Longer and shorter
Content is getting shorter. Much shorter. Call it snack culture if you want. (Josh sends us this one. Of course it’s fake.)
At the same time, advertisers are tempted to get shorter as well. To run shorter pre-rolls and shorter ads and pay to get their jelly-bean-sized logos in the corner of the screen.
I think the answer is to do the opposite. To make loooonger ads (put em on YouTube, they’re free).
I heard an argument about the Presidential debate from last week. 90 minutes for ten people. Impossible!
Why not start the Debate Channel? 20 hours a week of live debate available online. Get a cable network to run three or four hours of highlights every week as an inducement to the candidates, but it will really be about the Net. If a candidate doesn’t show up, the others get more time to talk. Use a chess clock to be sure no one bullies the conversation.
A huge portion of our lives (as marketers, as consumers, as voters, as citizens) has been dominated by the fact that there were three or twenty TV networks. That this was a scarce resource. It’s not. Not any more. So, if there’s unlimited real estate, what are we going to build?
[it seems from the trackbacks that I wasn’t as clear as I could be, so here goes: the reason you wanted shorter commercials is that they were cheaper to run and you had a shot at stealing attention. But now, you can’t steal attention and airtime is free (online). So, since the only people who are going to watch your commercial are the people who WANT to watch it, might as well give them something at least as long as they want to watch…]