Online Branding: Kill Your Call Letters?
Fun! Wait. Who Are You, Again?
Michael Malone at Broadcasting and Cable has an interesting quote from Steve Safran at AR&D regarding local television websites and the use of call letters in the URL: "By using your call letters, you're automatically limiting yourself to those who follow your newscasts," Safran said. "Why not open it up, make it more inclusive and pull in a whole new audience online."
Okay. I have many thoughts on this.
First, let's look at the example B&C offers as a success story, WCWJ in Jacksonville, which switched up its domain name to the jazzy and vague "YourJax.com" and saw its traffic spike. According to B&C, the rebranded website with its "fresh content like celebrity-focused weekly webisodes and interactive radar" saw its pageviews jump 150% and clicks on banner ads were up 44%.
The problem with this is that "YourJax" didn't replace call letters. The WCWJ website had the equally dorky and generic URL "MyCW17.com" as its online identity. (Go try and type that on a keyboard and you'll see just how awful that really was) So I can see how going from a disastrous domain to a boring/dorky one could improve your hopes of getting some clicks. (And add to that this equally key fact: WCWJ has exactly three years of brand equity in its call letters, which were changed to herald the arrival of the CW network)
I still believe call letters have value, and that value can be transfered from broadcast online, just as a name like The New York Times carries weight at the newsstand and even more weight on my computer.
NBC Local Media's on a call killing campaign with its generic (but NBC-boosting) "NBC New York" and "NBC Bay Area" web identities (which the network has certainly given thought to spreading far and wide, well beyond the O&Os; buying up NBC [CityNameHere] domains in most cities from coast to coast, whether the NBC station's owned by NBC or not) and that serves NBC, but not local stations.
Back to Basics at BZ
There's equity in call letters that have been around for decades. Heard of WBZ? The effort to run away from that local identity in favor of CBS4 was ultimately abandoned. Why? Because folks in Boston know WBZ. It triggers something. "MyClikBoston.com" may be catchy, but it doesn't resonate news. (Oh, damn. There I go again thinking this all has to do with news, instead of entertainment webisodes)
And it's not just me. Robb Lichter, senior VP of new media for LIN stations, told B&C: "The best way to get people to go to the sites is to take the brand they already know." LIN's stations use call letter branding online, and have associated microsites with original branding. "We don't want users to have to go to Google to find us."
SlimeWatch, Part 3: What Local Stations Can Learn from NPR's New Website
NPR.org doesn't exactly grab you by the shoulders and scream "cutting edge!" At least, not yet. But give it time.
One thing that is clear is this: the thinking behind the radio giant's redesign is advanced, and should be studied by every local television station manager and web team--at least the ones that intend to survive as employees of viable, profitable businesses.
For NPR, the new thinking goes like this: kinda, sorta, start not really focusing so much on the "R" in NPR: "This is an organization that's in transformation into becoming a fully functional news content organization, not just a radio company," said NPR's Vivian Schiller in an interview with Newsweek. Schiller's the force behind one of the most powerful news sites on Earth--nytimes.com--but she left the Times six months ago to join NPR and get the old school org all multiplatformy and stuff.
As Newsweek's Johnnie Roberts wrote, "For Schiller, that means building on NPR's reputation as a broadcaster of national and international news, by extending its reach into local news. She plans on relying more on local member stations to fill what she sees as a "scary" void in local coverage as hometown daily newspapers fold."
Supporting local coverage is obviously something most localnewsers can get behind. Unless, of course, that means a network, like NPR, or NBC for that matter, coming in an bypassing its local station to do the local work itself. And NPR's new model, as Schiller's old shop The New York Times noted, "would make it easier than ever to find programming from local stations, (it) will also make it much more convenient for listeners to bypass local stations, if they choose."
NBCChicago: No Worries for NBC-Owned WMAQ. But Boston, Tampa, Vegas?
This is exactly the threat, as I've argued, that NBC's "Locals Only" effort poses to NBC affiliates who don't choose to accept NBC's terms to do business on a local level. GE's already laid the groundwork by buying up domains from coast to coast that would allow the network to instantly be in the local online news business (as "NBC Boston," for example) and bypass entirely another "NBC" entity in the same city. Welcome to the Wild West, folks, where allegiances may shift depending on who's got better firepower, stronger horses, and cash.
Speaking specifically of NPR's aggressive move into multi-platform news growth online, Jake Shapiro, the executive director of Public Radio Exchange, a group that supports local radio stations, told the Times, “That’s the risk. It increases the pressure for stations to offer compelling and distinct programming."
As Schiller told the Times, NPR's revamped website isn't about offering National Public Radio a presence online, and certainly it's not an effort to drive ears to NPR stations. The new model reverses all of that, taking NPR's website “from being a companion to radio to being a news destination in its own right,” Ms. Schiller said.
The Web's News Giants Smell Money in Your Backyard. You Ready to Compete?
With TV networks contributing their content to Hulu and ending the once ironclad arrangement that you see NBC shows on NBC stations, the "bypass local stations but own local advertising" model is no hypothetical threat. It's time for smart station managers and news directors to look at their own websites and ask if they can compete against their own network--if it ever came to that.
Can you? Is your site that good? Is it tied to your TV product or growing in creative ways away from the TV newscast and terrestrial station? Is your local online reporting going to be better than NBC's or CBS's or Huffington Post's?
You may not be thinking this way. But trust me. They are.
Local TV Newsers: Meet Denise. She May Be the Future. She May Eat Your Lunch.
702.tv's Denise Spidle
Reading the story in the Las Vegas Sun, you could forgive a veteran local television reporter for an instinctive chuckle. Oh, aren't they precious! The newspaper people are trying to do TV! They've even gone and bought themselves a red couch and a curtain for a backdrop!
Yeah, you definitely want to laugh it off. But here's the weird thing about 702.tv: it's interesting, it's different, and it's the supposedly-dead medium of print, encroaching--yet again--on TV's turf. It's almost like (am I crazy here?) the print people think they can win the battle for local video online. Nah. That's crazy. We own that!
From the Washington Post, and it's excellent series of video documentaries posted online, to The New York Times' creative and compelling commitment to multi-media storytelling, it's becoming clear the print folk don't want to stay on their side of the fence in what's obviously a deathmatch. There will be local news, of course, and it'll probably be predominantly online at some point, but thinking that we're the experts on video and so obviously it's the papers that have to give up and go home... well, that's a huge mistake.
Think about your TV newsroom. What print tricks have you adopted? Certainly you haven't got bodies in police precincts running through the overnight arrests, and nobody's hanging out in the courthouse checking on interesting lawsuits. That's what newspapers are for, right?
Ah, but you've learned to write in print form for the web! Right? You doctor up your 6 o'clock script into a mock-print style and file it--sorry, feed it--to the website. And what a brilliant website it is, if I know anything about local TV, I'm sure yours is creative, ground-breaking, and chock full of unique uses of video. Right?
Right?
Everybody in town isn't coming out of this alive, folks. And assuming the print people will roll over and play dead just because, you know, the printing press is dead, well, that doesn't seem to be working. Sure, the paper won't be hitting doorsteps like it used to, but those print folk seem so aggressive about getting into our game. And far moreso than we seem to be about getting into theirs. Or even, about getting more creative about what we do. And that's how companies go out of business.
Doing a "webcast" that's a lousy and dated version of your noon newscast? That's not creative. That's not going to grab someone and say, hey, that's different. But I wouldn't put it past the kids in Vegas from getting that reaction. Yeah, sure, their motto is "News Never Looked So Good." There's that part of the equation. I get that. But there's something else. There's a creativity here that I haven't seen coming from TV stations.
Take a look at the winners of the Knight Foundation's 2009 News Challenge. No call letters among the bunch. But a LOT of creative, multi-platform, forward-thinking ideas about taking information and getting it in front of people, instead of sitting back on our broadcast bottoms and continuing to think the audience will just keep coming to us.
The Knight Foundation Voters Decide in Miami: Local TV? Not on the Table.
Eric Umansky and Scott Klein of ProPublica, and Aaron Pilhofer and Ben Koski of The New York Times won $719,500 to bankroll a project aimed at enriching investigative news reports by creating an easily searchable, free, public online database of public records. (As Jeff Jarvis would say, that's asking "What Would Google Do?)
Gail Robinson at the Gotham Gazette won $250,000 to create an online wiki devoted to local legislators' voting records and campaign contributions, so voters in New York can go someplace--free--and find usable information.
And in Phoenix, Aleksandra Chojnacka and Adam Klawonn of the Daily Phoenix won $95,000 to fund their idea of using news, games and social networking to help commuters on the city's light rail system informed about their city.
Where's the proof broadcasters get it? Where's the creativity that shows we will endure, succeed and prosper five years from now? Skype liveshots? Anchor blogs? Weather widgets?
Folks. The Buick dealer isn't coming back on a white horse to save you. What are you doing to change?
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