Captive or Captivate?

Media needs at least one to work.

When you think media + franchise, you think of Han Solo, Iron Man, or every NCIS in every locale doing procedural crime stuff.
 
I did too. Until I noticed a mammoth McDonalds billboard.

There are some 12,700 franchise Mickey-Ds in the U.S..
Franchises.
 
I could open a burger joint.
 
But I wouldn’t have McDonald’s Big Macs, their brand, or benefit from the $400M they spend on TVs ads, radio spots, and, yes, those big billboards.
 
That’s why people pay to $1m to $2m to get one of those golden franchises arches.
 
Great franchises captivate people.
 
Great media franchises captivate people.
 

People spend:
 
35 minutes/day on Facebook.
It’s 31 minutes on Twitter.
For Instagram, it’s 29 minutes.

 
If you can’t captivate – yeah, I’m looking at you pretty much every other media company – you better find a captive audience.
 
Which sorta explains banner blindness. That’s a term Neilsen wrote about in detail way back in 2018. We have conditioned ourselves to ignore things that look like ads.
 
Especially those banner ads. We know them by shape, size, and (if the Internet ever creates scratch and sniff), by smell. Which doesn’t explain why people spend soooooo much on programmatic. Just to throw ignorable ads on the sites that don't captivate us.
 
Instead ad should go where they reach captive audiences.
 
The aptly named Captivate Networks does this. You know it. It’s one of 12,000 screens you see in 1800 elevators in tall office buildings. It shows some news headlines along with ads. It started in 1998 when founder, Mike DiFranza, noticed that:
 
People in crowded elevators were uneasy and gave them media to watch.
Read that as, “Captive.”
 
It works for the same reason the billboard works. Whether you’re stuck in a car or stuck in an elevator, you’re captive.
 
And, when you’re captive, what else are you going to look at?

No, Captivate, LLC didn't sponsor this. It just happens to make a lot of media sense.

Which brings me to Substack.

I have franchise on Substack. No, I don’t pay in real dollars. I pay with hard-earned time writing here and promoting what I write.

So, where’s my Big Mac branding. It’s been a peeve of mine since I started doing this… lo these 13 days ago… I’ve been meaning to get to this at some point.

Then, Substack emailed their manifesto.

Yikes. Guys, you need to re-think this.

A better Internet for readers.

Really? $86m in funding and that’s the best you could do?

We “haven’t given up hope.” I should hope not. You have 17k franchises. We’re counting on you. Or, we’re all toast.

Your plan is to…

make a beautiful and exceptional place for readers that extends the platform we’ve built for writers and uses the best of technology to get the best for culture.

Again, YIKES!

Which MBA came up with this? I can see that, because I have one.

People read Substacks in their email. The reading experience is Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail. They’re fine.

You’re missing the point of your franchise value… VALUE.

Where the rest of the Internet is cluttered with junk, you have (my words excluded) lesser junk. I mean that with much admiration, love, and respect for 16,999 other franchisees.

It’s not for you to create a better “reading experience.” It’s for you to use the professional prose here (again, not mine) to win readers.

You don’t have the cheap burger. You have the quality, organic, free range, non-GMO burger.

Use AI or some other tech to find the quality that’s here and organize it. Attach it to the trends outside the platform.

Use the brilliance of the folks who write here (again, not me) to make Substack the place that answers the big questions.

And, if you’re still stuck for a working business model, hit me up. I’m working on a stealth start up that you need to hear about.