Metzger Associates' Blog

Maybe It Won't Be Video That Kills Theaters -- It Will Be Arrogance

Wired Magazine put Peter Brown, CEO of AMC Entertainment, on the "hotseat" this month (a short interview with tough questions). Either Mr. Brown wasn't prepared for his audience, or he's just plain arrogant about the future of motion picture entertainment.

For the most part, Mr. Brown simply defended AMC's decision to not show "Bubble" from Steven Soderbergh not because AMC was irritated at the decision to put the film out on DVD the same week as theater release, but due to the fact that direct-to-video isn't made with the big screen in mind, and the quality isn't as good.

"When you make the decision to go out, we want to take care of you," Mr. Brown says. When asked why surveys showed people like smaller theaters, it's the megaplexes that are the problem, Mr. Brown noted, "Over 250 million consumers buy our product -- that says something."

A couple of thoughts:

1. First, Mr. Brown, please be honest. Seriously, it's OK to say we aren't going to support a film that competes on this level, and explain why. For example, your industry makes your money on popcorn, so we can't bring in our own. Fine, we get it. But don't try to tell us that you stop people from bringing in their own popcorn because you're afraid the homemade stuff might not taste as good as yours. That's pretty much what you did here.
2. If AMC is truly concerned about the quality of motion pictures they're showing, there are any number of films that probably shouldn't have made it to our local AMC outlet, but did. In the end, we think we're in a pretty big club that believes we're not really looking for Mr. Brown or anyone else to make a value judgment on the movies we see. Let the ticket buyers decide. (We'd also like to note that Soderbergh isn't exactly a hack: he got the first double nomination in the best director category in almost 60 years at the 2001 Academy Awards for "Erin Brockovich" and "Traffic." He won the Oscar for "Traffic." This year he worked on such "low-quality" films as "Syriana" and "Good Night, and Good Luck.")
3. Over 250 million people visited an AMC theater because your company owns 5,672 screens (per the AMC Web site). In the end, that means that if your screens are showing movies about 360 days each year, you had a few more than 120 people visit each one of your screens last year. Divide that by three or four showings per screen each day, and it doesn't look like the lines were very long at the ol' AMC last year.

We'd recommend the following:

• Wired reaches a fairly sophisticated audience. Know that before you give answers that will appear -- as these did -- to be less than forthcoming.
• Wired also reaches people that tend to have very high-end home systems. What do you say to those people to get them to come out? "We're not going to show things we think aren't good enough" wasn't the right message.
• "We must be doing something right" in this context was a bad answer. How about, "theater attendance is down, but here are the three things we're doing differently to bring people back."

The way people use media is changing. Those that adapt will thrive. Those that arrogantly defend the status quo will not.

Why a Sony Rootkit Banner?

A member of our staff wondered why we chose to post a link to the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF) page for the class action suit against Sony for their digital rights management (DRM) scheme that dropped malicious software on computers without the customer's knowledge (good story on Boing Boing about this here).

It's simple. As we noted in our post about Quicken dropping desktop shortcuts all over the place, companies need to treat computers with the same respect you treat other private property -- it's not yours, if I don't ask you to put something there, you may not do so.

In this case, the leave-behind was not an annoying shortcut, it was a piece of code that opened computers to security problems. What would possibly make a company think that's even CLOSE to OK?

We agree that music is only free if those who own it says it is, but it's not OK to violate your customers' rights to prevent a possible crime. Using that logic, we can all be pulled over because we looked like we might be thinking about speeding.

That's not the way it works.

We hope Sony, and companies everywhere, learn a valuable lesson from this experience.

John Metzger covers VC in the Rockies Conference for American Venture Magazine

John Metzger, CEO of Metzger Associates, recently attended the Venture Capital in the Rockies Conference and covered the event for American Venture Magazine. A link to the article is here .

Fast Company and Business 2.0...You're Killing Us!

OK, these are two of the BEST business magazines out there, and we realize that advertising in all media is hard. However, advertising that just plain makes us mad is not going to have a solid result for the advertiser.

Let's start with Fast Company. The last issue was, editorially, outstanding. But who agreed to let the US Postal Service put those stupid tabs on the lead pages to every section of the cover story? We think we might all FedEx our bill payments this month just to boycott the USPS for that nonsense. We're just glad that Lance rode for Discovery in his last year.

And Business 2.0...we clicked on an RSS feed and got an ad that we couldn't get around for almost 10 seconds. It was for some anti-virus or spy software, but we didn't click, so we're not sure. SHAME ON YOU! You're a great publication...don't act like that. Advertising like that on an RSS feed? We think we might just unsubscribe.

In the end, advertising should be compelling and interesting. If you act like a two-year-old throwing a temper-tantrum in a grocery store, you'll get a response much like the other shoppers in that store give that two-year-old. Make sure your sales team lives up to the standards of your editorial staff.

We'll respect and pay attention to your advertisers if they treat us like thinking adults. If not, it will just irritate us. Change your approach, please.

YouTube vs. The New York Times

Guess who's getting more unique monthly visitors -- viral video site YouTube or The New York Times?

In an interesting post at the Church of the Customer blog, we find it's pretty much a tie. But in this case, a tie is significant. YouTube.com came out of nowhere a few months ago, while The Times is a brand name with a strong online presence. Both YouTube and the NYT are getting about 4.9 million unique visitors each month.

But YouTube is also getting 20,000 new videos uploaded each and every day by users. That's significant as well.

If you want to reach your customers and you ignore the phenomenon of user-generated content, you do so at your own peril.

Metzger Associates Scores Win for Sprint in "O" Magazine

Ask any author (even James Frey) and they'll tell you getting on Oprah can take an obscure book to the bestseller list. We hoped to make a Sprint phone a bestseller with the help of a story in O, The Oprah Magazine.

Metzger Account Executive Ali Randall was recently interviewed by PR Week magazine regarding work she had done on behalf of Sprint to get a new phone featured in this important women's magazine. Note the pitch timeline at the end of the article...much like a sales professional, PR professionals don't always "sell" the story on the first try. The key is to keep working for your clients.

The interview:

Who was your client and what were your media goals?

Ali Randall: We do national consumer outreach for wireless provider Sprint. We were targeting gift guides, and Oprah Winfrey's magazine was an obvious priority because it's one of the top-selling lifestyle publications.

How did you reach out to the editors?

Randall: We worked by e-mail initially. It took some digging to figure out the right editor and some persistence before we got a response. We finally got a 20-minute meeting with the style editor in August at which we were able to show her one of the new phones, Samsung's A940, for the Sprint service.

You were pitching new personal technology, which tends to be aimed at an early-adopter audience. Did you have to tweak your content or approach to appeal to O's predominantly female, mass-market readership?

Randall: O doesn't feature a lot of tech products, so I sold this phone not just as a hip gadget, but also as a fashionable accessory for women. We highlighted that the phone has a swivel screen and a built-in camera/camcorder. We also provided them with high-resolution images that showcased its sleek design.

What was the impact of the hit?

Randall: The A940 ended up making a special holiday version of "the O List," which is a selection of recommended products that have caught the eye of Oprah and the editors at O. Sprint had never been featured in the magazine before, and since everything that Oprah Winfrey touches turns to gold, they were very pleased. This phone ended up as one Sprint's stronger sellers during the key holiday season. Plus this new relationship we've established with O's editors should help not only Sprint, but also all of our clients over the long term.

Name: Ali Randall, account executive, Metzger Associates (Boulder, CO)

Placement: Featured on "the O list" in O, The Oprah Magazine, December 2005

Pitch timeline: Nine months

Listening to Customers -- What a Concept!

Thank you, blogosphere.

A great article in Friday's Washington Post again told of major corporations getting ideas of what their customers wanted and didn't want, liked and didn't like, would buy and wouldn't buy from the blogosphere.

What a concept.

"Following online conversations is the latest attempt by companies to grapple with the growing clout of their customers," the article says. Customers, in theory, have always had clout. What they didn't have was an easy way to voice opinions to large audiences. Calling a "customer service" line often gives little satisfaction -- and sometimes makes things worse. Major companies could afford to buy millions of dollars' worth of commercial time to tell us how wonderful they were. Now, customers can rave or rant for a massive audience -- free of charge.

In our opinion, companies are wise to keep a finger on the pulse of the online conversation. Companies like Umbria are doing excellent work in this area, and we think this has now become a critical element of any market research program.

No matter how a company chooses to do it, listening to your customers and potential customers is always a good thing. What a concept.

Natural Products Mirrors Technology’s Evolution Presentation at the Boulder Chamber of Commerce

Metzger Associates presented observations on how the natural products industry is mirroring the path of the high-tech industry prior to the tech boom recently at the Boulder Chamber of Commerce. The presentation was based on the article "Natural Products Industry Mirrors Technology’s Evolution: Maturing market follows branding opportunities at the beginning of the tech boom" by John Metzger that was originally published in the Natural Products Industry INSIDER in October 2005.

Click below if you'd like to download a copy of the article or presentation slides in Adobe PDF.

We look forward to any questions or comments you may have. Please post a comment here, or email John Metzger at [email protected].

Download natural_products_industry_insider_10_2005.pdf

Download boulder_chamber__natural_products_02_22_06.pdf

Borrowing from a Market Leader

It's fairly well known that the employees of Google are required to work on projects of their own choosing for a good portion of their work week. This practice is where Google News came from, and Google believes that the next great innovation of the company could very well spring from a creative mind turned loose.

We think that's a great idea, so we've decided to try a variation of that practice here at Metzger Associates.

Each week, every employee is required to spend a few hours working on a project that is not part of their account assignment group. They don't just "pitch in," they look at the company and see if they can come up with an idea to move the business forward. Maybe they find an article that gives us a fresh pitching angle with a targeted reporter, or maybe they find a business opportunity in a place no one would ever look in the day-by-day course of that client's business.

As a result, every Metzger client has a few fresh sets of eyes focused on their business each week. There's no pressure to come up with an idea each week, but we do expect every employee to be able to give an outline of what they're thinking about or working on at any time.

Once any employee thinks they've got something to move a client's business forward, they schedule time with the account director on that business and "pitch" their idea. We anticipate having an even bigger batch of fresh new approaches to take to our clients.

This is brand new for us, so we don't have a "Google News" kind of example of the success yet. But already we know that we've got a group of creative employees leaving no stone unturned for every Metzger client. In a small way, that's a success in and of itself.

We'll update the blog with some of the great ideas we're confident will come out of this.

Further comments from Apple

In celebration of the sale of their 1 billionth song last week,  Apple's is providing the customer who purchased that song with extensive customer incentives and rewards. In his blog, Good Morning Silicon Valley, John Paczkowski wrote:

"Apple's iTunes digital content storefront passed another landmark Thursday, selling its one billionth download -- Coldplay's "Speed of Sound" -- to Alex Ostrovsky of West Bloomfield, Mich., who scored quite a windfall along with his $.99 purchase. In celebration of the occasion, Apple gave Ostrovsky a 20-inch-screen iMac, 10 iPods and a $10,000 gift card for the iTunes Music Store. The company also plans to establish a scholarship in Ostrovsky's name at the Juilliard School of Music. Not a bad return on a 99 cent investment, especially for Ostrovsky, who isn't exactly an iTunes regular. "I've downloaded maybe 50 songs, but I was always more likely to borrow CD's from my friends," he told The New York Times. "I'm certainly going to download more songs now.""

It just goes to further prove that customers are receptive to incentives.  We can only guess at the amount of positive word-of-mouth publicity Apple will get from this one.