Brands Create Customers

These can be dire times for major media brands, as Gary Hayes explains in his post, “Heritage brands washed away by Web 2.0 tsunami.” Media brands stand at the end of an era, faced with an abyss they cannot cross in their present state.

Gary, a former BBC producer, reflects on the termination of the iconic BBC TV series, “Top of the Pops,” after 42 years as a mainstay of dictating music taste in the UK.

The broadcast model that supported the show was no longer viable in the Internet age. Gary writes:

A weekly batch of eight songs selected by a couple of ‘programmers’ prior to a Monday morning production meeting was never going to survive in a world of twenty 24/7 digital music channels, peer-to-peer sharing and the likes of iTunes/iPod.

The brand hobbled by the body

What’s happening in the UK is, of course, happening elsewhere. Traditional media brands were often built through market power and distribution channels. They could command attention because their sheer presence forced all other voices to the edge. Theirs was a reign of massive bulk and attenuated agility. Alas, when digital technology changed the means of content distribution, such brands were potentially in trouble. Throw in changes to the nature of content itself, and all traditional brand bets are off.

That’s pretty much where many media brands find themselves today. They will sleep with the coelacanths unless they radically reinvent themselves for new realities.

Their problem is that you cannot re-brand a dinosaur. The brand flows from new DNA, not the bones of reeling behemoths.

From Gary’s post:

I even fear for MTV and those other 24/7 music loop channels who will be very soon relegated to ambient background or occasional party channels as the audience simply shifts to on-demand, shared playlists and only really trusts a global ‘collective recommendation’ system. An individual simply has their own personalized Top of the Pops, which incidentally changes moment to moment. No, the editorial winners in the future are not teams sat inside boards rooms, those existing ‘heritage’ aggregators of content (magazines, broadcasters, film studios, newspapers) they will simply be a ‘wisdom of the crowds’ range of trusted filters. An avid music fan in Wisconsin becomes as important as the programmers at MTV or BBC — music will be found by searching for groups of trusted like-minded ‘browsers’.

And here’s how Gary summarizes the media brand outlook:

. . . the distribution channel is now irrelevant for most media consumers; they can get their content in many ways, so now the important thing is trusted sources of links to content. YouTube and GoogleVideo will of course do the same to TV programming over the next few years that MP3 (etc.) did to the music industry and TV music programming. The only TV programmes that will survive will not be the ones who simply plop their content a day earlier on iTunes but ones that differentiate themselves from the masses — those who build brand across multiple platforms and more importantly create a Web 2.0 blanket around it.

Don’t tread on me (I’m your new brand)

The evolutionary hope for existing media companies is to build new brands on the shoulders of new market entrants before existing media infrastructures wither and die. This is feasible. Brands have the power to grant new life, but brand building cannot be done by acquisitions alone. Media companies will need copious amounts of customer DNA. Their immediate challenge is to avoid crushing it underfoot once they manage to find it.

Bottom photo: Jon Sullivan

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 15th, 2006 at 2:39 pm and is filed under Brand Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.