Exploring Digital

Moving on to the second module of the L2 forum.  I’ve been informed that video of the presentations will eventually be available (but I’ve grown tired waiting for them) so I’ll post a link when they are up.

This past Friday, the NYU Stern School of Business and the L2 Think Tank held a conference for digital professionals (focusing on luxury brands) at the Morgan Library in New York City.  I initially wanted to live-tweet the event, but the internet connection at the venue was spotty at best, and eventually (around 11 AM, thanks Apple) my iPhone ran out of battery power.  So here is my recap of what happened.

Hi everyone,

I’m going to start posting a digest of interesting articles every week.  Usually on Sunday.  Here is a compilation of some things I thought were interesting this week:

Mobile:

• Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Review (Engadget)
• Old Spice Guy Promoting Windows Phone 7… in Australia (Mobile Crunch)
• Sprint Launching 4G in NY on Nov. 1 (Information Week)

Social Media:

• Unsocial Tells You Who You Should Meet (Tech Crunch)
• Follow Stocks on Twitter! (Tech Crunch)

Random Geeky Things I Like:

• Nasa Crashes Things Into Moon, Finds Water (Popular Mechanics)
• Theory of Relativity Proven A Few More Times (Popular Mechanics)
• How Fashion is Utilizing Social Media to Get Better (Mashable)

In addition, I’ve also been enjoying the following new-ish albums:

• Ben Folds and Nick Hornby - Lonely Avenue
• Mark Ronson and The Business Intl - Record Collection
• Jimmy Eat World - Invented (I know, I totally thought they were dead too)

Until next time…

Alright, so I’ve covered our early strategy and the motivation for the campaign - lets get to the meat and potatoes - but before we move on, I should congratulate Gambit and Videe This! Productions on winning Best Music Video recently at the Coney Island Film Festival.  More proof that the “product” is pretty solid.

Now that the campaign has been introduced, I want to talk about the history and details of the campaign.

Initially, the campaign was crafted for two reasons:  First, to create buzz for the band.  Second, to understand just how widespread the adoption of QR codes really is.  Those objectives being known, the first pass with Gambit QR stickers was really part social experiment, part marketing.  

Until recently, marketing was really in the hands of large organizations with deep pockets.  They would carefully select a message and a brand image, and then create commercials, posters, print advertisements, etc., to convey that image to the public.  With the rise of the internet, permission marketing, mobile technology, and “big” data, however, the door has been blown open for independent marketers.  With more choices than ever on how to get a message across, and the lack of traditional boundaries, small shops can now create campaigns that truly resonate with people, and are exceptionally effective for very little cost.

There are also tremendous opportunities for people to take a good idea and run with it, no matter how crazy, untraditional, or subversive it is.

So let’s talk about a little band called Gambit…

I love my music.

Now that I keep regular hours in an office, listening to music at my desk has become as necessary for my productivity as coffee and a computer.  I also, however, have a ridiculously long commute every day (over an hour on the train there and back) and can’t afford to have my entertainment leave me when I turn off my computer.  

Luckily, two new services have launched iPhone apps to go along with their streaming music services recently:  Rdio, a startup affiliated with some Skype veterans, and Mog, an older service affiliated with music blogging.  So let’s evaluate the two head-to-head…

The people marketing the upcoming movie “Inception” recently posted these in New York City:

Decades ago, before Walmart and Starbucks, people led far more personalized lives (or so old movies lead me to believe). The man at the drug store knew your name and asked about your family. Your neighbor’s kid threw a paper on your door step each morning and you’d wave to him as he went by. You knew most of the people in your town, and they knew you.

Needless to say, I’ve never lived in that kind of place. Over time, service became more and more depersonalized in the name of economic efficiency.  I grew up in a world where I did’t know my neighbors, let alone my pharmacist. As the Internet continues to get smarter, though, personalization is coming back - in a completely impersonal way.  

The most famous example of this is Amazon.  I don’t know anyone at Amazon by name, and I’m fairly sure that no one at Amazon knows me, but they usually make pretty good book recommendations for me.  As a result of years of serious development, their CRM model is one of the best in the world.  They may not know you, but their computers do, and even though it’s completely impersonal, it feels nice that Amazon “gets” me.

So how will mass personalization change entertainment?  Here are a some of my thoughts:

Television:  When I read about the future of television on blogs or in the news, everyone seems to talk about moving to an a la carte model where you watch shows on demand wherever you may be on whatever device.  While this seems great in theory, TV has historically been a passive, curated activity.  If you choose what you watch all the time, how would a studio get you to watch a new show?  What about the value added for the network by virtue of being able to guide you through several programs in a row instead of just the one you came to watch?  Maybe there’s a better solution…

How about mass personalization?  You keep all of the classic channels, but as you watch, the set top box monitors your viewing patterns and creates a personalized channel of things it knows you like, and things it thinks you might like.  Any blank spots where new programming is not running could be filled with recorded content of shows that you like to watch.  On top of this new, personalized channel being extremely sticky, it also holds a lot of information about you, making it more valuable to advertisers.

Music:  I always get confused when I get an email from a band proudly announcing their new tour dates in Germany.  Why do they think I care about tour dates thousands of miles away?  In this day and age, it’s pretty simple to determine where anyone who visits your site is from - and if they signed a physical mailing list, it’s even easier.  As music marketing becomes more sophisticated, I imagine the frequency of these types of emails will drop.  What else will change?

Well, if Pandora can take three bands I like and create a radio station for me, I wonder what Ticketmaster could do knowing 90% of the concerts I’ve gone to in the past five years.  They already remind me to see bands that I’ve already seen - maybe when a band I’m likely to enjoy is coming to town, they can send me an email with a streaming song by the artists, and let me decide if I want to buy tickets.  They would act, essentially, as my personal concert curators.

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The basic idea here is that good analytics and smart marketing allows a company to act more like your friend.  While that is both incredibly cool and incredibly creepy, I know that I am more likely to pay attention to things that seem tailored to me.  Even if it is only the illusion of intimacy.

Every month, a bill comes in from Time Warner Cable.  I stare at it for a minute, read the itemized list, and then let out a sigh of defeat and write a check.  

Every month, I pay a non-trivial sum of money for access to the internet.  In reality, though, I’m not paying for the internet.  In and of itself, the internet is fairly useless to me (after all, it’s just a series of interconnected tubes, right?).  What I’m really paying for is information.