Taking a 'Q' from Hollywood marketing - Front Lines - Brief Article

Chief Executive, The, August-Sept, 2002 by Richard Laermer

He who rules the standards rules the economic flow through." So says pop culture expert Bruce Sterling, who is known as "the king of dead products." That statement is especially true in the entertainment world, where keeping tabs on audience tastes is harder than ever.

Marketing Evaluations/TvQ, Inc., is famous for its "Q" rating system, which measures the appeal of individual actors, TV shows, and movies. In an early example, CBS was the first network to use the Q score when deciding whether "All in the Family" would air. Q ratings proved the potential for the show's ultimate success, despite the public drubbing the pilot received. Today, explains Q Vice President Henry Schaefer, the Q score of a celebrity can be a bargaining tool among executives determining what gets picked up for the coming season.

"The more complicated the media world is becoming, the less well people are understanding what is happening out there. Things are fragmenting so badly," Schaefer says. "I don't think anyone has the right answer right now. You have so many different outlets in terms of programming, it is diluting the exposure of personalities to the point of indecipherability of what 'good' exposure is these days versus what it was 10 years ago."

Today's managers, particularly in entertainment, but in other industries as well, must be better trained in disseminating information and making decisions quickly than in fully understanding the meaning and impact of the information. Yet this pressure to make speedy decisions could prove to be a problem down the road in terms of understanding what a company needs to do to make a product stand out.

With the whole competitive landscape in flux, entertainment executives continue to depend more on traditional methods of audience feedback than on high-tech approaches. "People and the industry are going to have to depend more and more on market research than they ever did before," Schaefer says. "I see that as a potential problem because the younger people coming into the industry are high-tech trained and not data-management trained."

Sounds like the rest of the corporate world, which cannot tell a good product from another -- except those that are stunningly gimmicky.

"How can anything become big if everything is an event?" says Mark DiMassimo of DiMassimo Brand Advertising in New York. "Olympic events were the extreme sports 20 years ago. ESPN2 is now a hell of lot more interesting than the Olympics.... If we are not finding the new medium to form our messages, then we are not getting bang for the buck."

Richard Learmer is the author of Trendspottinq (Penguin-perigee, 2002). He can be reached at rl@leighadvisory.com.