Founder Blog Posts

Alex Trebek And The Spincast TV Origin Story

Behind every new business venture lies the “Origin Story”. Just like a superhero’s each is unique. In our case, it starts with the tale of Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek and a commercial pitch for life insurance.

However, before we get to Alex and his life insurance commercial we need to talk about how technology (specifically cell phones) has changed consumer behavior over the last 20 years.

If you are like a lot of folks over a certain age, you grew up memorizing and writing down phone numbers. Kids were taught to memorize their home phone number for emergencies and everybody had a short list of numbers (work, relieves etc.) they called regularly that they memorized.

If it was for a business, you looked it up in the “Yellow Pages” telephone directory or it was printed on a business card and filed in your Rolodex.

Then things started to change. The use of cell phones became widespread. Everybody started using cell phones and they all had this neat feature to automatically save the last telephone number that was used in an address book on the phone.

Because of this, suddenly and seemingly overnight nobody could remember telephone numbers anymore and no matter how frequently they called that phone number, they were no longer actually dialing the number itself but just selecting a name out a list of contacts. This phenomenon has been going on for almost 18 years by now.

(BTW, The same phenomenon is now happening with GPS units in cars and people not remembering the directions needed to drive their car someplace.)

So how does this all relate to Alex Trebek and his television pitch for life insurance?

Well for several days in a row I kept seeing Alex Trebek in the same series of television spots telling his viewers:

“I’m Alex Trebek I have an important message write down the number on your screen so you can call when I finish…”

It was that moment I asked the question that would become the foundation for bringing Spincast TV into existence:

“In a world where no one remembers or uses phone numbers anymore why are you asking people to write down a phone number to call you?”

They should just be able to press a button to responded to your commercial just like they do with everything else on their phone.

That’s when I realized that television advertising has not been keeping pace with how a whole generation of consumers actually communicates. That television sponsors are asking consumers to complete a whole extra series of actions to respond to that sponsor’s message.

That’s when I decided that I would start the journey to bring the television commercial in to the modern age. Therefore, if Spincast TV were a superhero then this would be our “Origin Story”.