It's 8 Let's Watch Our Favorite TV Show!

Yeah right! These days are over. People still do it but they do it out of habit. As internet TV, digital TV, DVR’s and the fact that the worlds youth are growing up on the internet, the days of planning your evening around a television show are numbered. My six year old daughter knows how to rewind the DVR in an effort to miss the commercials. Is the net replacing TV?

The antiquated model of having big corporations pay big dollars to feed into big money video content production is short lived. As a society we are becoming more sophisticated in our leisure time. We can do yard work while the big game is on and then watch the whole thing two hours later. All this to still catch the ending live. Oh yeah, don’t forget we didn’t see one second of those big dollar advertisements that corporate America paid to fund the whole event.

Television, as we grew up with it, is simply not conducive to viral marketing. The internet
re-invented viral marketing on accident. The evolution of communication technology has enabled this phenomenom. We see something cool, amazing, horrifying, or unbelievable and the first thing we do is send it to our friends in two seconds flat. This revolution has completely upended marketing as we know it. We are seeing less and less big star/big dollar ad campaigns and more and more grainy (what looks like) user generated hard to believe clips. Where do we find this kind of content, you guessed it, on the net.

Television is passive. "Passive you say, we want a voice!" The internet (some times unfortunately) gives everyone a voice. If a product sucks, it’ll be blasted across the net just as fast as TV ad revenues are dropping. Inversely, if a product is great, you and your neighbor will be talking about how you need one the afternoon after product launch while raking the yard. As internet television increases in popularity you will see quick reactions to video content, one more reason television is breathing heavy right now. Is it against the ropes?

Finally, the technology of digital video is becoming easier to use and more affordable by the day. Right now a fourteen year old kid can get a Flip video cam for $149(FLIP Video), video production software for $495 (Avid Liquid), and build a website with video capability for $349 (ReelSnap) and for $1,000 they have their very own television show.
The bottom line is this, if you don’t have a marketing plan in place to take advantage of video in your business model then you will fall behind. Oh yeah, guess what, your competitor does!