TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

How-to: Kill a brand, the Viacom/MTV way

In 2005, Viacom bought iFilm - at the time, one of the ‘net’s premiere video destinations. Next year, Viacom will complete their decommissioning of the iFilm brand, rolling into “Spike.com,” which will serve as a generic “guy portal.”

From the precursor of YouTube, the herald of user-submitted video, to a URL-redirect in three years.

How has this come about? How did Viacom and sub-brand MTV fail so utterly to capitalize on iFilm’s first-mover advantage? AdAge summarizes the thinking behind Viacom’s iFilm moves:

Having a condensed sales team in the new Spike Digital Media Entertainment group is what Mr. Slusser believes will help the new team make the site an easier sell. Not to mention increased scale — iFilm.com had an average audience of 2.3 million users in August 2007, according to ComScore, down from 2.9 million in the same period in 2006.

“We’re able to present a much larger audience to the marketplace,” Mr. Slusser said. “There are a lot of cool sites around who are all doing neat things on their own, but I feel like we can really harness the power of what we can provide advertisers.” [from AdAge]

So - to paraphrase: the websites, their features, and content are an external representation of Viacom’s ad-sales unit. Does that strike you as the correct way to build a successful community property (i.e.: portal)?

Viacom/MTV needs to ask who their customers are; advertisers, or the site visitors that bring advertising dollars in? What came first - the dollar or the audience? Viacom has it backwards.

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