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!