Life defunked over a cup of tea
19 Jul
Last night I watched an ad for Spot Runner that talked about “affordable” television advertising. Having been privy to that world, I have known that television advertising has always been elitist, catering to the big fish of the consumer experience. So now that small businesses can advertise and more importantly compete with the big fish, it is going to be interesting to watch the new wave of Spot Runner ads.
While the concept is revolutionary, what piqued my interest is the approach. Just like we do in web design, Spot Runner uses templates for presentation and layout allowing for little flexibility in design while taking the guess work out of design. With modularity you pay a price, compromising creativity, to create a style that can sometimes be monotonous. You see that in blog and website design today. Big headers, white background and blocky layouts. But then you also have web standards making design presentation more sophisticated.
Local channels advertising sucks big time like website design sucked in the early 90s. Spot Runner can be the next Six Apart in the television advertising arena making for standardized and sophisticated looking ads that can make you want to give next-generation entrepreneurs of small businesses some thought.
Modularity as I am discovering is useful when you can leverage all levels of mass communication to tell a story quickly and for cheap.
2 Responses for "Spot Runner: Modularity in Television Advertising"
Spot Runner has a unique offering to potential customers, but it is something that just does not work very well. There are not enough “one-timers” to keep Spot Runner afloat under its own power because, frankly, TV advertising does not work for the many small businesses that Spot Runner appears to target.
Spot Runner can only make a small bit of money from large national companies who have local reps that want to boost their ego with a 30-second TV commercial. For example, Real Estate Agents. This type of business means that Spot Runner can only earn a small markup from buying a 30 second spot from the local TV networks and then reselling it to a customer. Furthermore, there are only just so many 30-second spots out there…and therefore there is a glass ceiling to the amount of profit that Spot Runner can earn in the US.
With dozens of millions of dollars that investment firms are pumping in Spot Runner, they can only hope that enough buzz will be generated about this unique business model and that a larger company like Yahoo or Google will buy them up. Just look at LinkedIn and you’ll see so many ex-Yahoo/Overture people working at Spot Runner. These people left presumably to start something new and oh, yeah, probably chase lucrative stock options. Unfortunately for them, by the time their options mature in 2010 they will be able to cash them out and buy a week’s worth of Venti Lattes at Starbucks.
The thing is that we haven’t heard much, if anything about customer success stories. There probably are not any. No small business owner is going to grown their business and hit critical mass because of a $3000 TV media campaign. Most small businesses don’t have that kind of loose change to spend anyhow on something that is untrackable. After all, how can a small business owner monetize how much new or additional business was generated through a TV commercial? Answer: He cannot.
Our prediction: See Spot die.
Jon,
I am not sure if I completely agree with your comment about TV advertising not working for the small business. I think TV advertising is being used although not effectively by small business primarily due to low budgets. But that does not mean that low budgets should equate to bad quality. Ever watched your local cable and shuddered at the sight of a local dealership ad? I know I have. I think Spot Runner has found that niche and while monetization is still a question to think about, small business who leverage TV could use Spot Runner’s quality and sophisticated tools to create affordable ads that you and I can enjoy. I think the concept has potential. What happens to it is yet to be seen.
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