The Entertainment Industry’s Failure to Meet Demand

By now you’ve heard about the Stop Online Piracy Act, both the arguments for and against. As the head of a progressively-minded online firm, I have a bias toward openness and against restrictions of content.

So we’re generally opposed to SOPA on principle. At the same time, as a creative, I also strongly believe in protecting the ability to generate money from creative work.

What I don’t understand, on any level, is why the entertainment industry is not being taken to task for even needing SOPA in the first place.

Flash back one year ago. I’m without broadcast TV, and it’s Super Bowl Sunday. Like any other red-blooded American, I want to watch some football and the accompanying cavalcade of $2 million ads.

I ended up looking online for a live feed of the game. Fox TV and Fox Sports did not make the game available. NFL.com did not have the game. No American outlet was providing me with the ability to watch the game legally.

In the end, I found a pirated feed.

Not only was I able to watch the game, but I also viewed every single advertisment. I became another set of consumer eyeballs, which should be exactly what Fox and the NFL should be wanting to promote.

Do I feel guilty about this? Not exactly. I don’t like the idea of breaking the law, and I would choose not to … were I given reasonable option.

And that’s where the entertainment industry is failing American consumers.

Rather than working to meet the burgeoning demand for online access to their content, media producers are instead fighting to protect an out-dated system. Whether it’s music or television or movies, the entertainment industry has been late to the game in meeting this demand and just as laggardly at keepign up with technology.

Napster didn’t happen because people wanted to break the law. It happened because consumers wanted music. The Pirate Bay doesn’t exist because people want to steal movies and TV shows. It exists because there is no real viable alternative in the marketplace.

We are seeing some consumer-centric products arriving. Hulu and Spotify are two examples, and yet the entertainment companies remain wary of commiting too strongly to them. CBS, for example, doesn’t participate in Hulu. Still, both have shown that when given a viable option, consumers will pay for access.

Instead, consumers are essentially being held hostage to protect out-dated modes of distribution, whether that’s movie theaters, local TV affiliates, or record labels themselves. Yet the genie is out of the bottle, and consumers are increasingly finding ways to meet their demand, even when the providers themselves are unwilling to meet that demand.

And no matter what steps the government or the media companies take, piracy (like money in politics) will always find a way to exist. You can’t eliminate it.

Instead of coddling an entertainment industry bent on limiting access to content, Congress should seek ways to encourage this very same industry to respond to the demand that exists. Rather than requiring online services to spy on consumers, shouldn’t the movie, music and TV creators be making their content more widely available?

Eyeballs are eyeballs, whether they watch the Super Bowl on television or online. Plus, Spotify and Hulu have both shown consumers are willing to pay for upgraded access as well.

The new models are out there. The demand is out there. Now we just need Congress to kick the entertainment industry in the wazoo and tell them to start serving their customers.

We want to give kudos to a buddy at Chattanooga’s News Channel 9. Seems the newsroom phones went down, so our pal used Twitter to help inform followers of the situation.

Now, we’re not saying @Public_Interest‘s tweet is going to undo what’s got to be a bad situation, but his effort to communicate the problem was a great action for two reasons:

1. It may help someone trying to reach the newsroom with an urgent story.
2. It tells people that they know there’s a problem and they care about people being able to reach the station.

No matter how small the gesture of sending out a tweet may seem, it’s demonstrates how businesses can use social media in to further their connection to their customers.

Too many businesses see Facebook and Twitter as nothing more than marketing tools, but that’s where they’re missing out on the real impact of these sites. Social media isn’t just about pushing your brand. It’s about forging a connection with real people.

Even if a Twitter follower didn’t need to call the TV station today, they will see that tweet and know that the station cares about being responsive and available. All for the cost of 30-seconds to send a tweet.

So yeah, it’s not a huge deal, but in any relationship, it’s the gesture – not the cost – that counts most.

There he is again. Look, see him, he’s hiding there in the middle of the text. No wait, he’s over here now, in this sidebar.

Uh oh, found him again in a banner.

It’s true. We’re being cyberstalked. By a shelf.

We’re not really scared. Other than it’s laughable design and even more laughable price tag, the shelf is far from menacing. The shelf was someone’s attempt to make a cheap particle board shelf look hip and all modern contemporary and worth the $84.28 it’s being hawked for.

Clearly they failed. But so did we.

We forgot for but a few minutes why we avoid Overstock.com. Our sin was a lust for storage. Now we will pay the price for our flirtation by being tailed endlessly by piece of low-end furniture for the next two weeks.

Like some other ecommerce sites, Overstock.com uses cookies to record what products you’ve looked at and has them display in their ads on other websites. And it’s always there. We get the clever marketing play here – “Someone might actually want to buy this thing, so dammit let’s keep it just one click away.”

Overstock.com’s online advertising is so broad that we’re seeing this shelf dozens of times a day, taking their game too far and into the creepy end of the woods.

There’s a reason why the pop-up adds of the late ’90s died. When your marketing begins to irritate your customers and readers, then it’s time to rethink your strategy.

This sad, pathetic, clueless little shelf steps onto the screen over and over again, beckoning us to a relationship that will never be. No matter how often we choose to ignore it, this persistent suitor of storage will show up again tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that.

Yes, we could delete the cookie and vanquish the shelf forever. We could break its little heart and kick it to the curb, but honestly, we’re stalking back. We want to know just how dogged this thing is so we can know its kind and learn from it.

We see part of our job as studying how others use online marketing for good or for bad, so we can take those lessons and put them to work for our clients. There are smarter ways to market online than Overstock.com is using, but what more painless way could there be to learn from failure than to learn from another’s failure.

We have every right to be miffed at the U.S. Postal Service today. A check from a client got held up for 8 days in limbo before it finally arrived in our mail box. We’re peeved and annoyed. Still, as frustrating as the Postal Service can be at times, we’d hate to imagine life without it.

1. Imagine trying to get anywhere driving with even more UPS trucks blocking traffic.
2. An army of people in gray shorts coming to your house, picking up letters and delivering them across the country for just 42-cents is nothing short of a miracle.
3. Do we really want to contend with more tracking codes?
4. Cheapest FedEx letter delivery: $7.60. USPS letter delivery: $.42 cents. You don’t really think FedEx and UPS will lower their rates when there is less competition do you?
5. Letters to Santa. A world in which children can’t send letters to the North Pole is not one we should allow.

Venn pioneered them, USA Today institutionalized them, and some 5th Avenue marketing whiz upscaled them into “infographics.”  Face it, a good chart is as sweet as a good pop song.

Click the chart to enlarge.

Even when they’re meaningless, we look at them. Our eyes immediately drift to them like a child’s eyes to candy. So, if you don’t have a good photo, then think about a nice colorful graphic to brighten your web page. When done well, they’re both lovely and engaging.