Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

I’ve been silent since the writers strike was settled, waiting to see what changes in the television industry.  Now something has and while I don’t know that it’s because of the strike, I know it’s big.  NBC has announced it will abandon the traditional spring upfront season along with the traditional September to May programming schedule.  For TV viewers, this offers a chance that the summer months won’t suck.  While Fox has been giving lip service to a year-long season for a few years, it – like the other networks – has programmed the summer with a litany of reality programs, not what you normally think of as “network fare” (to the extent that that means anything anymore).  

NBC may just be blowing the same smoke, but, if they are not just going to give us another chance to watch non-actors not act the scripts that non-writers don’t write, there are two significant changes afoot.  One is that networks can no longer take the audience for granted, knowing they’ll be back in September after being ignored for the lower-revenue months of good weather.  This is a direct result of the internet offering programming as it is created and the cable networks offering series like the Sopranos and Curb Your Enthusiasm when the creators think they’re ready and not to fit an arbitrary date.  But for us in the digital media business, it means possibly breaking the insane linkage between the network upfront season and the digital upfront season.  

What?  Well, because networks run their seasons the way they do, network-related digital properties try to get marketers to spend money online the way they have been trained to do on air, with the dollars committed in May but the spend starting in September.  But the non-network media properties that we work with honor the marketer’s budget more than the networks' and try to get us to sign up for annual periods from January through December.  Squaring these two periods is a pain in the neck, and for companies like ours and marketers trying to allocate budgets across platforms, the prospect of thinking about spends in terms of fiscal/calendar years across the board is a relief because we can plan all at once rather than in two spurts when we have to guess at how much we might want to spend on certain platforms before we know what we’re spending it on.  (Image: Strong Bad's Teen Girl Squad)

Matt Rosenberg