MTVne guy at Picnic

The head of MTV Networks just got off stage, and said quite a lot about the repositioning, and "re-energising", of the MTV brand. He showed lots of MTV promo vids/adverts, which I can't reproduce here, but I can more or less repro what he said. To a degree, anyway.

Most interesting point - MTV are launching a comedy channel...

Here it comes:

[slide with a guy in a room full of gadgets]

This is a schematic of a completely unrealistic living room, full of every device you can think of. One of the things I often talk about is convergence is bullshit. It’s bullshit for a simple reason – there are more and more devices in a single home than ever before.

Consumer electronics companies want you to buy more devices, more... how many CD players do you have? In your car, in your pc? What’s your reaction when you see this slide? “ARRRGH!” If you’re over 35, that is. You’re looking at this in the same way as my parent’s generation didn’t understand how to program the VCR. My generation of 35-40+ looks at this and sees Terrifying. Young people respond, ‘So what?’.

5% of young people care about technology. That’s about the same proportion as the rest of the population. By that I mean when you ask them, they’d say yes I'm interested in it. Also if you show them pictures we associate as tech, they don’t see it as tech. Mobiles, the PC, TVs... not technology.

They also – here’s three words I imagine you’ve heard recently: multiplatform, social networking and interactive. These are three words that young people never use. People under 15 don’t use the word blog, apparently. Although I’m not sure what they do call it.

So we as an organisation, how do we respond? We think back to what we are. When you’re faced with enormous choice, you have to think back to what you are. We’ve been in existence for a long time. It’s easy to forget what we’re about. First, we’re about M = music. You can forget this sometimes, you turn on MTV, and you might think we’re not music. One of the ways that we do that – [video – Ghemico advert, kid runs away with the M]

We remind our audience that we’re about the M.

The other t\ hing is, we’re about LIVE music. So we have to more immediate than playing canned music, we’re actually in touch with the music scene. We’re also about something else: content. There’s a TV part of this too. What does TV mean to us as a biz? We talk about unique, original content, and that’s hard in today’s world. There are lots of people doing fabulous stuff out there, not just on TV but online too.

How do you get attention in a multimedia world? It’s so very difficult to get anyone to pay attention to what you’re doing. Sometimes you have to be direct; sometimes you do things that get talked about.

[video – MTV animations]

We want to do interesting things on television. We have a various number of channels, with big choice to reach wide numbers of people. Male -= MTV. Female – Viva. Younger – Nickelodeon. Older – our new comedy channel, launching soon. Our audience numbers have gone up significantly since we did this.

Our ratings since 1993 – they’re roughly the same over 13 years. Then we had 1 channel, now we have 9. The other thing to bear in mind – if you’re one channel out of 20 and the universe multiplies to 200, you need to have 10 channels just to stand still. Extrapolate that to the internet. Imagine how hard it is to compete in and with the internet. I’ll come back to how you do that.

I’ll give you an example from

Holland

:
We started with MTV Holland, we acquired TMF, and Kindernet. We used Kindernet expertise to turn it into Nickelodeon; and TMF helped us launch MTV Belgium. Nick Holland helped launch Nick Belgium.

Create. More. Stuff.

In a digital universe, how do you get noticed? Well – color helps! We communicate through colour, our brands stand out. Also: engage with the audience’s issues: one of the things that we believe very strongly is that we have a responsibility to our audience. We have a relationship with them, we want to make the world a slightly better place. The future of the world is ... how do we build an active relationship with our audience?

The first thing you can do with new media is you can use it to market yourself. Most media companies are obsessed with launching their new media products and services, but new media is also a brilliant way of getting everyone else to notice what you do. We ran an ugly-people campaign, and in response, this website appeared, purporting to be about family values, stating do not watch MTV.com. If you download the video on the right, you get this [a spoof pro-virginity video]. That video was HUGE in

Spain

. It was the most downloaded YouTube vid, it was a ringtone, and it was obviously slightly ironic. It cost 35,000 euros, which is nothing, and it was huge. New media supports what we’re about – making fun of things, getting attention [in the right way], rather than shouting about how we’re still here, remember us?

It’s not just about new media. New media has so many choices –one of the great things about doing live events is that there are less of them in general, so it’s a great way of getting people to see what you’re doing.

www.mtv.co.uk/load

[‘film bus’ – headless bus vid.]

What’s that about? Making material specifically for mobile. That was .. made for mobile, with the idea to exploit the ultrashort entertainment opportunities on mobile. It’s a medium that’s immediate; you get a very short hit of entertainment. That doesn’t mean taking a piece you made for TV and chopping it to 15seconds – it means making new stuff for mobile.

On the other hand here’s a show we did covering all media: Barrio 19. Street skills from around the world. All platforms.

Next thing: a launch of ‘channels’ that are all new media. We created Overdrive, with the idea of exploiting video over the internet. Internet 1.0 was about press and magazines, internet 2.0 what we’re living right now, is all about video. Overdrive is a fully interactive space that you can be in and that exploits us as a video music player and not a text music player.

The idea of all this is to re-energize the brand. The final example is Flux: we created this thing... the idea was to try and create a TV product on internet and mobile, all together. We started this thing in

Italy

, on a terrestrial network; when we launched it, we turned the terrestrial network off. There are only 10 stations there, and we turned one to black, with the URL on the screen. We put yos.it on the screen, YOS = Your Online Space.

For everyone person that logged on, we were going to put one pixel back onto the TV screen. The whole country was talking about it. Who’s done this? The press called us – is it you? Yeah, don’t tell anyone, we said. So they told EVERYONE. That was really exciting. They also launched a poster campaign. Within the posters, we had Bluetooth, so when you walked past, a message would appear on your phone. We wanted to reinforce this concept of putting pieces together.

Hey I managed to get to the last slide before I mentioned user generated content! We still think TV is a sexy place to show up. Anyone can upload to YouTube. However, how many people can upload to TV? That’s sexy. Getting yourself on TV. We’re offering with Flux this idea that you can upload stuff to us, you rate it, and the best will show up in the TV channel. It’ll be a circle within, going round and round.

It’s really ambitious and I’m not going to tell you it’ll definitely work. If may be the future of our business. This may be the future of everything we do, our channels of stuff made by music video producers, and our viewers, this is the ultimate relationship with our audience. This is about creating an organization that doesn’t have walls, that reaches out to the viewers and makes them part of what we do.

We’re trying to explore the boundaries of TV, and incorporate new media in everything we do. We’re trying to get people reengaged with what we’re about. These promos don’t make it immediately clear – you need to explore it, there’s excitement and mystery. We want them engaging with us, so that we can have a future that’s as good as our past.

Thank you.

Comments

[Mole]

His point about young people's interest in "technolgy" is interesting. I'm taking a Foundations of Electronic Media course right now, and at the beginning of the semester we had a discussion about new media, from TiVo to YouTube to MySpace. At no point were the phrases "social networking", "viral marketing", or "blog" ever uttered, while social bookmarking seemed compeltely off everyone's radar. Any mention of folksonomy would likely have gotten stares of hopeless confusion. And I'm talking about a room full of upperclass Communications majors here.

I often can't help but think that a *lot* of new media hype is just that.

[kim]

If this kind of thing interests you, Guy Kowasaki has a recording posted of a panel discussion between VC's and a group of silicon valley teens. Similarly surprising results.

My fav example being Messenger (with 12 windows open at once) and myspace being the main vehicles for communication. "Email only contains things from parents and school, therefore it's bad. If I ignore it, it's not there".

Check it out here:
(checks website)
Holy cow! He just posted the video recording of it!
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/09/is_advertising_.html

[Rod Oracheski]

All the talk of branching out is interesting, but if they really want to "re-energize the brand" for MTV, they should try playing music on MTV from time to time.

[greg.org]

huh? doesn't he miss the whole point with his "uploading it to tv" comment? I'd guess the same generational shift that doesn't see "tech" as "tech" doesn't see "tv" as "TV" anymore, either.

The broadcast/distribution advantage of MTV is rapidly diminishing as more people turn to other channels for their fame fix. This guy sounds asleep at the wheel.