iMedia Coming Up

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I'm leaving at 7 AM Saturday morning for the iMedia Summit. I hate flying that early in the morning, but this summit promises to be a great one, so I don't mind. Rick Parkhill and his peeps always do a great job. While I'm out there, I'll still have plenty of work to do remotely, but I also look forward to breaking out for a bit to do some geocaching. I'm bringing a few GPS units in case some of the folks at the summit want to join me.

This morning, we got an e-mail from one of the folks running the show, asking what we think the biggest issues facing online marketing are. My biggest one? "Many clients still want to broadcast TO people instead of interacting WITH them." I also cited the notion of an increase of ad dollars in the medium with not enough content to support it (unless, of course, we figure out the revenue model for Citizen Media in the next few months).

(BTW, "Citizen Media" is my new proposed term to replace "Consumer Generated Content," which I hate for several reasons. What do you think?)

Do It. I Dare You.

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Link.

Responding to calls from conservative groups for tighter standards for decency in broadcasting, the chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission has raised the option of allowing pay television viewers to pick their own channels, setting up a potentially costly brawl with the cable and satellite industries.

My first reaction reading about this in my morning paper was, "My Gawd, what new stupidity hath the FCC wrought?"

Then I thought about it some more. There are a whole host of things wrong with this notion of letting people pick cable channels a la carte. The first thing that comes to mind is that it will allow people to essentially dig themselves deeper into an ideological sinkhole. Conservatives will pick Fox News and hear no opinions that they disagree with through their idiot boxes, resulting in yet another echo chamber situation.

Secondly, how will new cable channels get started without a guaranteed distribution right off the bat?

Thirdly, isn't this against everything I ever read from Ayn Rand? Umm, yeah.

Then again, think about the upsides. It's certainly a blow struck for consumer choice. Such a move would simply usher in the age of Citizen Media even more quickly than it's currently speeding toward us. Think about what the world would look like if broadcast and cable relinquished one of the few advantages it still has over emerging media - its penetration into households.

The advertiser community would have a collective conniption, and the siphoning of emerging media ad dollars from broadcast and cable budgets would accelerate greatly. (Back up a dump truck!)

Most likely, this is just more posturing by the FCC. But what if it wasn't? Strategically, I'd let them have their way with this one and then fight them tooth and nail on regulation of the Internet and satellite, armed with the notion that the FCC's mandate doesn't apply when bandwidth isn't constrained by geography and signal strength as is the case with terrestrial radio and TV stations.

If this is real, then the FCC has pushed a good chunk of its chips to the center of the poker table. It's time to call their bluff.

RTFM

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There's little in the media planning business that's more frustrating than reps who refuse to read an RFP. After we sent out our last client RFP, we got some VERY positive feedback from our reps, who took time out to send us e-mail saying that our RFPs were the best they had read. It's because we take time to outline client goals and our strategy. We disclose everything that we possibly can so that reps can come back to us with the strongest programs possible, tailored to what we're looking for.

But when people don't take the time to read the damned things, and they simply submit the same thing they did last year with a 3% rate increase, that's how they get cut from plans.