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Lee Hunt, the man who defined what it means to be a modern channel brand, has three words for those he’s helped over the years: “move or die.”
Harsh? Sure. But hardly surprising given the fact that even the children of television execs these days understand that Netflix and binge watching have totally changed viewer behavior. (Although hopefully they fret about it less than their parents).
Channel brands need a shift in attitude, Hunt said, if they want to make it out of this period of shifting viewer behavior alive.
“How do we keep our channel brands relevant? Right now we are navigators and we need to go back to being curators,” he said in Berlin on Monday. Hunt was one of the keynote speakers on the opening day of the 2015 PromaxBDA Europe Conference.
Media brands need the reach of large media, but need to focus on a niche product—creating a unique perspective and tying the products together, Hunt told the Berlin audience.
“It’s about owning it,” he said.
Today’s viewer habits also mean that effective promo is more vital than ever.
Hunt’s got one word that sums up a good promo: “Duh!”
His four rules for helping get your promo to the perfect State of Duh!:
1 - Every idea has to be simple
2 - It should be obvious
3 - Needs to be intuitive
4 - It’s gotta be emotional to get them connected
After he left the stage, Hunt answered question from conference attendees in a Twitter chat at #AskLeeHunt.
He said the biggest mistake he sees channel brands make over and over is “trying to copy — literally —the successful strategies of their competitors.”
HBO was name-checked as the strongest channel brand Hunt has encountered in his career, with ESPN and MTV coming in for praise, too.
“These stand for more than channels; they’re cultural brands,” Hunt tweeted.
His golden advice for brands: “Define. Differentiate. Be relevant.”
Hunt was making his first keynote appearance at a PromaxBDA Europe Conference with his speech on Monday.
But he’s no stranger to the organization.
He’s practically an institution at PromaxBDA’s annual June conference in North America, where his New Best Practices is basically a required session.
Hunt got his start in the 1980s, launching and branding Lifetime, VH1, and TNT. For the past 15 years he has run Lee Hunt LLC, a strategic consultancy that has worked with clients from A+E Networks to WNET, and (literally) everyone in between.
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