Dave

Last friday we welcomed illustrator and all round nice chap Marcus Oakley in to brighten up one of our internal meeting rooms. Armed with a head full of ideas and a bag full of paint pens, he spent a day turning the blank walls into something altogether more interesting.  From now on conference calls and powerpoint presentations will be held among smiling pencils, fields of mushrooms and clouds.

Check out more of Marcus’s work for Pointer Shoes, Howies, and Channel 4 among others at marcusoakley.com.

Dave's Sean McKnight appears in The Marketer magazine this month talking about managing multi-disciplinary teams.

Here's an extract:

...Sean McKnight, senior consultant at brand consultancy Dave, insists it’s essential to have one clear lead. Traditionally this tended to be the advertising agency, but today this bias is often unnecessary. As long as the client communicates which agency or consultancy is the lead, and what that means for project governance, they’re on to a winner, believes McKnight. “The client should also nominate a senior individual, who we call the client MD. The client MD role is to get the best from the consortium of agencies on behalf of the client.”...

Read the full article in The Marketer

Last week DAVE took part in Battlefronts – Channel 4’s documentary series about young people trying to change the world by campaigning for issues they care deeply about.  We were asked to help Holly Shaw raise awareness about organ donation and, more importantly, get more people to sign the organ donor register.

Two Minute Heroes was our campaign idea, based around a basic key insight: 90% of people in the UK agree with the concept of organ donation, yet only 23% have actually registered as a donor. We set about debunking the misconception that registering is both time consuming and a hassle. Our message is simple: it takes less time to sign up online than it does to make a cup of tea.

The campaign was hugely successful with GMTV, The Guardian and even The Prime Minister picking up on the key message!

“I want to give my support and thanks to Holly Shaw and all those involved in her campaign. Joining the organ donation register is a selfless act of kindness which only takes two minutes, can save many lives and offers new hope for potentially thousands of families across the country.”
The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown

So why not do something heroic today – put the kettle on.

Dan Bobby says that broadcasters’ attempts to shore up their lame content with snazzy brands are a temporary fix at best.  I agree.  He’s also right that fans of the Premier League or Sex and the City will seek out that content wherever it is. And it’s true that an easy-to-use electronic programme guide will be essential in making sense of masses of content.  But this won’t render channel brands redundant for one simple fact: the vast majority of content is unwatchable.

Because of this, people will always need mechanisms to select, edit and enhance content.  Not just today, but throughout the history of commercial entertainment.  There have always been aspiring musicians, comedians, filmmakers and footballers.  But most are useless.  So there has always been a need for talent scouts, theatre managers, investors, producers, and reviewers to choose and promote the best.  We will always need someone to sort the wheat from the chaff.

This is the role of the ‘channel brand’.  It is simply something or someone who regularly selects and presents a range of content based on some sort of reasonably consistent criteria: critical, thematic, political or just plain commercial.

Today it is mostly broadcasters who fill the role of ‘channel brand’.  For historical reasons – mainly because they owned or had access to the means of distribution – they have become pretty good at finding, selecting, commissioning, exploiting and marketing content.

But that won’t be the case for long.  Think about it; if you wanted to discover and select the best new music or film, you would turn to magazines, pundits, critics, bloggers or even knowledgeable friends.  All of these sources would become the new channel brands – trusted editors who can package and promote great content to exactly the right audience.  It’s not the content that we will buy from these brands, but their editorial choices, their opinion, their ability to sift through the rubbish and bring us something both reliably consistent with our expectations of that brand and occasionally surprising.  Since today’s technology allows anyone to produce content and the internet provides free distribution, the amount of content is increasingly rapidly.  That also means a torrent (pardon the pun) of rubbish.  So channel brands will be needed more than ever.

New ‘channel brands’ are already a fixture on traditional TV; MUTV, Teachers TV, even Girls Aloud T4 takeovers: but all these rely on the linear TV model and broadcaster support so they will always be limited in number and can’t exploit the openness and rapid natural selection of the internet.  It’s been happening widely online too; Mark Ronson podcasts, YouTube channels and video news from newspapers like The Telegraph.  But all these still feel quite limited in their ambition and are created for the ‘sit-up’ version of the internet (as opposed to a ‘sit-back’ TV experience).  I think the closest parallels are found in traditional media from confident brands: there is a TopMan magazine that runs fashion stories that include other high street retailers’ clothing – one could easily imagine that being turned into a complete channel.  The same is true of the Red Bull magazine.

So, all sorts of brands could do a great job of selecting and packaging relevant content.  They have multiple means of distribution online. As for the marketing, there are many tools that will rapidly help these new channel brands be adopted, promoted or dismissed; social bookmarking, RSS feeds, peer networks, blogging and tweeting are just a few of the tools where big audiences can be reached quickly.

So, the three ingredients for the new channel brands?

• First, have a clear point of view: use this to keep content consistent, but of course occasionally surprise. 
• Second, look for mechanisms to distribute the channel that allow an enjoyable TV-like experience – if you can’t do this make sure the presentation works for a sit-forward PC-experience. 
• Finally, make the content compatible with all the social media tools available to you to ensure your audience can find you.

But above all, never forget the oldest rule of all: content is indeed king.  Although we’ll never be able to account for taste.  According to viral video experts, Unruly Media, the most popular clip ever with over 130 million views is “The Evolution of Dance”.  And apparently 80 million of us watched Susan Boyle!

This month sees the international launch of Dave's campaign for
Sub-Zero & Wolf, the North American luxury kitchen appliance brands.

TV and the way we watch it is changing irrevocably, in the way it is produced and presented to us and how we choose to engage with it.  As always, technology is at the root of it, with new platforms and access technologies proliferating the amount of TV we can consume and challenging what we understand to be broadcast content in the process. 

More choice should mean the need for an editor or aggregator to steer us through and help find the can’t-miss nuggets we want  – perfect territory for channel brands perhaps?

Except it isn’t.  In fact, the opposite is true.  One of the outcomes of all this is that the old ad-funded business model is shot. Eyeballs=advertising revenue just doesn’t cut it any more. Lack of revenue reduces the ability to make or buy programmes which in turn cuts even more viewers and so the cycle repeats.

5 million+ viewers for anything other than major live sport or a ‘significant event’ are now virtually unheard of.  Audience fragmentation means tough questions about the long-term viability of not just TV channels but companies themselves.  Just ask ITV. 

Broadcasters are trying to fight back and one weapon in their armoury, which is increasingly being deployed, is the ‘branded channel’ - stronger, attitude or personality-led brands targeted to a key demographic who come because of the brand first and content second (or so the logic goes).

Most high profile of the channel brands have been the Channel 4 stable, with E4 being the younger, more fun version and More 4 the slightly more cerebral, grown-up brand.
All under the Channel 4 umbrella, which positions itself as edgy and non-mainstream.
(Big Brother anyone?)

Other examples to the branded channel approach include Dave and parts of UKTV, as well as Channel Five with Fiver and US. 

The reality is that this approach might stave off the inevitable briefly (in investment circles they call this the dead cat bounce, I think) but the long-term future for channel brands is bleak.  Rumours about the need for consolidation persist and even Channel 4’s future is far from assured. 

For audiences, the bottom line is that they want the programmes they want, when they want them.  They want to be in control and they want it to be easy to exercise that control.  Two things make me fear for the future of channel brands. 

Firstly, it has always been (and will always be) about the content.  If I am a fan of Sex and the City I will find it and watch it, irrespective of what channel it is on (I’ve probably go the whole series stored on my hard drive by now, anyway). 

If the Premier league moves away from Sky to another broadcaster then so will all the subscribers who watch live football.  No amount of channel ‘branding’ will make up for the gap left behind and consumers will promiscuously follow the content wherever it turns up. 

Secondly. technology is also making channels redundant.  Sky+ for instance is proving that all we want as consumers is a mechanism to get to the content we want quickly and easily (if that means by passing the channel in the process, so much the better). 

A good EPG (Electronic Programme Guide) or a clear consumer interface that allows search, select and download is all that is needed.  The channel becomes, at a stroke, redundant.  As consumers increasingly watch their programmes via the internet and/or PVR’s become the norm, people will build their own channels, not be spoon fed someone else’s idea of what should be on or not. 

In that instance, the question is not even ‘what is the role of channel brands but rather when will they disappear altogether?.

Building channel brands today is a little like building sandcastles – fun while you are doing it but soon to be washed away.  Go with the flow, save the money and invest in some original programmes instead.