The Next Internet Millionaire – Marketing Lessons Learned

I have just finished watching the first 3 episodes of the Internet reality show The Next Internet Millionaire. I heard about this a week or two ago but I missed the part about it being an Internet based TV show and I thought that I wouldn’t be able to see it being based in the UK. Slapped wrist for not paying attention!

What a Great Education in Marketing!

… and no I’m not talking about the content of the show. It’s entertaining for sure but don’t watch it thinking that you are going to actually learn how to become the next Internet millionaire. The education I got was from reading between the lines and seeing how the show itself is a brilliant piece of marketing in so many ways.

First Let’s Talk About the Crap

I’m not expert on Internet marketing but from what I have seen on the first three episodes, some of the challenges they are settings the contestants seem totally irrelevant to me. First of all they have them giving presentations testing their presentation and public speaking skills. What’s that about? These are essential skills if you are a customer-facing salesman but since when do you need that to build your online empire? Maybe you need those skills if you are doing the IM campaign for a large corporation but I think many of the people viewing this are individuals who just want to get started making a living online without needing all that corporate crap.

Then there was the logo design contest. Ok two scenario’s here: either you can afford to hire someone to do your graphic design for you or you can’t. If you can’t you are probably just starting out and you can get away with a simple text based logo that you knock up in a free graphics package. Once you start earning a bit of money you would just pay someone to do that for you if you are not artistic! Any Internet marketer who values their time would outsource graphic design tasks so I found this quite unfair for the contestants.

Then there’s the poker game. I don’t even want to talk about that! But hey, this is a TV show and it needs to be entertaining.

And Talking About Entertainment

Here’s the first great lesson. This is a reality show and they are huge at the moment, every loves them, and if you shove the word millionaire in the title it’s bound to get some attention. The fact that it is an interesting TV show means that people are going to watch it and they are – each show is getting in excess of 10,000 views which is pretty good though I dread to think what the bandwidth cost is.

The <Insert Country Here> Idol Approach to Marketing (ish)

I first heard this term coined by Ed Dale and he talks of the Australian Idol show. In the UK we had Pop Idol and in the US there is American Idol. The concept is the same – a bunch of contestants enter the talent show, and each week somebody is eliminated. At the end of the contest the winner gets a recording contract which makes a ton of money for everybody involved.

Now the reason this is such good marketing is that the winner has been voted by the viewers, so the success of the songs produced by the winner is guaranteed. Joel isn’t doing quite the same thing here as he has a pre-recorded show and he chooses the winner himself. However the concept is similar because what he is doing is building massive hype around the joint venture that he is going to launch with the winner. By the time he launches it, his marketing has already been done! Thousands of people will already be hyped up about it having watched the show beforehand.

Clever Use of Sponsors

Each day of the training is conducted by a big name in Internet marketing and with each episode of the show, you can click through to the website for that person right there on the website. The show gives you just enough of a taster to get you interested but of course doesn’t give anything away. We are watching a 50 minute long advertisement and loving every minute of it! Compare that to regular TV that gives you the entertainment then shoves the ads in the middle and that’s the part where you go to the toilet or grab another beer. With this show, the advertising is the entertainment. Very clever.

Let’s Not Forget The Upsells

Don’t you just love that cheesy bit at the end where Joel promotes his little business-in-a-box thing? I don’t know how much he’s charging because I didn’t want to put my email address in there. Somebody please enlighten me as to the cost :-)

Conclusion

As someone who is interested in Internet marketing and has a little bit of experience with it I think it’s easy to criticize a show like this. However, if you look at it from the point of view of Joel, who is his target audience? I suspect that it is not established Internet marketers, but the thousands of wannabes out there who want to make money online but don’t know how.

Watch the show, it’s entertaining and it’s educational. What do you think of it?

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