Lauren Zalaznick got her start as an independent producer, but she is well known for rising to the top of NBCUniversal’s cable operations, running Bravo and Style before exiting the company in September 2013. Since then, she’s kept herself busy with her weekly email newsletter LZ Sunday Paper and other endeavors.

Her insights on the rapidly changing television TV industry remain laser-sharp, as her conversation with Buzzfeed’s Ze Frank illuminated during an on-stage conversation at PromaxBDA: The Conference 2015 on Wednesday.

“I think the business of promoting great content has in and of itself fragmented,” she told Frank. “There are so many ways to tell people to watch so many different things. It’s fractured in three dimensions.”

And it’s not just the marketing that has fragmented but the industry itself. Moreover, the shows that used to be TV’s workhouses – “the tried and true shows that go on for 12 years, that’s what has collapsed,” she said. “If you take out the middle of a profitable solid structure, you start to collapse under your own weight. It’s fair to say that our industry took a few years to react to the DVR threat, the commercial ratings system and digital.”

For TV marketers, what that means is that their roles have changed drastically. Promotional content needs to travel far and wide, working for brands on-air, on digital platforms and on social media. Promo needs to be enough like content that people want to share it, but enough like promo that it gets the word out.

“Does brand still matter?” Frank asked.

“I absolutely think yes but only in that specific definition. Almost any word can become a meaningful brand when it’s associated with a business that has a real reason to be in business,” Zalaznick said.

The difference between networks and digital platforms is that TV networks are still the central place where the content lives. The best digital content can roam anywhere and still be connected to the originating brand. For example, only 2 ½ percent of Buzzfeed’s 1.4 billion views per month happen on the platform called Buzzfeed.

“That doesn’t work for a network,” said Zalaznick. “What’s the value of your organization versus ours?” she asked Frank. “That’s a stress point for all of these networks.”

But it’s hard to get any organization to change the fundamentals of how it’s run.

“It’s inertia. You can’t stop doing something that worked, it’s unnatural. It’s hard to give up doing the thing that built your business so successfully,” Zalaznick said.

Asked what factors networks have had to unwillingly give up, Zalaznick said: “Consistent audience, linear time and scarcity. What’s left is quality but even that is marked by fragmentation.”

“You are saying there’s an economic reset that needs to happen to marketing budgets. What is that reset?” Frank asked.

Her answer was a tall order: “You need to be able to measure anyone who touches your content anywhere they touch it and make them pay for it,” Zalaznick said.

In the end, although this world is changing quickly, Zalaznick has hope for networks’ futures.

“It’s not like we got it all wrong. We got it right, but now it’s diffuse and spread out. If we can recapture those diffuse things and then put the economic filter back on, we’ll be good.”

Image courtesy of Image Group LA.

Tags:


  Save as PDF