Business SMART:	Why the Industry Needs a TV Show
	By: Dennis A. Conforto A-Z Media Group, Inc.

Flip on the TV and you will see all kinds of shows that feature scrapbooking in one form or another. There are scrapbooking features on QVC that sell specific products and many scrapbooking how-to shows. But to date a TV show has not been created for the general public to demonstrate why everyone who takes a photo should seriously consider scrapbooking.

One of the biggest challenges that faces the scrapbooking industry starts long before someone finally sits down to scrapbook their memories. You can say it starts when someone first utters, “Say CHEESE!”

Everyone has the best of intentions when they are taking pictures. However, over time the sense of urgency is lost to other priorities. As the years pass the number of unorganized photos grows. The thought of trying to figure out how to tackle this challenge has grown into an overwhelming sink hole of time.

Organizing photos and the history of our lives is the biggest thing on which a person procrastinates. But the task becomes so overwhelming when left untouched for years, it’s like watching a garden slowly overtaken by weeds, and with each passing month the task of cleaning it all up becomes more difficult.

Is it any wonder why scrapbooking stores never have enough store traffic when you consider that most people procrastinate organizing their life story and the very solutions we offer as an industry? Frankly, I think most people’s scrapbooks are organized at the time of their funerals as family members race to put together a few pages of pictures. Then stories are shared at the services and a long life is reduced to a 20 minute eulogy. The stories shared that day typically are not tied to the photos, and over time the stories are lost and the photos slowly age and fade.

To be blunt, our industry’s number one job is to solve this issue of procrastinating the recording of our lives and passing our lives forward. Our challenge as an industry starts the moment someone takes a photo and our failure as an industry is evident when that photo is frozen in time in a digital storage device never to be used in a meaningful way again.

For this purpose the new reality TV show “The Real Vacation” was created. Its purpose is to tackle the questions, fear, and procrastination issues that face our potential consumers. We chose the theme vacations for the show because basically everyone who goes on a vacation takes pictures. Plus it allows the show to be tied to other industries that understand the common thread between a vacation, a picture, and a great memory.

In the reality TV show the “Extreme Makeover Home Edition” the impossible is done each week. A home is built from the ground up in only seven days. The race against time to get the home done before the family returns is one of the components that really makes the show so appealing.

In the reality TV show “The Real Vacation”, the impossible will be done each week as we reconstruct the stories of lives from the ground up in only three days. With a world class design team we will show millions how fast, easy, creative and rewarding it can be to take the time organize photos in a meaningful way.

This show brings to the table not only the travel industry, but the entire digital industry. The digital industry understands the common thread of a digital photo, the PC, the printer, and the software that runs it all. They understand the world of the internet and why these memories are so important to their business and the consumers they serve. We will show all the options from craft scrapbooks to digital photobooks, custom framed pictures to online family photos and story sharing.

The combination of all these industries represents hundreds of billions in sales. Just like “Extreme Makeover” has been great for its sponsors and the industries it serves so will be the case for the many industries this "The Real Vacation" will represent.

It is my hope that you will support the show locally, watch it, and if you are a manufacturer, even consider sponsoring parts of it. The show will create the much needed awareness of the category and go a long way in making what we do for living more mainstream. The show will help transition the industry from being just a hobby into a life style.

What we don’t want is the consumers to procrastinate doing business with us because the tasks they face seem so overwhelming. In the end, the show is a great solution for the consumers, the retailers, and the manufacturers. Matching up the challenges that consumers face with the solutions we own is what being business SMART is all about.