Monthly Archive for September, 2007

Blog Scholarship of $10,000 for student blogger

Published
by
Karl
on September 28, 2007
in Co-Creation
. 0 Comments

Damn, you’ve got to be a full time student :-( I could have used that to cover my student loans.

The Daniel Kovach Scholarship Foundation is giving away $10,000 to a
blogger this year.

Full scholarship details are available here:
http://www.collegescholarships.org/our-scholarships/blogging.htm

This 2nd Annual Blogging Scholarship offers a large prize of $10,000,
which will be awarded at the Blog World and New Media Expo in Las Vegas,
Nov. 8-9.

Apple Battling Customers

Published
by
Karl
on September 27, 2007
in Advertising and Co-Creation
. 0 Comments

The latest furor around the iPhone is that some people who have “hacked” their iPhones are now left with “bricks” or non functioning iPhones due to a recent software update. The problem is of course not that the iPhone is bad, or Apple is bad, or that the customers are bad, but it is putting Apple in a battle with its most passionate customers. The problem of course is people who have hacked and customized their iPhone are the people who would crawl over broken glass to get one, who have spent a lot more money, spent a lot more time customizing, and trying to use it outside of the box that Apple and AT&T has drawn.

As Saul Hansell says on the New York Times Bits blog

There is something futile about the way Apple appears to be fighting some of its most ardent fans, those who want to use the full capabilities of the iPhone.

Not to be too much of a Nokia fan boy but I must say this recent campaign for the Nseries devices and specifically the US version of the N95 is an inspired example of old school positioning, and the timing couldn’t be better.

n95

Firebrand - Extremely Ambitious Advertising as Content Destination

Published
by
Karl
on September 26, 2007
in Advertising
. 13 Comments

firebrand technoratiIf there was a techmeme for marketing Firebrand would be the most talked about story for sure. Even technorati which famously lumps every blog in the world in the same category is listing Firebrand in it’s top ten searched terms. With Rohit, Jaffe (Firebrand is a client of Jaffe’s Crayon), and Steve Hall weighing in it’s generating a lot of buzz in the Marketing O’Sphere.

So what is Firebrand? Some would say it’s a YouTube for commercials, but it’s not really, YouTube implies consumer generated, and Firebrand is almost completely big company generated. It’s a place where companies can showcase their commercials, and customers will come to watch the commercials, or at least that’s the idea. Watch this ad for Firebrand and I think it will give you a very good idea of how ambitious this project really is:

If your a marketer your heart is probably racing after watching that commercial, but as with most movie trailers they just put a montage of the best bits together, it was really a montage of the best ads of the last decade. But how many Wasssup’s can their possibly be, are there really enough really GREAT commercials to sustain an enterprise this ambitious? If they create original, edgy, hysterical, and brilliant commercials for it then they have a shot. I think it’s more likely they are going to recycle their 30 second spots that less people are watching every year in which case they will go the same way as BudTV. They have some great investors behind them with extremely deep pockets like Microsoft, NBC Universal and GE’s Peacock Equity Fund, and advertisers like BMW, Coke, Ebay etc. yet the internet is famous for burning through enormous amounts of money on “big bang” efforts like this. If they don’t get it right out of the gate it will be a losing battle.

firebrand boobs

Adrants has a nice write up on this including some of the hyperbole from Firebrand CEO:

Firebrand CEO Roman Vinoly said, “We program TV spots like a DJ spins music in a club. There is a rhythm and flow to it.” In an attempt to spin Firebrand as something other than a massive database of commercials, Vinoly adds, “On Firebrand, you’ll see more car chases, explosions, gags, drama, heroes, Oscar-winning actors, directors and producers in an hour than in a month of HBO.”

Now I’m actually a huge fan of good commercials check out Ad Critic, TBS’s Very Funny Ads,

BTW I just wen to check out BudTV’s traffic and it turns out my blog is higher rated on Alexa, weird.
experience curve vs budtv

An Evening With Nokia (S60) - San Francisco, Tuesday, Oct 23rd

Published
by
Karl
on September 25, 2007
in Marketing
. 1 Comment

Come and join us at the Element Lounge in San Francisco, Tuesday, Oct 23rd for an evening organized by the Nokia S60 team, for the uninitiated S60 is the operating system for the Nokia smart phones. Anyway, point being if your interested in some mobile, gadgets, the web, and want to play with some of our latest gear, meet some Fins and have a little food and drink come on down.

Register here

Amazon to sell 2,000,000 DRM free MP3

Published
by
Karl
on September 25, 2007
in Customer-Experience
. 3 Comments

Suffice to say, Hallelujah, i’ve pissed and moaned about my crippled iTunes music for long enough, this is a game changer with some caveats. If it is super easy to use, easy to understand where my media is, and is not too expensive. With amazons experience so far with ecommerce and even digital distribution this could really be it :-) This will certainly put Wal-Mart’s DRM free offering in the shade I would imagine.

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) today launched a public beta of “Amazon MP3,” a new digital music download store with Earth’s biggest selection of a la carte DRM-free MP3 music downloads. Amazon MP3 has over 2 million songs from more than 180,000 artists represented by over 20,000 major and independent labels. Amazon MP3 complements Amazon.com’s existing selection of over 1 million CDs to now offer customers more selection of physical and digital music than any other retailer.

Amazon MP3 is an all-MP3, DRM-free catalog of a la carte music from major labels and independent labels, playable on any device, in high-quality audio, at low prices,” said Bill Carr, Amazon.com Vice President for Digital Music. “This new digital music service has already been through an extensive private beta, and today we’re excited to offer it to our customers as a fully functional public beta. We look forward to receiving feedback from our customers and using their input to refine the service.”

Every song and album on Amazon MP3 is available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software. This means that Amazon MP3 customers are free to enjoy their music downloads using any hardware device, including PCs, Macs™, iPods™, Zunes™, Zens™, iPhones™, RAZRs™, and BlackBerrys™; organize their music using any music management application such as iTunes™ or Windows Media Player™; and burn songs to CDs.

Via BoingBoing and Engadget

UPDATE: I just bought my first album via Amazon MP3 and i’m pleased to say even on a Mac it was pretty painless and more importantly nothing unexpected happened. I bought the album using 1 click ordering. It gave me a screen telling me I needed to download the Amazon Downloader

amazon window

The app downloaded and I installed it, it ran automatically and opened a browser window prompting me to download the album, which then started getting downloaded by the app

amazon mp3

and the result? It created a new folder called Amazon MP3 in my music folder, then the artist, then the album, filled with lovely little 256kbps mp3’s, then iTunes opened up and started copying the songs. Pretty sweet.

Now i’m listening to Amy Winehouse “Rehab”, such and ironic song.

Of course the only thing that would make this even better would be a Amazon S3 driven bottomless storage option that would enable all my devices access to my library, and of course would enable streaming of all my stuff to my friends ALA iTunes.

UPDATE: Gizmodo is reporting that Amazon MP3’s are watermarked to identify they came from Amazon, but not with personal identifying information like iTunes DRM “free” songs are.

This Young Adults Panel Should Terrify Marketers

Published
by
Karl
on September 24, 2007
in Marketing
. 2 Comments

Picture 66A panel of young adults moderated by Guy Kawasaki which should be very interesting to marketers and anyone in the mobile business. Conclusions and insights from this should obviously be taken with a pinch of salt as this is a pretty homogeneous group, but some of the answers to Guy’s questions were stunning to me, and I consider myself extremely savvy. You can see the entire Veotag video here, which has the wonderful feature of bookmarking different parts of the video with hyper links (which I have done in the bullet points).

  • In this panel of 6 people 2 of them (girls) send over 4000 text messages in a month
  • Very few of them watched more than a couple of hours of TV a week and all of it was tivo’d so all ads were skipped
  • Almost all of them subscribed to or at least read wired
  • Almost all of them are on Verizon
  • When asked what gadget or service they would want they almost all wanted a converged mobile device that held everything all their content, music, video, and acted as a billing device so they could buy stuff
  • All of them were on myspace or facebook (no surprise there)
  • None of them knew what RSS was
  • Non of them wrote a blog but most read them
  • Only one of them knew what a wiki was but they all used wikipedia

Experience Matters - New Blog From Critical Mass

Published
by
Karl
on September 21, 2007
in Customer-Experience and Marketing
. 0 Comments

experience mattersLooks like a good blog to add to your feed if you’re interested in customer experience, design, and marketing. Couple of contributers I know well like David Armano of Logic+Emotion and Scott Weisbrod of Experience Planner. Looks like their blog is only a month old at this point, one to watch IMHO.

ODG - Original Design Gangsta

Published
by
Karl
on September 20, 2007
in Advertising and Viral-Persuasion
. 1 Comment

Great little bit of self promotion via youtube for Kyle T Watkins, graphic designer, illustrator and ODG. A great example of a viral video on a small budget but with a clear business aim. Interestingly it seems that Kyle has started a little side business selling the mp3 of the song for 99c and selling some t-shirts via cafepress.

It’s interesting as well that graphic designers are famous for creating little self promotional tools to show off their creative chops and attract the attention of potential customers. For some great examples I highly recomend this book called “A Smile in the Mind: Witty Thinking in Graphic Design “, it’s a brilliant coffee table book.

Conclusive Proof: Facebook is Mainstream

Published
by
Karl
on September 20, 2007
in Marketing
. 3 Comments

I have incontrovertible proof that Facebook is more mainstream than any other social network. That proof is that I got friend requests from my Mum and Dad who both have profiles…. that i didn’t set up for them. I rest my case.

Bob Garfield on the Death Of The Advertising Agency

Published
by
Karl
on September 18, 2007
in Advertising
. 4 Comments

Word. Big point here is ad agencies have to change how they are compensated.

Related:
Five Implications for the “social media agency
Agency Deathwatch bookmarks