And Hollywood and the music guys manage to sue the users and organizers of online file sharing out of business. Let’s imagine that against all odds, you can’t find copyrighted stuff online any more.
If that happens, sites like ibiblio – Sights and Sounds begin to do better and better. Here’s hours and hours of stuff for free.
Now what you end up with paid online radio and free online radio. Paid online video and free online video.
At first, the paid stuff is good and the free stuff is less good.
But soon, producers seeking an audience start to make their stuff free. Because when they do, the audience goes up 100x.
And then, in order to compete, others do the same thing. Wouldn’t you if you had a touring band? Wouldn’t you if you had already exhausted your DVD sales and wanted a big enough audience for your sequel?
And then, of course, we end up where we sort of are today.
August 10, 2005
The voice on the answering machine at the big fancy "customer-centric" company said (italics are theirs, not mine),
We guarantee a member of senior management will call you back as soon as possible.
and the spokesperson for the huge corporate lobbying organization assured us that, "we have very strict guidelines for members."
and of course, the box in the supermarket said FREE with purchase.
Naturally, none of these sentences mean what they appear to mean. And I think that people have finally figured that out. Nobody really guarantees the weather will be good… what are they going to do, give you your day back?
It may very well be that the tried and true weasel technique of joining a powerful assurance with a weak, hard-to-define modifier is finally reaching the end of the road.
I can unequivocally assure you that there’s a 100% certainty that weasel words are pretty close to dead.
Abhijit Nandy points us to Guest Commentary – Killer Features vs. Pseudo Features : Gizmodo. It turns out that one reason we ignore what marketers say is that they tout stuff that’s nonsense. What makes something purple is that a fellow human touts something that happens to be really and truly great.
If you’re writing for strangers, make it shorter.
Use images and tone and design and interface to make your point. Teach people gradually.
If you’re writing for colleagues, make it more robust.
Be specific. Be clear. Be intellectually rigorous and leave no wiggle room.
Takeaway: the stuff you’re putting online or in your blog or in your brochures or in your business letters is too long. Too much inside baseball. Too many unasked questions getting answered too soon.
Takeaway: the stuff you’re sending out in your email and your memos is too vague.
Figure out which category before you put finger to keyboard!
Articles about the Grateful Dead have the inevitable snarky headline (Jerry Garcia: The Man, the Myth, the Area Rug – New York Times) and often try to trivialize what the band accomplished, or make the case that it was a unique occurence, something that will never happen again.
Of course, this is nonsense.
More than Campbell’s Soup or American Airlines or CAA or Cisco or McKinsey, the Grateful Dead is the template for how organizations are going to grow and succeed moving forward.
No, not every element of who they were and what they did, but the idea of conversations and open source, the idea of souvenirs and emotion and live events and of remarkability. The Dead sells through permission marketing, spread their music through an ideavirus and yes, as long as we’re slinging buzzwords, profits from the long tail.
The most important takeaway is this: They repeatedly did things that felt like huge risks, that challenged the status quo and that seemed, on their face, to give too much power to their audience. And in those moments, the Grateful Dead were at their most successful.
August 9, 2005
The portobello mushrooms in the shrinkwrapped container seemed like a great idea. Until I got them home, unwrapped them and discovered that the bottom layer was rotten. I’m sure some produce mailer is smiling because he got rid of those mushrooms. But was it a smart decision?
The Napa Style catalog arrived at my house today. On the cover is some overpriced artisanal salt. And the amount of salt pictured couldn’t possibly fit into the container you’ll receive. Of course they may be able to claim that they were just touting, but is the disappointment worth it?
Starbucks wouldn’t sell me a cappucino over ice today. Instead of answering, "I don’t know," to my question of why, the barrista said, "we’re not allowed to because pouring the cappucino over ice causes bacteria to grow."
I love the fact Toyota is fighting with the EPA over the mileage reported on the Prius. It turns out that the way the EPA computes mileage means that the typical Prius driver will rarely or ever achieve the mileage posted. Toyota has realized that big mileage on the sticker isn’t nearly as good as big word of mouth in the parking lot.
Fine print is everywhere I look. Fine print means that a lawyer has made sure that you probably won’t win a lawsuit, but is the lawsuit really the point?
When did marketers fall in love with the idea of overselling and then hiding, instead of doing precisely the opposite?
August 8, 2005
For the last six years, people in big media have been asking me one question: "How will new media work for the big advertisers?" This is paraphrased over at: gapingvoid: the multi-billion dollar suicide pact between clients and television.
While it’s human nature to be selfishly focused on your issues, there is a bias implicit in the question that’s fatal to the entire discussion. The question shouldn’t be, "How do we use this different media to replace the media* that’s broken?" (*"media for big advertisers".)
The right question is, "How does this new media change the game for all the players?" How does it move upstream and influence everything from what gets made to who makes it to how much is charged…
Can the world of blogs etc. help Budweiser? Only on the margins. The world of new media is not the place to launch the next one-size-fits-all mega brand, nor is it the place to shore a flagging brand like that up.
Instead of using new media to promote the next megafilm from Disney or Julia Roberts, it permits movies like WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price to get made at all.
Instead of using new media to promote brands like Budweiser, it permits that very same megabrewer to launch brands that tell a much more vertical, more focused, more powerful story to a smaller group of people.
Instead of promoting mainstream political parties and mainstream political ideas, it provides donations and vocal support to the fringes.
I don’t think new media leads us to products that are better or more healthful or honest, necessarily. I think it clearly leads us to products (and the stories about them) that are far more focused. Not only isn’t there a cost to specialization, there’s now a benefit to it. Focus is no longer expensive. Mass is.
I resisted commenting on the purple cow publicity stunt all day. But after counting the incoming mail and the media links, I decided it was worth weighing in. Link: nbc6.net – News – Cows Painted Pink, Purple Used As Living Billboards.
No, I’m not behind this.
The casino that did it (the same folks that bought the grilled cheese on eBay that isn’t really the Virgin Mary’s face (what would it look like if it really was her face? Not sure)) has an aggressive approach of gaining media attention with clever stunts.
Hey, if it’s funny and the cows don’t get beheaded, why not?
But it’s not Purple Cow marketing. Why? Because you want your product to get talked about, not Paris Hilton or the grilled cheese sandwich.
My guess is that if they do it often enough and cheekily enough and crazily enough, they will actually build themselves into a mecca of kitsch. And thus the kitsch becomes the product, the same way a visit to the Leaning Tower of Pisa isn’t about the Tower, it’s about saying you went–"Hey! That looks just like the picture!"
August 5, 2005
Do you remember the logo for Bill Gross’s GoTo.com? Of course not. How about the banners or the slogan or the advertising?
Nope.
In this excerpt from John Battelle’s new book, there’s a great riff on the insights of Bill Gross (who does it often enough that it’s clearly not luck). Link: John Battelle’s Searchblog: First Excerpt.
My takeaway is that, especially online, if your product architecture and your story make sense, you ought to do just fine.
Did you ever wonder why William Seward wasn’t nominated for president instead of Abraham Lincoln?
Neither did I.
Turns out that he almost was. Except for the seating chart.
Joseph Medill was a hugely powerful figure, the editor of the Chicago Tribune back when being editor of a newspaper actually meant something. He had a falling out with Seward, and Seward made the mistake of saying to Medill, "Henceforth, you and I are parted… I defy you to do your worst."
Well, somehow Medill ended up as the holder of the seating chart for the Republican convention in which Seward and Lincoln battled it out. And he did a very clever thing. He seated the Pennsylvania delegation, which was on the fence, in a spot surrounded by Lincoln states, far far away from the Seward states. (thanks to Peter Lamont’s book on the Indian Rope Trick for the story).
The word of mouth did the trick. Pennsylvania went for Lincoln and you don’t remember Seward.
Who are your customers talking to? Where do they sit?
