One Size Fits One
I had the privilege of hearing Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail, speak today at Ad:Tech in Chicago. He’s brilliant! Even though I’ve read the Long Tail already, his talk was provocative and made me - again - think differently about modern media.
The first eye-opener: Chris uses Google ads on his personal blog so that he can find stores that serve his niche interests. It’s reverse ad-serving!
The second eye-opener: The network news will never get back to the ratings heyday of yore. It’s not a management problem. It’s not an anchor problem (you’re off the hook, Katie Couric). It’s not even (necessarily) a viewer apathy problem. More choices = more fragmentation. It’s not just the network news - no shows (with the possible exception of a one-time event blockbuster) will reach the ratings of days gone by. “The high market share of the 20th century was an artifact of the distribution channel.”
We need new measures of success in the Long Tail era.
The third eye-opener: We need to look at marketing driven success vs. organic (e.g., product quality) success. Cultural products - movies, television shows, music and the like - are disproportionately affected by the rise of WOM and the fall of the ad model. It’s the reason that the box office is falling off in the second weekend to a greater degree than ever before for most films. People talk. Online and off, people talk.
Fourth eye-opener: The traditional retail channel supresses culture. (Okay, I had gotten this message loud and clear from the book, I just wanted to say it again). The Long Tail phenomenon suggests that markets could be 50 - 100% larger with infinite distribution. Holy cow! The move from physical to virtual can double the size of your market!
Fifth, and germaine to my post “RIP, Second Life” (which quoted Wired, btw): Second Life and other metaverses have an added burden of needing to succeed temporally, not just in aggregate. On any other site, you can succeed by having many eyeballs over the course of a day or week or month. On Second Life, they need to show up simultaneously. For all those marketers looking to build a presence in the virtual world, think of events or other ways to turn destinations into appointment opportunities.
Finally, I loved it when Chris said “Failure is the new success”. In the Long Tail world, we need to measure success differently. What was a failure may now be a niche market.
August 2nd, 2007 at 10:24 am
Failure is the New Success. The eminent Bruce Mau has 2 spins on this in his Incomplete Manifesto for Growth (http://www.brucemaudesign.com/manifesto.html)
>> 4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.
34. Make mistakes faster. This isn’t my idea — I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.
Faster,cheaper distribution channels now allow these good but not implementable (is this a word?) ideas to be moved from the cutting room floor to the marketplace.
One size fits one! I want a t-shirt! - offer more, listen and let the marketplace drive innovation.