In case you’ve been going to sleep early these days and you’ve been missing all the buzz on both Facebook and Twitter about what’s going on in the late night TV world,  NBC “Promoted” Conan O’Brien to the big chair of late night, The Tonight Show.  But for some reason, they wanted to keep Jay Leno in the NBC fold and put him in a prime time 10 PM slot before the local news.  The reasoning for this is very simple.  Producing one show with one star is 100 times cheaper than producing five quality prime-time shows with multiple casts, crews, directors and teamsters for five 10 PM prime time slots.

After a very short run, a simple domino effect is in play.  Leno “failed” in the 10PM time slot which led to lower ratings for the local news and lower ratings for The Tonight Show. NBC Failed to provide good shows before the local news. And now, it seems that rather than accept responsibility, the NBC execs have thrown the blame on Conan.

Was this Conan’s fault?  Maybe a little.  He didn’t ask about the prime-time line up and his lawyers didn’t go through his contract with a fine tooth comb.  Conan has a pretty iron clad contract BUT they missed the detail of what time the new Tonight Show was supposed to start.

“I believe that delaying The Tonight Show into the next day to accommodate another comedy program will seriously damage what I consider to be the greatest franchise in the history of broadcasting. The Tonight Show at 12:05 simply isn’t the Tonight Show.”  - Conan O’Brien

“I left NBC prime-time the same way I found it: a complete disaster.” – Jay Leno

Considering what happened when Johnny Carson left the Tonight Show and the fallout between Letterman and Leno and now with the flip flop between Leno and Conan and back to Leno again, NBC is losing trust within the industry and Loyalty with its viewers.  And if NBC screws over Conan after what they did to Letterman the last go around, who’s going to want replace Leno AGAIN?  If Leno failed in a prime time slot why is NBC giving him a 30 min show at 11:35 going to help the Tonight Show or NBC?  What’s the point?  Carson didn’t do anything to compete directly with the Tonight Show when he left.  Why let Leno compete at all?

I'm with Coco

This can either go down as the biggest disaster in TV history; bigger than when NBC passed Letterman over for the Tonight Show gig, bigger than when NBC Let Star Trek the original series die in 60s, or it’s a fiendishly brilliant viral marketing plan to boost NBC’s lagging ratings (wishful thinking on my part, but we can hope right?).

Where is everyone’s Brand Loyalty?  Is it with NBC, Leno or Conan?  There’s no apparent popular effort to bring Leno back to the Tonight Show – but there is a whole lot of buzz on the Social Media web sites in support of Conan.  Simply put, NBC would be stupid to let Conan go. He would most likely end up on either Fox, ABC or, even worse CBS, where he could team up with Letterman and later on replace him on his show.  Everyone in Late Night is getting a leg up except for Leno and NBC.  Needless to say, I’m with Coco.

Dean Bairaktaris – The Greatest Living American Dude: Evil Power Digger, SEO Consultant, Social Media Maverick, Web Developer and Elite Space Monkey in Fort Lauderdale, FL. Think Green.

In case you’ve been going to sleep early these days and you’ve been missing all the buzz on both Facebook and Twitter about what’s going on in the late night TV world,  NBC “Promoted” Conan O’Brien to the big chair of late night, The Tonight Show.  But for some reason, they wanted to keep Jay Leno in the NBC fold and put him in a prime time 10 PM slot before the local news.  The reasoning for this is very simple.  Producing one show with one star is 100 times cheaper than producing five quality prime-time shows with multiple casts, crews, directors and teamsters for five 10 PM prime time slots.

After a very short run, a simple domino effect is in play.  Leno “failed” in the 10PM time slot which led to lower ratings for the local news and lower ratings for The Tonight Show. NBC Failed to provide good shows before the local news. And now, it seems that rather than accept responsibility, the NBC execs have thrown the blame on Conan.

Was this Conan’s fault?  Maybe a little.  He didn’t ask about the prime-time line up and his lawyers didn’t go through his contract with a fine tooth comb.  Conan has a pretty iron clad contract BUT they missed the detail of what time the new Tonight Show was supposed to start.

“I believe that delaying The Tonight Show into the next day to accommodate another comedy program will seriously damage what I consider to be the greatest franchise in the history of broadcasting. The Tonight Show at 12:05 simply isn’t the Tonight Show.”  - Conan O’Brien

“I left NBC prime-time the same way I found it: a complete disaster.” – Jay Leno

Considering what happened when Johnny Carson left the Tonight Show and the fallout between Letterman and Leno and now with the flip flop between Leno and Conan and back to Leno again, NBC is losing trust within the industry and Loyalty with its viewers.  And if NBC screws over Conan after what they did to Letterman the last go around, who’s going to want replace Leno AGAIN?  If Leno failed in a prime time slot why is NBC giving him a 30 min show at 11:35 going to help the Tonight Show or NBC?  What’s the point?  Carson didn’t do anything to compete directly with the Tonight Show when he left.  Why let Leno compete at all?

I'm with Coco

This can either go down as the biggest disaster in TV history; bigger than when NBC passed Letterman over for the Tonight Show gig, bigger than when NBC Let Star Trek the original series die in 60s, or it’s a fiendishly brilliant viral marketing plan to boost NBC’s lagging ratings (wishful thinking on my part, but we can hope right?).

Where is everyone’s Brand Loyalty?  Is it with NBC, Leno or Conan?  There’s no apparent popular effort to bring Leno back to the Tonight Show – but there is a whole lot of buzz on the Social Media web sites in support of Conan.  Simply put, NBC would be stupid to let Conan go. He would most likely end up on either Fox, ABC or, even worse CBS, where he could team up with Letterman and later on replace him on his show.  Everyone in Late Night is getting a leg up except for Leno and NBC.  Needless to say, I’m with Coco.

Dean Bairaktaris – The Greatest Living American Dude: Evil Power Digger, SEO Consultant, Social Media Maverick, Web Developer and Elite Space Monkey in Fort Lauderdale, FL. Think Green.

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association held its “WOMM-U” event earlier this month in South Beach.  The conference report which follows was originally published at www.TheWiseMarketer.com on May 28, 2009 as filed by Bill Hanifin, North American Contributing Editor.

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Loyalty Moving from Marketing to Engagement

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s conference in Florida earlier this month provided some surprising insights, according to contributing editor Bill Hanifin of Hanifin Loyalty, who notes that the loyalty business is desperately re-engineering itself as programme sponsors look for innovations to freshen up their programmes.

Among the hottest topics concerning loyalty marketers are those of ‘engagement‘ and ‘word of mouth‘, with both having been quickly identified as effective paths to building more frequent and meaningful dialogues between sponsors and consumers.

Among the brands represented at the conference were big names such as Amway, Dell, Disney, Heinz, Kraft, Lenovo, McDonalds, NBC, PepsiCo, Proctor & Gamble, Texas Instruments, Unilever, and Walmart. The Web 2.0 names were also present, including Facebook, Google, MySpace, and Yelp.

Yelp’s Geoff Donaker kicked off the event with an overview of what he called a “platform for lifestyle blogging”. Over 21 million people had used the service to search for local businesses during the previous month, and the bulk of the consumer reviews posted broke down into 31% for restaurants and 23% for shopping. Donaker provided several examples of the power of the Yelp service, such as a carpet cleaning business in San Francisco which had invested in improving its customer service and generated such good reviews that the company was able to save US$100,000 per year in Yellow Pages adverts.

NBC also discussed its social media strategy, noting that community conversations, blog posts, and so-called “tweets” can not only build brand awareness and loyalty but also positively impact search engine results. Charles Edwards, CEO for Federated Media, also confirmed the importance of a strong search engine presence (particularly citing Google rankings): “It used to be that the homepage of your web site was your first digital impression, but now it’s the Google search result. Every marketer is a publisher now, and we don’t just compete with competitors but with any consumer that is also talking about us.”

Lenovo shared the story of how it tackled the challenge of making the most of its US$120 million Olympic sponsorship in 2008. The PC manufacturer chose to recruit 100 Olympic athletes, offering each a free technology solution and asking them to blog live from Beijing. Lenovo chose “long tail” athletes (i.e. those who weren’t in major sports, and who weren’t expected to draw general media attention). The campaign was a tremendous success and the athlete blogs quickly became the “insider’s view of the Olympics” during that highly competitive time.

Jeben Berg of YouTube also highlighted the power of video in marketing, noting that 15 minutes of video is uploaded every 60 seconds, all day every day. YouTube claims to be the largest site in the US (and the sixth-largest in the world), and boasts 81.6 million unique US-based visitors each month. Interestingly, the largest demographic in this massive set of visitors comes from the 35-49 age group.

WOMMA was able to get representatives of both MySpace and Facebook onto the same stage at the same time, and Heidi Browning (MySpace) and Chris Pan (Facebook) compared and contrasted the two social networks in detail. Browning exploded some myths about MySpace (particularly stressing that the site is not “just for teens”), and claiming that more than 70 million of its users are in the 18-34 age group in the US alone. Pan explained that successful Facebook marketing campaigns usually involve “building movements, not campaigns”, with a good recent example being the election campaign of Barack Obama.

Duncan Wardle of Disney discussed lessons learned using social media, and described a campaign that invited people to apply for their ‘dream Disney character job’. This word of mouth campaign quickly became viral and the responses were overwhelming. But Wardle was also practical, noting that “impressions don’t equal engagement” and suggesting that brands who don’t change from marketing to engaging risk soon becoming mere “nostalgia brands”.

The conclusion was that advertising and traditional ‘interruption marketing’ techniques are slowly but surely being replaced with collaboration, co-creation and dialogue with willing consumers.

This article is copyright 2009 TheWiseMarketer.com and is published here with permission.