• by Jack Myers , June 1, 2007

Question of the week: What new TV series will you be watching next week, and why isn't there more publicity promoting them?

This week Bill Gates and Steve Jobs joined hands on stage at the Wall Street Journal's annual conference. The Bancroft family announced it was willing to at least meet with Rupert Murdoch, and most observers expect it to lead ultimately to a deal. The New York Post relegated the Bush administration's embrace of environmental policies to page eight while devoting the first three pages of today's issue to Alex Rodriguez' fling (a story with a good long tail). Ex-Wal-Mart-executive Julie Roehm is back in the news with tales of inappropriate behavior by senior Wal-Mart executives, with the Post again out-in-front on the story. And speaking of the Yankees, New Yorkers are being forced to confront the pending demise of Joe Torre and the error of allowing Willie Randolph to move across town. It seems inevitable that Don Mattingly, Joe Gerardi or Bucky Dent will soon be taking over the manager's role unless a winning streak materializes.

But the most significant issue confronting Americans today is the opening of the summer television season and the disappearance of their favorite regular season series. The favorite pastime is no longer baseball, nor has it been for decades. America's favorite pastime is television. Yet the average newspaper has four to eight pages of sports coverage and one page of TV coverage.

As "American Idol," "24," "Heroes," "Friday Night Lights," "Lost," "CSI," "Dancing With the Stars," "The Riches," "The Shield," "The Sopranos" and other favorites fade into fond memories, they're being replaced this coming week by "Murder She Wrote" on Hallmark Channel, "Hex" and "Footballers Wive$" on BBC America, "Marco Polo" on Hallmark, "Write or Wrong" with Kirstie Alley and "Army Wives" on Lifetime (why isn't Lifetime promoting day and date in its advertising?), "Make-over Train" on TLC, "Creature Comforts" on CBS, "Hell's Kitchen" on Fox, NBC's "America's Got Talent," "ABC's American Inventor" and "Fast Cars & Superstars," "Ghost Hunters" on SCI-FI, "Tyler Perry's House of Payne" on TBS, and "Top Chef" on Bravo. Fox's "So You Think You Can Dance" on Fox selects the top 20 finalists.

This is just a handful of the offerings the cable and broadcast networks are scheduling this summer to keep America occupied and, hopefully, to keep ratings robust. So I scanned through the television industry trade press in this week of premieres and major programming shifts, and visited the Web sites of Advertising Age, Television Week, Broadcasting and Cable, Multichannel News, Adweek and Mediaweek. At B&C and Multichannel News sites, I was devastated to learn that "Battlestar Galactica," which has had a creative resurgence this year, will only have one more season. Other than that, there's virtually no home page coverage of television programming. Even Variety virtually ignored TV content. This week's major news story in the TV community was NBC replacing programming exec Kevin Reilly with Ben Silverman. But by Friday, there was no follow-up insight and only MediaVillage.com's Ed Martin bothered to pay tribute editorially to Reilly's achievements.

To their credit, the industry trades do an extraordinary job of covering the industry news -- and to be fair, the news tends to be more deal-driven, while programming coverage is rarely front page news. But all of us in this business need to bring ourselves out of the technology and "deal-of-the-moment" haze and recognize the dramatic shift toward content that is about to occur. We are on the cusp of a significant refocusing of venture funds, executive demands, growth challenges and industry priorities away from invention and toward retention. In all media -- online, print, television, even out-of-home -- the focus for investment funding and development is shifting toward content. Barry Diller's IAC, CBS, Viacom, NBC are making aggressive moves to build their content portfolios.

The media industry -- especially the video media -- is inundated with digital technology companies, many of them redundant. Thousands of companies have received venture funding to build a technology foundation to facilitate enhanced content distribution.

Going forward, the deals that will capture the attention of the industry and move onto the front pages and home pages of industry trade publications and Web sites will focus on content. With ubiquitous delivery available through multiple streams -- wired and wireless -- the competition comes down to who has the most compelling content packaged in the most compelling ways.

The key to future growth is no longer technology -- it's programming. And even more important, it's about branded programming that has "legs" across multiple distribution platforms, supports sponsors through nontraditional means, and brings audiences back day-after-day.

Marketers are slowly moving budgets away from cost-per-thousand-driven metrics and toward sponsorships, alliances and promotional relationships measured by audiences' emotional connections -- quality rather than quantity. Of course, the ceaseless focus on commercial ratings, DVR ratings and other quantitative behavioral measures suggest otherwise, but soon the trades and the industry will realize the subtle shifts of the past few years have become a tsunami of change.

The industry today is consumed with digital advances, financial deals, partnership deals, commercial ratings issues, technology, upfront maneuverings... almost everything except content. Watch for it. The tide is turning and content is about -- once again -- to be king.

So, what are you watching next week -- and when will the networks realize it's not about finding the new hits season after season? It's about building loyal audiences through branded content -- audiences who return and who reward advertisers for their support.