A story in AdAge today urges local television stations not to be lulled into complacency by an improving economic picture and a promising Supreme Court ruling for political ad spending. “It belies a potential danger: lulling stations into avoiding the necessary reinvestment and reinvention their business model requires,” writes Brian Steinberg, who quotes Forrester Research’s research director warning the new influx of revenue “may hide some of the underlying issues we see coming up over the long haul.”
These underlying issues, of course, stem from new distribution paths that increasingly allow consumers to watch network TV content directly, without an affiliate in between. While the affiliates still have clout — as evidenced by the Leno affair — most agree it’s only a matter of time before the traditional network-affiliate model changes forever.
While local TV execs typically deny any similarity with the plight of newspapers, there are some important lessons. Local newspapers lost the advantage of being the primary distributor of national news, and their own expensive distribution path, print, became increasingly irrelevant. For local television, you can replace national news with network programming and print with over-the-air broadcast. Sure, the economics and marketplace are different, but the lessons remain: survival hinges on the ability to connect audiences and advertisers around compelling local content across multiple platforms at a profit.
This requires a reinvention of how local television is produced, with a low-cost model and a new class of creative producers who instinctively know how to create engaging content across multiple platforms, tailored for the social web. It will require a substantial investment and a willingness to experiment and fail. In other words, it’s not another newscast.
Sure, local TV isn’t going away in the next three years, but David Cooperstein at Forrester Research makes an important point: “Local affiliates have not been known for being long-term strategists.” And that has to change.