the F rant

It’s a good video, not great.

What would make it great – if they spoke about FORUMS.  Forums are the most popular, most important place for people to discuss products and services.  It’s where people can ask questions, it where massive communities gather.  Secondly, they should have mentioned the role of the company itself in the conversation.

When “Dave” is looking for information, if Dave is struggling to differentiate, then the company itself should be helping him answer the question, adding value, participating, not pitching.

FUTURE: Digital Media, Marketing, Insights and Trends advocates, brands, fans and friends, Forums, social media

Watching this video of Coca-Cola’s new interactive vending machine, Anthony J Phillips, the Global Marketing Manager of Coca-Cola, talks about the “fantastic partnership between marketing, technology and design”.  I think it’s a profound and important partnership that will dominate marcomms into the future.  I’d add another element – human behaviour in the form of anthropology / behavioural economics.

How best will we marketers and communicators best be trained for this future – in order to best understand and communicate with people?  Technology studies?  Cultural anthropology?  Town Planning?  Architecture and Design?  Typography?  Behavioural Economics?  Sociology?  All of the above?

To me, old fashioned integrated Marketing and Public Relations & Communications just doesn’t cut the mustard anymore.

FUTURE: Digital Media, Marketing, Insights and Trends anthropology, behavioural economics, coca-cola, design, marketing, public relations, technology

A Minnesota woman has been fined $USD2.4m for being a music download “pirate”.  The level of her activity was that she downloaded 24 songs illegaly.  The link to the article is here.

My initial reaction: WTF?

My considered reaction: most record companies are pretty much f*cking useless.  I know, I used to work for some of the biggest record companies in the world.  Some of them are good – a few.  But most, instead of building fan bases, instead of nurturing communities, instead of building excitement in their products, their artists and their creativity, they crush their fans, they fight over ever decreasing and ever more irrelvant means to generate revenues.

Nearly SIX years ago, I wrote this piece “Dinosaurs of the recorded music industry must evolve or die” in which I made an impassioned plea for record companies to evolve their business models.  I wrote the following things:

…digital networks are displacing traditional methods of production, distribution, and retail sales, allowing the customer direct access to music. Downloading enables direct market access for any artist, record label or potential supplier. It removes the barrier of expensive overheads contained in the traditional model. The biggest of these is, of course, the middleman: the record distribution company.

Not much has changed.  Record companies still think people care about them – that there’ll be a captive market for every release – and their job isn’t to cultivate that market, but to stop them accessing music without paying for it.  It’s so 1970s.

FREEDOM: Economics, Politics and Business, FUN: Music, Culture and Entertainment, FUTURE: Digital Media, Marketing, Insights and Trends download, itunes, music business, piracy, record companies

Some really cool digital / social media campaigns have been coming out lately – the past two days have had two great examples.

Here’s another – come join my Disco Party!  This campaign was created by the cool kids down at Virtue – Vice Australia’s creative agency.

FUTURE: Digital Media, Marketing, Insights and Trends

Just yesterday I wrote about augmented reality being a cool thing that we should be getting used to – something orgaisations should be using to enhance and augment our every day lives.  Just to reinforce the point – one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen popped up today in support of the new Transformers movie, Transformers II: Revenge of the Fallen.

The evil geniuses from Dreamworks / Paramount have built a f*cking brilliant augmented reality application that uses your own webcamera and facial recognition software to turn you into an Autobot, with an Autobot voice - by simply sitting at your computer.  Click the link to the “We Are Autobots” site here.

Here’s how it looks when you do it:

As mentioned by a web developer I know – it’s a great mix of marketing, creativity and technology – merging them all together for a really fantastic and very immersive user experience.  It’s so much fun.  Do it now!

FUTURE: Digital Media, Marketing, Insights and Trends augmented reality, autobot, creative, marketing, movie, transformers

Augmented reality is a way of looking at the world and having the experience augmented by technology.  A basic example of augmented reality in practice is GPS systems in cars.  You’re driving, and your reality is augmented with advice on where to turn.  With mobile phones becoming ever smarter, and high speed internet access becoming ubiquitous through these devices, almost anything can be augmented.

Here’s an example of augmented reality in action – it’ll be coming to an iPhone near you in a couple of WEEKS.  Not months, not years, but WEEKS.

Marketing and communications people, be remarkable, get noticed, get on board NOW.  I’ll show you how, contact me.

FUTURE: Digital Media, Marketing, Insights and Trends augmented reality, compass, iphone, mobile, remarkable, virtual

Visit this site and check out the incredibly cool idea behind Wario Land – Shake It – it’ll only go for a few moments, and it’ll be very much worth your time.

YouTube – wariolandshakeit2008’s Channel.

FUN: Music, Culture and Entertainment, FUTURE: Digital Media, Marketing, Insights and Trends ad, nintendo, wario land, wii, youtube

And here’s the joke:

A Story of Fiscal Stimulus

It is the month of August, on the shores of the Black Sea. It is raining, and the little town looks totally deserted. They are tough times, everybody is in debt, and everyone lives on credit.

Suddenly, a rich tourist comes to town.

He enters the only hotel, lays a 100 Euro note on the reception counter, and goes to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one.

The hotel proprietor takes the 100 Euro note and runs to pay his debt to the butcher.

The Butcher takes the 100 Euro note, and runs to pay his debt to the pig grower.

The pig grower takes the 100 Euro note, and runs to pay his debt to the supplier of his feed and fuel.

The supplier of feed and fuel takes the 100 Euro note and runs to pay his debt to the town’s prostitute, who in these hard times, gave her services on credit.

The hooker runs to the hotel, and pays off her debt with the 100 Euro note to the hotel proprietor to pay for the rooms that she rented when she brought her clients there.

The hotel proprietor then lays the 100 Euro note back on the counter so that the rich tourist will not suspect anything.

At that moment, the rich tourist comes down after inspecting the rooms, and takes his 100 Euro note, after saying that he did not like any of the rooms, and leaves town.

No one has earned anything. However, the whole town is now without debt, and looks to the future with fresh optimism…..

That, ladies and gentlemen, is how the United States Government under President Obama, Great Britain under Gordon Brown and Australia under Kevin Rudd are doing business today!

FREEDOM: Economics, Politics and Business brown, debt, deficit, joke, obama, Rudd, stimulus