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!
eMarketer User Generated Content by Type
According to Accustream (link):
Demand for professionally produced and distributed online video continued unabated in 2008, with cumulative volume advancing 24.3% to 41.6 billion views.
According to eMarketer User Generated Content (UGC) is also growing significantly. eMarketer (link) They are predicting that there will be over 27MM amateur creators of video content by 2013.
My first Internet Marketing job was with a “dot com” that was a platform for user generated content. Even back then there was this debate over if one type of content, professional over amateur, would win out. The data presented here paints a more realistic picture that both will flourish.
HOWEVER, Pro content will get the ad revenue. I know, I know — we’ll keep trying to monetize USG. But it will never happen. YouTube will only start making money when they get serious about pro content — or lose out to Hulu. If we never can monetize amateur content than what’s the future of amateur content? I don’t know. We’ll always have it — but I’m hard pressed for an answer on how to deliver revenue from it.
Internet TV is finally happening!
Check out this Rueters post (link) about Cable providers in talks with the cable networks to broadcast all cable content over the net. We all see this bus coming — the Internet will be available on your TV and TV content will be available over the Internet (on your TV or Computer). The show down will be between the content providers and the content distributors. This Rueters article is showing us that the Cable distributors don’t want to be pushed to the side. Which they kind of are with TV content sites like Hulu.com. Hulu is a joint venture between NBC and FOX.
I say that the Cable distributors are “kind of” pushed aside only because the Cable distributors in many cases are also the Internet providers. However, the Internet has reached pretty much complete saturation in the US. So the Internet providers / cable companies can’t make any more money UNLESS they start to charge for premium content over the Internet. That’s why they are eager to work with the content creators to work out a deal where they can charge for content.
In the Hulu model consumers pay their monthly internet fee and get access to all of the Hulu TV content. Hulu makes money on the ads. The Internet providers make the same amount of money regardless of what the consumer views on the internet. The content creators are now in a position to either push for free content over the internet and they can make their money on ads OR work with the distributors to charge consumers for premium content over the net. Which way will it go?
My bet is that you’ll see a bit of both — just like TV is now. You’ll get a ton of content over the Internet for free. And you’ll have to pay a premium for premium content — just like HBO.
What does this mean to us internet marketers?
