Did Paul Harvey Architect the Best Advertising Solution for Online Episodic Content?
The news of syndicated commentator Paul Harvey’s death reached my weekend “office,” a quiet hotel room overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in Nags Head, North Carolina. With the lonely winter waves lapping a desolate beach, I could not have devised a more contemplative environment (side observation: nature has absolutely no idea what a recession/modern depression is, it’s a great way to gain some quiet perspective).
Working for a company that offers advertising insertion technology as a core hosted business feature, it is easy to get side-tracked into in the notion that scalable online advertising requires an absolute separation between content and the advertising message. There are examples where this is practice is critical to to the trust of the veracity of the associated content. Modern professional journalism certainly requires and maintains an iron wall between editorial and advertisement. But Paul Harvey provided us one of the best and most valuable examples of why, with the right type of content, the marriage of host-delivered messages, by a trusted host, may very well provide the best advertising method in episodic content.
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Mar 01, 2009
Was Paul Harvey a newsman who sold a product, or a salesman who happened to provide some news. In all my years growing up and listening to him on the radio, I thought he was the former. I now realize he was the latter.
That’s not bad. There’s no criticism here. Rather, it’s the simple reality of mass media (since the beginning) and Paul Harvey was the poster-boy for it.
I reflect a lot on newspapers. Are they providing news, the costs of which are paid by advertising? Or are they first and foremost, a business whose product is messaging (ads), and in the process, the public gets informed on the news side? I wonder how many “Paul Harveys” today — particularly younger ones — can answer that.
On your comments regarding separation between content and the advertising message, I came across an interesting item on CNN today. Story was about Obama’s $100 billion for education, and they segued a bit to an sweet little example of “teacher-ingenuity” (“Teacher-entrepreneurism”?). San Diego math teacher wanted to help offset exam printing costs last year. What did he do?
Sold advertising to local firms, inserting ads into the top and the margins of the exam booklets. Go figure.
The medium is the message; not sure if that’s entirely relevant here, McLuhan’s thing, but you really can not distinguish sales messaging anymore from the medium that carries it.
And do we even need to?