Little things that count

A recent Ford Focus commercial grabbed my attention because 8 seconds into the ad there is an overt reference to Triple J.

In the scripting of this commercial any radio station could have been mentioned, but Triple J was chosen. Why?

Looking at the stats (part of the privilege of working at a market researcher) Triple J isn't the most listened to station by Ford Focus purchase intenders, but it is up there with Fox FM and Nova. I wonder what (or if) the decision making process was to choose this station in the TVC?

Here's the full ad:

The saddest Ad I've seen

This latest TVC for the iPad really hit me quite hard. Most examples shown are what I would consider a natural extension of technological communication and media interaction, but there was one snippet that made me really sad.

The kid learning to write on an iPad in what looks like a crayon style just hit home how removed our future generations will be from reality. If future generations will learn to write using an iPad then what understanding will they have of the crayon 'font' if they have never actually seen or used a crayon.

The gradual extinction of pen and paper and the rapid move to a digital world lived behind a glass tablet is one of the saddest things I've seen recently.

Continued socialisation of TV

NewTeeVee has reported that a new service called Tunerfish via Comcast is emerging and it's being billed as Foursquare for video.

While I'm a little ambivalent towards Foursquare (mostly because of its hijacking of Twitter feeds) I do really like that Foursquare is using gaming mechanisms to build community and this is what Tunerfish will supposedly do for TV.

To understand the potential for a service such as Tunersfish take the example of the Lost finale and its corresponding Twitter-stream (graphic on right from NewTeeVee). For Australia the TV show Q and A has ridden the Twitter-stream well incorporating the #qanda hash-tag into its show each week.

You can see that by combining Twitter and TV the once solitary act of watching TV by yourself is becoming a much more social affair. Tunerfish aims to tap this social wave and amplify its effect by game-ifying (I'm gonna TM that!) it.

Like browsing my Twitter feed to find out what people I follow are watching, Tunerfish will aim to be a social discovery mechanism where you find out what your social circle is watching. Now, for myself, I don't have Pay TV so I only have a limited number of channels to watch, but even still the idea of finding our what shows are popular and then watching them by totally legal and broadcaster friendly means is a good one.

Tunerfish is in private Alpha at the moment so I don't know how it really works but the idea of adding game functions to a solitary/social activity is a catchy one.

From a personal perspective the only question I would have is that will it be service agnostic? Because it is being developed by Comcast will someone need to watch TV via a Comcast service or will it be a generic web app for all to use?

Has the real-time web killed TV programming?

Never has the television industry been more hap-hazard in its programming than right now.

We have seen it coming for a few years now and I suspect that, in Australia at least, we may have seen a watershed in the industry with the phoenix-like rise and Icarus-like fall of Hey-Hey it's Saturday, all within one week.

But to truly get a grip on how a show of such historic proportions can rise and fall in a single week we must back-track a couple of years. We're going to a time after live debates and the 'worm' but before the real-time Internet. Let's go to the late-late night time slots that were once inhabited by a motley band of money-bag grabbers that were the late-night quiz shows.

These pre-real-time-interwebz quiz shows, of which Quizmania and Midnight Zoo were poster-childs, relied on the interaction of at-home participants ringing in to try and solve puzzles to win money. Masses of calls would flood the TV shows with ample amounts of would-be contestants queuing to win.

The biggest insight TV stations gained from these shows was that the real-time nature of viewers calling in allowed TV show directors to know what was popular and what was un-popular AT HOME based on the levels of calls coming into the show. An example could be that the host of the quiz waves his arms around and yells out 'money, money, money', from this the person monitoring the caller dashboard sees a spike in calls to the show. The director then tells the host through an earpiece mic to wave his arms again and ta-da another spike in calls. Real-time TV production.

Fast forward to October 2009. The real-time Internet is in full swing. TV shows no longer rely on viewers calling in because the viewers are already swarming with conversation on Twitter, Facebook, and other social websites. Enter stage left, Daryl Somers and Hey-Hey it's Saturday the Reunion.

It's a gamble for Channel Nine, a live TV show in prime-time and we haven't seen this show in over a decade. But they had an ace up their sleeve. Real-time monitoring. Just as Quizmania and Midnight Zoo used real-time monitoring of phone calls to judge the shows success, so too would Hey-Hey use real-time monitoring of the social web to measure the performance of the show.

And it worked. The Facebook fan page was a-buzz, Twitter went off the hook and got a little-known TV show trending with the US big guns. Results were in, it was a hit again.

One week on, take-two. This time the producers were confident they knew the forumla. The host announced the Twitter hash-tags they would monitor and kept the audience updated with a Facebook fan tally. The real-time show and the real-time web were in synch.

Here comes the sun, the programming pot of gold, it was in their reach. But alas, Hey-Hey flew too close to the sun and the popular tale of Icarus was played out all over again for the world to watch. It was a curious choice of skits for the carefully planned return of this much loved show. A group of men doing Michael Jackson in Minstrel Show style. Unsurprisingly it didn't go off well. The show's big name guest didn't like it, the audience was a little awry and the response was probably closer to absolute zero than a scientist has ever seen.

Real-time show, real-time web: press play. I bet the producer monitoring the real-time sentiment graphs was already on the phone to a recruitment agency before the show was even over.

For a full report on the crash landing of Hey-Hey it's Saturday view the Crikey dishonour board. I suspect we will not see week three of the reunion.

The lesson learnt from this saga is, as we have known for a little while now, that TV lives and dies by the audience. Pre-social-web a TV station could sell ads for a whole season of a TV show. Then it was months at a time. Now, unfortunately TV programmers have the inglorious task of trying to program on a week-by-week basis and the sales team have the even worse job of trying to sell ads to a show that might not even exist in a week.

TV programming is dead.

I think marketers need to think hard about where they put their dollars, stop planning above-the-line spend annually, and generally agree that TV, once the bastion of marketing spend, is now a risky investment.