Posts filed under 'Collison of Media & Commerce'
Talk about the collision between commerce and media. Some time this summer, Publicis is going to drive the launch of Honeyshed, self-described as, “MTV meets QVC.” Now, we should all recognize as eloquently stated in this Bubblegeneration blog post, that is actually a redundant statement. Regardless, I bow down to the revolutionary zeal that it had to take for an advertising executive to utter those words. To illustrate, a quick trip down memory lane….
A couple of years ago I was talking to Mitch Oscar, the interactive television guru at Carat. We were talking – as one often does with ad agency executives – about what was cool and what wasn’t. ‘Shopping,’ Mitch said, ‘is not cool. It’s grimy and pedestrian.’ Anyone who has spent time on Madison Avenue knows that that quote encapsulates the conventional wisdom of the advertising world.
So for Andrew Essex to include the ultimate retailer in the description of what most observers are describing (for lack of a better label) as a “branded entertainment” destination is not only astonishing but thrilling. Heck, here he’s even comfortable analogizing the whole concept to a mall. You may accuse me of reading too much into the semantics being used, but this is important stuff. Lots of commentators are riding Bubblegeneration’s coattails in slamming Publicis’ assertion that people love brands, but give Publicis credit for effectively allowing that people do hate advertising and recognize that they are creeping, however cautiously, toward the obvious common ground that people DO love products. Let’s forgive them for now if they still have to call them “brands” in order to continue to justify their own existence.
Admittedly they haven’t been copying me on drafts of the business plan (here’s the definitive article on Honeyshed to date), but I think my biggest fear is that the ambition is too big, that they are biting off too much at once & it will be very difficult to bring it all together in a coherent whole. If I understand it correctly, they will literally be trying to run live content at the same time that they are trying to compete in the ridiculously competitive “viral video” sweepstakes business (both services implying a dedication to a destination vs. giving themselves an easy fallback as a syndication play). And one wonders if the CGM side of things was tacked on at the last minute….have they decided what happens when they get the kind of videos that the NY Times described this past weekend in the CGM area?
If they can keep the aperture tight enough to get some traction, the implications will be vast. For one, it will suggest that agencies can create destinations for their clients and don’t need content providers in nearly the same way that the traditional media business is predicated on. Much more importantly, we’ll learn vast amounts about how wide the span actually is between brand “discovery” (the dream) and the grimy, pedestrian business of retail. Let the show begin….
PS – Haven’t seen anyone else blogging about this, but how about the participation of Smuggler Productions? As noted below, they are also involved in a big way with eBay’s video push. This has to make them the hottest professional production shop in web 2.0. Ah heck, why don’t I just go way out on a limb and predict that eBay will be a launch partner of Honeyshed.
May 31st, 2007
Hi - I just created a new group on Facebook dedicated to Commerce 2.0. If you move quickly you could even be the second member! It’s here
May 21st, 2007
Better start this one with a disclaimer: the New York Times is one of the finest, most credible news organizations in the world. They have super smart people that work like crazy and do a fabulous job walking the complicated ethical boundaries of their profession. The fact that the individual exceptions get so much attention just proves the rule.
But the point of this blog is how fast things are changing on the business side of the media business and how we’re often not appreciating those changes. So I’m going to tell a short story from our past. It’s meant to be illustrative. If it comes off as critical, let’s accept it as being self-critical for our own inability to communicate the future we’ve been seeing.
Eighteen months ago a (very smart) business partner with a (very) big title got excited about what we were doing in the area of ‘advertising as programming.’ And so he said, “you should talk to the New York Times Venture Group and I’m going to make it happen.” What does one say to that other than, “GREAT!”
I have no idea who he talked to & it doesn’t matter. But being the good friend he is, he gave us the direct feedback over the phone a couple of weeks later and it wasn’t good. It ran something like this, “This was a non-starter for them. In fact, there was, well, a shudder of repulsion at the idea of advertising being treated as programming. It’s kind of inconceivable based on the whole mission of the Times and they didn’t even want to entertain it.” As brutal as it was to hear that, I remember not being surprised.
Maybe that’s why, even with all that’s happened in the intervening time, I was still a little surprised to open up paidcontent this morning to see that the New York Times has entered the infomercial business (oh yes, it’s not even that newsworthy…you have to go all of the way to the bottom of David Kaplan’s article to find it). Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s the right thing for them to do. And I don’t think they’ll do it in any way other than a perfectly appropriate one for both marketers and consumers. But don’t get me wrong, the Times, they are a ‘changin.
Update: Apparently I’m not the only to think this is news! Adotas picked up this post and put it in their features section and Hawthorne Media (a leading infomercial producer and media buyer) has even done a videoblog about it.
May 17th, 2007
In the last post, I talked about how we’ve been thinking about the stylization of video content even in commerce context. An article came out today in AdAge that shows how one very important company has thought through the same issue: eBay.
A couple of weeks ago, eBay announced here that they were going to let users start creating links to videos they had created to sell their products.
But that was, as they say, the least of it. As AdAge reports, eBay hired CAA who hired Smuggler Production who are creating 200 videos which are already inspiring other sellers to create their own videos. In addition, Smuggler is creating short videos about successful product sales. While today users are only allowed to link to the videos (and the links are kind of hard to find), soon eBay will move to full hosting.
All of the videos I’ve been able to watch (or read about) have been done with a strong emphasis on entertainment over information. The videos will also apparently attach to the seller’s profile after the sale is complete (as opposed to, say, similar products). So the purpose of the video appears to be about raising the profile of the creator / seller and branding more than a “seeing is believing” approach to selling. In theory, that fun patina should rub off on the eBay brand.
I like it. It’s very complementary to other examples of the “media / commerce” collision which we’ve started to cover here.
BTW – Here’s a link to another to a blog called “dot.com to dot.bomb and beyond”. Peter concludes by wondering whether eBay will buy Expo. Hmm….hasn’t come up yet.
May 8th, 2007
Along with our site relaunching this week, we announced the hiring of David Becker. You can read the official corporate babble, but the reality is that this was a huge hire for us. David was the President / COO of two major internet companies: Uproar, which was an enormous casual gaming site in the late ‘90s and BeliefNet, which is the largest spirituality site. He brings a deep understanding of web marketing and web consumers.
The other thing David brings us is a sense of style that maybe some of our employees have individually (I don’t want to get flamed by my coworkers) but hasn’t marked us as a corporation. To be fair, trying to be ‘hip’ hasn’t been part of our mission statement. We’re tying to bring authentic consumer experiences to life and an focusing on style would have been out of keeping with the mission.
But (as the whole point of this sub-blog implies….) we’re playing at the intersection of commerce and media. Historically the most prominent resident at that intersection has been advertising. And advertising - regardless of what else we might say - cares an awful lot about being cool. Furthermore, the rest of mass media has been largely devoted to entertainment. So the truth for anyone playing in the emerging space between commerce and media is that we’re going to have to reconcile authenticity with entertainment. No mean feat. There isn’t a risk that the “market” will get it wrong…in this environment, the consumer will be served. But most of the companies that try will get it wrong. The path is too foggy, too many opportunities to fail, the stakes too high. David’s going to help us figure it out. Welcome on board!!
April 28th, 2007
I’m going to do a little spate of “shameless promotion” posts. They’re all related to the topic at hand, so I feel fine about it, but still felt that recognition might prevent reader annoyance. This first one is a link to a post from a couple of weeks ago by Brian Smith, the author of the leading blog on comparison shopping engines. As you might (or might not) know, our Videopinion reviews are syndicated to Smarter.com and Buy.com and we’ll have a couple of other announcements in the space imminently. Brian covers the Smarter.com implementation here …and he notes that he expects video reviews to someday be ubiquitous. Sounds good to us!!
April 28th, 2007
As noted in the first post, a big part of what we want to do here is just chronicle the collisions occurring in this space. This article (Shopping by TV Comes to the PC) came out last week in the Wall St. Journal and chronicles the emergence of ecommerce companies as media providers in the video space. We’ll talk more about the efforts of some of the individual companies over time, but for now let’s just stand back and appreciate the flood of new video content that this could unleash on the market. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but you can potentially see some of the subconscious struggle for context here as Jessica (a very thoughtful, thorough & intelligent reporter) calls the videos culled from HSN’s shopping channel and repurposed to the web, “product reviews.” How will we describe the infinite variants of video flooding into this grey zone? How do we appropriately capture the inherent bias and perspective of each participant…and maintain the transparency which will be critical to maintaining consumer engagement and trust? One of the many questions.
April 27th, 2007
Welcome to the newest area of the Expo blog! This section is going to be much more about Expo’s business and the space that we’re operating in. The point, simply put, is that media and commerce are colliding in unforeseen – and faster – ways than I think anyone would have thought possible. Editorial standards are shifting or crumbling but no one cares because the assumption is that not only are consumers smart enough to determine the bias of the speaker, but the consumer is now controlling and even creating the media itself. At the same time, commerce oriented entities (manufacturers, retailers and others) are flooding into media initiatives with both feet as a way to create, “new brand experiences.” It’s a fascinating, wide open time and we’re going to try to chronicle it right here.
April 27th, 2007
Next Posts
