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USA Edition | Today Is Friday, September 3, 2010 |
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| Browsing Materials Tagged Todd Belt | 3 Items Found | ||
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Give 'Em Hell, Mary
Good Data Driving Bad Choices
New York – Ratings have always been the measure of success in television broadcasting. Audience research data collected by Nielsen Media Research is the standard in audience measurement technology and methods. It’s not the demographic quality or accuracy of ratings that drive bad choices. To the contrary, it’s how that information is used by broadcasters and advertisers that has contributed to the ongoing decline in audience, debasement of traditional American values, coarsening of civility, disdain for education and intellectual achievement and corruption of journalism.
Recent research by Todd Belt (University of Hawaii, Hilo), and Marion Just ( Wellesley College, Joan Shorenstein Center, Harvard ) found that higher quality news content attracts more viewers — the opposite of current day theory and practice. Professors Belt and Just are not alone in calling into question how broadcasters mis-apply short term metrics that often produce results counter to long term corporate goals and aspirations. Belt and Just’s research addresses how and why short term metrics produced today’s entertainment-driven ( some believe corrupt ) broadcast journalism. Their research also provides broadcasters new insight into the ways that expedient, short term ‘fixes’ traded short term competitive advantage to the detriment of long range corporate goals, and survival.
Strategic Metrics — The Road Least Traveled
Customer retention and profitability consultant Mikael Blaisdell mblaisdell.com ( a Newsroom Magazine contributor, lecturer, consultant and writer ) has recently shed new light on how overly simple tactical metrics very often work against long term corporate goals. Blaisdell advises his high technology clients to broaden performance metrics to include strategic measures assessing how well the organization is satisfying both customer needs and corporate goals. Blaisdell’s argument is sound, for doing what customers may prefer for the moment while ignoring their long term needs creates opportunities for competitors with a more strategic management agenda.
One need look no further than Ford, GM and Chrysler, all of whom focused on what was most popular and profitable in the short term while Japanese car makers ( Toyota and Honda ) built brand loyalty through customer satisfaction. Newsroom: Expediency, Up Close And Personal
Tactical Measures, Bad Outcomes
The 4-Warn Weather Guy
Television programming in general, and television news in specific, are driven by a tactical metrics model that favors entertainment values with short term outcomes. Managing by tactical metrics favors dong what is most expedient and timely over what best serves long term corporate goals. Tactical metric management assumes that network branding is temporal and that viewer loyalty is at, or near zero.
Managing by ratings alone is predicated on the assumption that audience preferences for entertainment are the only criteria viewers use in making choices. What derives from such an assumption is focus on the short term ( being top ranked in the time slot ) at the expense of achievement of long-term corporate goals for profitability and survival. No argument is being made that tactical metrics and decision-making are unimportant in broadcasting, but rather that long-term, strategic metrics are equally essential. Absent a strategic metrics model and decision making mechanism, doing what’s best in the short term easily comes at the expense of long term corporate goals.
TV News — By Bean Counters
While viewership has always been important, what changed in the 1980’s was the transfer of broadcast property management from creative talent to Bean Counters. Over the ensuing years, program content ( creativity-driven criteria ) were thus increasingly de-emphasized while financial performance measures increased in prominence. Tactical thinking has had an immense impact on program content — especially news related broadcasts.
But, as one former large market general manager has been quoted, “There’s no television on television anymore.” What he meant is that creative people capable of developing and producing community based programming — from cooking shows to public interest broadcasts to performing arts — are all gone. What passes for programming today is anything syndicated, or better yet, infomercials. Based on what is seen on local television stations today, it’s clear the bean counters have driven off anyone who knows anything about television broadcasting that might serve the greater good for their local community.
12-12 Television
Some insiders seem to believe that the eventual outcome of good data driving bad choices may be the end of television broadcasting as we know it today. In it’s place, some believe, will be a new programming paradigm that consists of only two programming types more or less evenly divided into twelve hour packages. Without either network or syndication content, the broadcast day would consist of 12 hours of ‘local news’ and 12 hours of infomercials.
If that’s where broadcast television is going, station owners ought to consider an even less expensive programming model: Go to black — permanently. Or, as John Haldi, former GM at one of CBS’s most successful station, has suggested, hire some creative talent and direct them to entertain and inform. Haldi knows his medium well — as attested to by his election to President of the National Association of Television Programming Executives in 1967.
Oh, and Haldi says he recommends beginning by firing all the damn bean counters. Television, he wants us to know, is a creative medium.