If you’re an owner of content, you are faced with the rock-and-a-hard-place discussed below: content is plentiful and plenty of it is free, so how are you going to make money?
Yes, you can make your content the absolute best in class, and you will find a fraction of your audience that will pay because your content is just so damn good, but on a grand scale you can’t really add value to content. You need to come at the problem from the other side and add value to the consumer.
Social media, the tools we have now to learn about people, and the new way we build relationships between people and brands- these are the ways you’ll make each and every consumer more valuable. Display ads are nowhere – they’re a megaphone to an undifferentiated and indifferent world. But if you tell me you can reach Northwest dads in their 50s who rock climb and recently quit smoking (which you easily can, by mining plentifully available data) – and if you are a modern brand that’s built direct and personal relationships with those consumers- suddenly you’ve added value to those consumers, who, in turn, add value to you.

Great piece by Felix Salmon in his Reuters blog, which jumps off from News Corp and its proposed paywall and includes a quote from Group M characterizing non-paying readers of online news as “useless tourists”. Salmon says (I couldn’t possibly phrase it better):

Millions of people are willing to pay for a physical object — a newspaper — but are not willing to pay to read that same newspaper online. It doesn’t make sense that those millions of people are hugely desirable readers when they’re reading a physical newspaper, and hugely desirable readers if they pay to read content online, but are just “useless tourists” if they don’t pay to read content online.

Here we go again with the challenge we’ve faced since “content wants to be free” and “content is king” both came into being: how do you make the consumer of free content valuable?
Seems to me you’d better find a different means of valuation. If you can’t value the consumer by ad dollars because they’re not worth enough to advertisers, and you can’t value the consumer by the subscription dollars you so dearly WISH they’d pay…guess what?

It is up to you to make your consumer – your customer- your audience -more valuable.
More on that next post.

The major record label groups all operate on an assumption. That assumption is that a label is “about” its current roster and existing (mostly pop) acts and it’s an assumption that has been held for a very long time.
Is this the tail wagging the dog? Why wouldn’t a modern record label flip its priorities and become a catalog of recorded music first and a promoter of new acts second if at all?
The pay-per-download model isn’t financially satisfactory or sustainable to the majors. If the dream of a major label is a successful subscription service or monetization of radio services like Pandora – these experiences won’t be like pay-per-download. They won’t be hit-driven – not current hits, anyway. If you have all-you-can eat music streaming, a percentage of people are going to use that primarily to check out new music. Most people will listen to a lot of what they love. Which will mean catalog.
Pay-per-download isn’t and never has been good for catalog because, unlike the introduction into market of the CD, there is no “replacement” period during which consumers need to re-buy their favorites in the new format. CDs are a digital format and most people capable of buying an iPod are capable of ripping a CD.
I’d love to see a “label” take its history as or more seriously than its present and try letting the dog wag its tail.

The word “conversation” is used a lot to reflect the fact that, yes, it’s required of a brand or company to enter into the conversation its customers are having – otherwise the conversation goes on without you, which is a bad bad thing.
Now I see plenty of companies chattering away on Twitter, posting cool content on Ustream or Facebook, creating compelling blogs around their customers’ general area of interest- all in the name of engaging the customer and proving via a sort of “soft sell” that, really, we’re in it for the sheer love of what we do and not merely to sell you stuff.

This is all great, and necessary. But are you merely conversing? Or are you listening to your consumers – taking their input and responding, reacting to immediate customer complaints and the like- but not hearing them?

By hearing I mean…Are you practicing transparency, but not actually creating change? Are you ready and willing to make long-term, major changes in your company or product based on real and substantive interaction with your customer?

Great article by Martin Lindstrom in Fast Company yesterday on the most “addictive sounds” in the world – measured using neurological studies. Here’s his list of the top 10 branded sounds (i.e., sonic brands of one kind or another) in terms of their effect on the brain:

Top 10 Branded sounds:
1. Intel
2. National Geographic
3. MTV
4. T-Mobile
5. McDonald’s
7. State Farm
8. AT&T Ringtone
9. Home Depot
10 Palm Treo Ringtone

It’s amazing to me that there are so few contemporary examples of a “sonic brand”, “sonic identity”, or “audio signature”. Look at (or listen to!) the sheer memory power of these brands. The MTV guitar riff (created by Elias Arts and originally accompanying the “moon landing” visuals at MTV’s launch) is a million miles (and many years) away from what MTV is today- yet it’s familiar to so many.

There are quite a few great companies out there in the world of sonic identity, yet it’s a field that receives little attention.
My experience when attempting to evolve audio brands at corporations has too often been that people just don’t get excited about them. At one company, I had over half a million dollars in my budget for a visual identity and fairly basic website. After much case-making, I got $20,000 to try to develop an audio brand.

We are bombarded with visuals today. Millions of dollars are spent on creating a visual identity – why so little attention paid to a few notes that impact a different part of the brain, literally increasing “mind share”?

The spirit and essence of social media are completely separate from the tools we use to deploy them.

Following upon the really interesting coverage Marc Gobe did in São Paulo – where no outdoor advertising of any kind is allowed, presenting both a challenge and an opportunity for marketers- The Artvertiser is a brilliant next step in public spaces, blurring the lines between public advertising and public art. From the site:

The Artvertiser considers Puerta del Sol Madrid, Times Square New York, Shibuya Tokyo and other sites dense with advertisements as potential exhibition space. The Artvertiser is an instrument of conversion and reclamation, taking imagery seen by millions and re-purposing it as a surface for presentation of art.
The Artvertiser software is trained to recognise individual advertisements, each of which become a virtual ‘canvas’ on which an artist can exhibit images or video when viewed through the hand-held device.
After training, where ever the advertisement appears, the chosen art will appear instead when viewed live through the hand-held device. It doesn’t matter whether the advertisement is on a building, in a magazine or on the side of a vehicle.

Right now you need the Artvertiser’s own binoculars or webcams to see the substituted art, although an Android port is in the works.

Cool, yes? Everywhere a particular brand or campaign appears, it is replaced with a new image.

We live in a time when not only does advertising constantly use art to its own ends, but art subverts advertising.

image courtesy of the artvertiser

The New York Times yesterday announced its paid online model. The model’s very much like that used by The Financial Times: a visitor may read a certain number of articles for free, and after that is asked to subscribe for a flat fee.
The Times has been racking its collective brain for a couple years on which model to use and how to implement it. The thing is: the online newspaper is far more valuable than the print version. The core audience should be willing to pay, if they can also be made to recognize that fact.

What makes the online paper so much more compelling? It’s alive and evolving. In a time of instantaneous news, what will make an institution like the NYT relevant and valuable is layers of content and perspective.

No paper can compete on news, but today, the initial coverage of, say, the crisis in Haiti (it’s hard to think of much else right now) can be overlaid with new information (as facts come in), new perspectives (from different reporters and civilians on and off the scene, photos and video from those who are on the ground, and human stories from those affected. The story never ends; it is constantly augmented and remains relevant.

News is a universal commodity and it can’t be sold as-is. But if the New York Times can find a way to be the best at creating this kind of deep, evolving, honest, relevant story, then readers will pay.

(I wrote a post on this last April and have reposted it below. It’s about NYT entertainment content being made more valuable by the participatory nature of the Web. Also, Fred Wilson just wrote a great piece about the NYT and the “Freemium” model.)

(Reposted from April 16, 2009) It’s accepted wisdom by now that newsprint as it has existed for centuries is headed towards extinction. The Web is more immediate; TV seems more personal. But stepping away from the newsroom towards the cultural beat, here’s a lifestyle example of why printed matter cannot compete with the Internet. .
This article, about the vast world of Dead recordings and the band’s living legacy, is a great story and we enjoyed reading it in our Sunday NYT. A few days later, our friend Channon brought up the article to us. A great story, yes, he said – but the best part? The best part to him was the hundreds of reader photos of Dead shows over the years that had since been submitted to the Times online.
This user-generated photo collection, which amounts to a very personal history of the Dead, gives context, community, and excitement to the original story. The Times has also made available online audio excerpts and a link to a Dead roundtable moderated by the NYT.
Really, this says it all. The online piece is interactive and multimedia. It is alive, evolves and grows via user interaction. The print piece can only live in its moment, and quickly becomes irrelevant.