Crowdsourced TV Ads – The Future?

TV Advertising is a business that is very well suited for crowd-sourcing. 

That’s because traditional Ads take time and money to shoot. And then when that is done and you start putting it up on TV, you don’t know how the crowds will react.

So by  tapping into the masses directly, companies and brands gain speed, save money by shifting the costs to fans and maximize the chances that what the crowd makes, the crowd loves. 

Brian Hall, writing in Read Write (!) notes that the benefits spill over into branding as well

Big brands use the crowd not just for ideas, talent and inspiration, but to help generate brand awareness – even at the ad concept stage.

Pizza Hut, for example, encouraged football fans to submit videos incorporating the idea of quarterbacks shouting “hut” to hike the ball. Along with many great entries received, the campaign itself was a clever means of increasing brand awareness long before any finished advertisement even made it onto the television screen.

While Pizza Hut selected the finalists in its crowdsourced challenge, a popular vote was used to decide which ad made it to the Super Bowl.

IMO, what’s going to happen (if it doesn’t already happen) is that these (mass produced?) ads will probably first find a home on the Web…and then based on “viral”-ness and views, migrate to TV.

That way, big brands can use the crowds once again – this time, to minimize risk.

Dora And Her Viacom Friends Jump From Netflix to Amazon

So it turns out that Dora and her Viacom friends (Blue’s Clues, The Backyardigans, etc.) have all jumped from Netflix to Amazon. 

Subscribers may have been surprised (don’t remember seeing an email or pop-up message from Netflix ever about any kind of content disappearing soon, and for good. For good reason?).  But Netflix investors were not:

In April, Netflix told investors that it would allow its deal with Viacom to expire, saying it has been moving away from broad, multi-year deals with networks and cable channels in favor of more selective licensing arrangements.

As that LA Times article says, Netflix is instead getting Disney’s stable of characters – but only in 2016.

Obviously, this is a good deal for Amazon (it did shell out hundreds of millions of dollars for the deal; neither Amazon nor its shareholders care, of course) and Amazon Prime viewers. And this is a lucrative deal for Viacom, though it comes with a caveat (from the LA Times article also):

According to Bernstein Research, Viacom has become increasingly dependent on streaming service revenue to help boost profits. Subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) made up nearly 5% of the company’s operating income in fiscal 2012 — and 200% of its growth in operating income. 

“But SVOD hurts ratings for kids’ networks,” Bernstein media analyst.

“Now the debate is whether SVOD licensing fees offset the ad revenue decline,” he said. “In the short run, we agree ‘yes’ but going forward, we think ‘no.’  Cannibalization increases, and licensing fees decrease as the balance of power shifts in favor of the SVOD providers.”

Anyway. I am sure Netflix has its reasons for letting the deal lapse. And I am sure it fully expected someone like Amazon to snap it up. Two things though:

1. Given the importance of kids videos (not a very long-tail market, and they don’t mind seeing the same damn thing a few hundred times) to streaming video providers, does this deal help Amazon take off and firmly establish Prime as a very viable alternative to Netflix?

2. As long as Netflix is in the business of competing for content that others produce, expensive deals and bidding wars every couple of years will be the norm. So will we see Netflix attempt to start its own kids franchise at some point? Animated series only…which are presumably easier and cheaper to produce, compared to $100m grown-up dramas that most people only watch once or at best, twice.

Since You Can’t Lobby Congress To Ban DVRs…

What do you do when you want to prevent viewers from DVR-ing your shows?

You lobby Congress to ban DVRs. Or, you unsuccessfully try to sue Dish to block the Ad Hopper. Just kidding – about the first one. And because of that, Amol Sharma writes on The WSJ, you do three things:

1. You offer viewers content for their 2nd screens (SmartPhones and Tablets)…that is available only during live broadcasts.

2. And you make the content compelling by synchronizing it to what is happening on their 1st screens.

3. Finally, you walk the tightrope and hope that while this extra content enriches the experience, it doesn’t totally distract from the actual show itself.

An excerpt from his article (paywayll) on how AMC is doing it:

Last weekend, members of the cast and crew of AMC Networks Inc.’s crime drama “The Killing” were on location in Vancouver, British Columbia, shooting material for Sunday’s season premiere. What they produced won’t be shown on television, though. It is meant for smartphones, tablets and laptops.

The video vignettes are for an online application AMC channel is launching this weekend to promote “The Killing,” one of a number of increasingly ambitious such efforts being produced by TV networks. Designed to be watched on mobile devices and computers, the services show videos, photos, games, trivia and other content when the affiliated TV show is on the air.

PS1: A couple of years ago, Nielsen changed its ratings system and introduced the “Live Plus” system to take DVR-watching into account. But…I am not sure if Nielsen’s set-top boxes capture Ads watched vs fast-forwarded in recorded shows, and other metrics . Hence, these efforts on the part of AMC and others, I think. 

PS2: Recently, some have suggested that Twitter is actually TV’s 2nd screen. A proposition that has serious legs IMO because real-time social conversations enhance the TV watching experience more than anything else. I, for one, would want to know what my friends, followers and pundits think about what we are watching “together” more than I would want to know the backstory for a certain character. And I suspect I’m not the only one…

Google’s Music Service – Catching Up or Getting Started?

Google unveiled its new music service, Google Play Music All Access, at its I/O conference last week. As Matt Peckham wrote on Time this week (he chose to call it GPMAA, BTW):

…GPMAA represents Google’s attempt to offer a subscription-based music service, streaming “millions” of songs — intermingled with up to 20,000 more, uploadable or song-matched from your personal library — for $10 a month ($8 a month if you sign up by the end of June). Chris Yerga, Google’s engineering director who steered this part of the keynote, explained that GPMAA would include common music streaming features like curated playlists, album recommendations and a build-your-own-radio-station feature.

Since the current streaming music market is dominated by the likes of Pandora and Spotify, both of which offer “freemium” models (free for a certain number of hours/features; beyond that, consumers pay), Google’s move is a bit unusual because its music library is similar to their libraries. Also, no ads. Just a paid subscription, with adaptive streaming sound quality. 

As Matt and several others noted, this doesn’t sound like a differentiated service. In fact, it actually sounds like a narrowly focused offering, targeting those that listen to a lot of music every month. 

So why do it? And what is its long game?
(You can bet a decent amount of money that this seeming head-scratcher of a move fits in with a larger strategy.)

Some thoughts on this topic come to us from James McQuivey, a Forrester analyst, who writes on his blog:

To be clear, music is one of the most powerful tools for engaging digital consumers because they use it every day and connect to it emotionally and socially. If Google failed to make a play for the music business, it would later regret it because its customers would remain forever tied to another digital service that could ultimately open a vulnerability in the company’s relationship with hundreds of millions of Android and Chrome users. The fear of ceding this permanent vulnerability to others explains why Google Play is adding All Access.

In fact, he thinks that Google should have created a first of its kind “media package” consisting of music, movies and video games. 

If only the company had reached beyond simply catching up to existing music players. Google’s PC, phone, and tablet based customer relationship puts it in a unique position to reach for a blended media subscription experience, something that expands the very notion of what media is and how people believe they’re paying for it. Imagine $24.99 a month for all-access music, Netflix-like streaming, two current movie downloads, and a lending library for paid games where you can “check out” one paid game for free for one week at a time. That would be a way to make Google Play media content do more than merely copy iTunes, Pandora, and Spotify, it would take media consumption beyond the reach of Netflix, Amazon, and anyone else. But evidently Google wasn’t ready to reach for the real prize.

That last sentence is the key, IMO: Google may have exactly those ambitions, but its not ready. Yet. 

The bundle itself makes a lot of sense in theory, at least to me. Why have consumers sign up with 4 different services, for their audio, video, movie and game needs, when they can just sign up with Google? (Or Amazon, for that matter, who may also presumably be thinking along those lines…) 

And if you look at the Google Play snapshot I included above or go to this site and click on Books, Magazines, etc., you may just be impressed at the choices that already exist. (Question – do you know that you can buy magazine subscriptions via Google now? How about bestsellers from the NYTimes’ list? No? Thought so). 

So if I were Google, while I develop Google Music, on a parallel track I would furiously work to increase my partnerships in Movies and TV (Priority #1: Add streaming video) and start work on that all-inclusive monthly media bundle.

If and when this happens, successfully, not counting its driverless car business and its cloud provider (ala Amazon EC2) aspirations, Google would have transformed itself into a twin-headed colossus: An ad-driven “free” online enabler or provider of all kinds of data/user-content driven services, and a non-ad-revenue driven consumer media distribution giant. 

What do you think? 

PS: A big caveat here is that consumers that are willing to pay for movies, those that are willing to pay for music and those that will pay for other kinds of media may all behave very differently and may (or may not) see the value in a bundled offering. Just because something sounds good in theory is no excuse to expect it to succeed in practice. So I would imagine that Google either already has models that tell it that bundled offerings may not succeed, which is why it hasn’t already offered one just using the libraries it has access to – or – its models are telling it that such a bundle will be a runaway success, and all it needs is access to vast content libraries and a reputation in this space, both of which it will build in the coming months and years. As they say, watch this space…

Using Data To Optimize A Movie’s Box Office Success

The Interwebs are abuzz today with the news that a small new breed of Hollywood’s “script doctors” is rising – one that uses algorithms, in addition to, or instead of, painstakingly accumulated and honed skills, to tweak and optimize movie scripts for box office success.

Brooks Barnes, writing in The New York Times, describes this phenomenon. One of the more interesting excerpts mentions the most prominent practitioner of the art of the analytics:

A chain-smoking former statistics professor named Vinny Bruzzese — “the reigning mad scientist of Hollywood,” in the words of one studio customer — has started to aggressively pitch a service he calls script evaluation. For as much as $20,000 per script, Mr. Bruzzese and a team of analysts compare the story structure and genre of a draft script with those of released movies, looking for clues to box-office success. His company, Worldwide Motion Picture Group, also digs into an extensive database of focus group results for similar films and surveys 1,500 potential moviegoers. What do you like? What should be changed?

“Demons in horror movies can target people or be summoned,” Mr. Bruzzese said in a gravelly voice, by way of example. “If it’s a targeting demon, you are likely to have much higher opening-weekend sales than if it’s summoned. So get rid of that Ouija Board scene.”

Bowling scenes tend to pop up in films that fizzle, Mr. Bruzzese, 39, continued. Therefore it is statistically unwise to include one in your script. “A cursed superhero never sells as well as a guardian superhero,” one like Superman who acts as a protector, he added.

From a studio’s perspective (and the perspective of producers and other investors), this is yet another way to minimize risk. Given that movie budgets keep rising, they can certainly use all the help they can get. Disney, with its ~ $250m John Carter bomb, for example, might be wishing that it had used an algorithm or two. 

But at the same time, if movies within the same genre have increasingly similar elements and twists and turns, they risk turning off their audiences – which would defeat the purpose of using these hi-tech script tweakers in the first place. So are the masses going to catch on and punish these “doctored” scripts? Or will they blissfully keep working on their over-priced popcorn and soda while they sit back and take it all in?

With Billions At Stake, Hollywood Localizes Its Products For China

What do you do if you want a slice of a $2B movie market (expected to grow to $5B by 2015), when that market lets in just 34 “foreign” movies, every year?

You edit your movies in ways both small and big, to satisfy a select group of 37 capricious censors in that country, who also enjoy the power to arbitrarily yank a movie just hours before its local premiere.

The result, as William Wan writes on The Washington Post, is this, in the case of Iron Man 3:

Even the nerdiest comic book fan would be surprised to learn what cutting-edge technology secretly fuels “Iron Man’s” action-packed heroics: a milk-grain drink called Gu Li Duo from China’s Inner Mongolia.

That’s according to the Chinese version of the new blockbuster, which was released here complete with other surprising (read: odd and at times outright nonsensical) footage inserted by producers to win the favor of Chinese officials.

But when the reward for these advanced theatrics is a $64m haul in just 5 days (and who knows how much more in the next few weeks), expect more “product localization”, not less.