Buyers versus customers

Yesterday Disney held its "Upfront" presentation, a preview of the upcoming season designed to get advertising agency media buyers and corporate marketing directors to open their wallets.

Nothing interesting about that, every media company does it.

What was interesting was the media executives on the guest list were encouraged to bring their children.

As someone who was purposefully late to the satellite/cable party (a rant against Charter may be a future blog post), I occasionally stop on the Disney Channel as I'm flipping between ESPN, The History Channel and Comedy Central and wonder, "who watches this crap?"

That would, of course, be kids.

Rather than just boring the marketing executives with statistics, charts, graphs and stock photos of kids in a Powerpoint presentation, Disney demonstrated the power of their product by bringing kids into the room. And not just any kids, but those who the executives knew weren't plants coached to react to the content Disney was presenting.

So instead old guys in suits looking at the clips and wondering "Is this stuff any good?" they heard the squeals and laughter of their own children and thought, "I have to buy this."

Brilliant.

Never forget that sometimes your buyers are not your customers.