What Susan Boyle Taught Me About Advertising - Steve Rosenbaum - MediaBizBlogger

I think it's fair to say that Susan Boyle was about the furthest thing from my mind when I went to bed two Sundays ago.

I was thinking about niche video, web advertising, and what seems like the likely inflection point that we can see as TV budgets, print, and media find themselves in need of urgent re-calibration in a web-centric world. Best as I could figure it, we're in the catbird seat. Well, as it turns out, not so fast.

Which brings me to Susan Boyle.

On Sunday two weeks ago, the middle-aged, handsome woman with the blockbuster voice was onstage on "Britain's Got Talent". She killed.

At the same moment, a young man named Paul Woods was watching from his flat in London. Woods is a construction worker and father - and part time website builder. He's fan, and he's got skills.

Paul knew that Susan was going to be a phenomenon. He registered www.Susan-Boyle.com and began to build a fan site. So as I was sleeping, Susan-Boyle.com was pointed to a channel on my company's platform - Magnify.net. Without knowing it, we where in the Susan Boyle business before I woke up.

So far, nothing to report here. Folks build channels on Magnify.net all the time, round the world, and on all kinds of subjects. But Paul Woods had a tiger by the tail, and before Monday evening the site was the fastest growing channel EVER on the service, with 250,000 page views and more than 2,000 registered users. In the days that followed pages grew to almost 500,000 a day and registered members grew to 15,000. Paul was gathering and posting Susan Boyle news and videos as fast as he could get them, and the live twitter module was crackling with activity. The Wall Street Journal took notice, and that kicked in some more traffic. (http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/04/16/the-susan-boyle-bubble/)

By mid-week, when Paul called me, he was looking for some help finding an advertiser (or a few) to populate the site. The content was high quality, curated, consumer generated. The audience was passionate, and the demographic pretty easy to document. While we don't as a general course of business sell advertising other than through a few network relationships, this seemed like a no-brainer. Wrongo!

In the days that followed, I learned a good deal about the state of advertising today - and just how much of a disconnect there is between the speed at which the web moves and the speed that advertising agencies and media buying companies move.

First I learned even the most agile ad networks would need between four to six weeks to optimize the traffic. And individual clients who might be a great fit for the site (woman's products, earthy beauty brands, grass-roots targeted authentic consumer goods) all needed months, or years of data. For example, one buyer told me: "this might not go on forever, she might lose." Yes, true enough. Forever is a long time. Or, as another buyer told me: "The planning process is at least nine months out." Yes. That doesn't work here. What I learned was there is no marketplace to place, buy, or sell viral web media 'hits' that are fast moving. It simply doesn't exist.

So, here we are with a media phenomenon that real people connect with. A web site that is a hotbed of authentic content from and about fans - and what we're running on the pages are basic AdSense text ads.

There are plenty of questions as well. Who owns the ad placements on a 'fan' site? What if "Britain's Got Talent" takes down the original video they posted on YouTube? But, in any case - this video or the next - how will advertising move from its current glacial decision making speed to the new "twitter" speed world we live in?

Advertising folks - chime in here. Tell me I've got it all wrong. But I don't think so. In the emerging world of nano-networks, the opportunities and the speed that present themselves and then fade away requires a new kind of agility and streamlined decision making. Without that, lots of useful ad opportunities are going to die on the vine.

Steven Rosenbaum is the CEO and Co-Founder of Magnify.net - a fast-growing video publishing platform that powers more than 50,000 web sites, media companies, and content entrepreneurs to aggregate and curate web video from a wide variety of web sources. Currently Magnify.net publishes over 50,000 channels of Curated-Consumer Video, and is working closely with a wide variety of media makers, communities, and publishers in evolving their content offerings to include content created by, sorted and reviewed by community members. Rosenbaum is a serial entrepreneur, Emmy Award winning documentary filmmaker, and well know innovator in the field of user-generated media production. Rosenbaum Directed and Executive Produced the critically acclaimed 7 Days In September, and his MTV Series Unfiltered is widely regarding as the first commercial use of Consumer Generated Video in US mass media. Steve can be contacted at steve@magnify.net