Bob Garfield's 'Chaos Scenario' - Advertising Age - Viewpoint.
This is an old article, but I found it worth rereading.
Greg
Meet George Jetson, circa 2020.
He doesn't have a personal hovercraft or a food computer, but the rest
of the future is more futuristic than he thought. Spacely Sprockets and
Cogswell Cogs are out of business. Digits are the new widgets.
|
What
happens if the traditional marketing model collapses before a better
alternative is established? Bob Garfield dares to confront the question. |
|
Others Articles in This Series:
Inside the New World of Listenomics
How the Open Source Revolution Impacts Your Brands
|
TV is gone
Over-the-air network TV is gone, along with program schedules,
affiliate stations and hotel demand in Cannes in the third week of
June. George, Jane, Judy and Elroy get their entertainment, and their
news, any way they wish: TV, phone, camera, laptop, game console, MP3
player. They get to choose from what the Hollywood big boys have funded
and distributed, or what the greater vlogosphere has percolated to
their attention.
ABC, NBC and CBS are still major brands, but they surely aren't
generating radio waves. Three initials never uttered, however, are CPM.
They've long since been supplanted not just by ROI, but VOD, video on
demand; P2P, the peer-to-peer Napsterization of content; DRM, the
allocation of royalties for digital distribution of content; VOIP,
Internet telephony; and RSS, the software that aggregates Web content
for easy access by the user.
Branded Entertainment has long since been exposed as a false
idol, because consumers got quickly fed up with their shows being
contaminated by product placements. Satellite radio is a $4 billion
8-track tape player, stored on a high shelf in the garage, pushed aside
by podcasting, which is free. The Upfront Market is an exhibit at the
Smithsonian. The Super Bowl survived as the No. 1 pay-per-view event. Survivor didn't.
The space-age family of the future can still watch CSI,
any episode they want, whenever they want, but not on any advertiser's
dime -- unless they choose for their viewing costs to be subsidized.
Yet advertisers know everything about them and understand virtually
every move they make.
Marketers aren't adversaries
And the Jetsons don't fight it. In 2020, consumers understand that
marketers aren't adversaries; they're intimates, sharing info for
everybody's mutual benefit.
Yesiree, by George, it's a brave and exciting new world that
the near future holds, a democratized, consumer-empowered, bottom-up,
pull-not-push, lean forward and lean back universe that will improve
the quantity and quality of entertainment options, create hitherto
unimaginable marketing opportunities and efficiencies and, not
incidentally, generate wealth that will make the current $250 billion
domestic ad market seem like pin money.
Alas, the future -- near or not -- doesn't happen till later.
So let's return to contemporary business reality in the digital
revolution, already in progress. Because in the intervening 15 years --
or 20 years, or five -- there are three more initials to consider: SOS.
Because revolutions by their nature are neither seamless nor smooth.
Collapse of old model
Because there is no reason to believe the collapse of the old media model will yield a plug-and-play new one.
On the contrary, there is nothing especially orderly about
media's New World Order. At the moment it is a collection of
technologies and ideas and vacant-lot bandwidth, a digital playground
for visionaries and nerds.
So what happens when 30 Rock and Black Rock and the other
towering edifices of network TV are rubble, and the vacant lot has yet
to be developed?
Undeveloped and unprepared. Unprepared to lawfully deliver CSI.
Unprepared to absorb $4 billion ad dollars, much less broadcast's $42
billion. Unprepared legally, technologically and even socially to pick
up the pieces of the old world order.
Hold on. Let's change metaphors. Forget the construction site.
Make it a space-age treadmill, cycling too fast for George Jetson to
keep his footing. "Jane!" he pleads. "Stop this crazy thing!" But Jane
can't stop it. Nobody can stop it, and nobody can quite hang on.
Ah, yes. The Chaos Scenario.
Downward spiral
The statistics are already getting tiresome, but let's review a few of the more salient ones, shall we?
According to Nielsen, network TV audience has eroded an average
of 2% a year for a decade, although in the same period the U.S.
population increased by 30 million.
In the last sweeps period, for the first time, cable commanded a larger audience than broadcast.
The cost of reaching 1,000 households in prime time has jumped from $7.64 in 1994 to $19.85 in 2004.
A 2000 Veronis Suhler Stevenson survey showed that Americans
devoted an average of 866 hours to broadcast TV annually and 107 to the
Internet, a ratio of 8:1. The projection for 2005 had the TV/Internet
ratio at 785 hours to 200, or just under 4:1.
U.S. household broadband penetration has gone from 8% in March
2000 to an estimated 56% in March of this year, according to
Nielsen/NetRatings.
70% of DVR users skip commercials
Five percent of U.S. homes
are equipped with TiVo or other digital video recorders, and not only
does time-shifting of favorite programs render network schedules
irrelevant, 70% of DVR users skip past TV commercials.
Complicating problems, consolidation in the telecom industry
and potential re-regulation of DTC drug advertising threaten billions
in network ad revenue, jeopardizing the supply-demand quotient that has
propped up network prices for five years. Meanwhile, there is the sword
of Damocles called "cost." The reality-TV fad has enabled networks to
fill their ever-more-irrelevant schedules and cast for hits with cheap
programming. But how much longer will they last? Westerns and spy
shows, superheroes and hospital dramas all once burned bright. Then
they burned out.
What's ominous about that is not the inevitable end of the
latest hot genre; it's the inevitable end of the profitability that has
gone with it. And the downward spiral could begin at any moment. In
fact, to switch metaphors once again, Shawn Burns, managing director of
Wunderman, Paris, looks at the 2005 upfront and sees "the last strand
of the rope bridge."
Mr. Burns, of course, makes a living preaching the wonders of
segmentation and the bankruptcy of mass marketing. No wonder he
observes with barely camouflaged glee that the efficiency pendulum has
swung. "There's been research," he says, "that real cost of obtaining
30 seconds of the consumer's attention is the same in 2005 as it was before the invention of television."
Fraying rope
Emphasis his. Yes, he has a vested interest in being a doomsayer. He is
by no means, however, the only one who sees the rope fraying.
"I still love and enjoy TV and believe it is very effective for
advertisers," says Association of National Advertisers President Bob
Liodice. "But we're killing it. We're gradually killing it with cost
increases, the level of clutter, the quality of the creative that is
out there."
"How can they continue to ask for more and more for fewer and
fewer faces?" asks Geoffrey Frost, chief marketing officer of Motorola.
"I don't believe that is sustainable. I believe there will be
disruption. There's already disruption."
"It's an inevitable kind of slow collapse of the entire mass media advertising market," says J.D. Lasica, author of Darknet: Remixing the Future of Entertainment
and president of the Social Media Group consultancy. "What we're seeing
is that not only does television have to reinvent itself from the
content point of view, it has to reinvent itself as an advertising
medium."
Primitive standards
No mystery as to how, either. As
technology increasingly enables fine targeting and interaction between
marketer and consumer, the old measurement and deployment standards are
primitive almost to the point of absurdity.
"The industry's key currency is basically reach, frequency,
exposure and cost per thousand," says Rishad Tobaccowala, president of
Internet media shop Starcom IP. "I'm not saying whether it's right or
wrong but that's currently the currency. And where the currency ought
to be is about outcomes, engagement and effectiveness. Because right
now all I'm doing is I'm measuring how cheaply or how expensively I'm
buying the pig. I'm not figuring out whether the hot dog tastes good."
None of this is lost on any sentient being in the media and
marketing business. Any lingering denial most likely evaporated when
Procter & Gamble Global Marketing Officer Jim Stengel -- he of the
$5.5 billion marketing budget -- faced agency heads a year ago at the
American Association of Advertising Agencies' Media Conference and
declared the existing model "broken." But it's not just the ad model;
it's the content model, as well. Writer and former venture capitalist
Om Malik looks at TiVo and the video-on-demand horizon and is prepared
to call in the backhoes for the institution of the prime-time schedule.
"Hasn't it collapsed already?" asks the author of Broadbandits: Inside the $750 Billion Telecom Heist.
"Look at their viewership. Isn't it going down every day? I mean, we
can pick and choose what foods we eat, what car we drive, what clothes
we wear and what colognes we use. And some guy sitting in New York
decides how I should watch?"
Consumer control
Point taken. As more control has been placed
in the hands of the consumer, the consumer has shown every intention of
exercising it. Especially in the coveted 18-34 cohort, viewers are
fleeing TV and going online, where nobody need have their content
dictated to them. But as to Mr. Malik's rhetorical question -- hasn't
the old model collapsed already --the answer happens to be:
No, it hasn't.
Network TV spending went up in 2004, by 10.7%. According to Jack
Myers Report, last year's upfront market yielded a 15.4% increase
across the four majors, and Mr. Myers projects a 4% increase for the
top four in 2005. Yes: increase. There are many possible explanations
for the phenomenon. One is habit; gigantic institutions tend not to
rapidly adapt. Another is greed: the self-interest of the comfortably
situated old guard to preserve the status quo. The third is supply and
demand, upward pricing pressure from Viagra, et al, which engorged the
marketplace with billions in new spending. The main factor, though, is
that network TV audiences remain coveted, because -- shrinking though
they are -- they represent the last vestige of mass media and
marketing, or, as Motorola's Mr. Frost calls it, "the last surviving
conglomeration of human beings in the living room."
Precisely, says David Poltrack, executive vice president of
research at CBS, who sees incremental revenue opportunities in
video-on-demand, but no end to the dominance of broadcast TV in the
foreseeable future. "Unless the advertising community finds something
to replace television advertising, I think the relative value of the
top-quality inventory is always going to be appreciating relative to
all the other options," he says. "Unless someone can come up with a
more effective way of introducing a new product than broad-based
advertising exposure, I think that business is always going to be
there."
Which is why Motorola, whose nifty palm-sized Razr device represents
the Jetsons' media future today, mainly used TV to introduce the gizmo
to the world. Because there are still a few programs that catch the
imagination of enough human beings in enough living rooms to represent
a mass-marketing opportunity.
"I still believe in TV," Mr. Frost says. "People still watch
it, and I love being associated with the right kind of programming that
is different, that is appealing, that embodies the kind of innovation
we want to stand for as a company."
'Teetering ecosystem'
On the other hand, he acknowledges that
the financing of the "right kind of programming" -- not to mention the
overwhelming majority of flops --depends on network revenue streams
that could dry up quickly. "The teetering ecosystem behind all this
stuff that allows people like us to sort of cherry-pick" for
exceptional programs, he says, "may begin to find itself in serious
trouble."
So while the old model hasn't necessarily collapsed, new-media
gurus could be forgiven for seeing the beginning -- or middle -- of the
end. Steven Rosenbaum, pioneer of citizen-produced TV and founder of
MagnifyMedia, envisions a world of content created by and for
individuals over broadband. He snorts at Mr. Poltrack's defense of the
status quo.
"These guys," he says, "their job is to postpone the future."
Viacom split
Another skeptic apparently is Sumner Redstone,
chairman of CBS parent Viacom. One week after Mr. Poltrack spoke to Ad
Age, Mr. Redstone announced his plan to split the company in two,
presumably to reduce the drain of CBS and its other broadcast
properties on the stock value of the company's faster-growing media
assets.
So for the moment, let's assume that there is indeed major trouble
ahead, that the law of diminishing returns will eventually kick in,
that advertisers who've paid more and more for less and less will not
pay indefinitely for nothing. Marketers will begin to abandon network
TV. Ad prices will fall. Profitability will disappear. Program
development will suffer, leading to more advertiser defection, and so
on in a consuming vortex of ruin. But wait. The network refugees will
not flee empty handed. They'll draw carts bearing steamer trunks
stuffed with a quarter trillion dollars.
Then what? In the short run, obviously, more boom times for cable, and then:
Payday for the New World Order.
"A bit of it will go to this new emerging network which will be
on the mobile phones," says Mr. Malik. "The next thing, you will see is
the emergence of more Internet-based video advertising. ... There's
going to be a lot of hit-and-miss in this but I think that's another
area you'll see a lot of progress made. A third channel is ...
Internet-enabled cable services. They're not home runs by any means but
they're definite solid singles and doubles."
Economics of scale
No dingers? So what? The whole point of
new media is small ball. Quit playing for the three-run homer and amass
the singles and doubles. Because, says Starcom's Mr. Tobaccowala, "the
key thing is economics of scale is going to disappear. That's really
what the issue is. Our business has been built on the economics of
scale. And instead we're going to go into the economics of
re-aggregation. Which is how do you get 10, 20, 30, 40 thousand people
instead of taking in 250 million and making them into 12 and 30 million
dollar segments. How do you re-aggregate one at a time into the tens of
thousands?"
Fragmentation, the bane of network TV and mass marketers
everywhere, will become the Holy Grail, the opportunity to reach -- and
have a conversation with -- small clusters of consumers who are
consuming not what is force-fed them, but exactly what they want.
Producers and broadcasters capitalized with billions of dollars will be
on approximately equal footing with podcasters and video bloggers
capitalized with $399.99 12-months same-as-cash from Best Buy. And just
as DailyKos, Instapundit, Wonkette and Wil Wheaton have coalesced large
followings in the cacophony of the blogosphere, some of the
citizen-video programmers will find not just a voice but an audience.
Wait. Did I say "will find?" Make that "are finding."
"All of that is happening," says Drazen Pantic, founding member
of videologging Web site unmediated.org, "In the last two or three
years, we've had a silent revolution of consumer electronics. And
broadband is coming. It's a huge proliferation in the last two years.
And so people are going to start broadcasting from home and so on. You
will have zillions of people, broadcasting for the audience of 10."
Except when it's much bigger than 10. A month ago, a little
girl named Dylan Verdi posted a home movie on her father's Web site.
PressThink.org's Jay Rosen dubbed her the world's youngest vlogger. The
link went viral and, as her father Michael reports on his own videolog,
"24 hours later 2,000 people had downloaded her video." It would have
been much more, but he had to shut his site down so he wouldn't wind up
penniless from bandwidth charges.
Web proves it can outdraw TV
The Internet has also
demonstrated its ability to outdraw TV. JibJab satirical animations
have been downloaded by the millions, for instance. And even TV
programming has drawn better online than in its native habitat -- such
as when comedian Jon Stewart went on CNN's Crossfire to assassinate Tucker Carlson live on cable.
"That episode got, what, 400,000 viewers maybe on big old powerful
CNN?" says Jeff Jarvis, president of Advance.net, the online arm of
Advance Publications, and author of the media blog BuzzMachine.com.
"Well that same segment was copied onto the Internet, where it got at
least 5 million views. So what's more powerful, the network CNN owns or
the network no one owns? So now suddenly the distribution is exploded.
Now on the Internet we can all swim in the same pool as content created
by, you know, Universal or Disney. The tools are cheap and easy."
It is a beautiful thing: the total democratization of media,
combined with the total addressability of marketing communications. We,
the people, cease to be demographics. We become individuals again.
"Choice is a good thing," Mr. Jarvis says. "Choice is a proxy
for power. The more choice we have the more power we have. The most
important invention in the history of media was not the Guttenberg
Press, it was the remote control. It gave us control over the
consumption of media. Then came the cable box and the VCR and the TiVo
and now come the means of creating content. Now I can create a radio
show and put it on the Internet. Nyah, nyah, nyah."
Maybe it's "nyah, nyah, nyah -- take that Big Media." Or maybe
it's "tra la, tra la -- what an empowering new world." Either way, it's
underway.
Straight-to-Internet campaigns
On the advertising side,
Google last year generated $3 billion in revenue, about the same as The
New York Times Co. No surprise that Vonage, the Internet telephony
carrier, is using the Internet to find subscribers, but Procter &
Gamble put its money where Jim Stengel's mouth is by launching Prilosec
OTC with 75% of its budget allocated off TV. American Express allocates
80% of its budget off the airwaves. The new Pepsi One campaign will use
no TV whatsoever. (Not Capital One. Not Purina One. Pepsi One.) In the
new-media laboratory called South Korea, where universal broadband is
social policy and its penetration exceeds 80%, the Internet's share of
ad spending is twice that of the U.S. TV, meanwhile, accounts for only
34.4%.
In the wake of BMW films, such diverse U.S. marketers as Amex,
Burger King, Lincoln-Mercury and Motorola have created an
ever-expanding universe of content/advertising hybrids, Webisodic short
films to reach younger prospects online. Mercury's "The Lucky Ones" is
so barren of product and brand messages it is scarcely advertising at
all.
Netcasting, of course, also delivers pure programming, too.
From the top down was the streaming, on Yahoo, of Kirstie Allie's new
show, Fat Actress.
From the bottom up, video logs -- or vlogs -- like Dylan Verdi's are
being generated every day. At Rocketboom.com, chirpy, irreverent host
Amanda Congdon delivers oddball news and snarky observations in a
primitive studio (or maybe a one-bedroom). At J.D. Lasica's alpha Web
site Ourmedia.com, citizen journalists and producers post their own
news reports, animations, music videos and whatever else amuses them
free of charge.
So that should be the answer: the seamless transition from TV
to online, from mass media to micro media, from mass marketing to
permission marketing. But not so fast. George Jetson does his vlogging
in 2020. Om Malik says he believes the scenario could just as easily
take place by 2010. But this is 2005. What if the rope bridge finally
snaps, say, next year? Or the next?
It better hadn't. Because the future isn't quite ready.
Think: Yugoslavia.
Perhaps you are familiar with it. It used to be a country, ruled by an
authoritarian criminal. Then it began to fragment. There went Slovenia,
and Croatia next. Then Bosnia. Kosovo made its move, and in the ensuing
madness, the regime collapsed. The unshakeable Slobodan Milosevic, who
had fomented four wars in the name of Greater Serbia, was overthrown.
Democracy! Empowered individuals! A new model!
And, five years later, unemployment is 32%. The average monthly
income is $336. The prime minister was assassinated by organized
criminals and the country's most notorious war-crimes suspect is at
large. Unmediated.org's Mr. Pantic, formerly of Belgrade's
freedom-fighting radio station B92, is only too familiar with the
problem.
"There is no way," he says, "to make the transition into
anything that is different or new or whatever without chaos. Because as
with democracies you need five or six newly elected parliaments, you
need to replace people who have ties with the old regime."
Change doesn't happen overnight
Likewise, he says, in the
transition from old media to new: "The new paradigm is not going to be
established overnight." There are too many obstacles.
BROADBAND PENETRATION It has catapulted to nearly 60%, but that
is still a long way from 100%. In South Korea, where penetration
exceeds 80%, online advertising does indeed have twice the share of the
U.S. online industry, but it is still less than 5%.
CAPACITY "I don't think the interactive community has sufficient
capacity to handle a seismic change in a transition from network to
online," says the ANA's Mr. Liodice. "I don't think that's gonna
happen." Online-marketing consultant Joseph Jaffe agrees. The author of
the forthcoming Life After the 30-Second Spot doesn't believe
there will ever be a dollar-for-dollar transfer of TV money to the
Internet. But even 10% of all money now allocated to TV would more than
double the total online spending. "You've got a handful of publisher
properties that may be able to kind of cope initially," Mr. Jaffe says,
"and then be able to at least kind of sustain that increased demand.
But for the most part, when the tsunami hits, all hell's gonna break
loose."
QUALITY Dylan Verdi is a cute little girl, but once the novelty
of world's-youngest-vloggerdom wears off, there is no reason for anyone
outside of her immediate family to watch her iMovies. "I mean you can
put a lot of bad video clips that you shoot with your camera phone on
the Web," says Mr. Malik, "but how many people want to watch that? If
you're going to create a product for passive consumption it has to be
good. I mean look at all the shows that fail. There is very low
tolerance for bad television."
FINANCING "Where," Mr. Malik asks, "does the money come from to
produce the programming of high enough quality to reach the audiences
that are obviously going to be smaller than the status quo?" In a
video-on-demand universe, networks may send along free samples of new
shows to paying customers of existing ones, but absent vast reservoirs
of ad revenue, the risk of program development may well be prohibitive.
A collapse of the old model could create a Hollywood dustbowl.
LEGISLATION. Peer-to-peer software such as BitTorrent, which
permits affordable transfer of large video files, also enables video
piracy, and could be legislated or litigated into oblivion by a
beleaguered Hollywood desperate to preserve the value of its backlist.
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, last year introduced an anti-p2p bill called
the Inducing Infringement of Copyright Act of 2004 (Induce Act).
COST. As pricing in the search business has amply demonstrated,
any influx of spending into the online space will drive prices upwards,
potentially erasing the efficiencies promised by even the most
ultra-targeted media buy. The metrics of reach may change radically,
but not necessarily those of frequency. As Mr. Tobaccowala puts it,
"Millions of people arrive at the Yahoo Homepage. What people don't
realize is that they arrive one at a time."
SUITABILITY Content will be enormously diverse, agrees Forrest
Research research director Chris Charron, but will it constitute a
legitimate advertising medium? "A lot of people talk about these social
networks and blogs and the blogosphere as being great ways to attract
consumers and attract eyeballs and potentially good advertising
opportunities, but history shows that is not the case, even recent
history. Remember GeoCities? I think they were bought by Yahoo for $3
or $4 billion. Well, it never became a very viable advertising outlet
and that's because it wasn't a great context for people to place ads.
Advertisers weren't interested in putting it on a personal homepage for
Chris Charron for my friends and relatives to see."
CONTENT DIVIDE Convergence means not only technological and
economic disruption; it means social disruption. Cost of broadband and
VOD programming will surely exceed $100 per month for each household,
and most likely twice that, disenfranchising tens of millions of
Americans and changing the dynamics of a shared popular culture. The
idea of a vast digital underclass mocks the Internet's promise of the
democratization of media.
Then, of course, there is the biggest monkey wrench in the works: the
absurd lack of preparedness for anything other than the most deliberate
evolution into a Jetsonian future.
"Even if all the technology were in place and scaled up to
size," says Mr. Tobaccowala, "what isn't ready really is either
clients, agencies, or the media companies. Because in effect what we
have to change is the way we do business."
Oh, preparations are underway. Earlier this year, Rupert
Murdoch's News Corp. retained McKinsey & Co. to figure out how to
transition to this Internet thing -- which is something like nailing
plywood to the windows when the hurricane makes landfall. News Corp. no
doubt feels safe enough, because Fox network customers are still lining
up to buy, partly because they know how to do that. GRPs are buggywhips
that just feel so familiar and reassuring in their hands. No wonder Mr.
Stengel is showing up at the 4A's revival tent preaching salvation: "If
we believe that there's life beyond the 30-second spot," he demanded,
"why are we still dependant on reach, frequency and advertising
pre-market scores?"
Yahoo's gambit
So don't storm the Bastille just yet. Even
the revolutionaries aren't quite organized for the revolution. Among
those not quite ready for the end of prime time is Yahoo, which hired
ABC programming chief Lloyd Braun to develop whatever content will be
when content will come from the likes of Yahoo.
"The key for us," he told an iMedia Brand Summit in February,
"is to be able to come up with that unique, signature, compelling
content for the Internet, the way television has been able to do over
the years."
Duh. As to what that might look like, he was a little bit fuzzy.
"What I'm not saying is that we're just going to be doing
television shows on Yahoo, and we're going to be streaming them, so
we're going to do our version of Lost, or our version of Alias.
There's going to be a big place for video streaming and all of that,
don't get me wrong, but I don't believe ultimately that the future of
Internet content is by doing on the PC, or on mobile devices, what you
can already get on your living room television set. We have to really
get our arms around what those expectations are. What is the audience
looking for when they go on the Internet?"
Yes, that would seem to be the question. But nobody has
definitively answered it. That's why there are hand-wringing Cassandras
like Jim Stengel and giddy opportunists like Wunderman's Shawn Burns.
But what if you are a direct marketer in what promises to be
the Golden Age for direct marketing and a historic opportunity knocks
and you lack the manpower to answer the door? Under the current
circumstances, Mr. Burns says he'd first advise clients to scale up
their Web capabilities by a factor of 10. But he concedes that in a
Gold Rush economy, he doesn't know where all the Web designers would
come from to do the work. That, of course, is the essence of the Chaos
Scenario -- a critical shortage of resources and infrastructure.
It's almost comical to hear Starcom's Mr. Tobaccowala talk about the marketing landscape of the very near future.
"Expect to see a lot of event and store-based marketing," he
says. "Expect people to actually go completely away from electronic
media to experiential media, if you can call it that. So expect for
instance Starbucks, bars, all kinds of things -- bathrooms, OK?"
Bathrooms? Jim Stengel has $5.5 billion burning a hole in his pocket, and he's supposed to invest it in bathrooms?
"That's exactly the point," says John Hayes, chief marketing
officer for American Express. "There isn't the off-the-shelf capacity
today. You have to create it. You have to build them. You have to come
up with the ideas. To access the talent, you have to basically
construct solutions."
Hence Amex's Jerry Seinfeld/Superman Webisodes and sponsored
concerts Webcast to prospects. If the old model is broken, Mr. Hayes
can't just sit around waiting for somebody else to fix it.
"As in any industry," he says, "those who are unprepared for change will obviously suffer the consequences."
That warning has to be pried from Mr. Hayes' lips, but it is a
warning nonetheless -- sort of a reciprocal to another sort of warning.
David Poltack, of CBS, may or may not be the spokesman for the status
quo, but you can't miss the "You'll be sorry" quality to his caution
about his notion of the chaos scenario should marketers abandon network
TV.
An economic downfall?
"If they do," he says, "then the entire
marketing system that perpetuates this economy will be weakened. And
this is not a problem for just the broadcast television networks. This
is a major problem for everyone who markets a product to the consumers
in this country. Because there has been and there is not currently on
the horizon anywhere near as effective a way to market products to the
mass consumer marketplace. And if in fact that current system
deteriorates to the point that advertisers and marketers abandon it, I
don't see anything that's going to replace it and the entire marketing
infrastructure and the economy is going to be diminished. And that's a
lot bigger problem than just a network television program."
In other words, what's good for CBS is good for America.
The other possibility is the opposite: that what's bad for CBS,
and for ABC and NBC and Fox and Conde Nast and the Gannett Co. is very
good for America, because what emerges from the ruins will be superior
in every way to what it replaced. Better for marketers, better for the
economy and especially better for Mr. Jetson, who won't have a robot
maid but very likely will have a million-channel universe.
As Rishad Tobaccowala elegantly concludes, "Those who come to destroy TV are those who are eventually going to save it."
And the world will rejoice, happily awash in electrons. But
before the liberte, fraternite and egalite, beware. This is revolution,
and first we will be awash in the blood of the old guard.
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