Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Turning up the heat

At 8.30pm last night, I tuned into Channel 9 to watch ?Scorched?. I had a vague idea from same-night pre-promotes that it was a futuristic Australian movie about Sydney under bushfire arrest. I wasn?t far wrong about the program content but what I didn?t realise was the massive content extension online.

After speaking to some colleagues this morning I discovered that I can get a greater ?Scorched? fix online, via a plethora of extended content.

The ?Scorched? online world consists of a number of websites that all relate to the events of the tele-movie and online drama. The problem here is that I only found this out after a google search that lead me to a relatively uncaptivating ninemsn site (within the top 100 results none were for the official ?Scorched? sites except the ninemsn link). From here you can access the ?real? content on a number of sites built with different audiences in mind.

I don?t know how I originally missed that this was a cross-platform series. I work in media, watch TV before & after work, listen to the radio whilst at work, read the paper, am exposed to outdoor media at least 5 times a day and am online 90% of my waking hours. So begs the questions; am I oblivious to advertising or did Channel 9 not strongly invest in promoting this cross-platform locally produced program? I suggest the answer is the latter.

What annoys me is that despite daily desk research I, as a media professional, didn?t know about this development and the opportunities it could have held for my clients. When new developments alter our media landscape I feel it is the media providers? job to educate the public on how to adopt these changes. How can advertisers be expected to inject money into such developments if there is no guarantee their consumers will know how and when to engage with them?