Tuesday January 31, 2006

Advertising Wants to Be Free?

The New Marketing pundits had their knives out for ESPN yesterday, when the network was caught selling This is Sportscenter commercials on iTunes for $1.99 a pop. The iTunes message boards filled up with angry posts—the commercials are now free and the posts are gone—which isn’t surprising. I saw this firsthand when AdCritic.com became a subscriber-based, industry-targeted service. I would have gotten fewer emails, I think, if I’d burned the American flag in the middle of Third Avenue.

ESPN’s price point was certainly out of whack, but I don’t think charging for sponsored content is as absurd as ESPN’s critics make it out to be. It only seems absurd because advertising’s intrusive model has allowed ads to become so bad that consumers are doing companies a favor just by sitting through them. But people buy DVD collections of music videos, which are really just ads for songs. (In England, they are more honestly called “pop promos.”) People don’t expect DC Shoes’ hoodies to be free just because they bear the company’s logo. And plenty of people have spent money to see or own Dogtown & Z-Boys, despite the fact that the documentary was paid for by Vans.

Everyone agrees that marketers have to add value to their messages or they will be ignored by consumers. But there’s no reason this value can’t exceed the bare minimum required to earn someone’s attention. In fact, smart brands will find ways to provide quite a bit more value than that.

In the magazine world, there are different kinds of circulation that have different values for advertisers, based on the degree of consumer attention they require. Paid circulation is better than controlled circulation, and controlled circulation is better than free. So, how’s this for a new agency model? Agencies should be compensated based on which level of circulation they’re able earn for their clients’ content. Old, intrusive, “free circulation” messages earn the least, opt-in messages earn more, and content consumers will actually pay for earns the most. If ESPN had packaged the “100 Best This is Sportscenter Commercials” on iTunes for $1.99, I think they would have ended up on this third tier and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Posted by jim at 08:33 AM ||