The reception at MTV Viacom headquarters off Oxford Street in London tells an interesting story.
The Berlin Wall
As you enter you’re greated by a seminal piece of photography – 2 East German guards standing in uniform atop the Berlin Wall. It’s 1989 and the younger guard is holding, as a symbol of arrival, an umbrella emblazoned with the MTV logo.
Graham BrownPerhaps if you were to look back at the 80s and ask the youth of the day to identify the icons that defined the decade the Berlin Wall and MTV would feature in their top 10.
Madonna I Want My MTV
No doubt Madonna and Michael Jackson would feature highly in that list too.
Thriller – 27 million views, 9 million sold
So take MJ’s seminal Thriller Video – the most successful music video of all time selling 9 million units. Has the appeal faded? Not if you consider Youtube hits as any measure of popularity – 27.6 million impressions and (wait for it)… 66000 comments by last count. So when MTV decides to mimic Youtube with its own MTV branded Mymusic how does it fare? The same track (albeit higher definition) with the MTV house branding scores a paltry(!) 34000 views and 44 comments in the one month on air.
So is MTV playing catch up where it once was a defining and very “remarkable” brand of the 80s?
Hello Blyk
When Boy George was Social Utility
There was a time when youth media brands were significantly remarkable - BBC Top of the Pops was the catalyst for remarks among youth peers the day after the night before across playgrounds and in student bars in the UK and its syndicated territories; here’s Tommy Vance introducing Boy George’s first appearance on TOTP in 1982(!) “Do you really want to hurt me”.
culture club – do you really want to hurt me (TOTP 1982)
Few media entities can claim to be as remarkable for youth as TOTP was back in its heyday. Similarly, MTV has innovated since birth from its very format to later content offerings such as the Osbornes and Cribs.
Now BBC claims it has lost the middle youth ground and MTV resorts to unremarkable me-too offerings.
Media brands commercialize the mobile partnership
Youth media brands need to reposition themselves as solutions to commercialize the new channel opportunities that manifest in social media and mobile. 5 years ago Chris Gent, the then CEO of Vodafone, claimed that Vodafone was a media company – a claim later echoed by his successor Arun Sarin. Media companies, by their very nature, compete with their own ilk so MTV found more friends among the mobile handset manufacturers (such as Motorola).
Fast forward to 2008 and the Vodafone CEO Vittorio Collao is relaxed with the concept that they are a bit pipe – a smart one that provides the platform for media players to exploit existing billing and distribution infrastructure.
How to commercialize
The weakness of mobile is a distinct opportunity for media brands.
Mobile operators are no longer obsessing about mobile content (the fraction of the fraction) but keen to drive new revenues through advertising and reduce churn.
To achieve this operators need trusted brands to partner with as their own trust ratings languish at 27% (source mobileYouth report 2008)
With media brands come an entire infrastructure mobile can plug into. Blyk for example embodies the mobile thinking – that a good channel backed by numbers will drive the ad dollars. Not so, direct marketing is a zero sum game, the SMS channel is less a driver than it was even 2 years ago, and giants such as mediacom allocate less than 1% of its budget to mobile, so Blyk is currently a small fish in a small pond.
What mobile needs is the trusted relationships that media brands have with planners and buyers, the knowledge of inventory and profiling consumers.
Hello Blyk
20 years on
The year the Berlin Wall fell MTV positioned itself as a solution to the planning needs of youth focused brands – here was one of the few credible channels available to engage and reach out to young consumers.
Needless to say the landscape has changed. If youth media brands still cling to the old sales point, they are up against Youtube etc and there’s only one outcome. The challenge is recapturing the same spirit that made MTV commercially viable by solving the problems of its partner industries.
Mobile needs MTV, MTV needs mobile and there are plenty of ad dollars to be made in a successful partnership.
Technorati Tags: mtv, blyk, mobile youth, media, mediacom, michael jackson, madonna, boy george, music, content, vodafone
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