You Can Trust the Brand, but You Can't Brand the Trust

I read some media the other day that Weather.com is always in the top 10 web sites. This has contributed substantially to the value of the TV network that owns it (which is currently for sale for some magnificent figure). The fascinating thing about their content is that viewer's interest in it is almost all real-time, so their ability to sell their audience to their advertisers is very stable, compared to the slow erosion of real-time viewing that most other broadcast media outlets are experiencing.

Meanwhile, advertisers are working on many fronts to combat audience erosion. Recently I saw SNL broadcasting a "mini-mercial" of the setup for the next sketch in between commercials. And, shenanigans being played by shifting the start and stop of programs by a few minutes to punish TIVO viewers is widely known. Product placements and even more insidious product themed content have become more normal. For example, a couple of months ago I saw an episode of some youth-oriented action drama where one of the major developments of the story was that a main character's new SUV was stolen -- the same SUV that was advertised throughout the broadcast! Co-branding, especially of music, has surged as well. And certain programs have always been transparent vehicles for advertising, The Apprentice perhaps being a distant second compared to The Price is Right.

This MFW I'm trying to steer clear of advertising as much as possible. Once again, I am doing some major class work on a media web site -- this time, my personal favorite technology web site TomsHardware.com. Hilarious digressions into content keep occurring. It's really a shame how easy it is to turn a simple class assignment about web site usability (Organization, Labeling, and Navigation Analysis to be specific) into a shameless bout of media frolicking. This is especially true since I am in no way motivated to finish this assignment even though it's due at 5:30. "Focus. Focus."

One of the interesting by-products of this assignment is that I finally [almost] understand TH's web site. It turns out that even the third largest web media outlet for technology has major (and I mean "Call-me-immediately-and-pay-me-to-solve-these-problems-today"-scale) organizational, labeling and navigation problems. It all goes back to their recent flawed/half-hearted attempts to disentangle the different parts of their brand. To be specific, they are still attempting to sort out the presentation of their content and site organization following their acquisition/merger by/with another company several years ago, and a more recent attempt to harmonize their brand into THREE[!] separate websites that all share a navigational interface and similar branding and mission, as well as [gasp] intermingled content. These are TomsHardare.com, TomsGames.com and TomsGuide.com. (Huh).

Like many broadcast media, the web site has attempted to blur the lines of their content and their advertising relationships in a attempt to befuddle their audience, in an unholy and unwise attempt to grasp at several foolish goals. For TH these are probably to split their brand into sub brands that each can hopefully evolve into separate viable brands. Of course they are very ambivalent about this and in no way keep it simple by sequestering content on one side of a fence or another. I doubt their advertisers feel that any advantage has been gained, and I especially doubt that many choose to be on ONLY ONE site, which in turn proves that there really is ONLY ONE site after all (albeit one huge site with many discrete parts).

In conclusion, like many broadcast media networks, TH has been cursed with success and has complacently started chasing its own "long" tail by endlessly promulgating content channels as places to put ads, rather than taking a hard look at what attracts and retains readers/viewers. They have long been seen as one of the most objective sources of information about technology, and their charts and common navigational interface have been imitated many times because they are simply the best. However, the trend toward obfuscation of relationship between content and ad, and "channelization" of content into more and more specific persistent parts of the site, each with their own nav, are powerful erosive forces that may set the stage for a competitor to grab the one, great thing that TH has used as to anchor its success. Trust. And, once it's gone, "trust me", it will be very hard to get it back.