Oprah Helps Skype Discover Itself and the Right Audience

Oprah Winfrey has teamed up with Skype for one of the best product placement pushes I’ve seen on television.

“Where the Skype Are You?” will show Oprah’s audience icebergs in Antarctica and the depths of the ocean in a submarine – all broadcast live using Skype’s teleconferencing technology.

Oprah’s been using Skype as a lower cost alternative to expensive satellite links for a long time now. Last year I watched a podcast of Oprah in which she interviewed viewers all over the country who connected directly to her show via Skype. As a former broadcaster, I love it. The fact that anyone can be broadcasting live images instantly is a really amazing feat.

Check out her promo video for tomorrow’s show.

Product placement at its best

I know a lot of you out there are going to gripe about the quality of the video broadcast on Oprah’s show via Skype. And I do think you have a point. Skype is not meant to be used as a broadcast quality production vehicle. In fact, the video quality is extremely poor if you compare it to your 52″ HD Plasma TV. However, this is an expectations issue. Oprah and Skype CEO, Josh Silverma, must help manage audience expectations. Hey, it’s free!

But what’s really important here is that Oprah’s audience is the perfect audience to be introduced to the Skype product.

Let’s break it down, courtesy of Quantcast:

Oprah.com Demographics (Quantcast.com)

As you can see, highly educated, mature females, across the economic spectrum, with no kids at home would love to use video to communicate.

They communicate with kids away at college.

They call their aging parents in Florida.

They chat with their grandkids in Chicago.

They visit their sisters in California.

That’s what Skype is great for.

Skype’s demographics, you ask? Well, they’re younger, male adults with a college education. A completely different audience.

More important is that Skype is completely integrated into the format of Oprah’s show.

Forget about this particular show, which sounds like an infomercial for Skype; I mean on a regular basis Oprah relies on Skype to get herself, live, into people’s living rooms.

She’s actually creating valuable content and connecting with her viewers in a way no one (even Oprah) could have afforded 10 years ago.

I think there’s a future for this kind of product placement. A future where technology, products and even services pay for access to valuable brands and their audiences while they deliver high-quality, valuable content to their audience. It’s far more effective than traditional advertising.

Oprah helps Skype experiment

Skype is in the Gestation phase of its life cycle, and this is the perfect time for brands like Oprah and products like Skype to experiment with creating valuable content. The fact is, she’s got us and a lot of people that had never heard of Skype, talking!

Skype is about connecting

I just became an Uncle on my wife’s side. Last Saturday, 24 hours after the baby was born, my brother-in-law asked me if I ‘skyped.’ I do.

For 40 minutes I connected directly to his laptop in Miami (I’m in Boston) and chatted with the whole family about the new baby – and personally welcomed Anabella to the family.

That’s what Skype is for! I don’t need HD video to connect with my family on an occasion like this. Skype is easy to use, and it works as advertised. Oprah’s a perfect vehicle for Skype. In fact, I might start a Skype-only book club. Wanna join?

My Questions to You

Where would you market your product? If you were going to pitch product placement (think smaller than Oprah) where would you go? Where’s your valuable audience? What do they care about?

About the author

Andrew Davis -

In 2002, Andrew founded Tippingpoint Labs with journalist James Cosco. Since then, he's spent countless hours exploring the online universe and building a methodological approach to developing digital strategies that drive revenue or reduce costs.

Andrew's always asking big questions and analyzing data to understand markets, online forces and even business models. Andrew's research has resulted in the creation of innovative online metrics including Online Brand Value and Category Brand Value, eye-opening graphical representations of website evolution through the New Media Life Cycle and even using online data to predict offline revenue.

When he's not surfing the web, Andrew's traveling the globe speaking to a wide-variety of audiences about everything from social media to the future of print. Andrew is a frequent contributor to the Tippingpoint Labs website and has been creating valuable content since the early 1990s for The Jim Henson Company, CNN, The Today Show and MTV.

He's contributed to a book of short stories, called The Way Things Were and produced and co-wrote Roadside Ambition a documentary film about one small town with two huge balls.

"In a world where content is consumed as rapidly as it's created, companies need to develop a sound strategy to creating valuable online experiences that can, and should, be leveraged enterprise-wide. There is a content solution to every business challenge."