THURSDAY, JULY 18, 2007

MAKING NEWS: TEXAS STYLE (Terry)
Making News: Texas StyleIf you haven't seen it, here's the link. "It" is the TV Guide Network reality show "Making News: Texas Style" taped at KOSA-TV in Odessa, Texas. Airing Mondays at 8/7 Central, it's a behind-the-scenes reality program about life at the television station and with its news team. Episodes include "Making the team," "Honk if you love Hooters," "Take this job and shove it," and "Storm Chase!"

Successful reality TV requires oddball characters, conflict, drama, humor, action, and adventure. Could there be any better setting than a television station and its newsroom?

There's Melissa and her attempts to lose her "muffin top" ("I'm the elephant in a room full of mice."), stealing the competition's main anchor, his predecessor's dealing with a demotion, non-competes, GM Barry Marks' "state of the station" meeting, chasing news -- essentially everything you'd find in the day-to-day drama that exists in any TV station.

KOSA-TV General Manager Barry Marks told me that community reaction has been extremely positive and that the show has provided an emotional connection with viewers that wouldn't be possible otherwise. It's also created an emotional connection with advertisers both local and beyond. "One rep in New York called to say he had a crush on one of our reporters," Marks said. "He watches every show." Reps in Chicago, Atlanta and elsewhere feel connected to the station, and Marks says it helps with sales. Local advertisers feel good about ads running on the station, because they, too, feel emotionally connected and are proud to be a part of it.

The majority response, according to Marks, has been "we're so in love with Melissa" and "is Bill going to stay or not." Isn't it just like viewers to relate to characters in a drama?

Barry says the only real negative reaction comes because the show identifies the community as Midland, but they're actually located in Odessa. "It's a pride thing in a hyphenated market," he said.

The theme of the show is the drama of a second-place station trying to knock off number one, but it didn't start out that way. The production company began with KOSA's main competitor, the NBC affiliate KWES-TV, Channel 9 in Midland. One of the reason was "Mr. West Texas," anchor Jay Hendricks. When KOSA "stole" him away, the producers decided that would make a better storyline. They also liked the cast of characters at KOSA better.

Making News: Texas Style will end with KOSA-TV becoming number one, something they actually accomplished in February. They're already thinking about season two: the drama of holding the lead and the possibility of losing some of their talent to bigger markets.

"Authenticity is more compelling than anything staged," Marks told me. He said they've learned a lot about making reality TV and that he was surprised by how few people it actually takes. "We usually had just a producer and one or two people with small digital cameras around."

This show is smart in so many ways that it's hard to list them all. The emotional bond created by news people "being real" is priceless. The "show" is very well done and, I think, captures the reality that is local television. The people here are presented "as is," not through the artificial and controlled marketing messages we routinely fire at our audiences. This is one of the big problems with all media as it tries to compete in a world of expanding transparency, and nothing "gets past the glass" like people being themselves.

Reality television defines a genre that anybody can emulate. Steve and I have talked often about Flush TV, the online reality show about a family of plumbers in Brooklyn. They produce their own show, and it's a marvelous marketing tool. Michael Rosenblum's concept of turning news beats into ongoing reality programs -- where real people in the community "play" the roles as they live out their lives making news -- is something we're serious about here at AR&D.

As the people at KOSA have learned, life itself is compelling and filled with drama, even their own lives. What is news, after all, if not real people involved in dramatic situations? How we relay that to our viewers is the choice we have, and technology is multiplying those choices every day..   <Permalink>

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LESSONS FROM SPAIN: INVESTING IN YOUR OWN PEOPLE (Steve)
Steve in ValenciaI just returned from an amazing seminar at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain, where I had the honor of teaching a couple of classes in streaming media and the power of broadband video channels. The "students" were media professionals from 10 countries in the European Union. They came from companies that wanted to learn about the latest technologies and business ideas from the online media world.

Companies paid $1,650 for each employee to attend. In return, the professionals received training in a variety of online topics and one-on-one sessions with each of the four trainers, over a course of four days.

I could go on and on about what an excellent program this was, but that would miss a greater point here that's worth sharing and that is the dire need of companies to invest in their own people. One company sent three people to attend. Many attendees came from media outlets far smaller than an typical U.S. TV station. The companies were investing in themselves, and I dare say they got their money's worth.

For $1,650, the students learned about technology, broadband video, business, advertising, live streaming, VOD, IPTV, distribution, production and revenue models. Keeping in mind that I covered a couple of these topics, I still feel confident when I say that was a bargain.

Group shot

The attendees walked out of the program armed with the tools to create a business. We need to arm our own employees with this kind of knowledge. TV is near the bottom when it comes to industries that invest in their own people's knowledge. We wonder why our websites don't make money, but we refuse to educate our own web staff on the basics. Many of the Europeans in attendance asked me what they could do to catch up to America in the online marketplace. I told them they were already investing in surpassing us..   <Permalink>

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LESSONS FROM SPAIN: CHANGING YOUR IDEA OF A CONFERENCE (Steve)
Here's a typical seminar presentation for me:

  • Show up
  • Break out the presentation
  • Sit at a table with a few other people who are tangentially related to my industry
  • Make some of my points
  • Take some questions
  • Have a beer, go home on earlier flight if possible
Here's the typical takeaway for the audience: Confusion.

Now, here's how the organizers of Streaming Media Training at the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain handled things instead:

  • Gather everyone around a table
  • Discuss, discuss, discuss
  • Have one person present at a time
  • Have lots of questions and challenges
  • Offer one-on-one time with the instructors
  • Have everyone dine together with lots of good food and wine and share ideas constantly
  • Put the materials online, gather information for new materials to be put online, and have a place online where everyone can continue to share thoughts and ideas in the upcoming months
Here's the typical takeaway: A business plan, new international colleagues and new friends. Which conference would you rather attend?

Now, here's the key difference: the people. The Valencia training had 16 students in attendance and four trainers. That's a 4-1 student to teacher ratio, so that gave us plenty of time to discuss business plans. It also gave us plenty of time to know each other personally. It worked. The students were comfortable with us, and we learned from them in a way that helped us adapt the courses on the fly.

Did we bore them occasionally? Yep. But they were comfortable enough with us after a day or so that they told us "Move along!" and "Get to the point already!" Imagine doing that at a typical seminar. Or imagine being a presenter, hearing that, and chuckling. That's the power of taking the risk of doing things differently. When you have a small group of people and you invite them to share ideas openly, you will learn more -- ironically -- than you will from a giant convention.

Local television stations need to demand more from the seminars we attend. Enough with the static PowerPoints and self-congratulatory statistics. I've been to seminars about online video where the presenters didn't bring any video to show. Demand lots of online learning, not just the latest numbers about television. At the NAB keynote in April, the online world was not mentioned once. You have to demand it.

Then insist on more intimate, more thought-provoking seminars. You'll get your money's worth, and you'll enjoy them more, too.   <Permalink>

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ONLINE VIDEO: THE PATH TO PROFITABILITY (Terry)
In helping local stations with their new media projects, it's no surprise that the matter of revenue is always at the top of the list. Most companies are struggling to make quarterly profit margins, so this is a natural, albeit problematic question, because the paradox of Media 2.0 is that going after revenue first is the quickest path to irrelevancy in the marketplace. This seems crazy, but it's the main reason that our first strategic objective should be the creation of audience. Money follows eyeballs, and that's just as true in the Media 2.0 world as it is in the Media 1.0 world.

But we still need to make money, and we need to do it quickly, or we'll find ourselves in the same boat as our friends in the newspaper industry. In that light, the first priority of every local media company ought to be the creation and execution of an online, ad-supported video strategy.

Online video is booming. New reports this week by comScore's Video Metrix and the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM) paint the picture. The CTAM study by Nielsen, called "A Barometer of Broadband Content and Its Users," found that online video had reached 63% of U.S. Internet viewers by the study's end in March. The research also found a growing appetite for more, more, more. The comScore report for May found that nearly 75% of U.S. Internet users watched an average of 158 minutes of online video during the month -- more than 8.3 billion video streams.

In Borrell Associates' fifth annual benchmarking report this year, the company projected that the big revenue gainer over the next five years would be online video. TV stations understand video ad sales, so this ought to be a no-brainer in terms of priorities. However, you'd be surprised at the confusion and lack of resources dedicated to this in many companies.

So here are some things we need to consider in the creation of an executable online video sales strategy:

  • A reliable Flash player that you control is a must. This player needs ad elements beyond just running pre-rolls, including the ability to inject ad elements over the playlist while the ad is running and display a static banner ad during the entire clip. Flash (and Flash clones, like Wowza) is a marvelous invention, that allows for all kinds of creative solutions for advertisers. Don't be content with what everybody else is doing.

  • Your ad-serving software is as important as the player itself, because it needs to be able to join advertisers to specific videos in order to maximize value. Most companies see the value of the player but lose money over the lack of a sophisticated ad serving mechanism. Targeting can be done via niche site or site section or by tying ads to certain videos regardless of where they play. If you can't do this easily, you're missing opportunities with advertisers.

  • Your player needs to be portable to maximize the value of distributed media in the new landscape. You must be able to offer videos via RSS, and your player has to have the mechanism for embedding in other websites (emails would be nice, too). We don't care where our videos play, as long as we control the advertising associated with them. An embeddable player makes this easy.

  • More than anything, your dedicated sales staff needs to be up-to-speed on what your software can do, so that they can design ad campaigns for local advertisers. I've found a great hunger among advertisers at the local level to be able to do things they see national advertisers doing online, and the station that makes this available in its community will win lasting points among advertisers. CPMs (if that's the model you choose) for online video ads justifiably should be higher than those on-the-air, because users are more engaged with ads than they are in the world of DVRs and remote controls. This takes courage, but it also takes a well-crafted system and strategy.

  • Don't forget the truth that advertising is content in Media 2.0, so think outside-the-box in terms of what local advertisers can do with online video. Video classifieds are booming, and you can make money selling advertiser "channels," if you have the software (player/ad-server) to accommodate it.

  • Never throw away any video. Make everything you do available all-the-time, because the web world eliminates the "instant obsolescence" of television and especially television news. Searchable video-on-demand elements will allow you to make money with videos long after they've lost their glow as current news. This introduces long tail economics to our world, and there's considerable revenue to be made in that scenario.
A well conceived and executive online video sales strategy is a combination of Media 1.0 and 2.0 efforts, and regardless of what enterprises stations consider for the future, video will always be a part of them. Take the time and dedicate the resources to do it right up front, and your quarterly reports and investors will be happy for years to come.   <Permalink>