Year of Change: Television Becomes Tube
Let’s start our Year of Change series with one of the biggest, most visible examples: television.
Have you watched a show "on demand" on Hulu, Netflix, Scifi Channel, ABC.com, or any of a dozen different sites?
If you haven’t, you probably will in 2009.
And no, I’m not talking about illegal torrents, or clandestine copies of broadcast shows hosted by shady offshore networks. I’m talking about current television shows, broadcast in their full, unedited form, on officially sanctioned websites, for fullscreen viewing.
The networks are still getting their range on how to monetize this new medium, of course. Netflix offers a small selection of shows as part of your monthly subscription. SciFi Channel has semi-animated 30s spots in the middle of the show, usually from the same sponsor. Others run full commercials. Some have banners and contextual pop-ups.
But the fact is: full-length, current television content is out there, in reasonable quality, for on-demand viewing.
Have you considered sponsoring some of those shows? If not, why not? This is one audience that can’t TIVO away the ads. And it’s an audience you can get exclusive with–imagine being the only sponsor on a SciFi Channel show. You can show a half-dozen ads during the course of the show. Most advertisers fall down here, showing the same ad over and over again. But you show a half-dozen different messages.
Or you could show your own three-minute story, broken up into 6 different pieces. You could create your own narrative. And, of course, anything you create could be brought out into YouTube and all the other short-video channels.
Heck, you could even step back and sponsor short 3-minute videos created by aspiring filmmakers and animators, for segmentation and display in these on-demand shows. If you did that, you’d be doing several wonderful things:
1. Giving the audience a visual break from the usual monotonous commercials.
2. Tying your brand name to true customer care and innovation.
3. Exposing new talent to a much larger audience.
So yes, even while conventional television’s audience is declining, even as TIVO and its ilk are deleting commercials from the repertoire of today’s consumer, there are entirely new opportunities to reach your audience—and entirely new ways of going about it.
Welcome to the year of change.
