MARKET- WHAT MARKET?

It fascinates me to watch the progression of media product being deposited like bird droppings on the world. Unasked for, it descends and uses up time and life, in a quest for… what?

For the non-antiquarians among you, there was a time when this process meant something. TV was a social necessity, not a disease like it is now. Radio involved more than people incapable of shutting up when listening to music. The theory was that it was a form of entertainment, and at least some of the time it was.

Now, we have the results of some gruesome sampling routine, the same kind that samples 20 people on a continent and comes up with a marketing strategy. We have the media buyer’s routine, pitching shows on the basis that whoever it was bought the last show, so they’ll probably buy this one.

This isn’t marketing, it’s industrial suicide. The audience is no longer stuck with a TV guide as a measure of its ability to be entertained. The audience, in fact, is practically unknown to the market. Everything is now being sold to illiterate gangsta rappers 12 and under, kids with skin and scalp problems, and those too young to find their way out of prime time slots.

The main theory seems to be that parents empathize with their kid’s desire to own an Uzi and be shot dead for a few bucks worth of something made in a bathtub, while listening to 40 year old drum patches and multitrack miracles on an ipod.
”Thou shalt have no other audience” is the effect, so this tedious crud from the 1980s, complete with the obsolete street jive, still grinds on regardless. (Just for the record, any kidspeak on TV, particularly street language, is long dead. The jerks have to find out what it means, and that takes a while.)

Meanwhile, the rest of the world, literally, gets ignored. There are no people over 25. Can we have decent scripts, shows with characters in them, storylines that go somewhere? No, but we can have houses and beaches full of people. Can we have documentaries which were written for someone above second grade level? No, but we can have screens full of timeserving hacks who wouldn’t get a job in fast food.

So there you can sit, PhD in hand, a life of professional and personal commitment raging around you, and watch some two dimensional crap about “relationships” as portrayed by people who can barely understand their ratings figures. If you happen to have been so demographically tactless as to have a life, that too can be ignored and your time consumed by mindless patter from the deadly boring.

The print media, the dinosaur’s dinosaur, determined to make publication of anything a form of bureaucracy beyond any previous effort, is another offender, arguably the worst, incorporating all the problems of the others. A year or so of procedures, rituals, and various other spreadsheet-related ailments, to produce something that winds up in the bargain bin a month or so later. There was a few million trees we didn’t need.

No understanding of the new media, no straightforward, cheaper methods, but heaps of new rules, qualifiers, processes, and anything else you wouldn’t need to worry about with a decent disclaimer. Formatting for geeks who don’t know you can format any Word document any way you want. Paragraph alignments for those who evidently have no idea that you write to achieve a finished product, not a text document.

Then there’s the Book Proposal, notably absent from the careers of just about every good writer since the Bible. Imagine writing a book proposal for the Bible:

“Duuhhhh…. Well, it’s about this guy who creates a universe, then it gets complicated…”

“Who’s yer market, if yer so smart?”

“People that like to read.”

Interesting point. “People that like to read.” That might be a selling point. Imagine anyone going into a bookstore and buying something they actually want to read. Another breakthrough in human cultural development! Huzzah! Oh, swoonsies! To think that such genius has seen fit to grace our industry with its mighty insights! One might soil one’s undergarments in sheer ecstasy, were one not glued in place with admiration by one’s bodily sediments.

Tell Mensa to call off the search parties.

Look, gerbils, readers read because it’s a personal pleasure. They do not care about the sad little pretensions of an industry which is mass producing pitiful sputum masquerading as literature. They buy, you sell. That’s marketing. The rest you can use to line the birdcage.

Sort of like sex. You can pay someone else to have it for you, but is it quite the same thing? How many middlemen do you want in the bed? Is a written proposal necessary? Do you want to wait for 12 months for a response from the other party?

Try this for an alternative:

1. Get submission.

2. Read submission and basic cover letter.

3. Say yes/no to author.

4. Get on with your lives.

Basing this quaint notion on the fact that you can discard unprofessional and commercially uninteresting material at the push of a button, and publish much more cheaply as a download-

What’s the bloody problem?

The marketing industry has no excuses for the stupefying, insufferably poor quality of global media product. The new media gives production a tremendous advantage over everything before it. There’s no excuse to waste time, money, talent and effort doing things that just don’t need doing.

Marketers- if you want the right to be described as anything other than paid guesswork, learn your markets and stop stuffing about with ancient, lazy, methods. Sampling is by definition not accurate, nor is it supportable. The same sample, done the following week, using the same demographics, is quite likely to come up with a different result, sometimes a polarized result. Don’t kid yourselves.

Market surveys aren’t that great a personal hardship. You need decent information quality, and you have an excellent chance of losing your clients if you can be shown to be just going through the motions.

The intriguing thing to me is that marketing really is all about sales. Given the abysmal sales of some heavily marketed products in media, and the thunderous crashing of shows, books and movies that die in the first seconds/weeks, you’d think someone would wake up to the fact that all this stuff was made and paid for on false premises.

It was also done on the cookie cutter marketing approach. Not everything is a packet of soap flakes. Selling anything requires some basic understanding of the product and its target group.

If you really want insomnia as a marketer: Media is now a buyer’s market from the audience perspective. Nobody has to watch, much less buy. More importantly the sponsors are waking up, too. Who wants to pay for campaigns that don’t work? Just because you have an advertising budget doesn’t mean you want to be Santa Claus to the industry, and pay for any load of whatever that happens to be given to you as marketing, regardless of sales.

By the way, if anyone’s been wondering why I haven’t been trying too hard to get on to this treadmill- It’s because I really have no faith in the ability of these guys to sell sex in a jail, let alone media product in the market. They’re out of touch, trying to sell buggy whips and hay to Ferrari drivers.

I mean it. In a very few years, the entire methodology of media marketing as it now is will be ancient history, and there’ll be people doing theses on what’s wrong with it before then.

The Lord may very well giveth, but the market taketh away.