COMIC PREMISE

Land will be set at The Opportunity Services Group (OSG), a startup provider of customized education and career services (CECS). Land will center on the comic plight of OSG's CEO: like many men, he wants to succeed in his professional life and also be the best boyfriend, and later husband and father, he can. In his case, achieving this balance:

• is complicated by the magnitude of the stakes in the early market for CECS

• will be further complicated by company-affiliated actresses, who will routinely seek to make a favorable impression on him, not least by employing the latest innovations from the burgeoning sciences of enhancing desirability (including tactics derived from the psychologies of attraction and persuasion described, respectively, in Fisher’s Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love and Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion)

(The CEO's girlfriend will have a similar comic plight as a function of her professional life, so, more generally, the show will center on making a relationship work when both partners are routinely set upon by individuals leveraging the aforesaid sciences.)

Here's the main reason the actresses will seek to make a favorable impression:

But first, a clarification: As we know, ‘walking the walk’ is infinitely more persuasive than just talking. When it comes to commitment to a relationship, ‘walking the walk’ equates largely to not giving in to temptations. The most daunting relationship challenges posed by modern life, then, are essential inputs to a defining love story for our times. Now, back to the actresses...

OSG '1.0' will operate OpportuniTV.com, a “workflow market” that will facilitate bringing together the complementary talents needed to create video content.

"There are things that are essentially new ways of doing business, such as creating workflows to connect buyers and sellers together." Bill Gates November 24, 2003 "Three years ago, graphic artist Shane Felux came home with a digital camera newly purchased on eBay and gave his wife Dawn a deadline: three months to write a 40-minute Star Wars script, and then lights, camera, action. Now, countless volunteer hours and $20,000 in maxed-out credit cards later, comes the release of "Star Wars: Revelations," one of the most ambitious amateur films based on George Lucas' science fiction universe ever made. With its audience primed by anticipation for the new Star Wars film slated for release May 19, the film is sweeping the Net as fast as any X-wing. ...The most striking thing in watching the film is its technical competence. The computer graphics are easily as good as most TV science fiction programs, with complex spaceship battles and cinematic camera work. The sound is crisp and unmistakably Star Wars. The soundtrack is wholly engrossing. Most of this work was done by an ever-changing roster of 30 to 40 volunteers online, drawn from around the world, most of whom Felux had never met until the first real-world screening of the movie in Baltimore last week. The soundtrack was written from scratch by a British composer sounding very much like John Williams. The result is a product of astonishingly high technical quality, which has even been reviewed by major newspapers." CNET.com April 21, 2005 "Li & Fung, a $2 billion Hong Kong-based global trading company does...reconfigurable outsourcing with its network of more than [7,500] independent manufacturers. When a retailer like The Limited or Gymboree places an order for a certain kind of garment, Li & Fung rapidly assembles a customized supply chain." Thomas Malone The Future of Work 2004

OpportuniTV.com will also feature:

• an auction-based market to facilitate the insertion of advertisements and product placements into the videos

• an Amazon.com-style affiliate program to facilitate distribution

"Web users that do the most streaming of videos are...affluent. ...Marketers dished out $121 million for online video advertising in 2004, and they are expected to hike that to $198 million this year, and to $282 million by 2006, according to figures compiled by online market research firm eMarketer. ...Rich-media advertising, driven partly by video technologies and certainly buoyed by consumer uptake of broadband, is predicted to surpass search marketing as the largest-spending online category this year." AdAge.com April 4, 2005 "Advertisers are now paying about $20 to $30 a CPM for a 15-second spot that pre-rolls a broadband video, [Jeff Lanctot, a VP of media buying at Avenue A Razorfish] said." CBS.MarketWatch.com January 18, 2005 "Amex, Coca-Cola, Hewlett-Packard, Warner Bros., and others buy ads on AtomFilms.com and iFilm.com, which show short films. Both nearly failed five years ago but say they are profitable now. 'We've sold out ad space almost every month out of the last 24,' says AtomFilms CEO Mika Salmi, who founded the company. 'Our CPM's (the cost of reaching a million viewers) are approaching network TV's.''' Fortune February 21, 2005 "This year...a billion dollars will be spent on product placement in the United States, up from half a billion last year. Next year...the figure will double again, coming to represent a fifth of what is spent on all network television advertising." The New Yorker March 28, 2005

The surest way for OpportuniTV.com to attract video production talent is to attract advertising and product placement dollars.

Attracting these dollars starts with making the ad market deeply liquid (Which is not a 'chicken-or-egg'-style showstopper. Initially, liquidity will derive from OSG-supplied barter currency. Details in the business plan).

"Liquidity is the ability to trade large size quickly at low cost when you want to trade. It is the most important characteristic of well-functioning markets. Everyone likes liquidity. Traders like liquidity because it allows them to cheaply implement their trading strategies. Exchanges like liquidity because it attracts traders to their markets." Larry Harris Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners 2002

A key to making a market liquid is establishing 'information efficiency,' so that, at any given time, prices closely reflect the fundamental values of the tradeables (e.g., ad space).

A key to delivering this kind of information efficiency is attracting speculator-traders.

"If markets were not efficient, then there would be unexploited profit opportunities, that could and would be exploited by rational traders. For example, rational traders would buy (sell) an underpriced (overpriced) asset, thus driving its price back to the correct, fundamental value. In an efficient market, there can be no forecastable structure in asset returns, since any such structure would be exploited by rational traders and therefore would be doomed to disappear. Rational agents thus process information quickly and this is reflected immediately in asset prices." Cars H. Hommes Financial Markets as Nonlinear Adaptive Evolutionary Systems July 2000 "Informed traders generally differ in their estimates of value...The net impact of their trading is a market price that reflects an average of their different value estimates. This price is usually more informative than any of the individual value estimates. Markets aggregate data from many sources to produce prices that typically estimate fundamental values [i.e., the values all traders would agree upon if they knew all available information about the assets and if they could properly analyze this information] more accurately than can any individual trader." Larry Harris Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners 2002

A key to attracting speculator-traders to OpportuniTV.com is impressing upon them the fact that success predicting ad rates will put them on the fast track to 'narrowcast media' mogul-dom.

"As a vice-president at hedge fund D.E. Shaw in the mid-1990s, Anil Kamath helped bring sophisticated computer-driven investing strategies to Wall Street. Now he and other quant jocks are taking aim at Madison Avenue. Their goal: to bring financial-markets-style trading systems to the $ 9.5 billion online ad industry. And the quants are finding believers. Venture funding to the sector jumped from $ 25 million in 2003 to $ 175 million in 2004, according to VentureOne, a research firm. ...The trend towards quant-driven ad buying is not limited to the world of search engines. Ad networks run by companies such as Advertising.com (which was bought by AOL, a division of Time Warner, FORTUNE's parent) purchase banner-ad inventory from publishers and use software algorithms to optimize their advertisers' campaigns. Startups like Right Media in New York aim to go one step further by creating a single auction market for all online ad transactions. And everyone is looking to a not-too-distant future when the same systems will be used to buy and sell ads on digital TV and radio. Industry wags already have a catchy slogan: 'Welcome to the ADZDAQ.'" Fortune April 4, 2005 "On behalf of Sears and Unilever...MindShare, WPP’s media-buying arm, has joined with ABC to develop comedies and dramas and share in the profits." New Yorker March 28, 2005

Traders need good information.

So if inside information can be had, traders want it.

Enter actresses.

Actresses will want good relations with traders (i.e., future moguls).

Of course, OSG's CEO will have the most influence over OSG's future plans.

Knowing this, actresses will seek to influence him (thereby creating inside information). In particular, the actresses will seek to influence his plans for profitably marketing OSG's ever-expanding array of offerings through (OpportuniTV.com-enabled production and distribution of) an ever-expanding array of entertainment programs. Of course, the more favorable an impression an actress makes, the more likely she will be to succeed. Ambitious actresses are already aggressive consumers of innovations that enhance physical beauty. Being savvy ladies, they will also utilize techniques from the psychologies of attraction and persuasion.

And the CEO will have to meet with them, as they will be important contributors to OpportuniTV.com's workflow market.

Hence, his comic plight.

Fittingly -- Land is a sitcom, after all -- the CEO and his girlfriend will be largely responsible for afflicting their relationship with the worst-case scenarios of their comic plight. See the pilot treatment for the actually-kinda-artful details.

After submitting the pilot, I'll write up a book proposal for Land of OpportuniTV: How TV networks and education entrepreneurs can create millions of good jobs for Americans -- and use the advance to fund the development and online distribution of new Land episodes. Straight to VOD? :-)