Thursday, 6 April 2006

How Can You Resist the Chevy Tahoe?

Obey the Machines' Every Command

Chevy decided to open up the art direction of their new Tahoe to the world. Brilliant idea. This falls under the ‘spell your name right’ category of publicity.

From my perspective, it doesn’t matter if people create ads critical of the vehicle, they’re still creating ads for the vehicle. Which means they’re talking about the vehicle.

The image above is my experiment with the clips GM made available. Click it to make your own.

And if anyone knows how to pull a copy of it locally, lemme know. Thanks.

Wednesday, 15 February 2006

First Crack 73. The Banjo Brothers Bicycling Bags

I sat down with Mike, Eric, and Pete of Banjo Brothers for the low down on their grocery pannier and what got them started in cycling bags. There’s also some bits in there about how they’re partnering with bloggers like The Fat Cyclist to improve their bags.

Of course, you can buy their bags from Gene over at the One on One Bike Shop.

Hey, Mike & Eric gave me a Banjo Brother’s Mini Seat Bag, listen to the podcast on how it can be yours. Digital Dan Hook over at the Hook Show was the first one in.

  • Uplifter Minnesota, first event March 25th 2-6pm at the Acadia Cafe. Bring yourself, your gear, your passion.
  • DEMO LoFi musician showcases every Thursday night at the Acadia Cafe.
  • First Crack Podcast theme song by Jeremy Piller.

Listen to the Banjo Brothers Bicycling Bags [16 min]

Wednesday, 8 February 2006

RocketBoom Ads Not Worth $15,000

I wasn’t surprised to hear RocketBoom is pursuing a sponsor (via eBay even), nor was I surprised they want to keep full creative control (they should).

I was surprised that the high bid (as of this writing) of $15,099.99 hadn’t passed their hidden reserve.

Now, I know you need 10x that for a decent music video, but it makes me think RocketBoom doesn’t really want advertisers. Maybe they just wanted to see what their market valuation was.

At this moment in time, the market says 15 seconds in front of the RocketBoom audience is worth a hair over $3k (winner gets 5 ads).

I predict they’d get more from product placement or some other more persistent branding ad form more compatible with the medium. Yes, something closer to NASCAR drivers or superheros sponsorship.

Update 20 March 2006: Mark Pesce agrees – bugs, badges, and other screen tattoos are the future of advertising in a bittorrent world

Auction ended, $40,000 final bid and yes, the reserve was met.

Update 14 March 2006. I caught the first RocketBoom ad for TRM this morning. It was exactly what I expected it to be. A short video a la BMW’s the Hire.

Monday, 6 February 2006

Wanted – A Better Gillmor Gang

I’m the first to admit I frequently listen podcasts for the guest not the host – TechNation, PodTech, Larry’s World, and more recently – Gillmor Gang.

For the latter, it wasn’t the ads that bugged me, or the hub-bub around them. I’ll fast-forward past them until a new podcast-appropriate ad format is introduced.

I completely agree with Kurtiss Hare on the ad issue:

“[Steve Gillmore] continues to rehash the same point and refuses to raise the level of discourse.”

Yes, it’s great that someone with Earthlink’s reputation is sponsoring podcasts. I’ve had mixed experiences with them (yeah for mobile phone, boo for dsl). Shoehorning radio ads into podcasts won’t change that. Especially one’s I don’t hear. Remember the fast-forward button.

While I really enjoy the high-level strategic discussion of internet and business, I’m finding Steve’s fixation on specific vendors, continual hijacking of the conversation, and insistence that 30 second off-topic ads are cool – all tiresome.

Unsubscribing from the Gillmor Gang leaves a void in my listening and I’m looking for a replacement. Something with the same format – 5 people on a conference call, same topics – companies and how they’re adapting to the changing relationship between customer and vendors, and really heated discussion.

Any suggestions?

Om & Niall’s Podsession and This Week in Tech are both close, but a little too tactial

Tuesday, 17 January 2006

A Proposal for a TiVo, iTunes, Podcast Ad Formats

30 seconds is way too long. On the TiVo, we’re fast-forwarding through the commercials and other boring bits. We’re still watching as we fast-forward (we get the brand-impression, just more quickly and without sound).

Same with podcasts. As I’ve mentioned earlier, we’re not skipping the ads, just getting through them more quickly. I know one of the podcasts I listen to is sponsored by Earthlink. The host mentions it the moment before I start fast-forwarding. I don’t need to hear Earthlink themselves waste my time – the host already told me everything I need to know. Using 3 words – “sponsored by Earthlink”.

Likewise, television advertisers need to embraces the fast-forward and create media entertaining at both speeds. Something akin to the Levi’s ads from the 80s – a big logo taking up most of the screen surrounded by entertaining animations. This would scale to smaller video devices like the iPod, PSP, and Archos while giving TiVo viewers a reason to replay.

Monday, 9 January 2006

Search Engines Not Following

There are two semantic phenomena made prominent with the advent of tagging:

  1. We use related words to describe a concept wrapped in a point-of-view.
    If memory serves, in his Ontology is Overrated presentation Clay Shirky uses “film”, “movies”, and “cinema” as an example. Each of these words describes similar, but different things.
  2. We use the same word to describe vastly different concepts.
    Take “java” for example it could be referring to coffee, code, or a country.

Surprisingly, Google, Yahoo, and MSN haven’t yet connected people with their points of view. Dave Winer suggests:

“Let me tell [search engines] where my weblog is. Then it knows what my interests are. Give me search results relevant to who I am.”

Reminds me of something I wrote about on why Google Adsense doesn’t work.

Whether it’s the words in this blog or other sites I’ve read – I’m implicitly declaring context and point-of-view every time the browser refreshes. Then it goes straight down the memory hole.

(What I’ve looked at before + What I’m looking at now) / What you’re trying to tell me = Targeted ad

Excuse me, could I get a refill on the Attention Kool-aid?

Monday, 2 January 2006

First Crack 69. Garrick Talks About Attention, Advertising, and Interruptions

Just me today to kicking off the new year with a new mic – Sennheiser e816S, a simplified production process, and a glass of Armagnac.

Things on my mind:

  • Cooper’s crying is like interruption-based advertising is like a Vonnegat story.
  • Distribution is Advertising.
  • Removing distraction for the New Year; moving status indicators to my dashboard and unsubscribing from yahoo podcasts, ruby on rails, and a pile of rss feeds.
  • Errol Morris’ First Person
  • Special thanks to Dave Slusher for remembering the story was Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron, Lewis for the bottle, Sam for the delivery, and Jeremy Piller for the theme music.

Listen to Garrick Talks About Attention, Advertising, and Interruptions [10 min]

Tuesday, 20 December 2005

Monday, 19 December 2005

Fast Forwarding Through the Funny Parts

“What’s the value of that laugh to someone selling something associated with that laugh?” – Ron Bloom

I’m all for commercial messages in podcasts. I’m all for companies using podcasts as part of their ongoing marketing efforts. Done right – along the lines of what Whirlpool is doing – it’s a great way to reach customers with more on their mind than you. Directly. More deeply than any other medium allows – aside from living with a product.

When it’s expensive to publish (traditional media) marketers have to fight for column inches with real news… or at least the society pages. In the mind of the reader, the advertisements are noise and the column inches are signal. For the marketer – it’s flipped.

Today, it’s cheap to publish. For pennies a bit you’re reading this now. There’s no reason for editorial and advertisement to be delivered in the same package. Delivery is cheap, time is expensive. When I want commercial messages I’ll ask for them. When I don’t – get out of my way.

How many times have you gone to a website hoping for a specific banner ad to be there so you could click through?

Right, you’d just go to the marketer’s site. Directly. Duh.

Chances are someone in your organization is podcasting in their off-hours – might even be a customer.

  1. Find them.
  2. Pay them to produce your company’s podcast.

This is smarter than advertising on an existing podcast for three reasons;

  1. If your product isn’t interesting enough to talk about for 20 minutes why are you selling it?
  2. Your customers are not the same as anyone else’s.
  3. Everyone has a fast forward button.

Thanks to Dave Winer for the pointer to the Business Week podcast. If you listen to it, I recommend Mark Ramsey’s conversation with Douglas Ruskoff as a chaser.

Wednesday, 2 November 2005

Our Memories Are Poor, Measure in Context

“It isn’t as astonishing the number of things I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren’t so” – Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography, 1912

This Sunday, the Vikings are playing the Lions. I’m confident they’ll be keeping score throughout the game. Yard by yard, play by play. Rather than having the refs remember who played better and declaring an arbitrary score on Monday morning,

There’s a huge, often un-acknowledged difference between what people say they do and what they do. This delta widens with time. If you’re looking for accuracy – metrics need to be captured in context. If you’re looking for fiction – then making up what someone did two days ago is as valuable as asking them to remember (making it up just might be more interesting).

PodcastAlley, Podcasts.Yahoo.com, and a number of the other podcast directories offer ranking and voting for “your favorite podcast”. There are three problems with this;

  1. The metrics at different sites don’t know about each other – diluting the value of each of them. For example, what does it mean to be #8 at PodcastAlley and simultaneously #23 at Podcasts.Yahoo.com?
  2. All these systems rank unrelated podcasts against each other – just like Arbitron or Nielsen Ratings. The only people interested in how, for example, meatloaf ranks higher than lawn mowers are advertisers. This ranking doesn’t help the listeners’ enjoyment or the producers improve (in fact it could be detrimental to both).
  3. I still have to remember to vote, at one site or multiple (just like Arbitron). The action of voting and ranking is separate from listening, so I don’t.

I’ll let Mark Ramsey wrap this one up for us:

“The diary methodology is woefully inadequate to meet the challenges of measurement in our industry going forward.”

“If we want the advertising community to place any credence whatsoever in our measurements, then we are obliged to use measurement methodology which inspires credence.”