Power of Marketing in the Broadcast Industry

IBC - Amsterdam, September 15, 2016

As all of you, I also receive a flood of newsletters and online magazines. I have no time to read them all thoroughly, so only the most catchy titles win. Recently, I got caught by an article about the year 2020 being the year of 4K as it will be adopted by majority of providers and consumers. Immediately I got the feel of being guilty for lagging behind the peloton.

Then I read it again. Who is saying this? To whom and why? Almost all (an exact percentage written in the article) content producers and service providers believe in that statement above. Come on, guys. You really believe in that? 

Twenty years after starting the HD process we are still transitioning from SD to HD. Does the article provide any information, or just the primary feel of the duty to invest in 4K myself to keep up with the crowd? Well, there is no crowd. It is just marketing. A hype told a thousand times has the power to move wheels and create a new reality. It has the power to convince investors to put money into companies that are in the red. It also has the power to mislead customers and have them invest into something what we, manufacturers, want them to buy. We at Aveco are not good at marketing. We are great on developing new technologies. However, we tried one marketing strategy just recently.

Here is the story: one of our great automation products has, among other features, one truly amazing feature. Surprisingly, nobody pays much attention to it. So, we removed that feature from the product. At the same time, we introduced a new brand name that represents the same product with that feature included. Suddenly, that product and its "new" feature was getting a lot of attention; visitors of our booths were just amazed. It seems that there are many flavours of marketing. There is the misleading one, trying to confuse people or just lie. And then there is also another flavour – you can call it The Art to Tell. I hope we all will have the mental strength and wisdom to distinguish between these two in the flood of information streaming from all sources around us. We at Aveco grew quite big without any real marketing. We are the world's largest independent broadcast and news automation manufacturer, and we got to this position through the quality of our products and the satisfaction of our customers. But now is the time to move on.

We are hiring a new Director of Marketing and will let the Aveco’s Art to Tell run at full speed. With our proven products and great team of people backing them up, the sky is the limit.

Stay tuned. You will hear about us much more.

I wish you a great and informative IBC.

Pavel Potužák, CEO of Aveco