Dave

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!

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.

History is full of discoveries that have become milestones in human thought, and inventions that have led to paradigm shifts in civilisation.

There are accepted lists of the most important, from the wheel and gravity to the microchip. Then there are the inventions that make a difference to our everyday lives, the objects that distil this white hot  technology into a usable format. Unsung heroes such as microwaves and credit cards.

The object that transformed my life and thousands of others in a subtle but profound way was the Walkman. Not strictly an invention, simply a refining of process, the initial product was so simple that many people could not understand what it did or why anyone would want one.

For those of us who did understand why, the Walkman did several things. It liberated music from the home, created a thousand imitators and ensured the success of the humble cassette. More than this, it tapped into the beginnings of MTV and gave each of us a personal soundtrack to accompany the unfolding pop video of our lives—at least until the batteries ran out.


It seems a little sad that Sony were unable to maintain a grip on the zeitgeist. Next to the iPod their products look slick but soulless, there is no experience attached to them, they’re just about the delivery of music. They seem to have forgotten that music is about enjoyment, not owning a multinational record company. Perhaps the developers at Sony should dig out their Personal stereos, spend an hour or two playing some old albums and get their groove back.

Last night Dave hosted the Luxury Marketing Council’s monthly chinwag.  This was the second Obama-themed event I’ve attended since the coronation, sorry, inauguration.  And, I admit to being a little sceptical when I read the title, “The Obama Digital Campaign: Digital Marketing in Politics and Luxury”.  A tenuous attempt to be topical or a cynical use of ‘Obama’ to lure in the crowds?

Well, I was right about the crowds; over 150 of the great and the good from Chanel, Mulberry, Rolex, Gucci, American Express, Serpentine Gallery and many other glittering names flocked to our bar at Dave Towers.

But as for the tenuous link, I was wrong.  It turns out that digital marketing in US presidential campaigns has a lot of lessons to offer luxury brands.  Honest.

Dan Rowe, the Dave representative on the panel reckons luxury brands have become egocentric.  They don’t involve their customers in the development of their brands.  In today’s open-source world that won’t cut it.  They’ve become super-protective of their logos and view inaccessibility as a route to prestige.

While there are good reasons for this behaviour, Dan Rowe thinks they need to be more open about how they manage their brand assets – just like the Obama campaign was happy for his image to be expropriated by Shepard Fairey – the curator and creator of the Obey website (“Manufacturing Quality Dissent since 1989).  Fairey was able to express the spirit of the Obama campaign eloquently and powerfully.  And the party machine was smart enough to recognise that the ‘spirit’ of a brand is much more important and powerful that the ‘letter’ of the brand.

Naturally this alarmed the luxury marketers who are used to battling hard to protect their brands from counterfeiters and pranksters. 

Watch this space to see Tom Ford embrace a Popbitch mash-up.