Just wanted to let yall know that I’ve become a contributor over at productdose.com, a pretty cool design/technology/style site that contains short reviews on various products. Founder Cory O’Malley has got a good thing going there, and the site reaches a couple hundred thousand readers per month. For my first few contributions, I’ve reviewed the Barrington Money Clip, Lib Tech’s Magne-Traction Snowboard and some plaid plants from Original Penguin. Check it out, and let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see reviewed.
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I found an interesting interview with YouTube’s CMO, Suzie Reider, in Wall Street Journal. Suzie talks about the success of the participatory ad unit (one that people choose to watch) on the site and how brands are trying to entertain people and interact with them in new ways. Many brands are finally realizing that you have to target the right niche in order to have a viral hit. When asked why some brands’ viral efforts work (think Smirnoff’s Tea Partay) and others don’t, Ms. Reider’s response stood out to me:
“Marketers really have to think about the niche content for the individual user and not the huge hit as they approach these environments.”
I’m not sure to what extent the days of the “huge hit” are numbered, but there’s no denying the power of The Niche these days. We’re probably still in the beginning stages of seeing a bunch of niche-oriented social sites pop up everywhere. Even the Arena Football League has its own social network–more importantly, does anyone care?
I wonder if the rise in The Niche is due to demand or just because we can find it, since we have so much information at our fingertips. Probably some of both.
What’s really interesting to me is that despite the abundance of niche-oriented media, there are a few Huge Hits, which are the opposite of niche–for example, American Idol, which is still popular as ever. I wonder if there’s still a place for the Huge Hit or if they’ll become less and less frequent and eventually die out, because the amount of options we’ll have will continue to increase, leaving us with more niche choices and less time for the Huge Hits.
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From the makers of Habbo Hotel (www.habbo.com) comes Mini Friday (http://minifriday.com/about/) a virtual world designed to work on Nokia phones. As of now, it’s just a simple bar setting, but as phones become more loaded with features and storage, why not give people to opportunity to check out virtual worlds through their phones…
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NPR did a segment today about how social/user-created content is changing our economics. The segment featured Don Tapscott, co-author of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. You can listen to the segment here.
Basically the main thing to take from this is that the new way of solving problems, gathering information and reducing costs involves tapping into the world’s human capital, instead of just relying on the ideas of people from the company itself. In order to take advantage of the millions of ideas out there, a company must open itself up to the public and share its private data.
The power of user-created content speaks for itself and according to Tapscott, major brands are taking advantage of this concept in creating new, innovative products and services. P & G will soon have 50% of all its new ideas coming from outside the company, Tapscott says.
It will be interesting to see how brands will attempt to control the marketplace of ideas. One area that many brands have yet to realize that they can’t/shouldn’t control is the world of blogs.
Blogs are by nature irreverent, spontaneous, and fun, though some companies have insisted on trying to censor comments, create fake blogs and misuse them to their advantage. Ultimately, however, the truth will come out and the remarkable brands will be the ones that listen to customers, acknowledge their mistakes and improve. They will create products and services that will enrich their customers’ lives, not just market things that help their margins. As the spread of ideas increases and more companies become transparent and ask for customer input, the brands that aren’t remarkable will slowly die and be forgotten.
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As the window between movie release in theater and on DVD becomes smaller and with more and more people having home theaters, the blockbusters aren’t bringing in nearly as much money as they used to, there’s not as many of them and there’s less incentive to go see a movie in the theater (or so I’ve read).
There’s got to be a way to create more demand and exclusivity surrounding a movie release. What if a brand “owned” or sponsored a huge film- a Lord of the Rings or something like that with a huge demand–and created a movie “tour” similar to a music tour. The movie would only be shown in 1 city at a time and the “band” (a few of the actors/actresses) would travel to each city with the film. The movie could be shown in venues like the RBC Center (set up for a capacity of around 10,000) and ticket prices would be similar to concert ticket prices ($100+ each).
There would be a huge demand for these tickets, as it would be the only way to see the movie in a particular city (maybe until it is released to the public a few months later, or maybe the ONLY way to see it). The show would start with some dialogue between the actors/actresses. Then, the movie would be shown, along with some of the special features you might find on a DVD (but with the real life actors talking about it onstage).
There is definitely potential for $$ here. Say the movie tour hits 100 cities (1 show per city) and 10,000 people attend each show at $100 per ticket. That’s reaching a million people total and selling $100 million in tickets. You could play with the numbers to raise ticket prices or increase # of shows to bring in even more money. Plus you could create exclusive merchandise (posters, autographed items, DVDs of the show with special features, etc) and maybe get a cut of concession sales. Also, there could be other sponsors for the Movie Tour and the main sponsor could receive money from them.
I know this is a pretty rough idea, and I have no idea what the cost of building a tour like this would be, but I wonder if this could be a way for a brand to create something special for its customers and make some money.
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By now you’ve probably heard about the online virtual world called Second Life, which boasts around 900,000 “residents” and uses virtual money that is based on real money. It’s been featured in BusinessWeek and some big brands and ad agencies have jumped into SL recently. A few examples are Leo Burnett, IBM, Starwood Hotels and Sony/BMG.
On October 19, Starwood’s Virtual Aloft Hotel will open with a performance by Ben Folds. That same day, Sony/BMG will open it’s public space in SL.
IBM is throwing a virtual block party that you can read about here.
It’s still pretty hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that people spend so much time “living” in these virtual worlds. But I guess if there’s a market, there’s a business, and the brands that can figure out how to integrate into Second Life and other virtual worlds will be a step a head of the others–or at least they hope so.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
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