You Are A Media Brand

If you like weather, you know all about Ryan Hall Y'All. His team covers severe weather like nobody else. That's an angry tornado there, folks.

At the peak of his coverage last week, he had around 300,000 people watching weather on YouTube ... if you assume bots and some people outside the country, it meant that 1 out of every 1,500 people in the United States were watching ... him.

With the money generated from his broadcasts, his team created the Y'All Bot ... enabling 24/7 live presentation of weather, narrated by a bot.

Users donated money to the effort on the right side of the image ... the bot announces/recognizes each contributor.

That's a weather enthusiast becoming a media brand right in front of our eyes.

I frequently reference Headphones.com ... leveraging a fusion of media, community, and commerce. I doubt you have the patience to watch three hours of programming about headphone theory, but each Saturday they give you the opportunity to test your patience.

You can nerd out on frequency response graphs during a review of a new in-ear monitor (iem).

COVID accelerated the fact that you are a media brand. I gave talks about this concept a decade ago, but we needed technology to evolve a bit, and we needed an event that changed how people created content (i.e. being at home in 2020).

Old-school catalog brands have always been media brands. It's been baffling to me that these companies willingly chose to not advance their media chops.

Look at Patagonia (click here). This is a media brand.

I know, you'll tell me that you aren't Patagonia. True. But you are certainly like Headphones.com or Griot's Garage, your sales are likely comparable to their net sales, correct? You could have created April Fool's content like Griot's Garage did. Look how cold, cloudy, and clammy it is in the South Sound in March.

You are a media brand. The advantage of being a media brand is that you don't have to pay Meta/Alphabet Facebook/Google for new customers. You put those platforms to work on your behalf when you are a media brand. I mean, seriously, you can't trust Meta with anything ... here's another example. Why do you pay them for anything?

Anyway, something to think about as you watch your retirement funds literally evaporate in real time.

P.S.: For those of you who are "hunkering down", it's really important to be a media brand. If you're spending 30% less on marketing, how do you increase sales to increase profit to offset increased costs? You better leverage your free channels at extreme levels. Your live and recorded video presence cost you almost nothing. Get busy!