Marc Esper is NBC Universal’s Vice President of Search.
Five years ago, such a title at a major broadcast network would have been unthinkable. Today, it’s indispensable.
Esper, recruited a year and a half ago from AOL’s brand marketing team, is charged with making sure that NBC Universal’s 40 websites – including properties like Sci Fi Channel, NBC and Universal Pictures — show up properly in Google and Yahoo!, blogs, YouTube, discussion boards and the myriad other ways users discover content online.
“Each site has different marketing goals,” he said. “But each needs to tap into the huge online user base. We derive enormous synergies and cost-savings by having a group that focuses day in and day out on search.”
As the Internet eats into TV viewership, TV networks must increasingly turn to search engines on the web to ensure that they retain their core demographics. So must movie studios, game companies, music labels – any media entity that cares about surviving in the 21st century.
Gen Y doesn’t read newspapers. They Tivo past ads. They rip music. And they talk about favorite movies on MySpace. In other words, they live online.
“Search” conjures up images of Google and Yahoo! But, strictly speaking, any time you find anything online or on your cell phone, you’re using a search engine. Pointing your remote at the TV screen is a form of search.
Properties like TV Guide – which encompasses TV, the web, video-on-demand and mobile – will become essential in the new media universe.
“My view of search is that of a programmer looking at a sea of content,” said Dmitri Ponomarev, Vice President of On Demand, TV Guide Television Group.
About 60 percent of TV Guide Broadband’s customers come from search engines, including channels on AOL Video, Google Video and YouTube.
So things like metatags and hyperlinks are vitally important to TV Guide Broadband. And cross-pollination between TV Guide’s online, TV and magazine components is critical to its growth prospects.
Consider its experiment on MySpace with its TV Guide Channel TV show Look-a-Like, in which people are “transformed” into their favorite celebrities. Starting last January, MySpace users were invited to submit photos of their made-over selves to the TV Guide channel on MySpace. The result: 5,000 people submitted themselves for April voting; 2 million people visited the microsite; and five finalists have been selected for a Look-a-like TV show in April.
If that reminds you a bit of American Idol, it’s no coincidence: American Idol runs on Fox; Fox owns MySpace; and it also owns 41 percent of TV Guide.
Then there’s the brouhaha around a mysterious trailer inserted before a recent Transformers screening in Los Angeles. Surprised audience members saw the handycam-captured destruction of New York, with no title or distinguishing element other than the name of its producer J.J. Abrams. Type JJ Abrams and Transformers and you get….well, see for yourself.
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This post was written by Michael Stroud on July 19, 2007
