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If everyone does it...
May 16, 2007
If everyone does it, does it still stand out?
Two thoughts on the matter.
First, the NYTimes reports that the buzzword of "experience" is becoming commoditized in the hotel industry. From Hotel as Lifestyle:
What Starbucks did for coffee and JetBlue did for air travel, a growing number of new hotel brands is trying to do for the overnight stay: create an experience that offers something different from the status quo, then replicate it around the globe. ... most aim to offer guests some type of "experience," the buzzword cited most often. ...
"We're trying to bring boutique to a more mainstream broad audience," [one hotel chain executive] said. "We kind of 'democratize design,' if you will."
Good experience isn't a commodity, at least in aesthetic environments like high-end hotels. Boutiques will move on to something else to stay ahead of the chains.
Next, from the NYTimes, Sex, Drugs, and Updating Your Blog, which profiles popular (online) musician Jonathan Coulton (emphasis mine):
[E]very day, Coulton wakes up, gets coffee, cracks open his PowerBook and hunkers down for up to six hours of nonstop and frequently exhausting communion with his virtual crowd.
Coulton's single biggest spike in traffic to his Web site took place last December, when he appeared on NPR's "Weekend Edition Sunday," a fact that, he notes, proves how powerful old-fashioned media still are. (And "Weekend Edition" is orders of magnitude smaller than major entertainment shows like MTV's "Total Request Live," which can make a new artist in an afternoon.) Perhaps there's no way to use the Internet to vault from the B-list to the A-list and the only bands that sell millions of copies will always do it via a well-financed major-label promotion campaign. "Maybe this is what my career will be," Coulton said: slowly building new fans online, playing live occasionally, making a solid living but never a crazy-rich one.
Coulton gets my respect for growing his community with such hard work online (I hope he's read Bit Literacy to do it efficiently!) ... but it's telling that the traditional media continue to have the most reach, by a large margin.
Let that be a lesson to anyone who thinks the online media have upended everything. It's still a small world online.
While the old gaurd, mainstream media is vital to online success, the mere fact that each entity is desperately trying to build an effective, sticky site that integrates all media points underscores why online will win the day. In fact, when a fine artist does a promotion today, the newspapers have such a jaded p.o.v., that their reach has been marginalized by better reviews online than off. The most effective traditional medium from an advertising $/sense perspective is terestrial radio. My businesses can prove it. Ultimately, television ads have been killed by v.o.d. and the digital favorites easily programed via a cable commander. Customers do not have the patience any more...hope you got to read this full post.
Well, if you do have a promotion budget, online media is actually more effective than TV. If you know your target audience, you can reach them more effectively using online media (get a good media planner, though, because the options are endless).
With TV, however, there is a limit to how precise you can be, and a larger percent of the budget is going to be wasted on wrong audiences, (even if you promote on MTV). Direct marketing speaking, online media has the lowest cost per order of all media today.
Furthermore, the creative costs are way cheaper online (TV ads are kinda expensive...), so you can easily test online (different sites, different ads, different times, etc.) and get results almost immediately. Therefore, you can learn, apply and adapt ASAP and become even more effective...
This shouldn't be a surprise, really, except that the new media world is not so small in aggregate -- but it's spread out along the "long tail" so any one channel is fairly small, while there are many more channels to choose from.
A whole lot like the grass-roots performing market (small cafes and house concerts).
The media will always have a power-law distribution of popularity with big boys on top, but the promise of online media is that the rest of the curve will not be truncated, and the bottom-up dynamic will push itself up into the peak more organically than in the past.
Personally, I think the best stuff is in the "middle curve" where the best mix of quality and diversity is situated.