My uncle asked me at Thanksgiving what he should watch. Before I could answer I had to ask a question back: which services do you actually have?
He named four. Then he remembered a fifth, the one bundled with his phone plan, and could not remember the password for it.
We spent eleven minutes on logistics before anybody named an actual show. By the time it was sorted the pie was gone and someone had put the game on. Nobody in that kitchen was short on things to watch.
Those eleven minutes are the entire story of entertainment marketing going into next year.
I asked around at a holiday party in the Pearl the following week, mostly out of curiosity. Everyone had a number, and everyone was slightly embarrassed by their number. Four services was the median. Nobody could name more than two shows they were currently in the middle of. Nobody was canceling anything either.
The scarce thing is no longer programming. It is the audience's willingness to decide.
For a decade the industry optimized for supply. Netflix shipped something like seven hundred originals this year. Disney has confirmed a service of its own for 2019 and is walking its films back off Netflix to stock it. WarnerMedia is building one. Apple is buying shows without having a place to put them yet. Every one of those slates will arrive with a launch campaign, a billboard buy, and a press release describing an unprecedented commitment to storytelling.
Here is the part that gets lost. Subscription businesses are not won at signup. They are won in the ninth week, when the trial is over, the show everyone talked about is finished, and the charge shows up next to the gas bill. Acquisition is a marketing problem. Retention is a brand problem.
So three things I would put in front of any entertainment brand right now. One, market the shelf and not the item. A single hit sells a month. A reason to keep the app on the home screen sells a year. Two, make leaving easy. Services that hide the cancel button teach people to distrust the next renewal, and a hostile exit is remembered longer than a good pilot. Three, stand for a genre before somebody else does. Being the place for one specific appetite beats being the ninth place that has everything.
Acquisition is a marketing problem. Retention is a brand problem.
Truffles and Barnaby have no opinion about any of this. On Sunday I finally sat down to start a series I had been saving, and Barnaby laid across the remote and went to sleep, and I read a book instead, and the subscription renewed anyway. Somewhere a retention chart counted me as engaged.