Who's watching you?
Feb 1, 2007 12:00 PM, BY CRAIG BIRKMAIER
Getting close to your customers is critical for broadcast TV survival.
Do you know who watches the programming delivered by your station? If you are reaching for the latest ratings book so you can cite the number of viewers in specific demographic groups for various shows and day parts, stop!
This column is not about ratings and audience demographics. It is about the relationship your station has with its viewers.
Do you know their names, where they live and what they watch? Do you have the ability to communicate with them to better serve their needs? Are you building the tools and the skills needed to compete with those who have intimate knowledge about your customers and the ability to interact with them?
Chances are good that your answers to these questions are no. Why? Because you're a broadcaster. Your transmitters push analog and digital signals to the anonymous masses, the vast majority of which no longer use antennas to receive your signals.
You don't know them. They rarely communicate with you. And now you expect them to pay to watch your content if it is delivered by the cable, DBS and telco TV systems that serve your market. Some broadcasters may think this knowledge is trivial compared with the ability to leverage customer relationships to pad the bottom line with retransmission consent payments.
Maybe it's a good thing you don't know your viewers or talk to them. They might ask you why they should pay for the advertiser-supported content you have been giving away for decades. Perhaps they'll be sympathetic to your plight when you tell them that you want the same deal as all of those cable channels that they are paying for each month.
Here's why you need to worry about the future: Because analog TV could disappear in 2009. Because consumers may tell you and the rest of the TV industry where to stick it. And because they can spend the $50 to $100 a month they now send to a multichannel TV service to download the content they want via a broadband Internet connection.
A fork in the road
Be honest with yourself. Do you really believe that local broadcasting can survive the digital transition without changing the basic business model that has been in place since the middle of the last century?
I'm not talking about the DTV transition. That's almost over. I'm talking about the transition to a new digital communications infrastructure — the ability for anyone to access virtually any content at any time on a wide range of devices in the home, the office and on mobiles.
I'm talking about an emerging digital world, where the best coverage of that local news story comes from a viewer's video-enabled cell phone. I'm talking about the reality that a license to broadcast may stop being a license to print money.
We are approaching a fork in the road. One path leads to the digital cliff. The other leads to an intensely competitive digital world, where broadcasters will need to reinvent themselves in order to survive. Your survival will depend on the ability to leverage multiple infrastructures to get close to customers and the ability to create compelling content to meet their needs. Being a gatekeeper for media conglomerates that won't need your transmitters much longer will take you straight to the digital cliff.
Fortunately, the infrastructure to build relationships with viewers, and to create the new services that will help you survive, already exists. (Hint: It's called the Internet). A station's Web site may be the most important tool for the survival and rebirth of over-the-air TV.
But most stations are more concerned about the return on investment from new technologies they don't understand or control. Too many broadcasters think they do not have a back-channel to support one-to-one customer relationships, even as they rely on the infrastructure of competitors to reach those customers. Worse yet, they think they are in the TV business, not the information business, and that they are in the entertainment business, rather than the business of helping local advertisers connect with local customers.
David Kirkpatrick, a senior editor for Fortune magazine, notes that Web sites are the equalizer. “Regardless of their owners, they can all do the same set of things. In that fact lays the profound crisis facing all aspects of the media industry,” Kirkpatrick says. “It doesn't matter whether a Web site's owner once focused on publishing newspapers or magazines, broadcasting television or radio, making music or producing movies, or even selling soft drinks. Any Web site can host text, audio and video, it can facilitate connections and communication between users, and it can enable those users to create and display their own text, audio or video.” (See “Web links.”)
Case in point: When I need to get some information about a year-old local government story, I can't turn to a local station's Web site because the Gainesville, FL, stations do not maintain an archive of the stories they run in their newscasts. In fact, they do little more than use their sites as a shell to link to the Web sites of their network affiliates. Small wonder I go to the Gainesville Sun's Web site for news and www.wunderground.com to get the local weather forecast.
Radio is even further along. A local talk radio station turned to YouTube for a recent promotion. The station set up a contest for two tickets and an all-expenses-paid trip to Glendale, AZ, for the BCS National Championship game to watch the Florida Gators play (and defeat) the Ohio State Buckeyes. Contestants were asked to create a video stating why they should win and upload it to YouTube to share with fans. (See “Web links.”)
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