Dissecting Honeyshed: An Excercise In Understanding the Powerfully Lame
Below you’ll find a comment I left on Brian Morrissey’s [extremely awesome] blog, regarding the death of Honeyshed.
Honeyshed was one of the funniest marketing programs ever created, especially in context of how serious the producers were about it.
As some have noticed, I’m feeling a little rant-y the last few days, so please move along if you’re not in touch with your inner Colbert-loving media critic.
Honeyshed perfectly illustrates why 95% of “new” marketing programs will fail: the people in charge of green lighting this stuff have no useful framework for evaluating whether a given tactic or strategy will work or not.
I believe that, because of a lack of education, the media/agency execs were thinking this, regarding Honeyshed:
- “The Net gives us a cheap, direct comms channel!”
- “We can make our own cheap & global broadcast channel w/o having to do deals with cable TV companies”
- “It would be cool if we married MTV and QVC; that’s a way better idea than either QVC or MTV!”
- “People love brands, that’s why they watch advertising!”
- “Advertising is why people buy stuff!”
Some of those thoughts are decent ideas in isolation (except the last two, which are 100% and 98% wrong, respectively). In combination they make for a terrible strategy.
If people liked advertising, brands wouldn’t have to pay for it.
ExpoTV is a lot closer to what might actually work or be sustainable.
I agree that there should be a modicum of applause for taking a risk. But the problems is twofold: not enough risk was taken, and the bet was wildly uneducated.
The fewer multi-million dollar mistakes that are made, the better; more failures like this shrink the opportunity for real revolutionary thinking.
This is also exactly why I constantly criticize facebook; their inability to capture value so far is “proof” that online communities are lame and unprofitable.
;-)
