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Advertising in the new age of TV

May 23, 2005

Mark Pesce is back on Mindjack with his followup to last week’s article on “the new laws of television”.

In this installment, Mark shares some ideas as to how advertisers could take advantage of the changing face of TV distribution and consumption — even for an audience without access to broadband.

He also includes “Four Rules” for content producers to survive in this brave new world, the most important (and the most likely to be ignored) being “Do it or Die.”

If you ignore the coming era of hyperdistribution, we can write you off right now. You’re in the same boat as a producer of radio plays in the 1950s; the most successful of those individuals established careers in television, but others ended up bitter and unemployed. We have to deal with the world as it is, not as we’d like it to be. The clock can’t be turned back on BitTorrent. In the new, “flat world,” where any program produced anywhere in the world is immediately available everywhere in the world, the only sustainable edge comes from entrepreneurship and innovation. Yet broadcast television has become a self-contained world, inside a comfy plastic bubble, breathing its own air, which - after half a century - has gone noticeably stale. It’s ready to be shaken up.

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