Beyond Scarcity Marketing with events such as Hannah Montana, Disney is showing that it can also step up to the freshness and frequency needed to stave off the problems of Tivo and its time shifting short attention spans. High School Musical may well run into a 4th, 5th and 6th edition and the expansion of other creative properties on its network are creating many more reasons to watch early and regularly to keep up with the story lines.

Who else is figuring this model out? Trent Reznor of NIN. Didn’t think I could fit together Disney and NIN in one post, eh? Well, Trent has pushed no less than three albums in this year with free content, some pay for content and tons of interactivity with his audience.

Creative frequency is the new grand slam pop chart topper, and interactive is the new means to monetize by leveraging scarcity from a limited venue of both time and place.

At a time when some shows are tempted to lower costs by doing less weeks per year and less minutes per show, the new successful model in media is likely to be more content, more frequently and more interactive. As Umair would say, it is either in the networks’ DNA or it isn’t. I’m long on Revision3 for just that reason.

Disney has been a master of using limited offers to foster demand. They did it with VHS, they did it again with with DVD’s by using limited offerings “from the vault”. We had to scour the market for a Pixar Toy Story 2 DVD which we paid a hefty premium for because it was no longer being produced.

Disney gets a double bang from limited offerings:

1. The offer has a floor downside if the promotion is not successful. This is especially important as any product launch has a cost, and having the ability to withdraw the message and offer allows Disney to pull back any combination of promotion, media vehicle and breadth of offer to the market as needed.

2. The offer creates a fixed quantity of supply, even when unlimited supply could be made available. Disney mastered the idea that restricting supply allowed them to keep desirable content from becoming overwhelmingly saturated. This has been part of the company’s marketing mystique worth learning.

Many web companies have adopted a similar practice of scarcity marketing (e.g. Google/start up Beta launches) which allow the same upside. Why don’t more product companies employ this model? With dropping capital costs and products becoming far more variable, I’d expect to see more soft launches of “first run” concepts to occur in the future.

Disney’s marketing control of ‘Montana’ franchise pays big [Knoxnews.com]