marketing

NBC vs. Apple: SNL’s iPhone’Sketch

NBC vs. Apple: SNL’s iPhone Sketch: Either way, you must sit through a 15-second TV-style commercial before you get to the clip — a chilling vision of what the Internet would look like if it had been invented by the folks who run broadcast television. [Yeah… I know ads are big business, but no one is interested in interruption based ads anymore, if they ever were. The entrenched thinking that is forcing ads into the process (again) is wrong. The question is not “how can we shove ads down their throats, we love ads” it’s “how can we make money from this now that the ‘network’ is not relevant.” An example old school ads that work are product placement. Work defined as, I may or may not care what phone, car, cereal, shoes, etc. folks in the movie are wearing, but I may, so especially in an online download, make sure that metadata is there, and feel free to track the click, and make some money from it.]
Source: FORTUNE: Apple 2.0

freeconomics

freeconomics: I know they loved it because they emailed to ask when the sequel would also be available for free. For readers of my non-Dilbert books, I inadvertently set the market value for my work at zero. Oops. [You must be careful. The time to be free is when the works have no value. Once you’ve established a market, setting things to zero is a big mistake. I like that folks are willing to take a chance with “pay what you want” but it should again be seen as way of possibly beginning to establish a market for your works, and converting to a fixed price based on the data you’ve gathered. Unless something else is supporting your works (ahh, the joys of patronage) it’s not a smart play.]
Source: gapingvoid

We accidentally marketed ourselves into a corner

We accidentally marketed ourselves into a corner: First, I’d figure out how to teach parents to understand what really matters and what doesn’t about time spent in high school and the choice of a college. Second, I’d push for every selective college to share one application and do a draft similar to the one they do for medical residencies. Every applicant ranks the schools they’d like to attend, in order. Every school considers all the applications, grabs the students they’d love to have in priority order, puts the rest into the “good enough” pile and lets a computer sort em all out as pareto optimally as possible. At least kids will go into their twenties correctly blaming a computer instead of mistakenly blaming themselves. [I thinking about a lot of these isues as we search for Noah’s second school (that’s right, second school and he’s 2.5 years old. Don’t get me started… sigh.]
Source: Seth’s Blog

RSD and AtomPub — Together again for the first time…

It Pays To Advertise: Joe Cheng: Configuring an AtomPub blog needs to be equally easy. For some reason, people in the AtomPub community don’t seem to like RSD (only Six Apart puts Atom endpoints in RSD). We need another autodiscovery mechanism.

Hmmm.  When I looked at RSD nearly five years ago, it didn’t seem so bad.  In any case, here’s a ticket and a patch to get WordPress to support autodiscovery of AtomPub endpoints.

[Here, here! And the peasants rejoiced! And the reason one (influential) person in the Atom community didn’t like RSD wasn’t for technical reasons, but because Dave Winer is an acquaintance, and an early supporter of RSD… and he was reviled by some members of that community. Anyway, all these years later, RSD is quietly doing its job, and should be employed for this purpose. That was kinda the point, with no preference for one API over another. Thanks Sam!]
Source: Sam Ruby

Nine Inch Nails Becomes a Free Agent With No Record Label

Nine Inch Nails Becomes a Free Agent With No Record Label: Yesterday Trent Reznor wrote an amazing post on the Nine Inch Nails blog stating that he no longer has a record contract and that NIN is now a free agent.

Hello everyone. I’ve waited a LONG time to be able to make the following announcement: as of right now Nine Inch Nails is a totally free agent, free of any recording contract with any label. I have been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate. Look for some announcements in the near future regarding 2008. Exciting times, indeed.

This, along with Radiohead’s pay what you want release of their new album “In Rainbows”, are both signs of big changes to come in the record industry. [Finally. One of the reasons I left the music business was to learn enough about business to understand the record label model, and why it wasn’t working for so many talented folks I met. Then, when it became obvious that the disintermediation that the internet can provide makes it possible for things like the above to occur, it’s taken a long time for it to happen with major acts. That’s understandable. When a group becomes a break out smash without any help from the old mechanisms, that’ll be the next step.]
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