turns”.  Each of the over 13,000 episodes was scripted by writters, filmed by photographers, directed by directors, produced by producers, and acted by – well let’s just call them actors.  Lots of effort and cost that happened everyday year after year.  Given the much more cost efficient reality TV and talk-shows it’s become difficult to justify soaps.  But what does that have to do with Internet Marketing?

The internet is a medium for applications and content.  Both costly to produce.  Our history is ripe with examples of the lower cost UGC or “bot” created content trumping professionally created content.  Remember when the Yahoo search results used to be produced by paid humans?  Then Google’s “bot” produced search results without costly professionals deciding what to return for search results.  So when devising how to produce content think through how to produce that content without paying for it.  “As the world turns” has taught us the lesson that paid content will eventually always be trumped by a lower cost alternative.

What’s next — It won’t be long till professional quality scripted content will be created by the fan base.  Think of “LOST” living on past the fifth season but now written by the fans.  Sounds far fetched?  It is already happening.  Fan Fiction has been around since Sherlock Holmes was first written.  So let your fan base become your cheap content producers — and you might quickly realize that your fan base produces better content than the professionals!