We are in an age of high definition. Televisions, blu-ray discs even our telephones tout high resolution. Simultaneously, the proliferation of amateur created web photos and video have created a curious dichotomy –Less than perfect content on your high definition screen is perfectly acceptable depending on what it is. In fact certain kinds of content can lose genuineness when it is of too good a quality. This is what is meant by the realignment in expectations of content.
Professional content creators have a quality control knob for their work. This knob is designed on a scale from 1 to 10 with 10 being the only acceptable setting. If a video or photo cannot be perfect then it should not be done at all. From a retail point of view this means that if we cannot have the perfect video of our product than we should not have a video at all. There are two important problems with this. The first is that you are not serving the product, as it needs to be represented. The second is that while the higher the quality of any produced content is generally a good thing, there is a point of diminished return. In the information age, inadequate representation is unacceptable.
If you spend enough time on YouTube or if you search specifically for retail brands, you will find videos for just about any product. The majority of these videos are by amateur fans the brands. Many times these videos are created to fulfill the needs of the brand advocate for recognition but they also tend to be about brand information that is unobtainable by any other source. This underlines a lack of the product producers, sellers and marketers to address the basic needs of the customer. A great deal of the most important content about products cannot be found on the brands site or the retailers product page because of the perception of what that content should be like.
The customer shouts – “Make me video to show me how this thing works before I buy it!” We shout back “No! The lightings bad and we can’t afford a professional model!”
Let’s hope that since we as a business, cannot overcome our own restrictions that our customer will do it for us and post it on YouTube.
The open ideas market will respond to meet the needs of the modern content creators. As the big production habits of media creation outlets hold on tighter (and expensively) to digital rights, the market and individual content creators will respond with alternatives. Large organizations will be the slowest to realize this. The attitudes of traditional content creation and distribution by both corporate user and traditional content developer will only begin to erode once smaller, more nimble providers begin to undercut them.
This is happening now with companies like friendlymusic.com. In the battle of music content ownership the music industry set itself at odds with its own customer instead of finding a new way of doing business. Take for instance the use of music with home made video on YouTube. Copyright owners demanded the removal of their music from home made videos with threats of lawsuits. In step companies like Friendlymusic, where for as little as two dollars, licenses of any kind of music from musicians around the world, can be legally obtained.
This is almost a retelling of the ASCAP vs. BMI battle of the 1940’s and the results will be similar. ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) was the organization that controlled music publishing and distribution in the US. They began to use their monopolistic position to charge high rates to their Radio subscribers. Radio, in 1930, was a new way to distribute content and many legal battles arose about the ownership of that content. Sound familiar? When ASCAP, over the course of nine years, raised the rates nearly 500%, broadcasters rebelled. The broadcasters formed a new group called Broadcast Music, Inc. in 1939. BMI went to alternative content creators, created new performances of public domain music and offered cheaper services to broadcasters with far fewer restrictions. By responding to the new market BMI crushed ASCAP’s strangle hold of the media within two years – and ASCAP had the superior product!
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