The Super Bowl of Blood Sports

Recently, I attended a marketing conference devoted to what to do in a world where the balance of power has shifted forever to consumers who can now avoid or opt in for advertising messages, with the flick of a thumb akin to a Roman spectator deciding the fate of a fallen gladiator. With the advent of the PVR and VOD, viewers can effortlessly slay commercial messages that render the interruptive advertising model dead. So there we were asking ourselves, "What is the new paradigm?"

Obviously, these new technologies change the playing field forever because they allow consumers to decouple content from any prescribed time or means of delivery. Hence, TV becomes even more "hits" driven and it is the individual title, say, "Lost," that is leaving more than housewives desperate. The value of a network as a primary channel of distribution may be in serious jeopardy, with alternatives such as broadband streaming content over the Internet.

The implications for this are perhaps even worse for television advertisers. The head of research for one of the major networks shared preliminary research data that polled consumers about whether they would pay $1 for an on-demand episode of a new show sans commercials versus 50 cents for one with advertising. The results were split about evenly, but the more frightening revelation may have been his assertion that under the current ad supported model, each viewer is worth about 36 cents in revenues to the network. Therefore, every VOD click at $1 represents an increase that is nearly 2.8 times over the old advertising-reliant model and billions more in gross income. The executive might as well have pronounced, "We don't need no stinking advertisers!"

Before those of us who derive our livelihood from ballyhoo go into a full-tilt panic, let's not lose sight of an interesting dichotomy playing out right beneath our noses. On the one hand, while consumers are skipping, dodging and obliterating our marketing messages, in the online world the same public willingly seeks out and opts in for variations of the same communication. Perhaps, home shopping networks have it just right when they act as alternative programming--we'll call it shopping as sport--that fosters connections and community that lead to transactions.

Which reminds me of another community built around sport--our modern day version of a gladiator match--the Super Bowl. Folks gather from far and wide to socialize, eat, drink and be riveted by...advertising. All of which suggests that there are audiences for our self-serving content that in its purest form is alternative entertainment. We just need to find the optimal mix of disciplines within the marketing arsenal that allows them to find us and engage. Some might call this a bloody mess, but then it's the primal challenge of such activities that draw all of us into the arena.

Rick Petry, a partner with Downstream, is a consultant to the direct marketing industry. He can be reached via e-mail at rick.petry@downstream.com.