Jericho: Find-The-Boots

Boondoggie of Find-The-Boots gave us a lot of help during Save Jericho. Here's a look back at some of the inspiration he provided.


"I'm going to go out on a limb and make a prediction.

The Save Jericho campaign will change the way Old Media interacts with the internet.

Google for "Save Jericho" and you get 48,000 hits as of this morning. Think of the amount of time and money it would take a public relations agency to put up 48,000 pages with your message, all with unique and clearly human content.

This absolutely dwarfs the famous Star Trek letter writing campaign. Today marks the 1 week anniversary since the cancellation of the show. Things move at a different speed on the internet.

And all because executives at CBS were told by the Nielson ratings that the show didn't have much support. They're only 10 years behind the times, so I guess that's not too bad for corporate America. My experience has been that even "high tech" companies trail by about 10 years from what's available in their IT capabilities. That's why the power company has to ask me my account number instead of just looking at the caller id, and why I have to repeat it every time they transfer me. Hmm, make that 20 years. CBS is making its decisions based upon an old model, and sometimes that collides with the New Media and the result isn't pretty for the old guys.

CBS is under the impression that the old technology of set top boxes and personal diaries from Nielson families controls their business model. In some ways, it still does, because advertisers go along with it. The viewers aren't CBS's customers, the advertisers are. But when the advertisers figure out that the old measurements are pretty much useless, they'll start to change their models. Spending $500K for 30 seconds of prime time advertising won't seem like such a smart idea when that same $500K could be spent elsewhere.

And when that happens, we'll look back at the Save Jericho campaign and say that's where it started."