Make Marketing History

The views of a marketing deviant.

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Digital Killed The TV Star?

So television is old media and a dying element of the marketing mix? Well certainly there is a fall in absolute viewing figures and in weekly consumption especially by younger demographics. But that's only part of the story.

Amidst a polemic in a recent post, Robert Scoble reported "I’ll tell you what executives from big companies (like Kraft, Procter and Gamble, GM, and others) who were at MSN’s own advertising conference told me. An influencer is worth THOUSANDS of times more than a non-influencer."

This hardly earth-shattering insight was being used as a plea on behalf of blogging as a marketing tool which is fine by me, but we should not forget that television can be a far more serious influencer than any blogger.

Consider the UK equivalent of Oprah's book club. Titles featured on this segment currently occupy positions 1,2, 4 and 6 in the bestsellers list and executive producer Amanda Ross is described as the most powerful person in publishing.

Consider the advice given by Simon Cowell to the manager of UK success Katie Melua who's currently trying to "break" America - "Mike, don't believe anything they they say here. You don't have to tour for two years, you don't have to work radio slowly, you just have to get on a lot of television."

It's TV advertising that's dying, not TV.

1 Comments:

Blogger john dodds said...

Sig, I hadn't even thought about guests and panels but you're right. People may ignore advertising but if someone makes a pronouncement (however banal) on TV then many of the audience invests it with meaning and that audience is still measured in millions.

Vlogs may do this in the future but from my personal perspective they have to improve in quality immensely and learn to distil their information into a short period of time. Of those I've seen, the takeaway has not been worth the effort of watching because I find you have to concentrate more than you do on TV. It's early days yet and maybe this will change in time, but I know the majority of stuff I watch online is US TV highlights that i can't see over here. I'm just time-shifting.

I also think there will have to be a better way of finding the good ones if the audiences are going to build to anything approaching large numbers.

10:46 AM, August 22, 2006  

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