Entertainment lawyer Kevin Morris seems to have a better understanding of the world of online entertainment than most. He’s got a great quote in a recent NYTimes article:

“Everybody says that content is king, but they’re not acting like it,” Mr. Morris said. “On the tech side, they don’t have any cultural understanding of the tradition of paying for talent. They’re enamored of user-generated stuff because they think ‘Entourage’ is real — that they’re going to get ripped off.”

He continued: “The media companies, meanwhile, are so big, they have no spirit of entrepreneurialism and they’re obsessed with being tough. Nobody wants to be the guy that overpaid. It creates a risk-averse culture, just at a time when we need risks.”

He’s right. With a few small exceptions, the world of online video is still obsessed with two things right now: technology and user-generated content. While content is king, everyone is afraid of it, and because of that they are also afraid to take risks. The old-school media companies, with all of their money, are racing themselves to the bottom.

Where does this leave us? My prediction is that we’re going to continue to see the real groundbreaking online video work from small companies and less traditional online media companies. The movie studio of the future isn’t at a lot in Burbank, but is in some office building in New York.

Now’s the time to jump in.

A few months ago I posted about the rise of consumer choice and how centralized media giants like MTV would be taking the brunt of this change.  Here is an article in today’s New York Times about how MTV is struggling with this very phenomenon.

As a brand, MTV has been beyond durable, managing to reinvent itself continuously and in doing so presenting a fast-moving target that left many would-be rivals in its wake…

But finding the edge was simpler before competition for its core demographic started coming from all fronts, from video games and social-networking Web sites to amateur clips on YouTube. And consumers can use the Web to come up with their own reality narratives — the current transformation of Britney Spears from pop superstar to bald alien is pretty tough for anyone to compete with.

According to a recent NYTimes article, many TiVo owners do not skip ads. Who knew?

“That’s part of the reward of taping: being able to zip through the advertisements,” said Marjorie Elson, a 62-year-old psychologist in Maryland. “But sometimes I do watch them — only if they capture me.”

Guess what? It pays to make an interesting ad, even on TV.

The story of Anheuser-Busch’s online television network, Bud.TV (NYTimes, login required)

Bud.TV may be a marketing venture at heart, but it is marketing sotto voce. The shows’ plots won’t revolve around the quest for the perfect beer and a beautiful woman to share it with. Characters won’t declaim the virtues of Budweiser’s freshness at every opportunity. The site won’t be cluttered with banner ads. Anheuser-Busch executives are banking on a more subtle connection. Attach a brand name to something cool, something entertaining, and that elusive young man (and to a lesser extent, young woman) may check out Bud.TV’s offerings again and again, send them along to friends, even take a stab at creating his own minifilm for the site.

Vote for the best Super Bowl commercial of 2007

Seth Godin writes about understanding the Super Bowl:

So, as you waste an evening watching television, understand that the media game you’re watching (as opposed to the football game) is not about selling anything per se. Instead, it’s about creating a short little movie that spreads.

When asked about this changing environment, your average big-shot creative director articulates a mission built on the creation of something along the lines of “compelling content,” the kind of stuff that people actively seek out in contrast to the spots hurled at them during breaks on “CSI: Miami.” … The problem for a big-shot creative director in 2006 was that the most compelling content wasn’t made by highly paid ad-agency teams and aired on TV.

Full story: http://adage.com/article?article_id=114132

If you a person who’s has a conversation with me since December, you’ve probably heard me mention this book. Once again, if you’re interested in figuring out where advertising is going, I couldn’t recommend it more. But for those of you who are too lazy to read the whole book… here’s Part 2 of my series on Life After the 30-Second Spot.

Jaffe brings up a shocking fact on page 15 about DVRs (aka TiVo):

David Poltrack, executive vice president of Research and Planning at CBS television, recently reassured us that DVRs are not much of a threat as once thought because internal research revealed that ad skippers recalled, on average, two commercials and one brand, which is essentially the same level of recall as with live TV.  This is just insane.

Wow. Let’s consider the implications:

• People don’t pay attention to TV commercials at all. Maybe it’s because the ads are intrusive? Are they improperly targeted? Maybe they just suck.
• An average TV ad is just as interesting when fast forwarding as when it’s playing at normal speed. Sounds like the ads aren’t very interesting.
• It’s really hard to get people’s attention. Certainly true.

The funny thing is, the people watching the DVR might be a more captive audience. Here are two scenarios:

• Viewer A doesn’t have a TiVo, and he got home just in time to catch the latest episode of Lost. After the first commercial break starts he runs to the bathroom, gets a snack, and then finally reaches the TV after the break is over.
  Total Impressions: 0
• Viewer B has set her TiVo to record Lost and start about twenty minutes late, so she can skip the commercials. In the meantime she’s already gone to the bathroom and had a snack. Once the first commercial break starts she hits the fast-forward button three times and whizzes through commercials in no time. However, her eyes are fixed on the screen. She sees a Burger King logo, a 3d-animated Mr. Clean (no logo necessary), and a Hummer. It’s important to realize that she’s been looking at the screen the whole time.
  Total Impressions: 3

Why is everyone so afraid of the TiVo?
Joseph Jaffe’s blog is located at www.jaffejuice.com

Since its inception 25 years ago, MTV has been using its centralized empire of channels to tell kids what’s cool. And clearly, they’ve had great success doing just that. MTV is undisputed as a major clearinghouse for mainstream youth culture. But now MTV is scared. Why? Because the future of media distribution is not in ‘channels’ in the traditional sense.

The channel of the future is based on personal preferences and is customized to the viewer. The individual creates the channel. Pandora.com provides a model for this future. Pandora is an internet radio site that gives the listener the ability to create custom radio playlists centered around musical styles they already like.

If you’ve never used it, here’s how it works. I enter, “Miles Davis” – and I get Miles Davis Radio. This station includes Miles Davis and other artists whose profiles contain elements that Pandora has concluded make up Davis’ sound. For example, the third song on the playlist is a live cut of Scotch and Water played by Cannonball Adderly. Pandora lists the following, as qualities that it finds similar in both Miles Davis and this track by Adderly:

• hard bop influences
• bop influences
• a lively alto sax solo
• a piano solo
• a driving swing feel
• strong melodies
• a groove oriented approach

Miles Davis Radio is great, all my old faves. But what happens when I add another variable? This is where it gets interesting. So next I enter, “The Rolling Stones”. Suddenly I am presented with not just Miles Davis radio and not just Rolling Stones radio, but a calculated mélange of artists who combine qualities similar in both Davis and the Stones. This is where I’m turned on to a great song called He Went Down to The Sea, by a group called The Monks–who I’ve never heard of. Pandora decided that The Monks song was something I might like because, according to Pandora:

Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features basic rock song structure, a subtle vocal harmony, repetitive melodic phrasing, mixed acoustic and electronic instrumentation and major key tonality.

Far out! At Pandora, each listener has his or her own channel and that channel is constantly changing as the listener’s tastes shift.

So why is MTV scared?

In a Pandora-style world, the winners will be those media outlets that prove to be the most personalized and the most diverse, not the most centralized. MTV can only offer so many shows in a day, and certainly only so many shows that any one person could be interested in. But with Pandora, the listener’s options are infinite, and all of those options have been custom-fitted to the user. Would you shop at Amazon or eBay if they carried only what they thought was cool? The Pandora-model works the same way – it empowers the listener. In a Pandora-world, kids no longer need an MTV to tell them what they like. Pandora offers kids a much bigger pool of potential favorites, and from those choices the kids can figure out what they like for themselves.

This decentralization presents a lot of problems for a network like MTV. But for the consumer and the advertiser alike, it’s a boon. Here’s why: advertisers finally have the information needed to target their ads at those most likely to be interested in their product. This in itself is revolutionary, but it’s nothing new: Google, Amazon, and many others are already using architectures such as this to direct their search engine ads and product suggestions. What I am really excited about are the new sub-cultures and cultural sub-groupings that these metrics are going to recognize and promote.

Take for instance, this hypothetical example. What if GameStop discovered, that as a group, punk rock listeners who are also Bach fans tend overwhelmingly to be avid Nintendo Wii players? It’s an advertiser’s dream. It’s a chance to carve out new brand loyalty in highly-specific groups that essentially didn’t exist or recognize themselves as groups before.

This is beyond the grasp of MTV one-size fits all youth marketing. But for those blazing the trail of advertising with metric-based placement it will be a chance to get the first scoop on new audiences as they are created. MTV, watch out!