p2p Marketing & Innovation - Part 1

Marketing is about identifying your target audience, building a profile of them and then crawling inside their focus group created heads and thinking ‘what would make me buy FaceRash shaving foam?’… for the most part the answer is humour and a scantily clad lady. Ricky Gervais with breasts.

Ok so we wouldn’t win that pitch, in the same way that the MPAA will never win the war against the file sharing community. For every site that is shut down another appears, bigger, bolder with a little bit more ajax sprinkled about and touting the latest Harry Potter.

Most likely the quality sucks and if you’re lucky no one gets up to go to the loo during the illicit filming.

The studio lawyers wade in, the MPAA wades in and one or two pirates get fined and gain mythic hero status amongst the file sharing community. It’s kinda the old(er) and litigious versus the young(ish) and liberal and as a generation matures that has only ever known p2p file sharing, so the lack of regard for copyright becomes more entrenched.

The question no one seems to be asking is, ‘would that ‘pirate’ pop along to the local multiplex, pay his $10 and watch Harry Potter anyway?’ .

NO. A flat NO.

The studio isn’t chasing another lost sale, it’s chasing it’s tale, alienating a viral audience, the socially wired networking junkies.

Do the studio’s get this? Nah, they get legal whilst the incumbent marketing agencies on their payroll don’t get p2p at all, it’s not even recognised as a potential marketing channel. Now given the usage stats being thrown about, we’ll take 80 million active users at any given time as our average, then they are seriously failing their paymasters. This is an area crying out for innovation.

The p2p persona is tech savvy, give them a legal copy and they’ll talk about it for sure, they’ll talk about it being ‘legal’ for starters! This top tier evangelism will filter down to the social networking communities, to the forums. Let’s posit these people watch a bit of pirated dvd, maybe download, but also go to the cinema - they talk about the film to friends via IM, via SMS, this talk mirrors an offline campaign and suddenly Knocked Up II: Knocked Up Again, is topping the box office.

With p2p marketing the audience become the distributor and studios would do well to treat them as such rather than seek to criminalize them or frustrate them with dummy copies seeded courtesy of Mediadefender. The studios need to reach out to this community and interact with a new and wildly influential audience.

Identify and innovate rather than legislate and retaliate.

Posted in Bittorrent, New Business Model, Viral Marketing | No Comments »