JJC on TSC writes an important piece about ads in the internet era.
Come here, dad, look at this," my daughter called
to me this weekend. "This is that game you got me,
take a look." For the next hour I sat, transfixed,
as my eldest daughter played NFL Street, an
Electronic Arts (ERTS:Nasdaq - commentary -
research - Cramer's Take) production, on her Xbox.
It wasn't just the lifelike nature of the game,
where the likes of LaDainian Tomlinson and Michael
Strahan square off in a football pick-up game on a
parking lot, a construction site and a trash-
strewn baseball diamond, that kept me glued to the
television set.
It was the realization that this game, like so
many other games, is the most underexploited
advertising realm I have ever seen. The graffitied
walls, the smashed-up trash cans, the rusty gates -
- all could be adorned with abstract Mountain Dew
or Gatorade ads and we'd have to watch them, take
them in, almost as if they were instant-messaged
into our brains.
As if to make the contrast even more stark, my
daughter was TiVo'ing an episode of Pimp my Ride --
yeah, I know, this is what they watch -- while
playing, making sure that she didn't have to watch
commercials. She watches nothing unless it is
TiVo'd because she hates commercials so much.
There, in a nutshell, as the 33rd annual UBS
Global Media conference begins today, is the
problem facing all of media: The ads are in the
wrong darned places.
Now, all sorts of media outlets are scrambling to
change that. But I think my daughter, who seems to
have been born with an iPod in her ear and a
special sense of hand-eye coordination -- no
wonder she was a field hockey goalie with 9
straight shut-outs -- will outwit them, like so
many others of her generation. They have become
reverse entitled; they genuinely believe it is
their job to block commercials and try to get as
much programming as they can for free. To reach
them, you have to be where they don't block,
whether it be Coke in the green room -- now red
room -- of American Idol, or on the virtual walls
in an Electronic Arts game. Those who figure this
out could up what they charge brand-sensitive
companies. Those who don't, which includes lots of
souls stuck with the traditional media, won't ever
get a multiple again. feel bad for most of the 50-
somethings who run these media companies these
days. For the most part, they missed the dot-com
revolution. They cared only about trying to get a
stock public, not about providing a venue that is
cheap and fast and logical, like Google
(GOOG:Nasdaq - commentary - research - Cramer's
Take) or even Yahoo! (YHOO:Nasdaq - commentary -
research - Cramer's Take). Now they are trying to
deliver their own content through various means,
almost like kids saying, "I think we've got it
this time," and they don't have it at all. They
don't get the subversive nature of my kids'
generation. Their goal is to get content for free,
meaning free of ads, but if you can fool them, you
win. These media execs seem to have no idea how
savvy these kids are. The execs believe that they
are selling to the same people who don't know how
to hook up a VCR. I don't even bother to mess with
the remotes or the other gizmos in my kids' rooms.
They are way too complicated.
Because of this secular change -- these anti-ad,
pro-tech kids out there -- there aren't a lot of
winners left in the media. And the ones who are
winning, such as Electronic Arts, don't even know
how good they have it yet! (I probably would buy
it for Action Alerts PLUS if I didn't already own
GameStop (GME:NYSE - commentary - research -
Cramer's Take) and Microsoft (MSFT:Nasdaq -
commentary - research - Cramer's Take);
diversification can't be ignored even for this
great secular trend.)
The losers, they are myriad.