Sigh. Meme-oriented tourism exists, as reported at the weekend:
Central Asia, one of the least-known parts of the world, is the perfect home for Borat Sagdiyev, the faux television presenter whose new film Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan, arrived in Australian cinemas last week.
…do I get some kind of badge for “First Post!” honours?
The current trend of articles built as “The Seven…”, “The Top Tips You Need…”, “5 Winning Strategies” (etc) are starting to grate a little on me. I can only guess that this is a Q4 2006 “minutes to midnight” attempt to grab social networking visibility.
But at least Ken has gone out on a limb and named some working/nearly-working implementations for marketing messages via mobile.
Real-world working models have been few and far between in my usage and visibility of them as a consumer. As a technologist, it’s clear that the device no-one can leave home without, and which is seen as a link to the rest of the world no-matter-where, is an advertising success story waiting to happen.
He’s right in that with regard to some blue-sky ideas:
It’s [the strategy] not clear, and by the time this one is figured out, the mobile marketing train will have left the station long ago.
In this context, as per his opener, the most-discussed strategies may not have the strongest long-term prospects.
The one I feel most strongly about is the corollary/inverse proposition of
3) Location-based advertising: Remember all the hub-bub about location-based services in 2000? Mobile phone users will merrily walk down the street as their mobile phone beckons them in to the nearest boutique or café with a well-timed ad. The scenario sounded nice…until you actually thought about it for more than two seconds.
Traveling in Europe and East Asia at the beginning of the year, I acutely felt the begging need of a location-based, customer-initiated, service to give me context-and-texture for where and when I was.
I work as a visual thinker; I can’t draw or paint, but I have worked as a pseudo-Producer on projects with real, actual, talented artists.
The visual part of my memory and work processes means that I can “look” with my mind’s eye simultaneously at both the macro- and micro-levels of problems and solutions. Visual thinking may have come from my grandfather, an architect and artist.
So I get strong, even visceral reactions to architecturally-sculpted forms, and their (digital) media representations; seeing this go by on flickr made me reach for an image I clipped from my cousins’ portfolio:
They say
We thought of the Tin Alley facade as a hedgerow - an urban edge of artificial landscape.
I “feel” it more like a futuristic-retro anachronistic “funky workplace design”; translation: what people in the future might think that we of the present thought a retrospective of today might look like. It works, in an R-and-D/University Research building context, as well as a design and layout for a small media company.
The great thing about opinions on architecture?
Everyone has one, and they’re all different.
To simplify invoicing, I had a few choices to pick from when I restructured Crixa some years ago:
While I aspired towards #2, Crixa ended up actually only doing #3.
2006 was to be different: I switched to FreshBooks (referral link) and haven’t looked back.
They have also experienced a variant of unintended use cases in their discussion fora: the Structure Makes It Worse use-case.
“I’m all in. You diversify the categories too much and there is no center of mass for everyone to hang and talk about issues, they end up using their time jumping back and forth and leave without adding anything to the discussion. Let’s do it.”
This type of issue is what convinced me to make gkoya post categories on the fly, and reshape/reform them as usage changes.
(gkoya/Crixa has no affiliation to FreshBooks, except as a satisfied customer)
Dion Hinchcliffe’s diagram somewhat resembles a cross-section of an infection, and perhaps rightly so.
While I dislike the “Seven Habits Of…” angle/meme of the article, I did like his checklist, despite (in my opinion) the misuse of “leveraging” for “lever” or indeed the simple “exploit”:
If you consider unintended use cases, it’s possible that the “inspired users” might create the social community themselves; cf. the critique of the World of Warcraft Social Network.
I decided to keep the photographer’s original title.
The texture of the image induced a quiet femtosecond of reflectivity.
The large size is recommended for your digital photoframe; keep looking at it over the course of an hour, and you may also feel the “chill”.
If I could draw, and hadn’t already resigned myself to the fact that I will write on the back of every card I receive, I’d love to encapsulate meetings in single panels as nicely as Gaping Void.
Some material is a little hit-and-miss, and other material not-safe-for-work.
Auto-Widget below.
Courtesy once again of the venerable Guy “No Bull-Shiitake” Kawasaki, a checklist to be tattooed on the top of the hand.
Out of the ten points (point eleven is a “given”, isn’t it?), I see listed name-brand companies failing on #6, #8 and #9 regularly. Guy’s observation of how to combat #9 was a statement only a startup-guru could make:
One innovative way to fix this might be to reduce the CEO’s and CFO’s stock options by ten percent every time they change the report.
A former financial controller for a large German electronics company once told me:
Don’t make me mad:
If you’re over budget, it comes out of my pay packet.
If you’re under budget, it goes into yours.
It’s surprisingly hard, when you do the post-mortem on a project to legitimately get precisely on-target.
MediaDailyNews reports that Proctor and Gamble is
reallocating investments from parts of the communication plan that aren’t working as hard for us, to parts of the communication plan that are working harder.
David Goetzl posits that this could mean
reducing television spending in favor of Internet and direct marketing initiatives.
Now, in the context of the news that Google’s take of UK advertising revenues will exceed the ad revenues of Channel 4, this is a reasonably straightforward guess: more now with ten blades! razor adverts for all.
But perhaps P&G, and large ad buyers such as GroupM and their clients might consider individually addressable TV/IPTV advertising, their pitch being
“The ability to deliver addressable advertising differentiates cable television from broadcast and satellite services. With PVR-equipped consumers skipping ads, it is vital that next-generation service providers deliver compelling ads that entice viewers to watch,” said Gerry Kaufhold, analyst with In-Stat, a market research firm headquartered in Scottsdale, Ariz. “BigBand’s demonstration shows that after years of discussion, new technology is at hand that can allow the cable industry to give advertisers far better returns on their media investments.”
BigBand Networks’ cable-oriented solution is the type of backported platform that brings redistributability to “online-only” advertising objects.
…making it scalable for operators of all sizes will be the challenge to gain traction…
When I noticed that an online contact of mine was heading to Ukraine, I wondered if he might do some “Borat Tourism” (like wine tourism, but more meme-related) as he flies towards “Great Nation of Kazakhstan”.
The hype on this film seems to be grassroots rather than astroturf, and colleagues of mine who saw it locally in a preview screening rated it as “the funniest, least politically-correct film this year”.
