The theory of modern media consumption is that what we watch/see/read for free is underwritten by advertising. Media produces content, we pay attention to it, companies want our attention -- and that's advertising. But today there is just so much media -- nichefied and decentralized like never before. Fifty years ago popular shows grabbed three times (or more) the market share they do today. How does a company expect to make money by advertising to a fractured and sundry crowd, spread thin as white linen across the channel buffet? And that's not even to mention TiVo. They have to change.
Seth Stevenson, Slate's ad writer, details the coming revolution. Here's the big takeaway:
(Expect) the gradual demise of the classic, 30-second TV spot, which has been the lifeblood of major agencies for half a century ... Advertising will need to be less about displaying hip imagery and implanting mood associations and more about interacting with consumers online, analyzing their complaints and desires (as revealed in their blog posts and Web site comments), and providing utilitarian information to those who seek it out.Stevenson says TV networks have two other bold options: Start making more TV shows online-only to cut down on costs or (gulp) consider charging for subscriptions like HBO.
But the truth is that television's crisis isn't just an ad crisis. It's also a content crisis. In an age where you can watch television shows as a unified narrative -- a full season on Hulu or a few seasons on TiVo -- it calls into questions whether serialized television is necessarily the best way to consume those stories in the first place. As Michael Hirschorn wrote in the Atlantic a few months ago:
More and more Americans are watching more and more video online for longer and longer periods of time, so it stands to reason that sooner or later, someone is going to raise their own money, shoot their own full length show (half hour to an hour long) withoutnetwork interference, put it on the internet, and it will become a cultural phenomenon.Television is facing a Catch-22. The demand for new content experiences will only continue to stretch their audience across platforms. You can watch 30 Rock on Hulu, NBC.com, DVDs, TiVo and, oh yeah, the old fashioned teevee box. That stretching of audiences (already diluted by cable's buffet) means Stevenson's clarion call isn't the last you'll hear about the new ad crisis in television.
Yes. I watch Netflix streaming and Hulu exclusively now. On my computer. What's a television?
Enter cable providers throttling/capping broadband connections to make online viewing sucktastic in order to preserve their cable tv revenues.
Well, if I am an advertiser, I generally don't want to buy eyeballs that aren't going to be interested in my product. If I am selling tampons, I don't want to buy male eyeballs, etc. So for me, the bad old days were, say, 1968, when I had much less demographic fine-tuning of my audiences. It's amusing that you can quite accurately infer who is watching a show now by the commercials (e.g., it's pretty clear that if you are watching a traditional news show, you are almost certainly wearing some sort of incontinence product -- or if you are watching Maury Povich, you are unemployed and/or in deep doo with the IRS). So being able to precisely target your ads to likely customers seems to be a good thing. Unfortunately, the ability to hit specific demographics makes content that is enjoyed by all less attractive. The networks' response is to ditch quality (cost) to make such content profitable at lower than optimal ad rates. Hence, crappy reality shows and cop procedurals and fewer shows of quality, like Mad Men or Seinfeld.
One thing that has been killing the networks since day one is what I call "the tyranny of the local stations" - this includes everything from covering up a portion of the video with ridiculous graphics to pre-empting network shows for local programming, or even worse, censoring a particular episode because it might offend some of the local yokels. I've been wondering for years now why the networks don't bypass the local stations entirely and broadcast a direct feed on satellite - people would be a lot more likely to start watching a network series if they knew they could get it reliably every week, without having their video marred by local station weather graphics or repetitious news crawls.
Of course the networks themselves aren't much better. A couple of the major networks have developed a reputation for just dropping shows mid-season, never allowing viewers to see how the series ended. I've pretty much sworn off watching any new CBS shows because of this (anyone remember a science fiction show called "Threshold?" It might not have been the world's greatest show, but at least they could have aired the last few episodes to wrap up the story for those who had followed along to that point.
Oh, and as for the advertisers - do they really think that they can show the same spot day after day, week after week, month after month, ad nauseum and no one will develop a negative association with their product or service? There is a certain medical supply company that will never get my business - I'd die before I'd give them a dime because of there exceedingly annoying commercials (hint: Don't hire a pitchman who played an annoying character in his TV series, because he's even more annoying when he's pitching a service). People wouldn't watch the same show week after week, yet advertisers seem to think that repetition is the key. Even a humorous commercial can seem annoying after you've seen it the 1,000th time.
I think traditional TV has had its day in the sun. It could be saved, but the people running it as such old dinosaurs that they think that what worked in the 1970's will still work today, and into the future. They couldn't be more wrong.