Blast - Malaguena and Medea!

Ok...the little excursion into drumlines today has led me to this performance of Blast!  Blast! was born out of the Star of Indiana Drum and Bugle Corps moving from the field to stages, auditorioms and finally to Broadway.  Lisa and I attended the opening on Broadway as guests of Donnie Van Doren's and had an absolute blast (don't really know if pun is intended!)  Soooooo many of the performers were either students, fellow performers, instructors when I was running the drum corps, or my instructors it was insane.

Ah, but the point of this post, other than sharing with you the incredible athleticism and musicianship, is a discussion about pay per play, ad supported, and free content that generates supplemental income. I am faced with these discussion daily now that I run a startup in podcasting that generates ad revenue for content producers. When I was involved with YEA!, the budgets were extremely tight and changes to our way of being were extremely difficult as any miscalculation could mean that the buses may not get fuel that night. Yes, the budget ran that tight at times (and I can't imagine what George is doing now with the incredible jump in diesel this summer).

One of the significant sources of revenue, for both YEA! (including the Cadets and Crossmen) and DCI (for that matter, any of the top 6-10 corps) is multimedia sales -- CD, VHS, DVD. There were always discussions about copy protection, fighting digital distribution, etc. Upon my departure in '99, discussions began to embrace the emerging internet market and illegal distribution of content through new, easier, faster channels.

A quick search of DCI or USSBA (which is run by YEA!) on YouTube displays quite a few copyrighted videos from previous years/seasons. One aspect of this is that it may immediately affect sales of multimedia which has an immediate and direct impact on the not-for-profits and their services to young people. This is not good.

However, further analysis may prove differently and show that the syndication of these performances through sites like YouTube and through podcasting actually enhance reputation of each group and have the opportunity to increase revenue:

• Most of the viewers of this clip and the clip of the drum line in my pervious post would never have seen a drum corps performance. Their preconceived notion of drum corps is based on their high school or college marching band, which can be argued is very different than the incredible athleticism and attention to detail that is displayed. The opportunity to syndicate content to distribution points that will capture eyeballs that never would have been exposed to drum corps is extremely hard to quanitify into revenue, but I argue that the opportunity far out weighs the risk. As these individuals would most likely never be exposed, there is little, if any, revenue lost but incredible marketing gained.
• For those that are involved in the activity, whether parents, alumni, or performers, the quality is a far cry from the experience that a DVD or CD provides. The experience of watching a flash playback only drives more interest into getting back into the activity as a fan, performer, donor or volunteer. I can tell you first hand that this has been my gut reaction to watching. I will be buying DVDs of previous performances and looking to see when shows are in the area.
• If I remember my numbers correctly, the largest revenue center for DCI is still ticket sales. There is not a medium that recreates the feeling of 60+ brass performers and 40+ percussionists wailing through a crescendo and running into a final formation. Nothing. However, attendance has been shrinking, audiences are getting older, and no new marketing tricks are being introduced to entice new audiences. Syndication of this content provides the opportunity to interest new audiences to get into the stands! This is targeted marketing at its best -- and not for advertisers, but for content producers. The individuals that are syndicating this content, flagging it as a favorite, viewing it through different portals, are the target market for increased ticket sales and promotional sales. These are the new audiences!
• This is not a *great* vehicle for advertising, at least in the short term. Adwords, Adsense, Overture, et al, have done an incredible job of connecting advertisers and consumers through targeting whether through search, relevancy or combinations. However, it is difficult to associate a performance medium such as drum corps with an advertiser -- especially online -- until a large audience is built and demographic/psychograpic analysis have been done. The obvious advertisers of musical equipment and band uniforms have multiple challenging factors: most have been tapped through current sponsorships, investments in these items are capital intensive, and the lifetime of the investment is fairly long. Sponsors such as Toyota, with their diversified marketing buys in Nascar, Motorcross, WMC, and SXSW are challenging to land as defined audiences must be established. This may occur over the long term, but would be difficult to implement in the short term.

So where does that leave us? I argue that using systems like Castfire can enable activities such as drum corps to gain additional revenue through existing ticket and promotional opportunities by increasing exposure to new audiences. To enable this, systems must be used where the content producers, in this case DCI or YEA!, can insert marketing messages to drive ticket and promo sales at the beginning, end or middle of each segment published. In addition, the marketing message must be relevant to the time that it is played by the consumer, not the time that it is published by the content producer.  Therefore, dynamic creation of multimedia content and the ability to update marketing messages is key.

By not moving ahead of the fan base that is already posting the content, the DCI and YEA! lose the ability to add these revenue generating segments. Embrace the new medium and take advantage of it -- there are new audiences that will be interested!