Church of the Customer Blog
« If only MTV had apologized | Main | Looking at giveaways »
July 09, 2005
If only MTV had apologized
MTV was all the buzz this week, but for all the wrong reasons. Its coverage of Live 8 seemed universally derided as pitiful, horrible and a dismal failure.
MTV's biggest sin was frequent cutaways to its multitudinous "correspondents," who seemed to get more air-time than musical acts. MTV itself fielded more than 2,000 complaints during the original airing of the multi-country event.
At first defensive, MTV capitulated and smartly announced it would show five hours of "full musical sets" of artists without commercial and correspondent interruption. Smart move.
Then MTV commentator John Norris introduced MTV's five-hour coverage today by saying:
Due to an overwhelming response from our audience in the past week, who have told us they want to see full musical sets from their favorite artists from Live 8, MTV has assembled five hours of just that.
Norris was basically reading from the MTV press release. MTV did the right thing with the do-over, but it was the equivalent of a legal settlement in which the obviously guilty party pays a huge fine but makes no admission of guilt.
Can you imagine how much credibility if the network had simply said: "We screwed up. We thought we were doing the right thing, but everyone said we didn't. We're sorry. Here's five hours continuous hours of full musical sets shown the way we should have done it in the first place."
Apologies are credible.
Other blogs that reference If only MTV had apologized:
» If only MTV had apologized for it\'s Live 8 coverage from BlogSpy.NET
We found this blog entry very interesting so we've added a Trackback to it on our site. [Read More]
To see how effective apologies can be:
http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/
Yes, apologies are credible. But MTV knows they don't have to in order to keep their audience.
Expecting an apology assumes that MTV felt sorry for their egotism in the first place. Anybody who has tried to watch MTV lately will know that MTV really has nothing to do with music anymore. Perhaps I'm just jaded because I'm part of the GenX crowd who grew up on a steady diet of Madonna, Prince, and Duran Duran videos.
It's an example of the 800 lb gorilla doing something half-way because it doesn't really have much competition.
There's doing what must be done, and then there's doing the right thing. For this particular case, it's the latter idea.
