Commentary

Web Still Waiting For Lucy

by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer, April 12, 2011

Is the Web still waiting for its “I Love Lucy” moment, i.e., that single blockbuster content brand that blows the industry wide open? Yes (sorry, sneezing panda), but when it does hit it’s going to be a wakeup call to a lot of people, says Jeff Minsky, Director of Emerging Platforms at Omnicom Media Group. What’s more, when it hits it’s going to take a big, experienced agency -- rather than a single vendor -- to make sense of the show and its advertising potential. So says Chris Pyne, Chief Strategy Officer at MediaCom. “When we approach the marketplace we don’t approach it from the perspective of the individual vendor,” Pyne said. Agencies help clients see the bigger picture, he said. Adds Teri Gallo, VP of Marketplace Development of CADREON, the billion-dollar question for agencies to help clients answer is: “How do you reach audiences across all of these channels.” Then, of no less importance, it’s the responsibility of agencies to help their clients innovate and move forward.

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Rob Schmults from Intent Media, April 12, 2011 at 5:37 p.m.
Probably unfair to react to a synopsis of someone's talk, but doesn't the web already have one? It's called Google. I get it probably doesn't fit the mold of the kind of "content brand" Minsky was thinking of, but the web is different from TV so it's logical that the molds would in fact be different. I could be off base, lacking the full context from the presentation, but Minsky's comments sound like a throwback to the mid-90's when brand marketers and agencies were busy trying to force the web into familiar metaphors. So we got sites that bent over backwards to look like glossy magazines (remember those sites that wanted you to flip virtual pages?). Or even worse, a clickable TV (and we're still stuck with Flash as a result). The web isn't actually waiting for a blockbuster content brand in the mold of "I Love Lucy" because it's not TV. The metaphor is different as is the value and the means for marketers to leverage it (user intent vs. audience demos).
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