They Thought They Had Us By The Antenna

Seriously, squatters…now you want to sell? You bought a bunch of URL’s.  Now you want to sell them.

It was a dark and stormy night sometime in 1995.  My entry into the Internet world was thanks to a terrific VP of Marketing for a major pharmaceutical company.  We had given a presentation to her on pay-per-view and video on demand as we placed them in a test with one of the then baby-Bells.  After the meeting she asked, “Guys, do you think this Internet thing will ever amount to anything commercially?”

On the flight home (no angry passengers, no TSA, no service ponies) the guys I was with decided we needed to get some religion.  We studied a number of areas – designing, distributing, monitoring, including “naming.”  Network Solutions was the only game in town managing URLs…they tied site names (xyz.com) to actual DNSs.  In other words, when someone went looking for a web page using a URL like xyz.com, Network Solutions managed the relationship list that told Mae East and Mae West and all their friends, “Oh, looking for that?  Well, go to 253.254.255.256 (Yes, it’s an intentionally impossible address.  But then, go dial 555 1212).

A few folks got a bright idea – register a bunch of URLs using companies' names then squat on them.  When the companies come knocking, bump that $70 registration fee up to a few – or many – thousand dollars.  You got it, they want it, supply and demand, eh?

Well, the law caught up with these squatters.  In effect, it said that the .com extension really was to be applied to commercial entities and declared that unless you had a reasonable right to use a URL, you had to give it up.  Said another way, McDonald’s Excavating could have registered and kept mcdonalds.com but others, with no connection to the name could not.

Seemed pretty simple.  You can breathe now, the backstory is over.

It got complicated for broadcasters.  Smart squatters registered hundreds of call letters – letters which, by and large, are gibberish and would be available to anyone and, therefore, not totally protected by UPC rules.  And they sat on them while they called or snail mailed stations offering to sell at anywhere from 10 to one thousand times the registration cost.

A few stations paid.  Most balked and went another direction…and it was the best thing they could have done.  The squatters forced stations to look for other names and in doing so, they incorporated (OMG) branding into their URLs.  So we saw wabcradio.com, wlsam.com, wor710.com, 103.5KISSFM.com, or abc7chicago.com   The URLs actually clued prospective visitors in about the site and bolstered the stations’ brands.

So the Internet grew, more stations jumped aboard, started streaming and were able to cross promote between the web and over the air.  And stations succeeded because in their URLs, they had a catch phrase – mnemonic, if you will , in most cases – that would resonate with their audiences.

I think just about everyone I know listens to streams of broadcast stations.  And of them, I’d wager that most, if not all, know the URL of the station.  Some have set bookmarks and don’t remember.  Others rely on recognizing the station logo in the iHeartRadio listings or on tunein.com and its derivatives.

Well the payoff to this rambling story is that about a week ago I got an email from a company acknowledging that I was the website manager (not webmaster…big difference) for a number of stations. 

They went on to say that they had recently acquired the URLs for the stations’ call letters.  It was quite well laid out and correctly listed the stations and their owners.

And after that, they laid out the sales pitch and why these stations needed their call letter URLs – just the plain 3 or 4 letter URLs.  They also said that it would be good marketing for the station as we could promote multiple URLs.  Oh, and that the offer included wouldn’t last long.  That offer, by the way, varied by market size so they did do some homework..

If you know me, you know that I jumped at the chance – No, no!  I was polite.  I simply laid out history and offered my condolences for their having purchased a pig in a poke.  It was fun.

Sadly, someone spent their (or worse, someone else’s) money to buy those URL’s.  Sitting at lunch, a couple of beers and they start talking and realize – falsely – that if they can get their hands on these dormant URLs, they can score big.

There was an episode of Twilight Zone (yes the original) where some guys stole a bunch of gold.  They put themselves into suspended animation for a number of years so that when they emerged, the robbery would be long forgotten and they would be rich beyond belief.  When they did actually awaken, scientists had discovered how to create gold artificially and their haul was worthless.  Not an exact parallel but close enough. 

Guys, enjoy your URLs.  You own ‘em.

Distribution without a Network? Be your OWN Network! Here’s the Secret.

Content.  Easy Access.  Promotion.  No burying the lede here. 

 

I wrote about “channels” before.  It’s a word that’s outlived its time, unless you’re trying to talk to your great, great grandmother.  Now let’s discuss “networks.”  It’s funny.  Everyone wants to be one.  No one wants to be part of one.  That sort of makes sense…what they’re really saying is that they want to control the distribution of their content and don’t want to relinquish control of it to others.

 

It’s consistent with the evolution of media distribution from bicycling 16mm film around to local stations to “ordering” of content directly from the producer over the web.  That early method worked but there really was no control over the airing except the trust built into the contract.  Even so, a show could get multiple runs, be copied, or get lost in the rotation.  Today anyone with uncensored Internet can watch just about anything when they want.  It’s truly “what you want when you want it” (WYWWYWI or WhyWhyWhy.)

 

Which begs the question, “Why?”  Why a network?  Well, the agencies and the existing networks will argue,

• Networks are the largest aggregator of eyeballs
• They are efficient
• They are easily measured (accurately? Well, that’s another story)
• They are cheap - goes with efficient
• People are used to networks (whatever that means)
• They’re easy to buy (they’ll never tell you that but think about it – about buying time in a few networks rather than tens of thousands of individual pieces of content.  What else would you expect from an agency!  Ask me how I know.  As an early proponent of cable, I got thrown out of my share of offices for suggesting taking positions in cable programming.)

I would counter that with

• People feel their own time is valuable.  Patience went west when the remote control came on the scene.
• It’s become a world of instant gratification.  The WYWWYWI mindset applies to entertainment as well as everything else.  People want it now.
• Viewers are fickle.  The era of someone tuning a specific network and spending their entire night there is gone.  If the show’s bad, they’re outta here.  (Remember hammocking?)  I see broadcast networks still having at it, hoping the lead-in will help sampling of a new show.  I usually see it in a promo as I’m on my way to the Roku.
• Measured?  You want measured?  I can find out who, when, how long…with at least as much reliability as network numbers
• Sure, largest aggregators…but really only on big, live events.  And (you heard it here) when the NFL gets a little more fortitude, they’ll put the Super Bowl on NFL Network as a $50 PPV.  BTW – that won’t be a network.  It’ll be a direct link to their servers.
• Repeating myself from a statement made years ago, No one cares what kind of car brings the pizza.  It’s the pizza – the content – they want.  And just like that pizza, they want it now.

 

By now, you’re screaming back at the screen, “OK, so what’s the secret?” Well, I told you right off.  The secret is you don’t need to be a network. There it is. You surely don’t want to yield control to one but you don’t need to be one, either.  There are 3 simple steps to distribution

 

1. Create content people want
2. Make it easy to access it
3. Tell people about it, including where it is

 

I’m wondering if you’re laughing, maybe shouting, “Duh!” or breaking your knuckles trying to stick your arm into the monitor to grab my neck (you can’t, I’m back about 3 feet from this thing) but, it’s that simple.

 

The devil is in the details, of course.  But he ain’t that mean.

 

First, as far as content people want, you don’t have to appeal to the whole world.  If you want to offer fishing videos, there are plenty of fisherpeople you can offer your wares to.  In fact there are plenty of folks in the “I just want to fish for bass” school (pun intended) to whom some of your content should appeal.

 

Second, make it easy to access.  Devil’s back and he/she thinks he/she’s tightening the screws.  Thing is he/she’s easily defeated here, too, though way too many locations make it so difficult that it isn’t worth it. It’s just that if you have the content, make sure that people can get to it.

• Yeah, your marketing and advertising person said you can put the program 3 clicks, 2 prerolls and an overlay away and people will still come to it.  Is that your guy?  If so, pop him/her with a 2x4.  Wanna cut your views in half, quarter or even by 90 percent?  Put up those barriers.  Go ahead try it.  Or try it with a restaurant – put some “Police Line” barricades in front of the door or do a chalk outline of a body on the sidewalk in front.  Make the door really hard to open.  Lemme know how it works out with customer traffic.
• Get the video playing in one click.  You can add overlays – heck, networks have pretty much abandoned the lower third of the screen anyway – or even some complete commercial interruptions but get viewers to the content NOW.
• Don’t make anyone wade through a bad search engine to find their content.  If you have a few pieces, put them right there on the home page.  Yep.  Thumbnail, description and direct link.  If you have a lot, consider using subdomains to divide your content.  Your prospects go directly to the subdomain and then to the content.  Special bonus:  On the landing page of the subdomain, you can promote all sorts of other content you have.
• Don’t choose some convoluted player.  HTML5 has its own and there are others which can be used easily without forcing the prospective visitor to download one.  A.) Given today’s malware, you’ll lose prospective viewers to the paranoia of a cryptolocker, and, B.) It’s that WYWWYWI thing.  If they have to go through the trouble of downloading a player, they’ll go on to another site.  And be careful with Flash.  How many times do you get angry because you get the, “You’re hosed.  Your version of FLASH cannot play this video.  Please click here for the nightmare of downloading and installing a new version, including having to close this very browser?”

 

So that’s the second point.  Now, number 3.  If you don’t tell the world where your great content is, nobody knows about it.  This is the only place where current networks have an edge.  They can cross promote including full promos and lower-third supers, the ones we love to hate.  But, today, even that isn’t enough.  Some of you may remember doing specials and getting a guarantee of 125 or 150 GRPs on air promotion for it.  But back then, that meant 10 to 20 promos (yeah some were voice over crawl but the promos were there).  Today, it would have to be, well, maybe a hundred or more.  And, as always with networks, you don’t know who you’re really getting.

 

But you can get around that with your own promotion.  Just stop and think how you can reach prospects.  This is Advertising 101, OK?

• You can buy time/space elsewhere.  If you do and you don’t link that directly back to your promoted content, you’re wasting a lot of money.  By “directly,” I mean they click and the content starts playing.
  • “Buying” can be in the form of cross promotion.  You promote other content on your site and those folks promote content on yours.
  • “Buying” can also mean trading.  You can put ads/promos on your advertisers’ sites.  They help drive people to your content where they see ads for the advertiser.
• Use public relations.  Get PR out there about your site, what you’re doing, what the content is, and, include the link.
• Do interviews, make calls.  “Oh yeah? Where?”  You’d be surprised how many people will take your calls/emails and follow up with you.  Putting it kindly, there are plenty of lazy reporters out there who will schedule you for an interview or will take your talking points and build a story.  Saves them work.
• Spend some money.  If you don’t have a promotion budget, set one up.  It’s all the rage.  If your content really is good, the expense will be small to get it found.  If you do it right, you can turn that promotional investment into a lot of visitors.  And if they return or tell others, well, you know that story.  I can’t go through determining where or how because it varies with content.  But if you don’t know who your target is, please, figure that out first.  From there, you can get to the right promotional places.

 

Finally, direct distribution means no intermediary.  Your viewer sees what you want them to see and when they want it.  It’s the ultimate cord cut.  No cable, no antenna needed.  A good web connection and viewers are off to the races – if that’s what they want to watch.  And if you have the content, make it easily accessible, and make sure to tell the world it’s there, you’re going to be part of their viewing mix.

Broadcasters and Streaming: We Get it. Or Do We?

Many broadcasters have gotten religion about ways of streaming their product.  They understand that there are two additional groups of users out there – those who want to watch or listen to programming as it’s broadcast but can’t access a receiver, and those who would prefer to watch or listen to that same content at a later time.

They have that understanding.  Cool.  But it’s how they address it that’s really missing the mark.

Courtesy,
Jay Ward Productions

Sherman, set the WABAC Machine for 1930.  Let’s go visit the Galvin Brothers¹ as they place a radio in a car.  I selected that point because the auto radio presented a special problem…selecting a station while driving.  Tuning up and down the band – such that it was under the Federal Radio Commission – was done with peril.  Dodging ruts and rocks while spinning a dial to find a station wasn’t easy.

So we made it easier.  By then Major Armstrong² had invented the superheterodyne process so listeners didn’t have to tune multiple stages.  That, alone, made radio ready for home.  But for the car:  presets.  Push a button and get to a preset frequency.  One could listen while on the road.  So what’s the big deal?  We made it easier for someone to listen to our product.

Sherman!  Get in the machine.  We’re going back to 2016.  We have AM and FM in cars.  We have Wi-Fi, WiMAX, even Bluetooth to get from our phones to the dash.  And we have buttons…myriad buttons.  We have them at home, too.  I’m convinced that many of them don’t even do anything…they’re just there.

Well with all of that, you’d think the idea would be the same as a paragraph ago…make it easier to listen/watch. Yet broadcasters are missing the boat.  A combination of poor use of technology and overzealous marketing is killing streaming.

Weblands Archive

Do you spend a lot of time listening to broadcast streams online?  I mean, do you spend a lot of time listening – after you join their club, give them a significant amount of information, including your location, then reload the page because after you clicked “Submit” the page hung or you were sent back to the site’s home page.  Or maybe you hit “Back” and got the old “For [browser} to reload this page, it needs to resend information.  Do you want to do that?”  You click “Yes” and you get the page but your info is gone.

More often, you’re faced with a wall trying to keep you out.  Like opening a restaurant and putting an oil drum in front of the door.  Seriously.  You’re asking visitors to come in; use your product.  Sure, if you’re a car dealer and you want them to take your latest SUV for a test drive, demand a driver’s license, thumbprint, picture and saliva sample (I cleaned that one up).  But we want people to come in, like what they see or hear and stick around.  Why the heck put a bar on the door.

On other sites, you get the impression that a wunderkind told management, “If we put the stream behind 5 clicks, think of all the extra impressions we get along the way.”  Really?  That’s good business?  It is if you check your analytics and see that almost all the folks heading for a stream actually make it through all the clicks.  If not, you might as well make your stream the last frame in a Taboola list of 25 celebrities who never learned how to tie their shoes.

Aha!  I got in.  Now we’re cruising.  Well, maybe.  If you limit your streams and people can’t get in, they probably won’t come back, especially if you’re offering syndicated programming.  You have to have a high enough number of concurrent slots available.  I’ve seen it.  You log out and can’t get back in.  I’ve been there – on the wrong end – as prospects called saying they couldn’t get the stream.  Not good PR.

OK.  You got in.  Suddenly there’s the dreaded preroll.  This has gone from :05 to :10 to “I don’t care how long it is, I sold the preroll to 10 advertisers so you run ‘em all.”  A few enlightened streamers offer visitors the ability to skip ads they’re not interested in.  Many broadcasters don’t.  Heck, they’re still scratching their heads of DVR zapping.

Let me reiterate:  you have to make it easy to get to your stream.  Do 2 :05s or a :10 and see how it works.  Look at the numbers.  How many stick around, how many leave.  You can A/B this with two links.  Alternate them so that half the visitors get, say, a :10 a :30 and another :10 preroll.  Then give the other half just a :10.  Then just look at the stats.  The revenue will probably fit along a bell curve – no preroll, no money, little bit of preroll, little bit of money, etc. all the way to lots of preroll, no money. 

Also, think about overlays.  Viewers will tolerate them if they don’t get in the way of important information.  I mean, on broadcast, we’ve already given up the lower third of the screen to promotion.  Sadly, people are used to it…used to a bright animated lower-third wiping its way across the screen during a dark stakeout.

Then, consider the real estate of the entire page.  But do so within the context of all the possible devices you’re serving.  If you’re distributing to multiple platforms, you can deal with each differently.  If you’re not, you may want to consider adding additional formats.

We’re done, right?  Oh, no, no, no, no. How about the stream itself.  Why do broadcasters, of all stream providers, seem to gravitate to lousy standards.  Part of it is cost.  Maybe we/they don’t want to continually upgrade.  Or they don’t want to pay for bandwidth.  Maybe it’s a training issue.  That shouldn’t be the case.

Remember the Adobe Flash wars with Apple and Android?  I will tell you that it made streamers miserable.  It also pushed us toward .mp3, .mp4, even .wmv and .wma.  During the evolution, a lot of prospective viewers and listeners came, saw, and, unfortunately, left.  We’re starting to get them back.  But now we have to keep them.  How?  Quality streams and minimal glitches that are playable on the maximum number of devices possible.  Nirvana.  Utopia.  Impossible.  But that has to be the goal.  We still have to make it work before we can sell it correctly.

Beyond live streaming, what about podcasts.  Well, I’m going to save some of that for the future.  But on a basic level, what are you offering and how do viewers/listeners get there?  Putting up those oil drums again?  Really!  If you promote them on the home page, link right to them.  Yes, have an aggregate page too, where you offer them all.  And you can insert commercials judiciously.

But how do I figure out who’s coming?  There’s an old survey adage – never ask a question in a survey that you can get the answer to elsewhere.  If someone is masking their IP address and you can’t see where they’re coming from, do you think they’re going to tell you on your club page?  You do?  Well, don’t.  There are many ways of finding out where someone is coming from.  Your visitors might not think so but there are. 

So, bottom line, let’s clean up our act.  Get a good compression scheme, pay for enough slots, and get your prospective visitor to the content as quickly as possible, consistent with making a buck, knowing that if in increase the advertising, you may only make half a buck.

¹ If you don’t recognize the name do a little digging.  Won’t take more than a click or two for your eyebrows to go up.  Hint:  Their products are still alive and well.  Uh, sorta well.

² That’s right.  Major Edwin Armstrong, inventor of FM has plenty more creations to his credit.