Tag Archives: advertising

No more creating mass through scarcity

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So you’ve got a TV station or radio station or newspaper with all this good “content.” The cost of producing it is already sunk so you put it on your website and sell some banner ads. Ch-ching. But it just isn’t working for a lot of “legacy media” and Terry Heaton explains why:

“The assumptions of any content play are that its value is so great that expensive, adjacent advertising will support it and that the mass attractive to advertisers can be created through scarcity. Neither of these assumptions is viable online, and the real problem is that both must be present for significant revenue to be realized.”

So what do we do?

“We should nurture our legacy products as best we can, but we simply must separate our ability to make money from our dependence on the content we create. The key to that is in defining, understanding and developing the Local Web.”

I added the bold in hopes that would help me understand what he’s saying. I think he’s referring to the content we are already creating. We have a story in the paper, we put it on the web. We have a good radio morning show, we stream it. And so on.

We can’t just “re-purpose” our existing content and expect to attract an audience that will be attractive to an advertiser. I think he’s right.

Listenomics and why things are different this time

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I remember reading Bob Garfield’s The Chaos Scenario as an article in Advertising Age but I’m not sure I listened to the interview Mark Ramsey (Hear 2.0) posted to his website back in March. More on that in a moment. I don’t think the book is out yet but here’s a blurb from the web page:

“What happens when the old world order collapses and the Brave New World is unprepared to replace it…as an ad medium, as a news source, as a political soapbox, as a channel for new episodes of “Lost?” That is The Chaos Scenario.

In this fascinating, terrifying, instructive and often wildly entertaining book, Garfield is not content to chronicle the ruinous disintegration of traditional media and marketing. No, having established the problem, he travels to five continents for solutions.

What he discovers is the answer for all institutions who wish to survive – and thrive – in a digitally connected, Post-Media Age. He calls this the art and science of Listenomics.”

Mr. Garfield is Advertising Age editor-at-large and co-host of NPR’s On the Media. Looking forward to the book. If you spot it before I do, let me know.