Mad Men

Light up a Lucky, pour a scotch and get me a URL!

Love Mad Men.

Great period piece from the 1960s.

So well done.

I recognize the toaster my parents had. The blender. The cars.

Perfect.

Nary a blackberry  in sight.

Everyone uses manual typerwriters, wired dial-up phones.

How charming.

The ad agencies in the 50s.

On the content creation side we have rocketed ahead of these charming but quaint days.  We’ve embraced the digital and online revolutions and pretty much torched our old institutions. Some, like The New York Times are still smoldering, and at NBC they’re only starting to smell the smoke; but for the most part, it’s a Brave New World of content. Everyone is making it online.  A billion bloggers and vloggers and videographers filling the web with the product of their work.  A billion views on Youtube every day.

Cool.

The problem is paying for all this stuff.

It’s fine and dandy for the ex-employees of The Rocky Mountain News or the displaced journalists from The Newark Star Ledger to band together and decide to put their excellent products on line for all to see

The future.

Fine.

And how are they going to pay for this?

Um…. Advertising.

And what exactly does that mean to these legions of fine journalists?

Well…um.. we’ll hire ad sales people and they’ll sell ads.

Great plan!  Call Don Draper….

Mad Men.

And in the end, it does not work.

It does not work not because the product was not great, and not because you don’t have something to sell. It is because ‘ad sales guys’ don’t fit in the new world of the digiweb. 

Had it been the reverse:  Had the ad sales guys from The Rocky Mountain News (also in need of jobs) gotten together and said, ‘hey, let’s reformat the paper and put it on the web’

“and where will we get the content?”

“Easy. We’ll hire a bunch of reporters who wear hats and pay them salaries and benefits and open an office with carpeting…..but we’ll put the paper online this time!”

See the problem?  As my friend Jeff Jarvis says,  you have to ask yourself, “What Would Google Do?”

Well, hiring a bunch of reporters and putting them on staff is NOT what Google would do.

And so neither is hiring a bunch of ad sales guys to generate income.

which is why all these new ventures fail. All the online revolutionary ventures.  And soon TV networks as they go online with their content. 

While we understand the content creation and distribution side of the business and we’ve gotten pretty good at how the digiweb makes that content both voluminous and cheap, we are still stuck in the 1950s on the revenue side.

Mad Men.

So what we have to do now is do to the revenue side, the ad sales side, what we have already started to do to the content side – Googlize it.

In other words, let the web do what it does best when you open the process to the general community – let the people sell the ads.  Not that ad sales guys.

Do you see any ad sales guys on eBay?

Do they sell a lot of stuff?

Imagine a user walking into the offices of Don Draper for a meeting.

“You want to sell old Pez dispensers where? I don’t get it” is the best Don could say.

And pour himself a scotch.

Content online comes from hundreds of millions of people creating it. Now ad sales (and revenues!) can also come from hundreds of millions of people both creating it and selling, as opposed to five guys in Hart Schafner Marx suits sitting in an office.

The Rocky Mountain News and thousands of other websites and content creators can thrive if they can do to their revenue side what they have already done to their content side.  Open the process to everyone.