Like most kings, the consumer can be greedy, selfish and out of touch with the world. So why are marketers still working with ad formats that offer our products for free?
We've all thought it on the publisher side, the agency side and the client side; and sometimes we have wanted to rant about it out loud. Who do consumers think they are? Seriously? Consumers are greedy, selfish, self-absorbed and don't get it. They want everything for free. Do they understand that we are not here so they can steal from all of us? No. There's a value exchange, but they don't seem to think that they owe anything to that value exchange, and we tolerate it.
Why? Because the pace of technological adoption outstripped the pace of luddites controlling those companies to understand what was happening. Apple proved with iTunes that if you develop a good product and make it easy to use, consumers will gladly pay for the music, or the movie. It's just not worth the hassle to steal it at a good enough price point. But the greedy execs wanted to put a stranglehold on content, and the consumer just didn't want to play their game. And this is where we ended up. With a consumer that says, "Oh, I'll pay for it if I like it, but I want it first." You don't want to pay for the new Jay-Z album? Ok, but get off your butt and go paint his living room, you selfish jerk. And while you are there, tell Beyonce that she shouldn't get paid a few million to be in "Dreamgirls," too. Maybe she'll give you a few bucks to buy your popcorn the next time you go to the movies.
Why are we all trying to figure out ways to give our product away for free anyway? Aren't we devaluing the content overall? When someone asked me at a streaming media conference what would happen when people were able to fast forward through a pre-roll, I asked him back, "Why would we ever let them do that? Didn't we learn anything from TV and TiVo?" Better ad formats? Sure. But no ads? No way. But we need those better ad formats! It's the type of ads we are giving them. We are annoying them. We are even annoying each other. It's not that we have gotten complacent. It's a combination of public company pressures on short-term goals, and senior level luddites not wanting to risk their fat cat salaries. It is a toxic formula that breeds an aversion to change.
As I have mentioned before, pre-roll, for lack of a better word, sucks. It is a holdover from lazy traditional thinking. Can we all just agree to adopt
ScanScout's technology and move on? In fact, all of our ad formats basically suck. It's a problem with our technology and the way we consumerize it. Very few companies, MySpace being one of them, are bridging the gap of content and advertising, and how marketers support all of this. The subscription model is just fundamentally flawed online because the information, in vast quantities, is so available in other places that the consumer is just unwilling to pay for exclusive content. Yes, exclusive content is a value add, but most of it is just not
enough of a value add that we are willing to foot the bill. In offline, consumers don't really comprehend that the vast amount of content they get is repeated and reused, with just an added smidgeon of exclusivity. Online, this is readily apparent.
Very few companies understand that if we cannot solve the digital content consumption paradox, our industry will be in for a world of hurt. The reason? The more we go to support all of this with advertising, the more vulnerable we all in this industry are. Why?
When money gets tight, when companies are hurting, we all know the first place many of them go to solve their problem?slashing the ad budget. That is because in the corporate economy of publicly traded companies, being a slave to the quarterly stock price often takes precedence over long-term company goals. We are witnessing that right now. Fortunately, we have two things working in our favor this time. One, our industry is fundamentally measurable, and a bit more proven this downturn. And accountants love measurable; so hopefully the offline world will take the brunt of the hit. The other thing that may save us in 2008 is that it is an election year, and election money has an expiration date.
It's not just limited to the internet world, it extends to all things digital. Look at what we've done with the cell carriers. They are all trying to lock people into exclusive value-add offerings that, guess what, no one is buying. Does any major call carrier have the balls to just open up its network and allow us to run the apps we want? GPS? RFID payment systems? Open API's? Why in the most technologically advanced nation in the world -- the one that created the internet economy -- do we not have 3G phone access? Why can we not pay for vending machines, subway tickets or movie tickets with our cellphones via a simple text or a wave of the phone. Oh that's right, now we've looped in our financial industry and the consortium of Visa, Mastercard and American Express. Maybe Visa's now being public will start to break the mold, but American Express has been a public company for years. Why is it not partnering with a major cell-carrier or, even better, making an open standard for payment so that we can ALL use it?
Because when you get right down to it, it's not about the consumer's choice, or even all consumers. What companies care about is their consumer, and how to balance their satisfaction as it relates to profit. In fact, it is more a strategy of preventing attrition to other carriers, companies or sites than it is about true customer satisfaction.
Who do consumers think they are? They think that we're all trying to take advantage of them, lock them in, control them and then maximize our profit from them while managing their discontent. And you know what? They're right. No wonder they're stealing from us.