Dear NYC Post-Production House:
I would address this to you by your company name, but of the three people who just called me (within 5 minutes) on your behalf, none could speak English well enough for me to understand. Not that I didn’t ask each of them to say the name of the company again; it’s just that they chose not to respond to my question, they just continued on with the script.
Just read John Jantsch’s latest post on his blog Duct Tape Marketing called Podcasting Makes You a Member of the Media
And while I usually find his posts useful and/or informative, I have to take him to task on this one. My immediate reaction is to mentally add the following subtitle:
“In the Same Way that Saying Your Bedtime Prayers Makes You a Member of the Clergy”.
His basic premise being that having a podcast gives you a foot in the door with “industry insiders” or potential clients by requesting an interview for your podcast.
Let me get this straight John, I want to meet with Joe Blow of JBlow Industries, and sell him a couple of hundred gross of my higglepips. Mr. Blow, being the egotistical boob that he is, can’t resist being a guest on The Higglepipodcast, so he agrees to the interview. Then I pull the old switcheroo and spring my sales pitch on him? Seems a little… umm… how you say… deceptive, no?
I’m not picking on John though, Jeffrey Gitomer suggest a similar ploy (Answer #21 on page 43) in the Little Red Book of Sales Answers. Except, in his case, he suggests the interview for an “Ezine” (What a quaint, 2005 term, huh?). In Jeffrey’s case, he suggests that this ezine be sent to a list, which he warns, you should actually have, and actually mail to. In John’s case, he makes a point of saying:
People can’t resist interview requests. No matter how small the audience.
Again, it seems a little… umm… how you say… deceptive, no?
Anyway, back to the title of this post:
In this Web2.0 world we find ourselves in, it’s pretty easy to convince ourselves that if we throw enough technology in people’s hands, they’ll be able to do what the professionals do. In this case, give some schmuck in the higglepip business an MP3 recorder, and suddenly he’s Chet Huntley. It’s just not true, sorry, I said it, and I’ll say it again, It’s Just Not True.
Self-appointing yourself a Member of the Media is fine, as long as you don’t go around actually believing it, and trying to convince others that it’s true. Mr. Jantsch has forgotten that the full name of “the Media” is “the Mass Media” in that you reach a significant population and (most importantly) maintain some semblance of responsibility in doing so. Just having a “podcast” available and claiming to be a member of the media is pretty sketchy at best.
Follow their advice if you’d like, it’s not my company you work for, I’ll continue making connections, networking, getting meetings the old fashioned way: not relying on a half-truth to get a foot in the door, thank you very much.
And I haven’t even gotten into the whole “quality of the sound” problem that pervades the web2.0 world we live in… I’ll save that for another post (I can hear your shouts of joy already).
Author’s Note: You’ll notice that there’s a link to John’s blog over on the right, it’s been there for the whole existence of this blog, and will be staying there. I still read Duct Tape Marketing almost daily, you should too. And I’m also still a fan of Jeffrey Gitomer’s books, it’s just that I don’t happen to agree with this particular tactic. So lay off all you Duct Tape maniacs, it’s not total blasphemy.
A while back I wrote about the whole Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD battle raging (OK, maybe that’s a bit of a hyperbole) and how Hollywood is hoping that a new DVD technology will bolster sagging DVD sales (without even considering that the crap they churn out may be more to blame for sagging sales.)
Well, it seems that the Blu-Ray standard is starting to pull ahead of HD-DVD in the last 48 hours:
1) On Monday, EE Times Online reported Blu-ray adopts content protection. So Blu-Ray is first out of the gate with the one requirement that the Hollywood Studios care about. Sure HD-DVD has it’s own protection scheme developed by the AACS, but as Fox Group’s president of engineering Andrew Setos put it in an interview also published in Monday’s EE Times:
“In the final analysis, Blu-ray found its way to add two features that interested us greatly — an anti-commercial-piracy technology, developed primarily by Philips, and a renewability technology called Self Protecting Digital Content, developed by Cryptographic Research Inc.”
In other words, the Hollywood studios are interested in backing the format that offers the most protection against copying, technology be damned.
2) Yesterday, Universal Music Group announced that it is backing Blu-Ray. No reasons have been cited in anything I’ve seen, but I’m sure the anti-piracy announcement was the tipping point.
3) Today, the New York Times reports that Lions Gate Is Expected to Support Blu-ray Discs. The article states:
“Lions Gate, which controls about 4 percent of the DVD market, is the latest studio to declare its allegiance in the format contest. The Blu-ray technology is being developed by Sony, Panasonic and others, while the HD-DVD standard is backed by Toshiba, NEC and Sanyo.
Sony’s movie studio, as well as Disney and Fox, have also said they will produce Blu-ray DVD’s, which will include high-definition video, enhanced audio and stronger copyright protections. Lions Gate, Sony, Disney and Fox sell about 45 percent of the DVD’s in the United States.
MGM, which was sold to an investment group led by Sony, controls another 4 percent of the DVD market. Many industry analysts say MGM’s movies are likely to be produced in the Blu-ray format as well.
Paramount, a division of Viacom, and Warner Home Video and Universal Studios Home Video plan to release more than 80 titles in the HD-DVD format starting as early as the fourth quarter this year. Together, the companies control 45 percent of the market for the current generation of discs.”
So by my math, that’s 49% of the market committed to Blu-Ray, and 45% to HD-DVD. Place your bets now.
The other variable in this horse race is who will be first to market with their technology? Sony will have the upper hand there with next Spring’s launch of the Blu-Ray drive equipped PlayStation 3, and technology powerhouse (meant to be ironic) BenQ just announced that they will ship Blu-Ray drives in the first quarter of 2006.
The PS3 launch just may be the tipping point.
There’s been alot of press coverage over the last month or so about the raging battle betwen the next generation of DVD technologies: Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD. I say alot, but I suppose I should really say “more than usual”.