“The View From the Phlipside” is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY. It can be heard Monday through Friday around 7:30 AM. The following are scripts which may not exactly match the aired version of the program. Mostly because the host may suddenly choose to add or subtract words at a moment’s notice. WRFA-LP is not responsible for any such silliness or the opinions expressed. You can listen to a live stream of WRFA or find a podcast of this program at wrfalp.com. Copyright 2013-16 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Programs from week of October 3, 2016
This Week’s Podcast:
My name is Jay Phillippi and I’ve spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
End of the Box?
The business that comes up in front of the Federal Communications Commission rarely makes the news. Outside of the occasional fine for some broadcast outlet violating the obscenity rules, most of what happens there isn’t very interesting for people outside of the media bubble.
But the Commission postponed a decision last week that WILL be of interest to a great many of us because it involves OUR wallets. In this case, it involves the box that comes with your average cable or satellite service. I’ve mentioned them before, they are generally referred to as “set-top boxes”. Every month you pay rent on that box. The national average is just over two hundred thirty dollars a year. What was being considered was changing the rules that would allow us to get rid of that expense. Either by accessing our channels through apps or through boxes that we buy ourselves and therefore own. Consumer groups have been all in favor of the idea. Unsurprisingly, the industry has been dead set against it. They lobbied hard last week and got the commissioners to postpone the vote. The official reason was that they want to iron out some technical details.
I’m here to tell you that the industry is going to do everything in its power to see that the ironing process takes as long as possible.
Obviously, they don’t want to lose a source of income. But behind that obvious fact are a few other facts that are even more disturbing for the cable and satellite companies.
First, there’s a whole new generation of viewers that don’t see any reason to have a box. Within the twenty-five to thirty-five-year-old demographic, you have folks called “cord nevers”, people who have never used a traditional pay service. Here’s the worse news for the industry, those folks are actually very happy with the service they get through other outlets. No less a source than J.D. Powers in their wireline satisfaction study says so. Video watched via online connected devices increased by fifty-eight percent between August of 2015 and this past August. And that doesn’t include just cat and laughing baby videos. There are a lot of numbers out there, covering a major change in viewing habits.
But old-line media remains old line media. They have a business model, they put blinders on about that model and they aren’t ready to change. With more younger viewers standing on the cusp of becoming lifetime non-customers, the service providers need to make sure they can hang on to their income sources, meaning your and my wallets, as long as possible.
So keep your eyes peeled for any stories about the Federal Communication Commission in the weeks or months to come. It has more to do with you than you realized.
Selling People
There are a lot of ways to sell things. You can use celebrity endorsers, or expert endorsers, you can use sex appeal or an image campaign. Heck, you can even just lie through your teeth. Every single one of these approaches has worked at some point.
Yet for all the time that I spend looking at, and thinking about commercials, it never ceases to amaze me the number of times that the concept seems to evade me. That’s usually a bad sign. Advertising 101 says that if the audience doesn’t remember what the product is you have failed. On the other hand, you can remember the product and still have no idea what the ad is supposed to be convincing me. As an example, there is the latest Lincoln automobile campaign with Matthew McConnaghy. Now I’m a fan of the actor’s but I’m trying to figure out why having him fall into a swimming pool in a tuxedo is supposed to make me want to buy the car. Let’s face it, he’s not getting into MY Lincoln soaking wet.
On the other hand, I’m paying attention to a couple of campaigns that are playing on one of their core strengths, the close family feeling of their companies, to sell their product. Johnsonville Sausages went to their employees and asked them for ideas for the commercials. The best were chosen, written and produced by a professional ad agency but feature real company “members”, which is Johnsonville’s term for employees. The ads are silly fun, but they have that “brainstorming over a couple of beers” feel to them that brings some authenticity to the spots.
The other is a new campaign by the Jack Daniels Whiskey distiller. Their campaign in more serious and heartfelt. They feature employees plus residents of Lynchburg TN, the companies home.
Both companies are relatively small, combined they don’t have two thousand employees total, and are privately owned. Instead of being a commercial for one of the largest sausage companies in America, it’s about a bunch of guys from Sheboygan who make sausages having fun. It’s not an iconic American brand name, but a small company in a small town creating something special for us all.
Not every company can get away with this approach. BP tried it following the big spill in the Gulf of Mexico with adds that focused on the people, often local to the Gulf coast who were working on the clean up. In the end, they remained small cogs in a vast international corporation.
Sometimes what advertising is selling is just a feeling. A feeling that the product is made by people just like us. Or in the case of luxury cars, that maybe we can be someone completely different.
I’m just not clear why that means I need to get all wet.
Sic Transit
I was watching part of the 1971 Academy Award winning movie “Patton” the other day. There was a line that stuck with me for the rest of the day. Patton, portrayed brilliantly by George C. Scott, talks about conquering Roman generals returning with all the spoils of war. In the victory parade, a slave holds a gold crown above the soldier’s head and whispers into his ear that all glory is fleeting.
In a culture as hung up on fame as ours is, that may be a very important concept to keep in mind. You can be the king of the hill one day, and virtually forgotten the next.
The company that is currently staring that in the face may surprise you. Twitter is facing some very serious issues right now. How serious, you ask? Let’s put it this way, a lot of commentators are using the names Twitter and MySpace in the same breath.
In case you’ve forgotten, in the early days of social media, MySpace was king. Launched in 2003, the site rapidly rose to the heights. In 2005 News Corp bought the company for five hundred eighty million dollars. In 2006 it would pass Google as the most visited website in the United States. In 2008, Facebook passed it, in 2011 it was sold for a mere thirty-five million dollars. Today it is an also ran. So you never want your company mentioned in the same breath with MySpace.
So as a variety of big media companies begin to circle Twitter as a possible purchase, the question remains – is Twitter the next MySpace?
Twitter has basically stopped growing. While Twitter’s three hundred twenty million monthly active users may sound like a lot, Facebook has almost two billion, and Snapchat has surged past Twitter in the user numbers as well. This has hammered the value of the company, dropping it by roughly two-thirds.
So what brought all this on? Part of it is new competition. Part of it is the fact that Twitter has done little to compensate for that competition. But the part that has to be most frightening to both the company and its potential suitors is that part of the problem is deeply ingrained in Twitter itself. Quite simply it can be confusing and alienating. That’s not my assessment, those are the words of the company’s CEO Jack Dorsey, earlier this summer. There’s a rising question among users, it is “Why am I on here?”. The iconic one hundred forty-four character limit can be a huge stumbling block as well. Finally, the rising tide of viciousness on Twitter is driving people away as well.
Maybe there’s still a great company there, waiting for some deep pockets to help it over the hump. Or maybe it’s another case of sic transit gloria mundi.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2016
Theme music for “The View From the Phlipside” and “TVFTP – Podcast” is “Hustle”
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
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