At the Ad Age Digital Conf. today: Bob Barr, the newly hired GM of Blockbuster.com, participated in an "Open Idea" forum. As it was the last session, many attendees started filtering out and maybe that was for the best.
The "Open Idea" forum was intended to allow attendees to "help" Barr with his marketing challenges. He would essentially tell the crowd about his problem and then ask the crowd for suggestions. Barr opened by asking Netflix subscribers to raise their hands (about 60% of the crowd?) and then asked Blockbuster Online subs to do the same (2 hands out of a few hundred). Anyways, Barr basically lambasts his own company, proving (convincingly, I might add) that Netflix has outpositioned Blockbuster, that Blockbuster Online products have better value but are misunderstood by the marketplace, and that there's lots of mentions of Blockbuster in the media/blogosphere, but most of it is centered around new releases and/or discussion of the fate of the parent company. He said he was going to "bare his soul" and he wasn't kidding.
So Barr starts fielding suggestions from the crowd, but the Q&A-style format is all wrong. People start suggesting things like:
- Make it easy for Netflix subs to switch by grabbing information out of their queues and
- Create a new sub-brand because you just proved to us that BB's brand basically sucks.
Barr is left to defend what he's already doing and every suggestion comes across like an attack.
A lady who introduces herself as a Corporate PR person laments, "you're letting your own story spin out of control. You need to do some real PR. You need to KISS: keep it simple, stupid."
Jonah Bloom, Editor of Ad Age, is trying to moderate. He tries to lighten things up by playfully suggesting that Blockbuster should create an online brand without the 'e' (i.e. "BLOCKBUSTR") to match flickr and tumblr. It gets a nice laugh, but Bloom's efforts are largely futile. Barr was too good at pointing out the faults of his own company and is unable to get a real dialogue going with the crowd--he was like a wounded animal that needed to defend every comment.
Finally and mercifully, someone from the crowd says, "You're a hero for doing this," followed by hearty applause from the crowd, me included. Another person shouts out: "Blockbuster can make a comeback. I mean if Brittney can do it, so can you!"
