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The Timeless Wisdom of The Price Is Right

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The man, the myth and just maybe the gold standard of Madison meets Vine meets Social Media.

Remember the Price is Right (TPIR)? Among the digerati and urban hipster set Bob Barker’s legacy doesn’t get much mindshare, but the show is still going strong, if in a more heavy-handed attempt to garner a younger audience. Drew Carey now hosts, but the premise is much the same as the original show of the 1970′s (which, it’s interesting to note, was itself a revamped version of the true original show of the 50′s and 60′s). Today the venerable Price now has a website, Twitter feed and other trappings of the modern media era.

I started thinking about The Price Is Right today when a coworker blurted out the name during a meeting. It dawned on me that even back in 1972, The Price Is Right was miles ahead of its time. TPIR preempted a lot of trends that came up years, even decades, later. As one of the vanguard programs in ‘reality TV’(which is basically what early TV gameshows were forerunners of), I’ve come to believe The Price Is Right is instructive to today’s businesses, the media and the marketing industry.

Building a program from the constituency on up.
I don’t know if the original producers envisioned it as such but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. The entire original Price Is Right concept (I’m talking the iconic Bob Barker version) was brilliantly built around the primary viewers of the show – stay at home wives and moms. Obviously these are the women who are near TVs during the shows airtime (midday during the week). But The Price Is Right does more than target based on availability of eyeballs, it let the people define the program (how very ‘social media’of them, indeed)

Consider for a moment the notion that being a stay at home wife or mom is a vocation no different than being a lawyer, doctor, graphic designer or construction worker. As with any trade, there are skills involved; time management, multi-tasking, organizing, financial dealing and of course procurement. This last one, in more conventional terms, is called shopping and it is a defining job responsibility of state-at-home moms and wives.

Not surprisingly, like all other professions, there are degrees of savvy, skill and quality in shopping. Good shoppers know the stores to visit for certain products. Good shoppers know which prices are high or low. Good shoppers like to wheel and deal and work the system (coupons, buy-one-get-one, frequent shopper points). Good shoppers, like any other group of skilled workers, also compare notes, provide tips and enjoy the fruits of bragging rights. In short, they too like to be recognized for their skills just as any other professional. The Price Is Right understood this driver decades ago and built a show around it.

Every aspect of the Price Is Right is about shopping and the benefits of being good at it. Additional layers of risk and reward are added to make it exciting: the thrills of roll-of-the-dice randomness, the suspense of ticking clocks and the mayhem of group sourcing (remember how the audience yells bidding suggestions to contestants vying for the opportunity to play a game?).

Social Media 1.0
Think about it and you’ll realize that The Price is Right  leveraged a lot of the principles of social media a full generation ago. Per the mention above, it provided for group sourcing. It also plucked people from the studio audience to participate thus elevating amateurs to near-professionals – the same 15 minutes of fame people now get publishing on YouTube, Flickr or Facebook. And of course every show ended with a solicitation for people to call or write in for tickets to be in the studio audience. It might be a stretch to call this ‘joining a community’. Then again, for thousands of women bound together by the joy and skill of bargain hunting, price guessing and shopping-for-rewards it could also be argued that fans of the Price Is Right were a powerful community already and that TPIR simply gave them an early aggregation point (the same thing a lot of brands are trying to do with social media today). It’s also worth noting here that advertisers would kill today for access to a captive, engaged shopper community of stay at home moms and wives.

Product Placement 1.0
Remember the stir a few years ago around “Madison & Vine”? The concept – a reaction to the breaking down between marketing and content in a fragmenting media space –  was to blur the lines between programming and advertising. It spawned forced new terms like ‘advertainment’, it led to books, brands making movies, and more than a little buzz. Before the social media gurus jumped in and took over the spotlight Advertainment gurus were pontificating on how insert brands into storylines in a way that walked the fine line between selling and selling out. Had they looked at dusty old Price is Right they’d have seen a sterling example.

TRIP was a natural fit for brand integration. Numerous products could be featured. They’d play a central role in the show. There was time to deliver a little sales pitch (I recall Turtle Wax and Rice A Roni being Price is Right standards).Think about it, here you had people watching other people guess the price of products that were being advertised to them as they played. Even more brilliantly, the Price Is Right built tiers into the process of integrating brands. Small packaged goods figured into most of the games as devices for gameplay. more treasured items like washers, driers, fur coats and ‘a new car!’were served up as prizes.  And finally, the Showcase Showdown was full of luxurious products from every category including exotic hotels and airline travel.  All were given a collective ‘oooooh’from the infatuated (and no doubt, teleprompted) audience. TPIR sold its sponsor’s brands hard because doing so benefited the brands, the show and most importantly excited the professional homemaker who’s middle income dreams were fulfilled with the chance to one day drive off in that convertible Malibu.

You can almost hear brands lining up to be involved. Can you imagine the premiums you’d command today with the trifecta of seamless brand integration, perfect and large viewer audience and  a narrative the encouraged participation and sharing.

Price Is Right 2.0
Sadly, the Price Is Right hasn’t kept up with the times too well. Sure is still has a warm and inviting host. And sure it has comely aspirational women fawning over the products. But the attempts to appeal to college students feels forced and out of place (most college students know the price of beer and books but otherwise aren’t savvy shoppers). The online presence of The Price Is Right is superficial and feels equally forced. It’s done little to follow its customers online besides apply the lipstick of social media by setting up the requisite Facebook page, Twitter account, flash games, and chat rooms. It looks, in short, like a website conceived by a television-centric company that read a few books on social media and shopped for an ‘interactive agency’to work through the punchlist.

I believe The Price Is Right could recreate its greatness again in the social media age if they took the core elements of what made them great the first time and applied them to today’s blog-hopping stay at home mom’s. TPIR could leverage a brand still associated with shopping and fun and by using the tools those mom’s have come to know and love establish itself again as the expression of homemaker savvy. By respectfully reflecting what it means to be a professional homemaker today, TPIR could again find brands beating on their door for a chance to participate all the while gathering a valuable community whose data, eyeballs, input and wallets would command an absolute premium.

In the meantime though, The Price Is Right offers those of us building brands, selling programs and trying to build communities a great case study in how to do it. It all boils down to one word…

Alignment.

What The Price Is Right did was align its program, game play, strategic partners (the brands) and talent around an understanding of the lives of the women it wanted to reach. This methodology doesn’t start with tools or technologies. It starts with people’s lives and a desire to look deeper that demographics and man on the street interviews. The Price Is Right appealed to the psychology of what being a stay at home mom/wife meant in terms of worldview, self-worth, desires and ambitions. It reached a lot deeper than the execution of the show would indicate at first blush.

Dispatches from the Front Porch

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Misc Coffee Cup.JPGI live in an old farm house with a front porch. On that porch is a wicker sofa. If all goes well, on Sunday mornings I park myself on this sofa, drink coffee, read the paper, and  mull things over. I decided it might be a good construct for posting to my blog. So, I’m creating a Front Porch section to do that. Below is dispatch one from my front porch. (No doubt your click finger is twitching for the RSS button.)
Now Not New

The subhead on this blog is ‘Now Not New’and encapsulation of my personal belief that while we need pioneers to go off on quests for ‘paradigm changing innovation’, most of us should be focused on evolution not revolution.

This article in today’s New York Times drives that message home from the perspective of technological migration within industries. It is presented in this article as a business strategy. It struck me as worth thinking about on a lot of levels as we all grapple with change in our businesses, rituals, lifestyles and relationships.

Spongemonkeys from Quiznos ads and rathergoodDefining Culture or Keeping Up

One of my formative impressions during my first years working in the ad industry early in my career, was that of agencies taking credit for defining culture when mostly they were just latching on to it. Some examples include Docs which were popular long before some agency convinced the brand to advertise in print. Timberlands which were advertised to WASPS but staples in the Brooklyn hip hop scene. And a few years back one of my favorite nutball sites rathergood.com, got picked up in Quiznos. A certain ad critic went on at length about how the agency created the ultimate mix of creative genius for the brand. Meanwhile, what they did was hire rathergood to take a song they’d already written about the moon and change the lyrics to be about sub sandwiches. Needless to say said critic got a lot of comments to his write-up and quickly buried it.

So, to just put it out there, I read this article on my front porch today, and am betting it will be 90-180 days before some ‘buzz agency’slaps a brand on this concept and then takes credit for starting a trend that already exists.

I’m not saying advertisers are supposed to define culture, I just get annoyed when they take credit for it like a prophet of cool.

Hive board game tilesHive: A Board Game without a board.

Apparently board games remain huge in Europe and especially Germany. In my home we play our share as I think its a great way to gather the family around and talk, laugh and spend time together. On my recent vacation to New Hampshire I picked up the game Hive which I read a review of in Wired magazine (the print edition no less). I can’t recommend this game enough. It’s elegantly simple in concept, quick to learn and reveals layers of complexity the more you play it – like chess. But unlike chess, it doesn’t takes hours to play and young kids (my daughter is eight) can pick it up pretty quickly. Plus, it fits in an easily-carried pouch and I’m guessing works the brain well. Hive has just displaced Blokus as my favorite game of the moment. In a world of great video games, its still nice to see innovative old-school board games too.

Robot MooseThe Moose Report

I was recently in New Hampshire on vacation. Whenever I travel I try to spend time observing the people around me. I believe its my full-time 24-7-365 job to study people and how they interact with each other, technology, products, media, etc. Sure, Gartner, Forrester, Yankelovich etc. put out great reports, but nothing beats first-hand observation when you can have it.

Mind you, I was near North Conway and Meredith, not backwoods New Hampshire. This is a Boston vacation community I’m talking about. A few things I noted worth mentioning:

  • No one mentioned Twitter. Not once.
  • Teens were continually texting but few had ‘smart phones’.
  • In cafes with Net connections more people were dealing with spreadsheets and Google than Facebook and Flickr.
  • Technology was an accessory not a focal point of how people presented themselves.

…All of this struck me as a contrast from my normal travels in the NYC metro area. We need to be cautious that we technophiles don’t begin to believe everyone is like us. Per the first part of this post, it’s one thing to be an opinion leader or early adopter, it’s another to assume everyone is.

bartsgirlfriendOne Final Word

One of my favorite Simpson’s lines is from an old episode where Bart is trying to woo a girl. At one point he’s blathering on clumsily as young boys often do in front of girls. This girl, who is a bit snotty, interrupts him dismissively saying, “Bart, do you ever think anything you don’t say?”

This line pops up for me now and then when I think about social media and especially status updates. Do we ever think things we don’t say (or post)? Should we? The sentiment was underscored in this SundayStyles article about no tweet no blog VIP parties.

Two quotes from the article:

“People think that every thought they have, every experience – if its not captured is lost.”

“When its off the record, you actually listen to the conversation, not just wait for your turn to speak.”

Food for thought. And a deliciously apropos point to stop blogging from today.

Rethinking Social (without the Media).

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My college mentor once noted that the technology of television could’ve been used to educate around the illiteracy barrier. But the first movers successfully promoting a marketplace for TV were the news, entertainment and advertising industries. Not surprisingly they largely defined how television emerged culturally. It’s used for education, a little, but mostly for news, entertainment and advertising.

As is well know by geeks the world around, the original purpose of the Internet was not news proliferation, entertainment or advertising either. Yet, as with TV, the media and marketing industries were first movers in leveraging these new technologies to their industries’needs (and profit). Though ham-fisted in their efforts at times, by and large the influence of the marketing/media industry can be felt as far down as the development of code standards for display (would engineers or researchers have created a need for CSS or AJAX)?

Today, the influence of the media industry (under which I bucket news, entertainment and marketing) on the dialogue over Web 2.0 technologies can be felt right in the name ‘Social Media‘. The technology itself is not media, per se, it is in its usage that the media piece comes into play*. But what if the ‘media’piece went away? What if some other industries had been the first movers? How might social-interaction-enabling technologies (a better, if wonkier, term in my mind) be used if we ignore the tendency to leap into thinking like an entertainment or marketing person when the topic comes up.

(* if you’re about to argue ‘everything is media’hold your breath, I get it, but that too is a media-centric world view.)

Dream a little with me now…

You’ve just been employed by ACME corporation. On your first day at work you show up and your computer’s homepage is your personal page on the company social network (think of it as Intranet 2.0). Sitting down with your coffee you’re able to see images from the company softball team’s latest game. There’s a new video of the CEO’s keynote speech at her alma mater. You notice a new employees forum where you see advice on where to find the office supply closet, how to call a car service and where the best place is for burritos.

This isn’t all touchy-feely though. There’s serious business to be done.  Further into the site you notice new product designs are available for viewing. In fact the company wants everyone’s input, via a poll, on the best color combination for the new widget. Better yet, there’s a small reward for doing the poll. Accrue enough points in the reward system and there are some prizes to be had – MP3s, a free lunch at the great burrito joint, a Q&A session with the CEO.

R&D has also posted requests for insights from people who participate in Medieval Maypole Dancing (humor me, at least it makes for an interesting read, right?). These insights will be used in developing a product extension to meet the growing needs of this fertile market segment. R&D has also invited current customers of the company to participate in the company’s ‘innovation lab’. In exchange for their ideas, and some person-to-person interaction with the scientists in product development, outside members of the lab will be in a drawing to receive a free new widget when the next version is released.

While you’re pondering who you might refer this Innovation Lab to, HR contacts you through the network to discuss your benefits package and to let you know that there’s a new employee cocktail hour happening up the road tomorrow night. Already you see that the company is using the network to post internal job openings and to allow managers to provide feedback and even recommendations for employees within the company.

During your first day at work, you note that all interoffice messages route directly through the system as does calendaring, sales leads and follow-ups, meeting notes, etc. This, in turn is easily synched with your smartphone. And without ever leaving your desk you’re already beginning to meet the people in the company as they chime in with instant messages through the network. In fact, a simple search of the network returns three people on your floor that grew up in the same area you did.

But perhaps the nicest part of this interoffice system is how easily integrated it is with Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube. Through the company network you can open or close gateways to your personal profiles and content online. And your friends on LinkedIn looking for work can jump right in through connection invites you make with them and HR (saving the company headhunting fees in the process). Even the suppliers you’re going to work with can build (or import) profiles on the Company network making business transactions easier and keeping all the traffic, memos, notes, invoices, and messages streaming through a single pipeline.

…this is, of course, a dream but it doesn’t have to be. Individually the technologies do exist. What is needed is an embrace at the operational level of the type of transformation these technologies can make in a business. R&D, product development, HR, sales, customer service, operations… almost any facet of a company could benefit by integrating social-enabling technologies into the very fabric of the organization. And it need not be in the full Eutopian sense of the dream above, it could be in small, simple, inexpensive but nevertheless meaningful ways.

My point is, freed from the seemingly defacto association with applying these technologies to media/entertainment/marketing problems, there is much fertile ground to leverage them across an enterprise. Connecting people, opening dialogue and harnessing the cumulative knowledge of a group can improve the outcome of many, many endeavors.

In a plug for my own company, taking a holistic look at a business (we use a construct called Enterprise DNA) and seeing how the technologies of today can help it today (something I refer to as looking at Now Not New) often leads to some interesting ideas.

I continue to hear rumblings in meetings, and see evidence online of an early-stage backlash against social media from a marketing standpoint. Personally, I believe it is too early to tell for sure whether or not, and how, social applications will influence customer acquisition. While I think its foolish to dismiss social media in marketing outright, the more tentative, measured and reasoned thinking going on now is probably appropriate. As with anything, I’m guessing the truth sits someplace between the hype and the cynicism. In the meantime though, it might be worth opening up some new avenues of thought on how to leverage all the incredibly powerful technologies we have today toward other aspects of enterprise value creation. Start by walking down the hall and asking the company accountant.

Skittles – A Monochromatic Rainbow

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So why does the Skittle social media experiment feel more ‘media’than ‘social’? It has all the ingredients du jour – FB, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter – yet it still doesn’t live up to the holy grail promise heralded by the pundits of Web 2.0.

Skittles’association with rainbows is an interesting reference point here. There are two ways to think of rainbows. One is singular. A rainbow is a band with many colors. The second is to realize that a rainbow is a composite of many bands of light, all with their own characteristics.

It is between these two definitions that I see Skittle’s problem. Skittles.com has leveraged all the right technologies but is treating its audience like a singular thing.

The Skittle experience feels monochromatic. There’s no real sense of diversity or even humanity to it. In many ways, its the old ad agency model (‘be really funny and carpet bomb the media’) applied to today’s distribution channels of choice. Like TV, Skittles efforts feel more like a broadcast than a dialogue. The customer doesn’t figure into the equation much deeper than the polarities of comments. (“Skittles rule” and “Skittles suck” to save you all a bunch of time.)

Inherent in the brand is the concept of diversity – in colors, in flavors, even in varieties of Skittles – yet the message of Skittles.com and the assorted Skittles pages on the sites they’ve chosen, is largely generic, Madison Avenue TV fare.

In fact, the whole thing feels almost lazy. Like all they did was slap a (poorly placed and annoying immoveable) sticker over a bunch of sites with a default ‘skittles’search in place.

Ultimately, Skittles is making a splash, not a connection. And when the splashes’ripples fade (usually in the shadow of the next confectioner’s attempt to out-funny or out-Facebook their competitor) all that’s left is, well, nothing but a dormant list of 600K+ ‘friends’and some dusty repurposed TV spots on YouTube.

For my part, if Skittles focused more on the ‘social’and less on the ‘media’piece their efforts would bear more (artificially flavored) fruit.

As a brand that could leverage concepts of diversity easily, Skittles could support expressions of art, writing, dance, music, fashion, etc. – through social strategies. I’m not talking about some ‘upload your favorite Skittle rap’nonsense here. I mean going out into communities and finding and spotlighting diversity as it exists authentically here and now.

There are opportunities of tribalism and competition. There are mixes to be made. Matches to be hatched. Games to be played.

In fact Skittles, more than many confections, is tied to color, which in turn is connected to emotions, personalities, preferences, and entire chapters in psychology tomes.

With all the technological power to narrowslice, create art and build individual connections, why has Skittles opted for a monocrhomatic, Madison Avenue tactic distributed in social media?

Your guess is as good as mine.