get the picture?

Well, now here's one killer notion Abode's just offered: Flash everywhere.

With new technologies seemingly raining from the skies, it's easy to lose sight of the Great Leaps Forward when they bubble up.

This is one, so intimately tied to the future of how we'll interact with brands and entertainment that 'game changing' may be too feeble an adjective.

Here's what's up: Adobe's Flash 10.1 will now deliver high-quality video literally wherever there's a Flash socket. Heretofore, Flash functionality was limited to the so-called "PC web"—laptops and desktops.

Now Adobe has jumped the connectivity gap. Everything connected (and configured, of course: there will be upgrades) can now run the same video content: mobile, netbooks, gaming devices, TV.

What this means is revolutionary, not least because Adobe's Open Screen Project has quietly been attracting partners like Google Android and RIM's BlackBerry for the past year. (Apple's iPhone has been temporarily sidelined. Something to do with iTunes, you think?) The OSP is dedicated to creating seamless video experiences everywhere. No longer will mobiles strip out Flash content in formatting web pages for smartphone browsers; no longer will gaming platforms be blind to web video content.

And the kicker? Seamless web experiences for TV...everywhere. The Holy Grail of Convergence is now very, very close. Imagine pure web experiences on your connected TV or gamebox. Or in your car's GPS.

Ubiquity.

And now imagine your brand leading that experience, leading new discovery by multiple niched audiences via the platform of their choosing.

The interactivity now possible for brands to explore new media with their audiences (this WILL be collaborative, folks) is breathtaking; the new possibilities for branded experience across multiple platforms will shape how consumers live and engage each other in the new world of Pull...and how they live with and engage with brands.

Here we go...

Come bearing gifts

One plus one equals...maybe five. Let's take a look at two breaking stories about online video.

The skyrocketing stat.s detailing interactivity with streaming video are pretty well conclusive: the landslide has become an avalanche.

Parse out what the latest ComScore viewer numbers suggest and things get even more interesting. Note that Facebook has climbed into the top ten; while it's a given that Google's properties lead the pack (eg YouTube et al), that a social media site is rising fast in the video engagement sweepstakes is Big News.

What's this mean to media buyers trying to calculate their best venues for IOB (Impact on Business) in the Age of Pull?

Everything.

Social media consumers are the savviest minds on the web. They're the market niches everybody wants: the early adopters, the influencers, the alpha males and the gamma females whose interactions in online communities shape the power of the web. I'll say that again: they shape the power of the web.

And here's the kicker—these folk hate banner ads. One of the most empowering things these folk do is NOT to click banner ads.

They are less likely to click on ads because they overwhelmingly prefer to interact with video.

To these users, video is a gift, an opportunity to interact, not a flat "push" ad—which (if they're anything like the folk I live with on Facebook, they'll ignore as crude and condescending.)

Here's the killer distinction, courtesy Lotame Co-op's interactive creative insight numbers released yesterday:

"Of the banner types in the social media space, we found that video creatives had higher click-through rates than non-video units, with in-page units performing better on average from a CTR standpoint than expandable ads. When compared on the three most common banner sizes on the Lotame Co-op, we found that wide skyscrapers (160x600) had the highest click-through rate performance, followed by medium rectangles (300x250), and leaderboards (728x90), which had roughly the same click-through rate performance...

The full report's here.

In a nutshell, taken together, the August 2009 video stat.s and the Lotame analysis are yet another nail in the coffin of Push.

The takehome is simple: if you want to create a conversation around your brand, use the creative medium that's not only going to change minds but change the very minds whose opinions shape the web.

Streaming creative video.

It's that simple. Be well.

Trust me...if you can find me

Last time we chewed over the Age of Pull and the new art of listening.

OK: so what do you really want to hear from your business?

The cash register. It's all about return on investment, any media decision, correct?

Well, in the Age of Pull, despite the near-complete inversion of media strategy underway (and wait until we have mobile analytics and addressable TV metrics) there's no doubt we have to keep our eyes on the prize of growing sales and innovating our products. That hasn't changed...but damn near everything else has.

Here's a terrific refresher course in what ROI means in the Age of Pull...and that's pretty well what it's meant since the Age of Steam: for every dollar invested in the company, there's an incremental return. The ROI slideshow's author Olivier Blanchard isn't a social media skeptic: far from it.

While he's 'media-agnostic', Olivier's all for it. He just thinks that the ka-ching off the till is the be-all and end-all.

But here's where he and I part company: where in the Age of Push, media spend used to be a direct linear equation (more or less), as Olivier so wittily and thoroughly details—and I love the slideshow's old sci-fi motif: brilliant—now it's not.

Olivier's analysis of SM metrics is masterful...it's a clear roadmap for the whys and wherefores of social media expenditure vs return. I don't think he goes far enough. But he's built the basement beautifully.

And for media investors looking at their company's value chain (with their customers out there in the haze at the far end, looking like they're beginning to run the show), it's a Wonderland. Where to begin?

Engagement with the brand. That's terra firma.

And what does that mean in the Age of Pull, when the audience is running the show?

It means BEING FOUND.

If your web presence is simply no more than a corporate website glowing with product info...who really cares?

If no one really cares enough to search for you, why will they come to your site?

Here's why...and it's ALL about branding your engagement experience. Nothing else matters.

Why? Because social media is the most powerful tool for creating conversation but it's also an amazing amplifier of your messaging. Right here. Right now.

And I'm not talking flat Twitter metrics or friends on Facebook. You gotta drill down deeper, because in the Age of Pull, it's not mere hits that count—it's what they're saying about you (which you can respond to: it's a conversation out there) and, equally importantly, it's how they're saying what they're saying about you (who are the opinion leaders? why are the lurkers watching and what are they watching/waiting for?)

Check this out. Liana Evans isn't a social media evangelist. She's a hard-core search engine analyst. She loves data. But she also gets PULL...and the conversations PULL engenders. And she knows that people who live on web—for product reference, for consumer advice, for intelligence of all stripes to live their lives better—increasingly trust social media. Why?

Aside from the fact ComScore tells us that YouTube—the king of social media sites—has just passed Yahoo as the No. 2 search engine (my 10 year-old taught himself Photoshop off YouTube in three days FYI: talk about convergence), there's a dead simple answer.

IT'S RELEVANT. I personally source all my automotive repair decisions off the Swedish Bricks blog, dedicated to Volvo owners. I can get complete diagnoses and parts/service advice from Volvo mechanics and enthusiasts...within minutes. Free, from a community of people I trust. I save $70/hr bench time and on parts as well.

That's what I call Pull. Nobody's shilling at me: I'm creating a conversation around my steering rack and there's a community out there just dying to help me. (It works for every consumer decision from lawyers to leaf blowers to laundry detergent. The answer's out there.) Do I buy Volvo parts from Volvo? Yep. Do I overspend on repairs? Nope. I now know what I'm doing when I bring my car in for repairs. Should Volvo be part of this conversation? Uh huh. Are they? Nope.

Liana gets this. I'm not sure Olivier does...and for sure he gets the importance of being found. He just doesn't appear to grasp the pent-up power for changing and opening minds out there is something far deeper than marketing AT people.

It's about trust. Win their trust and you'll be top of mind when they reach for the product on the shelf or click your product into their online shopping cart.

People trust social media now. And their appetite for the abundance of intelligence online is bottomless.

So you have to ask yourself, in the Age of Pull, "how are they gonna find me?"...and—killer question—"why should they trust me?"

Engagement, baby. They'll find you if you've made the effort to engage your audience on their terms, with content they find relevant, useful, applicable, hypercustomized, in a voice they believe, in an experience they find at once authentic and intimate.

Final note: if you have any doubts that social media aren't going to rule the engagement game of the future, take a gander at this demo of Google Wave. Email is going to become realtime chat: out of the inbox and into the conversation. The message is the medium. (Sorry, Marshall.)

Next time around: "come bearing gifts"—comedy and the art and science of engagement in the Age of Pull. Be well.

Listen. Then listen again: welcome to the Age of Pull

We all know there's a supernova of social media out there, a space rich with smart people ready to share opinions and open debate that builds consensus, about everything from online banking to diapers to eco-tourism to...your brand, right?

There's also an attendant terror of "losing control of the message." A valid concern...but one that the history of the web is washing over a warpspeed.

Welcome to the Age of Pull. The Age of Push—one-way communications and marketing predicated on hierarchy and control and enforced scarcity rather than the abundance of online interaction—it's over. So over. (For more on why, read Jeff Jarvis' terrific roadmap to Web 3.0, What Would Google Do?)

What Fresh Baked does with our branded comedy webisodes is engage those "high-value" folk who are your best lifetime customer investment. (There's precious little point in starting anywhere else, is there?) We figure the brightest and most vocal have a real penchant for funny. And they know how to "onpass" conversations authoritatively and objectively.

So who to learn from best? Who best works with the niche-dwellers who lead opinions, who're early adopters, and who beat the drum most effectively for a new brand experience? We'd submit it's those organizations who have most at risk...and the fewest resources: non-profits.

Make no mistake: Fresh Baked wants corporate clients with deep pockets and vivid brand imaginations. But the learning piece for heavyweight corporate clients—the most instructive evidence—may well lie with those organizations who have no choice but to think lean and think creative. They don't have the resources. They need to be smart with the pennies they have (thank you, Bernie Madoff.)

Here's a shop we read routinely, the Non-Profit Marketing Guide, a savvy and simple daily read from the trenches of working the media and the blogosphere for cash-starved non-profits. There's more strategy here than most boardrooms, we reckon.

We'll make it way easy: if you like lists that'll help you clear your head about how best to work with the blogosphere and the battalions of Twitter and Facebook people who're on your radar but not vice versa, check this out: how to figure out your "ROI of Listening" to the digital social media conversation about your brand out there...which is really (of course) in here. Right where you are now: in the digital conversation.

FreshBaked's branded entertainment is one superb medium to engage this conversation, to open up new and innovative ways of having people talk about your brand—with our comedy web series structured around your messaging needs, we're here to launch (and listen to!) a remarkably powerful and memorable conversation about your brand. And—equally importantly–we can help you listen to that conversation in measurable, mission-changing ways.

Laughter—can you beat it for starting a conversation? We think not.

This is gonna be fun...what're you waiting for?

Help me, I'm drowning in TMI

It's elementary. Advertisers and marketers have to go where the consumers are. And that, for now, for sure, is social media.

Question is, what's the best way to engage consumers on their own terms in this strange and wonderful new world?

We think WARC, the UK based advertising research group, has its eyes on the prize: identifying brand experiences that are the most engaging, most powerful modes of all—the ones that build relationships by deepening emotional connections with brand values.

Here's more, from Alexandra Wheeler, Starbucks head of digital strategy:

"A brand can promote the heck out of themselves on Facebook and still not build a following if they don't have anything behind that and only nurture and care about it as marketing but not as relationships...(Another important goal) is the translation and understanding [of] whether these communications add value to the bottom line and the business and we believe they do."

...which is why The Big Heads at Fresh Baked are happily tilling that rich rich marketing soil where comedy meets branded content.

You can Twitter all you like—and Twitter's a superb quick-hit distribution too—but if it's a brand community you want (and that's the Promised Land for marketers: relationships that add up to brand communities) then you need far more than simply a Tweet.

And can anyone top entertainment for brand engagement via social media? Doubtful. Comedy clips made viral video, simple as that.

Want more proof?

First watch this, a stunning YouTube overview of the supernova of social media, right here, right now.

And then weigh those amazing stat.s and the explosion of social media messaging possibilities against this, a terrific GigaOm piece on the failure of realtime search to help us contextualize/personalize the 'gushing firehose' of social media today.

The PR agencies recognize the power of the medium—they're ramping up social media content creation—but is all that content actually engaging anybody the way branded entertainment can?

We say no. Point is, for a brand experience to work, context is everything...without relevance that builds engagement (that in turn builds brand communities), we face brainmelt from Too Much Information.

We're drowning in a sea of TMI—which, contrariwise, is why branded entertainment is innately a messaging aggregator of such power. Why drown your brand when you can engage?

Want to know more? Call Rob or Brett @ 647.346.3521. They'll bend your ear.

Funny you should ask

The evidence keeps piling up that we're sitting on a branded entertainment powder keg here at FBE HQ. (So much so we're thinking of giving the bomb squad the heads up. More on this in a coupla weeks, when we indeed will have a Big Bang to report.)

So where do folks meet to talk about the hottest entertainment URLs? Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn, of course, which are spinning off numbers which suggest very strongly that digital social media is an absolutely vital brand dialog space.

According to data from market research consultants Anderson Analytics, some 110 million people in America visit Facebook or MySpace at least once every month. (Jeez, in my house, there's at least three of us on Facebook at least twice a day.)**

Here's the killer: 52% of those same people have already "friended" a brand—established a peer relationship online with a product—and a further 20% more would "like to" share more dialog from their favourite brands.

Anderson's test group was 5,000 strong; here's what these opinion leader/"early adopters" are up to:

Overall, the average user of web properties like Twitter and LinkedIn visits these sites on five separate days each week, typically doing so four times a day for around 15 minutes at a time.

Within this group, 9% of netizens stay signed in to their portal of choice throughout the day, and are "constantly checking out what's new."

That's an average of five hours a week that nearly two visitors in five to these sites are likely to interact with a brand peer2peer.

That's staggering compared to scattershot TV and print ad.s—and the Anderson numbers don't break out the building tsunami of mobile social media dialog with brands. (That roar you hear in the distance? That's the tidal wave of mobile, heading for shore...)

So where's all this brand dialog going? LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are the savvy brand marketer's go-to sites for now, especially LinkedIn, with its desirable $89K annual household income benchmark, well above Facebook's $61K AAHI. (The place to connect with the student body? MySpace, because it's the hot corner for music peer2peer; Twitter if you want to spread a clip or soundbite blurry fast.)

Now comes the juicy part: how do you connect with these content-hungry communities? What's the best context for a brand dialog?

That's the web-wide engagement question, right now.

We think (modestly, truly) it's us.

Want to start a memorable conversation at the pub or around the dinnertable? You tell a funny story, right?

Want to start a memorable brand dialog, one that engages from the brainstem up?

We'll get your brand talked about amongst the most articulate and most "likely to share" communities on the web, via episodic comedy experiences that'll burn brand into your target market's funny bone.

Call us. Let's talk webisode.

**with files from subscription-only Wall Street Journal (13 July 2009) and WARC.com (13 July 2009) links

The Grey Lady Speaks Fresh Baked

Well, looks like the universe is catching up with us here at Fresh Baked. In today's New York Times, right there on page B1, there's the low-down: rising broadband capacity and convergence—the public's willingness to play on any digital screen, not just TV—have conspired to create two tipping points.

The first is broadband capacity: it's now no longer a sketchy experience to watch a short film online—entire TV episodes are well established Hulu-fodder. (So much so, Hulu may move to a cable-eseque subscription model entirely.) And Hulu has grown 490% in a single year, making the site the second strongest online video content brand after YouTube.

Web video quality isn't IMAX yet but it's certainly lush enough for the (illicit) viewership of film and TV sites like Surfthechannel.com to explode in past year, never mind the US, UK and Canadian broadcasters cutting entire TV series loose online. Moreover, the proliferation of HD cameras in the hands of web-savvy filmmakers young and old portends a tsunami of content coming down the interweb pipe.

The second phenomenon is where we live. The web literally has no time constraints for streaming content; it's a natural home for short films, as MarketingVox notes, echoing the Times. And that's what we do: branded episodic comedy series for the web.

There's no question now: none whatsoever.

The future of engagement is online and the future of online engagement is video. Here's the gospel from on high, the dude at Nielsen, the measurability people:

"Historically short form, clip-length video has ruled streaming on the web - as demonstrated by YouTube's top spot month after month,” said Jon Gibs, VP, media & analytics, Nielsen Online. "Hulu, along with pure-play providers like Veoh and the TV networks, has spent the past two years trying to convince consumers that the internet can be a good place to watch full length programming as well. April's strong showings of Hulu, Fox, and ABC suggest that consumers are beginning to listen."

And the hottest viral content that consumers want—witness the bottomless online appetite for comic viral video—is comedy.

So, marketers: you want an audience with a vast appetite for comedy we can help you brand, help you build engagement and drive folks to the cash register...what're you waiting for?

How big is it?

At Fresh Baked, we’re  all about engagement via comedy webisodes: creating engagement, episode after episode, over the arc of a series, with sharply funny takes on the most authentically human of situations….and all shaped with an eye to amplifying audience relationship with the client’s brand.

 

One of the questions we’re asked most is brutally simple: you guys are funny and you talk pretty but how do you measure return on investment with your stuff?

 

Great question. How do you quantify engagement with a short film that’s not an ad and not a broadcast episode, subject to third party audit by the likes of Nielsen?

 

The short answer: we specialize in converting niche market segments, the web-savviest conversation-starters, the alpha males and females of web opinion.

 

And where do they live? In social media: FaceBook, MySpace, and, increasingly, Twitter. The “speed of adoption” of these community-building tools has defied all prediction; Twitter in particular seems headed for global domination as the medium of choice on the web. Personal networking, in short, is literally becoming the web…and vice versa.

 

Here’s the game-changer: industry standard measurement of social media. At last: on May 5, the Interactive Advertising Bureau announced the first industry-standard metric for determining ROI in participatory media. There's a meaty PDF explaining all: well worth the read. 

 

More on this as the metrics evolve, folks—this is the beginning of a whole new meaning of ROI. Be well. 

Loved her...loved him too, sorta

Thereʼs nothing better than poking the odd giant in the eye. And when it comes to venerable topic of branded entertainment and recent campaigns launched, we feel no compunction at sharpening up the old stick and making like we never heard our motherʼs warnings about sharp sticks and vulnerable eyes.

So here goes...

The most recent of the recent is ConAgra Foodsʼ Healthy Choice campaign, spokespersonwanted.com, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus and the underrated but absolutely brilliant Don Lake. Directed by Christopher Guest of Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show mockumentary fame, the campaign follows the exploits of Louis-Dreyfus as super agent Doug tries to convince her to be the new spokesperson for Healthy Choice.

Hereʼs what we like. Superb writing (so far). Even better performances (so far). The story-line works the brand into the story in a believable manner. We like them promoting the next episode coming out today. We like the sharing functionality built into the website. We like the sidebar interview with super agent Doug that extends the brand experience. We like the coupon offer.

What we donʼt like.

Well, either the client – who we generally applaud – or the agency got cold feet and put a little too much “look at me holding the package lovingly” action in the blocking. It was like they all of a sudden thought they were working on a television ad again. And to be fair, there is every indication that this will be released as an ad. Not only that, and to be transparent with the inside workings of Fresh Baked Entertainment, our Creative Director, the contrarian Brett Heard, feels that when Louise-Dreyfus holds up the package ʻlovinglyʼ, there is so much disdain in her expression, that if counters any T.V. ad pack shot sensibility.

Finally, thereʼs no social media angle included offering customers and prospects an opportunity to get involved. Weʼre not going to take off full marks on that one though because we know from our experience that corporate lawyers have absolutely no sense of humor when it comes to social media. They can be real kill joys in this regard demanding monitoring regimes that put the cost of social media into the stratosphere.

What is still in doubt is how strong the story lines will actually be. Will there be character development and will the story move out of super agent Donʼs office? What would be most disappointing is after such strong launch, the subsequent episodes are treated more like a campaign of T.V. ads. Stay tuned.

Contrast the Healthy Choice effort to the another recent and well-funded foray into branded entertainment, bewarethedoghouse.com for J.C. Penney. Launched with great fanfare and soaring YouTube hits before Christmas, this effort had oh so much promise.

We were positively giddy at first watching. Then like a bad Tim Allen movie in which Santa Claus does not save Christmas, we were profoundly disappointed with where it went, rather, did not go. The initial hit had a great branded entertainment piece based on a males-only purgatory (the doghouse), where the only way out – hint, hint– was a purchase of diamonds from J.C. Penney. The website had all sorts of participatory opportunities allowing women to place their current squeeze in the doghouse. Emails were then sent to the offending lovers with a suggested reprieve, one that included a trip to the Penney.

The branded entertainment film itself was funny and well shot. What led though to our great disappointment was the one-off thinking. Not that we like to generalize but it really felt like the typical old fashioned ad agency M.O. After setting up a situation that just screamed for episode two and three and four... one for each of the diamond giving holidays like Valentineʼs Day and Motherʼs Day, they went silent. Only to reintroduce us to the same episode in the spring.

Sorry guys, been there, done that. We want something new. So says the consumer, so should the marketer deliver. To us it seems like the blew their wad on the production of the first film. With such a great story premise, they shouldʼve found a way to shoot five episodes for the same money and strung the resulting engagement out over the year, jumping back into the market with the latest installment with every holiday.

So what can we learn from all this? Well, first, one story is not enough. The marketing lynchpin to branded entertainment is a story that brings the consumer back on their own—again and again. Thatcreates hand-raisers. The second learning is that once youʼve started the conversation, giving the viewer and chance to participate is a good thing.

And finally, we of sharp stick in hand fame, respectfully submit that those marketers who are turning a blind eye (sharp stick, blind eye, get it?) to branded entertainment as a powerful tool to build emotional engagement and hence brand loyalty, are going to be the ones that find themselves sent down to the doghouse.

SEARCH ME

So: what comes after Google, in an online cosmos where online bookmarking and tagging and rating are booming, scaling up almost faster than we can comprehend...and where the visual is the new king?
This week Thomson/Reuters announced a hint of what’s to come: a “cloud” search result for all text relationships to reportage of a given news event.
Thomson Reuters has partnered with Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society to launch the Media Cloud, a set of research tools for tracking online media coverage. The joint effort is meant to bring some clarity to the vast tangle of news and information on the Web, attempting to answer questions about what types of stories are covered by which media sources, where stories begin, and how blogosphere coverage compares to that of the mainstream media.
As reported in Mediapost.com, TR and the Berkman media wonks at Harvard set themselves an interesting problem: which “drives” news, the blogosphere or the mainstream media? And how best to visualize the results?
Well, fellow doughheads, take a gander for yourself at the Mediacloud website. TR's Big Heads realized a graphical representation of the momentum of a story is far more valuable to grasping what’s actually happening than a simple Google-based hierarchical “blue-underlined” page result, the PageRank result we all know and love.
That’s relevance. That’s engagement.
At Fresh Baked, we’re convinced that relevance is everything in creating engaging content. We spend a fair bit of our time not only in building relationships with our clients and assembling new comedy strategies but also in parsing what our clients are really telling us.
Here’s one HUGE client-side message: how is the audience going to find your work for us?
Google is failing, incrementally, in answering this question. Why? Because although Google is “aware” of a Milky Way’s worth of URLs [over a trillion now, and counting] but the algorithms stand literally zero chance of actually indexing this supernova of information.
Ladies and gentlemen, social network analysis is the Next Big Enchilada: analysis of the network of networks of people who are totally connected to each other.
To understand what this means is not only to understand the meaning of search post-Google but to grasp the very guts of marketing itself.
Why, you ask? Because, just like search—the science of information retrieval on the web—marketing is all about cognitive psychology, language, statistics and relevance, relevance, relevance.
Problem is, web search was never conceived for the commercial and visual medium the web now indisputably is.
Tapping graphically into the “search wisdom of crowds”—just as ThomsonReuters/Berkman’s MediaCloud has done—is to begin to understand how web search must evolve new “tools of engagement,” without which the new signals we humans are sending one another—the online multi-voice dialogue around user-generated content, from photo-sharing to video—the web will be so much…noise.
Point is, Fresh Baked thinks the future of marketing on the web isn’t so much about clicks…but about cliques.
More on that next time, doughheads. Meantime, want some great further reading?
Download The Economist's superb insight about marketing strategies in These Difficult Times. Now: it's terrific.
Be well.

Divorce, American style

Marketing is all about relationships.

And in this current economy, boyoboy, do we ever have a lotta marketing relationships on the rocks. While some strong and proven marketing marriages are as strong as ever, after a scan of the trades, sure feels to me like there were a slew of dysfunctional marriages out there in marketingland, with all too few therapeutic moments.

And now, with the economy in retrograde, as the astrologers say, we’re learning some very hard lessons indeed about marketing value and ROI…and the future of every advertising model under the sun.

To say print budgets have cavitated is putting the case mildly. They’re vanishing at warp speed; Condé Nast, home to Vanity Fair and the king of NY magazine houses, has shuttered or sliced circ throughout its lineup; Portfolio has halved its frequency. Even Vogue, mere months after its annual monster September issue hit the newsstands, has the feel of a mailbox brochure. It flops rather than thuds when you drop the sucker: that’s the sound of advertising revenues fleeing the jurisdiction.

Will Google, as scuttlebutt has it, buy The New York Times? The grand old lady of newspapers just closed a fat refinancing loan with a Mexican billionaire at 14% interest, ladies and gentlemen—and that, the street has it, is simply to cover interest payments on existing debt, the "deck chairs on the Titanic scenario;" flagship American newspapers, like The Rocky Mountain News and The Philadelphia Inquirer are toast.

And today, on the New York Times’ media blog, contribs pose the $64,000 question: do we still need network TV?

As somebody who worked for years in the trenches Canadian TV, I really think the jury’s out. CanWestGlobal looks like another cripple at the back of the flock, waiting to be picked off; south of the border, the executive suites are sweating bullets about the very future of network entertainment, with the exception of TNT’s push, new dramatic material rare as hen’s teeth. (HBO’s gone stale, you ask me. Damages and Mad Men are solid stuff but with little of the operatic highs and lows of The Wire or The Sopranos.)

As if the writers’ strike and the 2008 collapse of the US autumn pre-buy ad cycle wasn’t enough, advertising’s vanishing before the network brass’s eyes. People aren’t actually watching net less TV—they’re just shattering the broadcast timeslot model and moving away from the ads that feed the TV beast.

How, we’re asking around The Bakery, do you keep the ads following the video? And what strategies keep that video close to the cash register?

Let's back up.

Does anyone honestly believe that a greater ratio of ads per broadcast half hour is going to do anything but drive people farther away from primetime—especially via DVRs—except for sports and talent/reality shows? How how do you market in a black hole? At Fresh Baked, we’re convinced that advertising and marketing messaging without an engagement premium—we think it’s laughter and learning—is a non-starter.

Here’s what Ad Age has to say about the imperiled broadcast model’s equally vulnerable cousin, cable TV:

Both the networks and cable operators have a lot to lose if the subscription model breaks down, but the networks are particularly vulnerable. For the last two decades, cable has dined out on broadcast ad dollars, moving from 20% of their revenue from advertising to 50% today. But the salad days are over; TV advertising is flat, and operators such as Viacom have sustained themselves with subscriber revenue in the midst of flat or declining advertising…

[snip]

….one cable network executive said including those who watch online could increase a show's TV rating by as much as 10%. "In a flat-is-the-new-up universe, 10% is a big gain. Until you start to put it in those terms, you're not going to move dollars from TV to online," he said.

Absent that, US network TV has every appearance of a creative race to the bottom. And if you believe Jay Leno at 10pm is going to revive the creative state of the network nation, I got this bridge in Brooklyn—she needs a new owner. Crap TV will drive out the good, increasingly.

There’s no going back. HULU and its timeshifting online kin are the bridge technology, because without fresh hits, HULU is in danger too. And who’d gonna pay for the content that drives the system? Pirate film sites like [insert pirate site URL here] only amplify the argument that copyright—and thus the impetus to create new work for network TV—is doomed.

Back in the early 1950s, when the Hollywood studio system finally shattered with TV’s rise, cinema didn’t die. I don’t expect broadcast TV will die entirely either, even in the face of the web’s vast potential to dominate distribution without regard to time constraints.

But like so much about the American experience today, the days of the broadcast empire—just like the days of Louis B. Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn half a century ago—are numbered too.

Touch me there

It’s a curious thing, intimacy. Most of us aren’t more than passingly good at it and we all worry, at one time or another, about “giving it all away.”

Here’s the thing.

When the web first entered daily consciousness, sometime around 1997, the only thing anyone really understood the vast reaches of cyberspace—dwarfed today by the supernova of data the web’s become—was that it was a kind of electronic card catalogue…without the benefit of a Dewey Decimal System.

Remember when AltaVista was state-of-the-art search technology? Sure you do. In those days, the whole internet beast was fact-based, driven by what Rob Tait, our fearless leader, came to know as “speeds and feeds” when he worked on the Apple account back when he had hair.

Call it the Golden Age of Dial-up. And dial-up internet didn't do intimate.

No more.

What’s really going online appears chaotically innovative but underneath the hood, it’s really quite simple: the web is growing more and more like the human nervous system. [A metaphor that the web’s founder, Tim Berners-Lee, is working on exploiting right now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Center_for_Collective_Intelligence]

That's huge, no? But marketers in general are still immune to a shockingly simple rule of life on the web: it’s not your mom’s web any more.

Broadband—which gave us Fresh Baked’s métier, online video—now means the web is experiential far more so than hierarchical.

What’s this mean? It means that the degree of emotional engagement—collective emotional engagement—is exploding before our very eyes.

Sure, Facebooking is one facet—instant intimacy in instant neighbourhoods. But then there's the tantalizing prospect of far deeper, far more authentic emotional experiences, drawing on the collective creativities of the worlds of theatre, film, advertising, gaming, the performing arts…even geography, given the power of geographic information systems to bring databases to life.

Marketers ignore this tidal wave of web-change at their peril.

In my humble opinion, we’re living smack-dab in the middle of the kind of technological revolution Sony incited via the transistor, the handheld radio that sent Motown and The Beatles into superstardom from Tokyo to Toronto. The Walkman, which made Michael Jackson, the VCR, the DVD, the Flash player: you get the idea.

Every new media technology inspires a revolution in…everything.

Politics, sports, art, communication, cuisine...leisure and education.

Everything.

We connect better. And when we connect collectively online, the depth of the engagement—think: Barack Obama’s Facebook campaign and its amplifying effect on volunteer recruitment and motivation—is earthshaking.

What we do at Fresh Baked is to water one small part of the emotional engagement garden: comedy.

No small thing, that.

The emotional engagement power of comedy—and its already built-in familiarity from fifty years of weekly sitcoms to bring in massive audiences—means that what brought billions of eyeballs to I Love Lucy and Your Show of Shows and Monty Python and All in the Family and Friends and Seinfeld is just waiting to be harnessed for the web.

Repeatedly: week after week after week.

One-off comedy virals be damned: give me a reason to come back to your website every week and see something riotously new and you got me, babe. You just went to the top of my Facebook comments and Digg and YouTube.

People stick around. They pay attention. They engage. They learn to love sticky. And they talk about it.

A lot.

So that’s what we at Fresh Baked do: we slow the web down.

What's that mean, Mr and Ms Marketer? After—even during—their laughter, visitors linger on your website, explore, deepen their interest and willingness to share that interest with others online.

That’s not a virus: that’s experiential marketing, nested in all the possibilities of social communities online.

Via emotional engagement.

Right where we want to be.

Live and be well.

On funny generally and digital funny in particular

Funny thing about funny.

It’s hard.

The old chestnut about “dying is easy, comedy is hard” isn’t just a happy coincidence. Funny that stands up (oops: 86 that pun)—like Chekhov, the Marx Brothers, Mel Brooks, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Dorothy Parker and Shakespeare—touches the universal in ways that drama can’t touch.

Think about this: I reckon wit played a huge part in the downfall of Communism. Laughter is about resistance too, a dose of the anarchic in our all-too-conformist lives. Why? Because laughter is about truth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_political_jokes

Bashing Stalin aside, Dilbert and the rise of “cubicle comedy” opened a vast real estate for the workaday wits, who’ve of course reached their apogee in the likes of Ricky Gervais and Steve Carell. (Isn’t a carrel a cubicle? Hmmm.)

Point is, did you catch the clip on the Fresh Baked website with the guy in the Listerine costume? Or Motherload, about the mom who loves snow? Those bits are tantamount to a parable, you ask me. You recognize stuff about human nature.

Here’s the thing. Which would you rather watch: Hard Day's Night or Look Back in Anger? Both set in the UK in the ‘60s, both classic period film pieces…but which gets watched today? Or the original Producers versus All About Eve? (Well, OK, that’s a tossup.) M*A*S*H* or Platoon? Or FAILSAFE or Dr Strangelove? And that first Austin Powers flick really puts paid to an entire industry, doesn’t it?

Me, I’ll take the laughs first any day.

Now around the Fresh Baked oven, there’s often talk about return on investment and monetization and all the marketingspeak created to somehow explain how some branding stories stick and others don’t. (What we in the trade call “brand narrative.”)

Yes, what we do at Fresh Baked can be measured six ways from Sunday online, which is great and helps make the argument that branded entertainment’s The Next Big Thing (TNBT, for short.)

Well, it goes without saying that we think it’s TNBT too.

After a lot of serious and not so serious thought—pints and pints of serious thought—we as marketers (our main gig, really) think that the marriage of branded entertainment and the infinite copying machine that is the internet is indeed TNBT.

So that’s what this blog’s about: weighing the present and the future of the art and science of persuading people via comedy.

But that ain’t all.

We believe—and we’ll put it out there on this blog for everyone to take a pot shot at, so go to—that learning is part and parcel of any marketing message that stands a sliver of a chance of cracking the online clutter.

We poor battered vintage 2009 human beings—especially the talkers and evangelists and change agents every marketing client wants to reach and convert—are suffering from what someone clever called “screen bloom”: we see too much nothingness on the flatscreens increasingly part of every facet of our lives, from the gas pump to the airport lounge to the elevator doorway to (egads!) the public washroom.

Here’s what the research shows, all you marketers out there who think that spraying TV ads hither and thither is really going to amount to much persuasively in this day and age of Facebook and Twitter and TIVO and clickthru remotes.

This is indisputable: any learning expert will echo what you’re going to read next about learning and context.

Ready?

Learning/human performance ace John Wilkinson (most recently trainer-in-chief at Kellogg's and DHL) tells me the professional learning literature suggests retention is multiplied, sometimes by a factor of 10-12 times when the learning experience takes place in an emotional context…like laughter.

Got that? That means that the likelihood of retaining a message or a process is an order of magnitude greater if you’re laughing.

Think about what that means to your messaging strategies and the return on investment of your marketing spend.

Shekels and chuckles, all you ROI-heads out there…shekels and chuckles. Separate, they’re just great…but together: magic.

That’s all for tonight. I have a date with a wonderful novel called Armadillo, by William Boyd. It’s one of the best London novels ever written and not a bad read in these days of financial black holes everywhere. Who knew a tale about insurance could be so fulfilling? And funny?

http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/boydw/armadillo.htm

Next up: how laughter is contagious—the clinical case for the power of laughter to persuade virally.

It’s all about contagion. But not the kind you think…

Live and be well/doughhead