Finding The Glue To Make Local TV Stick

With all the recent mergers and acquisitions — Gannett and Belo, Tribune and Local, Sinclair and just about everyone else — we are seeing the end of one era and the beginning of another.  We used to work in loose confederations — with lots of autonomy at the station level, or in tight confederations — sharing autonomy with corporate. No more. We are now rolling up into a small group of local TV empires.  

Empires are built to face down other empires — like the cable guys or the telecoms. Villages (smaller sized station groups) don’t’ stand a chance in a battle of the titans. Empires are also built to throw back or absorb the barbarians — disruptive, dis-intermediating plays like Aereo and all those social, digital and mobile pure plays.

Business empires are built to join them if you can’t beat them — to own the new technologies and make the rules around them instead of living by the rules laid down by the barbarians. Empires are the only entity that can play hard, sustain the fight and win in the wars for spectrum and retransmission revenue. So this is no random thing or passing fad. Empires are here to stay because the situation we face today demands it.  

The question is no longer whether or not there will be a small group of local TV empires. The question is which ones will succeed and which ones will fail?

As Yale Law School Professor Amy Chau writes in her 2007 book, Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance — and Why They Fail, it is a story about social glue.

Empires that succeed and endure have created the best glue.  The glue is what makes an empire work. The glue performs three functions:

• It attracts and keeps the best minds and puts them to work on the biggest opportunities.

• It causes those minds to privately choose to fight together as a disciplined unit.

• It causes local people across multiple locations to publically fight for a shared future.

Let’s consider each function of the glue. No single company has a monopoly on genius. Original thinkers who actually do things are rare and widely scattered across many companies and industries. In villages you’re pretty much stuck with the normal percentage of geniuses — a very low number. Villages stagnate. They rarely leap forward. They die for lack of breakout ideas.

Empires attract a disproportionate share of genius. They cherry pick the best minds from all the villages – and even from other industries. A critical mass is reached when enough of the best minds are working on the hardest problems and biggest opportunities.

Think about Google. It attracts, deploys and organizes enough of the world’s minds to launch one game-changer after another. Empires change the course of history with jaw-dropping achievements. 

But the glue does something else that is just as essential but much harder to quantify or replicate. It can’t be bought off the shelf. Just because brilliant people are brought together doesn’t mean they will work together. Successful empires give these people more reason to fight alongside each other than to fight against each other.

Empires do not fail because other empires conquer them. Nor do they fail because they were overrun by a horde of barbarians. They fail because they could not mount an effective response when then those inevitable threats appeared. What happened?  Once under attack the glue was just not strong enough to hold the empire together.  Money is a part of the glue formula — but not the crucial part.  

Where does the crucial part of the glue formula come from?  

The village.

Turns out home-grown glue is the best. The thing we learned in the village was a deep connection to our local community, and a strong understanding of the ground game where we all live. We super served our audiences and advertisers and they loved us for it. Now that is true glue!

Empires fail when the bond between the station and its community breaks. It is not necessary. Great GMs, GSMs and news directors are the holders of the true glue formula. They hold an idea worth fighting for — under the flag of the empire. Nothing advances and sustains the priorities of empire in battle with other empires and barbarians — like a deep sense of shared future, identify and purpose. 

Nobody does local better than local television broadcasters. Our new empire can bring heavy artillery to bear with devastating effect — and those of us on the ground will take more ground than ever.    

If we stick together.

Tim Daniel is the president of KubasPrimedia, a global consulting firm with offices in Toronto and Denver that advises news media companies through the risks of transitioning to new business models with advanced yield and change strategies. He may be reached at [email protected].