With video on the web, it's not about what you're saying, it's about how it's said.
For as long as I remember it's been my feeling that part of what made the internet so powerful was that it finally gave us a way to understand networks. Prior to the web, networks were mostly invisible and we didn't have a great grasp of how they worked.
The problem with my argument was that I didn't really ever have anything to back it up. I mean, I had my understanding, but I hadn't ever read anything that explicitly spelled things out this way.
I am repeatedly asked a few basic questions when I lecture about networks: Why did it take this long? Why did we have to wait until 1999 to discover the impact of hubs and power laws on the behavior of complex networks? The answer is simple: We lacked a map. The few network maps available for study before the late 1990s had a few hundred nodes at most. The enormous World Wide Web offered the first chance to examine the intricate anatomy of large complex systems and established the presence of power laws. As other large maps followed, we gradually understood that most networks of practical interest, from the language to the sex web, are shaped by the same universal laws and therefore share the same hub-dominated architecture.
In case you didn't feel like reading that, my bigger point is that whatever it is we take away from the surface web (say watching videos or reading blog entries), the structure is equally important to our understanding. You might even say the medium is the message.
Think of it this way: The message is the bright shiny object, the low-hanging fruit. It's the 3 minute YouTube video of the guy lighting his farts on fire. It's the thing that makes you laugh. The medium, however, is also communicating some very strong messages, letting you know that you can find entertainment on new screens, that three minutes is the ideal time for your shortened-attention span, that if that idiot can light his farts and get 70,000 people to watch it, so can you.
Most everyone concentrates on the message, and rightly so, those watching the video most likely don't care about the deeper repercussions. Much of that communication is covert. The thing is, if you want to understand what's really going on and make something meaningful, you need to be in touch with that covert communication.
Here's how McLuhan broke it down:
What I am saying is that new media may at first appear as mere codes of transmission for older achievement and established patterns of thought. But nobody could make the mistake of supposing that phonetic writing merely made it possible for the Greeks to set down in visual order what they had thought and known before writing. In the same way printing made literature possible. It did not merely encode literature.
Super simple text service that allows you to easily start a mobile blog.
It's been awhile since I stumbled upon a new service that made me say wow, but I've finally got a new one to add to the 'newly discovered' list. It's called twttr and it's simple:
Sign up. Send a text message to 40404. You've got a mobile blog.
There's more to the service, but at the moment all I'm using it for is just writing myself notes. If I'm out and see a friend and want to remember their email, 40404 it. If I'm in the bookstore and see something I want to buy off Amazon, 40404 it. If I'm reading in the park . . . you get the drift.
It's super simple, it doesn't cost anything (assuming you have unlimited text messages) and it does something I seriously need (give me a place to keep notes). Once they add an API/RSS feed to get my data out of there and some way to edit something you've sent, the service will be amazing. Not sure how they're going to make money off it, but if you're reading this, I think I'd be willing to pay a subscription fee.
Anyhow, if you want to keep up with my thoughts/notes, jump over to twttr.com/heyitsnoah. Nothing overly exciting at the moment, but that's cool.
Ugly, YouTube and customer experience . . . you name it we got it.
There's enough going on around here this week to warrant a morning edition. Here's a bunch of most-likely unrelated stuff to read, click on, watch, hear and think about.
TV was a temporal medium before YouTube. Now that everyone can catch a moment on YouTube is TV finally a mass medium? After that Zidane incident, the water cooler was once again abuzz.
It's all about the customer experience. Of course it is. I need to write a whole thing about how customer experience and product design are the two most important things marketers should be thinking about. (CK gets credit for the link.)
Finally, a few weeks ago I saw this episode of Zefrank's The Show. I've been thinking about it a lot and figured I'd share it with everyone. All about how the democratization of design is going to force us to reconsider what we find both ugly and beautiful. (RSS readers, click over to the site.)
If you haven't been following there have been some amazing comments to the last few entries I've posted. Thanks so much to everyone who's added to the conversation and if you haven't, join in. As a small incentive, I've turned off "nofollow" so there could be some PageRank in it for you.
If it's not money that's driving the web, what is it?
I want to talk about attention. More and more lately I've been thinking about it as the primary driver of people's actions on the web. But when you think about it in a larger context, it's really at the center of what much of the population does off the web as well. Think about it, how many people want to be famous? What's fame? A whole lot of attention.
The vast majority of the world don't get paid to contribute to culture, they do it for free. That's why artists starve and actors wait tables. The light at the end of the tunnel is never just fortune, it's always paired with fame. People want to be noticed and that's the bottom line.
As I understand much of traditional economic theory is based on the idea that people are completely rational beings, but if that's the case, why is attention so valuable? Sure, sometimes you can convert attention into profit (think infomercials), but what about all the people that just do stuff to get on TV. Come on, you know the guy, the one who stands behind the newscaster making funny faces so that maybe, by some stroke of crazy luck, one of his friends is watching.
We're not rational in any way, television did a good job breaking that. But now, with all these people on the web, it's becoming all the more apparent. There are millions of people adding content to the web with no apparent goal in sight. My writing here is not a profitable endeavor. I have to pay for my hosting and, assuming my time has some value, waste my time. The result is a site that I hope will attract interesting people. I want attention.
Sure, down the road I may have a hair-brained scheme to turn that attention into profit by using this site as a springboard, but the fact is that most of us don't even do it for that. We do it because we like being a part of something. We want attention. We want to feel connected. We want to meet people of likemind. In fact, most of these things are probably worth more than money to a lot of people.
So the big question is, what happens when the non-web world catches on? If the web economy is made up of things like attention and trust, what happens when, like most trends nowadays, it exits the digital realm and enters 'real life'?
Anyone??????
Update (7/26/06): Just ran across this Anil Dash entry about the current Digg vs. Netscape feud and why people contribute content.
I've been reading way more than I can possible write about, so here's what didn't make the entry cut (yet). Also, for those not aware, you can follow my sidenotes by subscribing to the RSS feed. Anyway, let me give you what you really came for . . .
Jeffrey Veen: "Users aren't stupid, they're efficient. They're spending the least amount of effort (i.e. intelligence) as they possible can on each step of the goal they're trying to achieve. If you make them spend more, they'll go somewhere else -- it's like intellectual bargain shopping."
The Oreo CEO: "I’m Internet famous. It’s a rough life I live, but I wouldn’t change it for anything in the world. And if you actually believe all this shit then you must be Internet famous like me."
Bob Sutton: "Bob explained that weak opinions are problematic because people aren't inspired to develop the best arguments possible for them, or to put forth the energy required to test them. Bob explained that it was just as important, however, to not be too attached to what you believe because, otherwise, it undermines your ability to 'see' and 'hear' evidence that clashes with your opinions. This is what psychologists sometimes call the problem of 'confirmation bias.'"
A logo is a flag, a signature, an escutcheon.
A logo doesn't sell (directly), it identifies.
A logo is rarely a description of a business.
A logo derives its meaning from the quality of the thing it symbolizes, not the other way around.
A logo is less important than the product it signifies; what it means is more important that what it looks like.
Guardian Unlimited: "In the centuries since their freebooting peak, the reputation of Captain Kidd, Calico Jack and co has endured a remarkable transformation. In the 18th century, pirates were the baddest of the bad guys. They created a crisis in world trade: between 1718 and 1722, they captured and plundered more than 2,400 vessels on Atlantic trade routes. According to American preacher Cotton Mather, "all Nations agree to treat [pirates] as the Common Enemies of Mankind, and to extirpate them out of the world". The modern parallels are there, as playwright Simon Bent points out: "For pirates to take out merchant ships returning laden with gold from the New World would be like taking out the Twin Towers in our era." So will the Johnny Depps of the future play raffish versions of Osama bin Laden in Hollywood blockbusters?"
Why is everyone so afraid of people accepting money to talk about products?
[Editor's Note: I don't make any money off this blog and at the moment have no plans of doing so.]
The hot question is what's the revenue model. Everybody's got a great idea, but none of us can put our minds together and come up with anything better than let's slap some advertising on it and hope that people pay attention. Well, today, while reading John Hagel and Jeff Jarvis on the train to Connecticut I had an idea which I'll get to after a bit of set up.
Journalistic integrity is bullshit. Now that's not to say that journalists don't have individual integrity, but if you ask me it takes a lot more integrity to stand up and admit to your bias than pretend you don't have one. Reporting both sides of a story when the other side is all but non-existent isn't fair and accurate, on the contrary, the situation you're creating is one where two unequal sides are given equal attention.
Now I know the road I'm going down here is a bit of a treacherous path, people need to receive both sides of a story and I'm not arguing against that. I'm just saying that often journalists search out the other side and represent it in an unbalanced way. In Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," he cites a study of 928 abstracts of global warming articles, noting that not one questioned the existence of or human contribution to global warming. On the other hand, he reported that a large number of journalistic articles in that same timeframe presented the story as a two-sided one, often quoting skeptics. Sure, numbers can lie, but the larger point is that clearly many of these stories misrepresent the opposition as larger than they really are, an idea that can be even more damaging than not representing them at all.
Okay, so what does all this have to do with revenue models? Well, here at NoahBrier.com, I don't have journalistic integrity, I've just got personal integrity. I have to answer to myself and myself only. The information posted here does not go through an editor or fact checker, it just goes from my head, through my fingers and out to you. I only post things I find interesting and fully admit that something I said yesterday I may not believe tomorrow.
The reason you keep coming back is you trust me as a filter for you. You come for the links or the writing. You want to read what I've got to say. If all of a sudden I started talking gibberish (which I may be doing right now) or started to sound like a commercial, you might decide to end the relationship. But until then you'll probably stick around. Maybe you'll even leave a comment sometime. We're connected.
So why shouldn't I use that connection for some financial gain? What would happen if I started accepting money to talk about products. Except part of the deal for the company was that in accepting the payment (1) I didn't have to say anything and (2) if I did say anything it didn't have to be nice. No part of the deal was that I had to mention I was paid, though. Why should you care? You're here because you trust me. If I broke that trust by recommending a shit product you wouldn't come back, leaving me without the audience needed to demand the cash from the 'advertiser.'
Here are two tests. Most media companies today are driven by product centric economics – they track in great detail what it costs to make a media product, how many units are sold or distributed and the revenue generated by product. How many of them effectively track the life time value of their audience members or customers – what it costs to acquire an audience member or customer, how long their relationship endures and how much revenue and profit is generated by audience member or customer? These customer centric economics drive customer relationship businesses.
Second test – how ready are most media companies to point their audience members or customers to media products offered by their competitors? From my experience, very few. A customer relationship business acts as an agent on behalf of the customer, helping to connect them with whatever resources are most valuable or relevant to them, regardless of source.
It's the second test I'm interested in. I'm in the customer relationship business. I constantly send you to other sites without any worries of whether you'll return or not. I know that if I recommend something interesting, you'll come back for more. So why couldn't I just extend this model and start recommending goods and services? As long as I wholeheartedly believe in what I was recommending, why does it matter if I was paid or not? Sure there are dangers with people selling out and recommending crap, but like I said before, if that happens they've damaged the relationship with the reader. In other words, I would have a serious financial interest in only recommending the best stuff out there.
Now I have no clue whether this would actually work or not, but at least it's an interesting idea. Right?
Four thoughts about how the internet is reshaping the world we live in.
1. The idea of celebrity is changing.
Steven Johnson is one of my favorite writers, the guy brilliant looks at trends and extracts the deeper implications. I've read his books and now read his blog. The other day I decided to just drop him an email and tell him how much I enjoyed his writing. Five minutes later I got an email back telling me I had made his day.
He's in it for the same thing I am: attention. His blog is not a moneymaking venture (to my knowledge), its a place for him to reflect and think out loud. Just like this one.
With each search, with each subscription, our narratives expand to tell the story of which team we follow, where we will be taking our next vacation, which conference we are planning to attend. The gestures of our lives are recorded, and we become represented – on “Top 100� lists, blogrolls and Flickr badges of different sizes. And the narratives of our electronic Attention gestures have even crossed back into offline mass media: on CNN’s headline news or American Idol’s SMS voting. We may not be followed by paparazzi, but airtime on national television is a start.
2. Everything is flattening; we're entering the free agent age.
That comes from chartreuse (BETA). If you don't read him, get on it. He understands what's going on without all the hype normally associated with blogging, videos, web 2.0, blah, blah, blah. The way he sees it, "We are all eventually going to free agents and it’s important you have people who around you who realizes that and know how to exploit it to your benefit."
I hung out with chartreuse and Loren the other night, we chatted for a really long time about what's going on in this crazy online world. The two of them are working on a new kind of talent agency.
3. PageRank is the new hot.
Speaking of Steven Johnson, in lieu of flowers and food baskets, he's asking for links to a post about his new son Dean. As he puts it, "I'm titling this post "Dean" for Google's sake. I think it would be most excellent if everyone would link to this page, and drive this post up Google's results for the word "Dean." I think it would help him get a head start in the world to have a lot of pagerank right out of the gate." PageRank is an indicator of future success.
4. It's all about the people.
Over this week I met a ton of different people who up to this point I only knew online. I mentioned Chartreuse and Loren, plus the first likemind.ny went off like a rocket. About 15 people showed up and every single one of them was interesting. It was great to talk to everyone and I expect some big things will come out of it. If you missed this one, we'll be doing the next one soon, I'll make sure to announce it here, but if you head over to likemind you can sign up to stay informed.
More than anything else, though, this week reminded me that there are some unbelievable people behind all these sites I love. Getting to know them is amazing. When you meet a blogger for the first time it's like you get to skip all the garbage. You know what they've been paying attention to for the last six months, giving you common points of interest. Blogs are almost like people filters, helping you figure out who you are connected to an who you're not.
There's a lot of hype about the coming doom for marketing/advertising. Here are some ways to save it.
Tonight I attended an event called Attention vs. Engagement put on the ROOT and BuzzMetrics (or maybe more specifically Seth and Max). Much of the conversation felt like a lot of people who were deeply entrenched in one way of thinking (advertising) looking for any possible way to justify it. It's not to say I blame them, I understand that it's got to be hard to watch your world crumble around you, but instead of trying to come up with new metrics why not spend the time looking for new ways to cash in on your core competencies?
Eventually the conversation kept coming back to what makes people talk about products/services. That's not advertising or marketing, it's great customer experiences. If you want to inspire passion in your customers, don't spend the money on marketing, concentrate on building a great business that puts them first. Now that's not to say that all us marketers are out of a job, on the contrary, there are now more opportunities than ever for groups who understand how to interpret audience needs.
As marketers we need to step up to the plate and find better ways to leverage our skills to help companies create great customer experiences. That might mean writing copy for customer service reps in call centers or helping the company create packaging that's easy to open. After that our job is easy. Think about: Great products sell themselves, but instead of helping to create great products, we're stuck marketing mediocre ones.
With that said, I came up with 9 ways to save marketing
Start saying something! Don't be afraid to speak your mind, at least you'll elicit a reaction. A negative reaction is better than no reaction at all.
Get involved earlier! Why do we wait until we get a brief? We need to try and insert ourselves more into the product development cycle.
Let go of the brand! That's not to say the brand is dead, just that we need to accept that it may be appropriate to deliver different brand identities to different groups with different needs.
Admit there's no one answer! Different products have different buying cycles, there's not going to be one metric/method for every purchase category. Toilet papers will always be different than TVs.
Institutionalize R&D! Let's stop relying on employees to bring innovative ideas to the table and start investing in innovative thinking.
Advertising's dead! Don't even bother talking about just advertising anymore. It's silly. Marketing is the only option.
Marketing's dead! It's a holistic approach. Don't limit yourself by what's 'marketing' and what's not. Include everything and anything that helps you reach your end goal. It's all about creating a great experience.
Leave no stone unturned! There should be nothing within the organization that marketing doesn't at least attempt to touch. You need to be worried about everything from call centers to product placement. It's all about the experience and that's what you do now.
Stand for something! Have beliefs and stick to them. Don't be afraid to stand behind something that might be controversial. You'll most likely gain more supporters by standing your ground than detractors, no matter how loud they may be.
Sorry, I couldn't come up with 10. Got any more I could add?
Yesterday was the two year anniversary of this website. I actually had it marked on my calendar and everything, except for some reason I wrote it down for the 17th, not the 16th. Anyway, it's been a wild and wonderful two years and I wanted to thank everyone that's contributed to the site.
I often try to explain to people why I keep a website like this, but I never quite do it justice. At its most basic it's an expression outlet. I get to keep track of new thoughts and ideas as they pop up and, on occasion, even get to discuss them with the world. More importantly, though, having this outlet has allowed me to stay in a perpetual state of critical thinking. Anything I encounter I treat as possible fodder for the site. Whether it's an article in the newspaper or a sign on the street, having this outlet lets me think about its relation to the rest of the world. I guess what I'm saying is the site is my excuse and I love it for that.
On the other side, of course, are the many great people I've met as a direct or indirect result of the site. So many of the most interesting conversations I've had in recent memory have been with random people. It's nice to know that there are so many people out there that are excited as I am about thinking about the future.
Anyway, all that was a longwinded way of saying thank you. Thanks for sticking around, for reading the site, for entering conversations and generally for being a part of my life. It's fun to know that anything I write will be read by hundreds, many of whom are complete strangers.
Finally, my usual request, if you've been hiding for all this time, why don't you come out of the shadows? Leave a comment or drop me an email, tell me who you are, what you do or what your blog is. I'm a real person. I swear.
Oh, and for those interested, how about some stats from the last two years:
A chance to meet up with people of likemind in NYC to drink coffee and chat.
Last week I asked people if they'd like to meet in real life. Well, Piers from PSFK got in touch with me and suggested we do a coffee morning together. Out of that grew likemind.us. The idea, not surprisingly, is that a bunch of people of like mind get together, drink some coffee and talk about things of mutual interest. Here's the info for the first morning:
when: friday, july 21 at 8am
where: sNice, 45 Eighth Avenue, at West 4th Street, NYC (GOOGLE MAPS)
If you're interested all you've got to do is show up. You can get more info and sign up to stay informed at likemind.us. I hope to see some of you there.
One last thing, I thought it might be cool if other cities hand their own likemind mornings. So if you're interested in doing one, just let me know and I'll post the info on the site.
A while back a bunch of companies got together and decided the best way to curb comment spam was something called a 'nofollow' tag. Essentially what it did was tell the search engines not to give credit to links that included this tag, the idea being that if spammers didn't get credit for their links they'd stop spamming. On the Google blog they explain it like this: "From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn't a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it's just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists."
Now 'nofollow' was a perfectly fine idea, but it did absolutely nothing to stop the onslaught of comment spam. I would often wake up in the morning to see 40-50 comments talking about everything you might expect spammers to talk about. Because spamming is so cheap, it turns out the SEO (search engine optimization) help doesn't really matter. Now I don't completely understand spamonomics, but I've got to assume that the random person who clicks and buys something through these fake comments makes it all worth the while.
So why do I mention all this? Well, mainly because I just turned off nofollow. Like I said, it was doing nothing to help me with my spam problem. Turns out it's just one of those things that are great for Google and not the rest of us. What I mean is, they now know what's spam and what's not, so they don't artificially rank spamming sites, but the comment spam here wasn't slowed at all. It was a totally one-sided solution.
For the other-sided solution, I have turned to Akismet and I must say I'm very impressed. The occaisional spam filters through, but it's mostly been smooth sailing for the month or so I've had it installed. I can't say enough good things about. (I'm knocking on wood the whole time I write this. The goal of this entry is not to incite spammers to try and break the system. Please leave me be.)
Akismet was originally developed for Wordpress, and still requires a Wordpress.com API key, but now they have Movable Type version. So if you're having a comment spam problem, I suggest you turn to them.
Before I finish, let me expand a bit further why I turned 'nofollow' off. What it meant was that all you wonderful commenters were not getting any Google credit for your comment. If you had a website, by commenting here it was not helping your PageRank. Now it is. Not that all of a sudden everyone should start commenting for a better PageRank, but I thought it was only fair that if someone leaves a thoughtful comment they should be rewarded in some way.
The company I work at is hiring a jr. writer and it could be you.
Renegade (the company I work at) is looking to fill a jr. writer position. It's a great company and a really cool group of people (including your's truly). In addition, this position would work quite closely with me. If you're recently graduated and looking for a first job, this could be perfect. Here's the description:
We're looking for someone who's passionate about words. It doesn't matter if people call you a 'writer' or you studied English in college, you just need to enjoy using language to express yourself.
As a Jr. Writer you'll be collaborating with the creative team to develop Renegade ideas. You'll be called on to assist in both the writing and ideation phases, and work with the team and client to develop copy that meets both their needs and yours. Projects will be online and off, so you should enjoy working in all media.
With that said, it's very important to understand that you'll be doing more than just writing. Your appetite for words should be equaled by your appetite for ideas. You should have a desire to understand human nature in addition to grammar.
You don't need to know everything about marketing, in fact you shouldn't. You should be curious and excited about an opportunity to grow and learn new skills in an environment that encourages that sort of stuff.
If this sounds like you, email Christopher Downing (cdowning@renegademarketing.com) your resume and a few writing samples (if you're wondering what a few means, in this case it's two or greater). Please include "Writer" in the subject line of your email.
Two possibly money-making ventures for you to tear apart . . .
I've had two pseudo-money making ideas in the last few days and I figured I might come right out and tell everyone about them to see if they make any sense.
The first is a job board/blog. The idea here is that lately I've been hearing about a ton of interesting jobs. I want a place to pass these opportunities I hear about on to like-minded individuals. Unlike a regular job website, it's not a place anyone can post. It's exclusive. I've got to be sold on/connected with the place to post the job. It's got to be something I think is cool. The idea here is that if I act as a filter (and do a good job), it should have some pretty interesting stuff on it (like this opportunity at Buzzmetrics).
The second idea is to compile a nightly (if I could pull it off), PDF that could be printed out by commuters. Included would be a number of interesting articles from the day for you to read on your ride home.
In the end, both of these are based around me as a trusted filter. This is one of the most interesting things going on in advertising for me at the moment. Looking at The DECK for example, you see a network that only accepts ads for companies it knows/respects/uses. With the way blogs work as a trusted source, it's a simple extension to offer recommended goods and services.
Enough babbling, what do you think? Anything to either idea?
If you live in the NYC area and want to meet up sometime, drop me a line.
Lately I've had a desire to meet some people from the blog world in person. So, if you're a reader of this blog and live or are visiting the NYC area, drop me a line and we'll get coffee or a drink.
Five links for your cerebral (and not so cerebral) enjoyment.
It's been a while since I did one of a roundup of the latest links. If you've missed it I suggest, as usual, you subscribe to the sidenotes. In the meantime, though, here are what I think are my five favorite links from the last week (in no specific order):
Fimoculous 3.0: Fimoculous is the blog of Rex Sorgatz. The majority of the content on the blog are fantastic links elsewhere. Rex used to do a weekly (or so) wrap-up, but has since decided to change the format and in the process redesign the site. In this post he highlights his thinking behind the current redesign (which is mostly on the homepage). Basically he's decided to use his site as a personal aggregator, pulling together all his data from elsewhere around the web. As he puts it, "Once you start thinking of your life as aggregation potential, you start to wonder about all kinds of possibilities. ("How dangerous would it be to expose my clickstream?") Although this isn't revoluationary thinking, I like the idea that this site updates even when I'm not explicitly creating content for it. When you start to think about your blog as a receptacle for capturing all parts of your online life (and perhaps even your non-digital life), you can start to imagine a constantly updating page of personal data. To get metaphysical for a moment, the self-aggregator becomes another version of you."
Making Something Meaningful: Anil Dash takes technology to task for not making his life better. He echoes the sentiments that almost every person that interacts with the web has felt in an eloquent way.
2006 so far: This comes from the blog of advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy London. It's an incredibly honest evaluation of the first six months of 2006. It's refreshing to see a big agency willing to be so open. This to me is the meaning of a corporate blog. I applaud the agency and the blog, welcome to optimism.
The Second Crop of Mac Ads is Finally Here!: I hate those new "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads. I think the Mac guy comes off like a pompous prick and they overemphasize many PC problems (for the record, I am a Mac user). Lucky for us, the bestweekever saw many of the same flaws and decided to spoof the commercials. Great stuff.
At the New Jetblue Terminal, Passengers May Pirouette to Gate 3: I love it when unlikely teams form to solve problems. Like architect/design David Rockwell hiring choreographer Jerry Mitchell to help him create the new terminal for Jetblue at JFK. The Times piece is a great look at how a deep understanding of the audience can lead to better results. It's multidisciplinary collaboration at it's best.
One last thing, Max Kalehoff works at Buzzmetrics and is looking for a marketing manager. Max is a very cool and smart guy and Buzzmetrics is doing some amazing stuff to understand online buzz. If you live in New York (or are moving here) and are interested, check out a more detailed description over at Max's blog. Also, if anyone is or knows of a copywriter who might be looking for some work, drop me a line.
I got a CD that is so well protected I'll never listen to it. Way to go RIAA!
I am very lucky to be on the receiving end of a fair amount of free music. Thanks to DJ'ing and some other hookups I've been labeled a "tastemaker" and get sent a few free CDs every month to listen to and review. Like most things free, it's fun to get and much of the music is fairly good. This story isn't about music, though, it's about stupidity.
I recently received an advanced copy of an album by a band called "Under the Influence of Giants." Like most of the CDs I get I brought it work to listen to in the background. When I put this CD I noticed some FBI piracy warnings, but nothing more than the usual. Then I hit play in iTunes and all I got was a strange drum loop. It kind of sounded like the CD was skipping, but that wasn't right. Anyways, I switched songs and the same thing happened. I tried a few others, but on those I got nothing but silence.
Perplexed I pulled the case off my shelf and looked at it, on the back was this friendly message: "COPY PROTECTED: THIS CD IS PROTECTED AGAINST UNAUTHORIZED COPYING IT IS DESIGNED TO PLAYIN STANDART AUDIO CD PLAYERS. IT IS NOT DESIGNED FOR PLAY IN COMPUTERS. PLAYBACK PROBLEMS MAY ALSO BE EXPERIENCED WITH CAR STEREOS, DVD PLAYERS AND GAME CONSOLES."
So I've been sent a CD that I can't play in my computer, DVD player or game console. That's insane. I don't even have access to a regular CD player at work and at home, the only one I have is in the shower, hardly the best way to listen to music with a critical ear.
My question to the record label (Island Records) is this: At what point does your quest to protect your property completely ruin the experience? The DRM on this CD is at a level that makes me unwilling to ever listen to the music. Now if you're trying to save an industry, is this really the best way to do it?
Chris Anderson's latest Wired article is mostly an introduction to his upcoming book. Not to say it's a bad article, just not quite as revolutionary as the first. With all that said, the last paragraph got me thinking . . .
The mass market is yielding to a million minimarkets. Hits will always be with us, but they have lost their monopoly. Blockbusters must now compete with an infinite number of niche offerings, which can be distributed just as easily. Justin Timberlake still makes albums, but today he has thousands of bands on MySpace as rivals. The hierarchy of attention has inverted – credibility now rises from below. MTV and Tower Records no longer decide who will win. You do.
It was mostly the last few sentences that got me: "The hierarchy of attention has inverted - credibility now rises from below. MTV and Tower Records no longer decide who will win. You do." I hadn't really thought about it before, but this is right inline with my idea of idiocentricity:
[Idiocentricity is] an individual determining his or her own influences . . . It is what makes the internet such a powerful medium, and what makes blogs and other social software such a great addition to the web's landscape. We have now begun to shift away from messages being broadcast to us by traditional media, instead opting for the route of the internet. This allows us to sit at the center of our media universe and pick and choose what we receive. We are no longer held hostage by the television schedule, rather, we can just tune into an aggregator and receive all the news or entertainment that we've decided we want.
As the name would suggest, we are the center of our own worlds. As Anderson puts it, "credibility now rises from below." Millions of people are determining what they pay attention to. The world is no longer held hostage by the choices of a few programmers. We can now spend our attention anyway we want to. That's powerful stuff.
For an industry that relies on its ideas, where is the research and development to make sure they're on the cutting edge?
Over at MediaPost, Max Kalehoff writes about the need for R&D within advertising agencies, hitting on some things I've been thinking about lately. The entry comes out of a question Max asked at the Innovative Marketing Conference: "Why the heck are advertising and marketing agencies so often so late to invest in or experiment with new technologies and emerging media, while the marketers and clients demonstrate increasing interest and tendency to pursue them directly?"
It's an interesting time to be in advertising/marketing. With the media world in a state of upheaval, marketing is scrambling to find new ground to stand on. That ground is increasingly new media/emerging technology. Even with that said, however, agencies are slow to adopt and invest in the latest innovations. There's a bunch of possible reasons for this which Max highlights in the article.
All in all this fits into one of my big interests: What does marketing in the future look like? Its my feeling that marketing is going to need to deliver far more value in the future to compete in the media saturated world. Broadcast is not as viable as it once was, and that doesn't just mean television, but also speaking at people rather than engaging them. Brands and 2.0 puts it like this, "Brands only have a role [in social media] if they can make the conversation more interesting." (Thanks to Kareem for the link.)
This is going to require some serious rethinking within the agency world. The current structure of account and creative lends itself well to the old-fashioned ideas of advertising. However, it may be time to consider a far more interdisciplinary approach to solving the problem of how to get consumers to focus their attention on your company.
One of the responses to Max's piece is from Ted McConnel from P&G, Ted explains:
If the role of R&D in Agencies was to enhance the skills and options in creativity then it might make more sence to agency managers as an investment. For example, whoever imagined the Subservient Chicken had a knowledge of what was possible before they got the brief, I feel sure. How did they get that? Luck, I assume. Well, if Organizations are about making your own luck in the marketplace, then maybe they should consider that systematically discovering and communicating 'what’s possible' within their creative departments might be a very profitable investment.
I think this is right on target. Like almost any company, the danger is that people and their ideas will get to comfortable. This is all the more dangerous when you make a living selling your ideas. It's time for some checks and balances in the marketing world.
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Mostly random thought (from Twitter): Spent the last 5 hours doing math. Haven't done that since ever. (26 July 2010, 1:45 am)
Q: What is this site all about?
A: I think Michael Bierut explained it nicely a few years ago in response to people asking him why he didn't write more about design on Design Observer: "But the great thing about graphic design is that it is almost always about something else. Corporate law. Professional football. Art. Politics. Robert Wilson. And if I can't get excited about whatever that something else is, I really have trouble doing good work as a designer. To me, the conclusion is inescapable: the more things you're interested in, the better your work will be." Replace "graphic design" with "media/marketing/technology" (or whatever you'd like to call my field) and you've got my deal.
Q: Where else do you live?
A: Good question. All over the place as a matter of fact. On Tumblr for more randomness, Twitter for short bursts, Dopplr for places I'm going, Delicious for things I'm reading, last.fm for music I'm listening to, Flickr for photos I'm taking and Facebook because I don't really have a choice. (Oh, and Amazon for stuff I want people to buy me.)
Q: I meant that literally. Where do you live?
A: Oh, sorry, Brooklyn, New York is where I call home at the moment.
Q: Any other side projects you'd like to tell us about?
A: As a matter of fact, yes. There's How Much Does it Buy?, a calculator for the rest of us. Holy Crap! Facts (and accompanying Twitter feed) which is pretty much exactly what you'd expect. Da' Bears Blog is, in my opinion, the best Chicago Bears blog on the web (I don't write it, I just helped it get off the ground) and Tweemail is a little PHP script I wrote for getting Twitter updates by email. I'm also always working on a few other things and will let you know when they're ready for public consumption.
Q: Um okay.
A: Yeah, that's a fake question mostly so I can throw in this one other quote I like that I think sums up some of what I try to do here. This one comes from Albert Einstein (or at least the internet says so) and goes something like, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Words to live by.
Hi, I'm 