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Blog 10/19/2006 9:34am - Everyone is doing it, you should too!

I find it interesting how the ad/marketing community plays "follow the leader," shifting their thinking towards what the "industry thinks" rather than realistic planning. Has anyone thought about the end user and asked if consumers really care, or is the idea of "virgin marketing" more important? Are marketers falling for their own marketing? I'm reading story after story
about how the "entire industry" is making moves towards web content, but as of yet, no one has seen any real and definable ROI, and I wonder if they will. Sure there are some isolated successes which drive the hype machine, but can the money being spent on web migration make it viable? Is it the future, or just more hype being swallowed by a confused industry? Because one company wasted 1.6 billion, does that justify everyone else in following with the false hope of what the future brings? This all reminds me of how everyone quit their job in the nineties to become website designers because the "industry" said that was the future too. We were all going to have a website and that would become the "future of how business is done." Those folks have since found real jobs again after that hype-bubble burst.

YouTube gets plenty of visits, but are those visits something that we can turn into a viable market or are those "youtubers" just looking for the outrageous and "different" on a site that does what conventional TV can not and should not do?

YouTube is not unique. Ebaumsworld.com did the same thing a few years ago, offering all sorts of video posted by anyone who had the time, and it grew to millions of hits a month. The only difference between the two was that YouTube caught the hype wave. A visit to YouTube shows lots of visitors, primarily to any clip that has the word "sexy" in the title or any clip that shows someone getting injured or worse. Let's not confuse 30 second video clips with television programming. It is not!

I will not deny that some of the promotional postings by the TV networks get sometimes thousands of hits on YouTube. Why shouldn't they? It's a novel idea. But with viewer comments to these postings such as, "Thanks for posting this clip, now I know not to watch the TV program," it seems to me marketers are selling nothing more than the same ideas in a freshly painted room. YouTube works the way it is, but once the pop-ups, ad banners, and
conventional TV appear, will the 'viewers' still come? The industry may be moving with full steam to find their place on the web, but I actually see it as the second time they are trying this. The last time, it failed too. I think the industry needs to figure out how to invest in quality products and stop substituting marketing for their lack of viable content. That's why we
called television the BoobTube in the first place. And now we are just going
to call it YouTube.

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