“Honey, I am going out to the store to buy some media for tonight.”
“Thanks – can you make sure you don’t get the store-branded media – the kids found it a bit violent last time. I really like that Sony media the best.”
This sounds like a silly scenario – nobody thinks of buying and consuming media this way. Yet, even now, we have companies still talking about their position in the consumer’s eyes as media companies. I worked for the biggest media company, Time Warner, and you would think that all of the operating companies within TWX ascribe to this philosophy, but you’d be wrong.
Take HBO – you would definitely believe that a company with its successful track record would think about the HBO brand as its lead to the marketplace. The execs there, however, knew that the real brands that mattered to consumers were “The Sopranos”, “Deadwood”, and “Curb Your Enthusiasm”. Did the HBO brand have some relevance? Yes, to a degree, but in a world of several hundred cable channels (and the lessening effectiveness of audience re-circulation), the marketing of the ingredient brands (the shows) was the most important thing to get right.
Being a media company on the web might be something OK to talk to analysts about, but to consumers, the web is all about personal aggregation of best-in-class experiences. You talk to a consumer about the major brands (Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, AOL, MySpace), and they use terms like “That’s my homepage”, “That’s my search engine”, “That’s my email provider”, “That’s my sports news provider”, “That’s my social network”.
Positioning to compete in a world where the consumer is his/her own personal programming is what the web is all about, but that should be nothing new. Heck, the first real enabler for personal programming was the TV remote control (the first version of which, the “Lazy Bones” by Zenith, goes back to 1952).
In this world of dis-aggregation, the most important thing to get right (and the most difficult) is never losing focus on the importance of the primary position of your brand in the eyes of the consumer over time. Lots of us got distracted along the journey – we start talking about ourselves using “inside baseball” terms like being a new media company, when the brands that are dominating have incredibly crisp and consistent value propositions in the eyes of consumers. That’s one reason Google continues to succeed. Even with their moves to expand the value a consumer gets from them, their mission, their branding remains laser-focused on search. This is one of the big challenges Yahoo faces under Jerry Yang – what is the central consumer-focused value proposition they need articulate that serves as their foundation? It’s also one Microsoft continues to wrestle with, as it struggles with the positioning of its “Live” portfolio.
As incumbents, our world gets more complex and challenging each day. Think about People Magazine – it defined a new category of content when it launched. Its brand is incredibly important, but we did the JV to start TMZ.com less than 2 years ago, and it’s become the monster in its category on the web – all due to a more focused view of entertainment content than what People had morphed to over time.
In the end, if being a media company isn’t the right positioning, is there still a role to be played by big web companies who believe in the importance of original higher-editorial-value content, producing the Live8s, the LiveEarths, etc. (by default making them at least in-part media companies)? As a consumer, you’d hope so – long-tail content isn’t going to fulfill all of your needs. The challenge is what sustaining brand contribution does funding of these events means to the company underwriting the costs. Who, in this new world, will step up to play the role of financier for content plays on the web, knowing that at the end of the day the perceived value might be be served by a portfolio of destination brands, versus a few “mega” ones? Will the usual suspects continue to play the role of banker? It doesn’t feel like it to me…
