Marketing, media and change.

The last two Saturday nights in our household, we’ve output the laptop to our large TV screen and watched internet content. More later about what we watched, but I wonder how many people are blanking out the face of their tele and putting on internet content?

Marketers need to respond to changes in how people consume content. This post is just an observation of a couple of changes I’ve seen in the last few days, not a sustained, detailed argument about changes necessary.

Last night we watched the final “Gruen Transfer“, downloaded from ABC TV here. The panel were discussing a “Soccer idol” kind of cable TV program, sponsored by a breakfast cereal…so the logo appears over 400 times in the first half hour. One of the panel mentioned that it’s “almost impossible to reach the male 18-24 demographic” via traditional TV ads.This kind of program is one attempt – “we give you entertainment (something you want) and you give us your attention (something we want)”. Very Cluetrain.

If you are not from Australia, but want to watch an intelligent and very funny program about how advertisers think and sell products, then the shows are available for download for the next few weeks. Check out “the Pitch” at the end where two advertising companies are challenged to produce the best ad for the unsellable – holidays in war zones, spending nothing, whale meat…

Yesterday print media did something different too. To sell more copies, several newspapers on the other side of Australia included a free copy of Spore Creature Creator . This new game from EA, which is being marketed as a phenomena as popular as the Sims, can already be downloaded online, but only includes 25% of the anatomy catalogue. The other 75% is on the free DVD as well. So…. traditional newsprint is becoming the distribution point for one of its greatest rivals – gaming.

….back to what we’ve watched on the last couple of weekends. If you want to see content better than I’ve ever seen on TV, I’d advise you to unplug your tele for a couple of hours and watch these too. Both transcend their subject matter to tell fascinating personal stories.

Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture: achieving your childhood dreams

Randy Pausch died on 25 July from pancreatic cancer. He was a Computer Science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. The “Last Lecture” is a CM tradition where an academic gives the lecture containing what they’d tell their students if they only had one lecture to give. This lecture ranges over Randy’s childhood dreams, his career (including designing the Aladdin carpet ride at Disneyland) through what he learned on the way. Be prepared to laugh out loud and shed more tears than you would watching Steel Magnolias.

An anthropological introduction to YouTube.
Michael Wesch runs the Digital Enthnography program at Kansas State University and previously made The Machine is Us/ing Us , A Vision of Students Today and Information R/evolution….which you *should* have watched last year. With his students, he created 40 minutes of video to support the talk he gave at the Library of Congress. The focus is on what it means to talk to a webcam and upload it to YouTube.