Here are the most interesting articles that came across this week…
STATUS STORIES
However, while well-known, storied and very visible STATUS SYMBOLS will dominate consumer societies for years to come, they will face increasing competition from STATUS STORIES:
STATUS STORIES: As more brands (have to) go niche and therefore tell stories that aren't known to the masses, and as experiences and non-consumption-related expenditures take over from physical (and more visible) status symbols, consumers will increasingly have to tell each other stories to achieve a status dividend from their purchases. Expect a shift from brands telling a story, to brands helping consumers tell status-yielding stories to other consumers.
http://www.trendwatching.com/trends/statusstories.htm
Apple passes Wal-Mart, now #1 music retailer in US
It has been a dizzying climb for Apple, which only managed to pass Amazon to become the number three music retailer in June 2007. The biggest surprise is Amazon's drop to the number four slot, which might be explained by consumers using iTunes, Wal-Mart, and Best Buy gift cards to buy music after the holiday season—and those gift cards certainly helped propel Apple to the number-one position.
For the music industry, there is a dark side to Apple's ascension to the top of the charts. Buying patterns for digital downloads are different, as customers are far more likely to cherry pick a favorite track or two from an album than purchase the whole thing. In contrast, brick-and-mortar sales are predominantly high-margin CDs. For 2007, that translated into a 10 percent decline in overall music spending according to the NPD Group, and it's a trend that's expected to continue for the foreseeable future.
Overall, paid downloads accounted for almost 30 percent of all music sold in January, a number that would have been unthinkable just a few short years ago. With the Big Four labels throwing off the DRM shackles and experimenting with new delivery models like Last.fm's free streaming service, the future looks bright for digital music distribution.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080402-apple-passes-wal-mart-now-1-music-retailer-in-us.html
Wired 2008 Business Trends
Sure, there's bad news out there, what with the panicky Fed and people whispering the R-word. But somehow, the wired world continues to churn out smart, useful, occasionally game-changing ideas.
From the rise in instant manufacturing to the growth of open-source business models, these trends show that innovation can bloom even in a grim economic climate.
Here's a look at nine trends driving business in 2008 — and a deeper explanation of the surprising secrets to Apple's success.
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-04/bz_opensource
Post-Strike, Networks Revamp Pilot Season
And because the strike delayed the development season by many weeks, the networks have had an even greater incentive to cut through the typical bureaucracy, speeding up the casting process, making quicker decisions on scripts, and planning in advance to sell shows internationally and on the Web.
"There's much more thought being given up front to whether there are opportunities to create digital worlds around some of these shows to help create awareness ahead of time," says Gary Newman, chairman of News Corp.'s Twentieth Century Fox Television. News Corp. also owns Dow Jones & Co., the publisher of The Wall Street Journal.
NBC has led the charge in picking up a number of shows without pilots. "My Own Worst Enemy," won its acceptance largely because Christian Slater is in the starring role. Fox Broadcasting Co. decided to forgo a pilot for its new series "Dollhouse" by "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" creator Joss Whedon, opting to invest money instead in building the elaborate, life-size dollhouse that will be the show's set. For its murder-mystery "Harper's
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120692540745275735.html?mod=dist_smartbrief
10 Social Networking Trends
Aki Spicer has released a presentation he has made on ten social media trends. Lots of smart thinking and detail, pity about the use of the $100 laptop early on.
And if you need to cut and paste something into a presentation this afternoon, here you go:
1 Social graphs
2 Social shopping
3 Portability
4 Lifestreaming
5 Crowdsourcing
6 Continuous partial attention
7 Privacy protection
8 Open social
9 Virtuality
10 Measurement 2.0
http://www.psfk.com/2008/04/10-social-networking-trends.html
MySpace music venture to take on iTunes
MySpace executives approached the music labels about a possible joint venture several months ago, talking about how to capitalize on its already strong music platform, which attracted about 68 million people in February, according to online measurement firm ComScore Media Metrix. The site also hired Fred Davis, founding partner of
"In many ways, it is an unprecedented foray into music on the Web," said one person familiar with the deal. "Now, you have music discovery happening in some places, and music consumption happening somewhere else, and the non-recording aspects of music, such as ticket purchases and merchandising, happening even elsewhere. MySpace Music is going to aggregate all those disparate activities."
MySpace Music would combine free and paid services. Music streams and music videos would be free to users, but carry advertising. Downloads, ring tones and ring-back tones would be sold.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-myspace3apr03,1,1646549.story
Viacom Gets Vertical
MTV Networks said last year that it would invest more than $500 million in developing its gaming business over the next two years. It also secured an exclusive deal with Jerry Bruckheimer in December to develop videogames. What can we expect from that business in the next 12 months?
Our gaming business we've split into four categories. The first is games media and that's things like Game Trailer, which is all about information about games or video about games. Then we have casual games, which is Addicting Games, Shockwave plus some of the Nickelodeon properties. Very simple flash-based games, which is a huge category for us. AddictingGames.com is the most trafficked Web site of all our 300-plus Web sites. Then we have console games, with "Rock Band" kind of leading the charge there. And there are probably some Bruckheimer games in the console area. And our fourth category is virtual worlds, and we now have 11 virtual worlds.
For each of those, it's very much a vertical entertainment strategy. We've really gone after certain types of verticals, even in the casual gaming area. There's Addicting Games [for] teen boys, and Shockwave, which is parents and moms. What's coming is more of that. We haven't done a lot in teen girls. So we're looking at what we should do in the teen girl space.
http://www.forbes.com/business/2008/03/28/internet-advertising-salmi-biz-media-cx_lh_0327mtv.html
How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong
Apple's successes in the years since Jobs' return — iMac, iPod, iPhone — suggest an alternate vision to the worker-is-always-right school of management. In
Likewise, Robert Sutton's 2007 book, The No Asshole Rule, spoke out against workplace tyrants but made an exception for Jobs: "He inspires astounding effort and creativity from his people," Sutton wrote. A Silicon Valley insider once told Sutton that he had seen Jobs demean many people and make some of them cry. But, the insider added, "He was almost always right."
"Steve proves that it's OK to be an asshole," says Guy Kawasaki, Apple's former chief evangelist. "I can't relate to the way he does things, but it's not his problem. It's mine. He just has a different OS."
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-04/bz_apple?currentPage=all
Microsoft Unveils Web Series Slate
The company unveiled an ambitious slate of original programming created for its multiple Web platforms, including the MSN portal, MSNBC.com and Xbox Live before a group of agency and marketing executives at its first ever Digital Showcase held at the Director's Guild Theater in New York. During the event, executives emphasized the company's commitment to producing highly targeted, large scale Web series, which facilitate integrated advertising opportunities.
Among the new series to come out of MSN's Branded Entertainment group are In Need Of Repair, a male-aimed home improvement series featuring a pair of sophomoric, mostly inept hosts; and The Men's Room, an instructional fashion series geared for 20-something men who are averse to reading magazines such as GQ and Details. Also in the works are Seven Secrets About…, a light look at the secrets of pop culture icons such as Justin Timberlake; 50 Greatest, a spoof of the multiple pop culture list shows common to VH1 and other cable networks; and What on Earth is Going On?, a channel/series aimed at raising social consciousness.
http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/news/recent_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003785474
NBC to Revive a Mainstay of Early TV
“Kings” is a pilot for a potential series, meaning that its performance in the ratings and with critics will help determine if it joins the NBC schedule with regular episodes. The cast will include Ian McShane, perhaps best known as the profane Al Swearengen on the HBO series “Deadwood,” and a young Australian actor, Christopher Egan.
If the network decides to order episodes of “Kings,” Liberty Mutual will have 30 days to exercise a right of first refusal to become “the key partner in the series,” said Michael Sheehan, chief executive at Hill, Holliday, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies.
The sponsorship agreement, for undisclosed terms, will extend from NBC to a sibling cable network,
The Liberty Mutual site serves as a showcase for the campaign and is also home to short video films, most of them made for Liberty Mutual, that computer users can watch.
Life on the Edge: Learning from Facebook
Edges not only spawn product and service innovations; they also catalyze business-model innovations. On Facebook, for example, the fragmentation of development activity made it inevitable that brokers would emerge to help entrepreneurial application developers monetize the results of their programming efforts by connecting them with advertisers. One of the most prominent of these early brokers is SocialMedia, a company formed by Seth Goldstein, a serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist who recently migrated from Silicon Alley (the infotech neighborhood of
Goldstein sees a massive shift in the online world of communications and advertising, shaped by social network sites like Facebook, as applications provide a new context for placement of relevant advertisements. Rather than placing an online ad on a page of static content, why not place it in an application at appropriate points within a sequence of user actions? To take it further, why not make the entire application a promotion for a product or service?
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/apr2008/id2008042_809134.htm
Networks lose out to cable during writers' strike
The major TV networks are just now crawling out from the wreckage of the three-month writers' strike, returning new episodes of favorite shows.
But Nielsen figures for the first three months of 2008, when most top network series were off the air, show the damage: Four of the five top networks are down from last year, some sharply, while 20 of the top 25 cable networks were up, 10 by double-digit percentages.
"Cable always benefits when networks are out for the count," says analyst Shari Anne Brill at ad-buyer Carat
Overall TV viewership levels remained flat during the strike, suggesting viewers didn't abandon television to read books or surf the Web, as some polls suggested. Instead, the absence of fresh episodes "led viewers to search for alternatives, and the source of the alternatives invariably was cable," Brill says.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2008-04-01-networks-writers-strike_N.htm
Trust in Peers Trumps the "A-List," Study Finds
This meme got kicked around in the 'sphere a few weeks back when Duncan Watts released some research that contradicts Malcolm Gladwell's theory outlined in The Tipping Point. Today, however, there's new data that to me may just reveal that
Mediapost reports that a new study from Pollara found that people who engage in social networks and communities put far more trust in friends and family who are online than in popular bloggers, or strangers with 10,000 MySpace "friends." Nearly 80% said they were very or somewhat more likely to consider buying products recommended by real-world friends and family, while only 23% reported being very or somewhat likely to consider a product pushed by "well-known bloggers."
http://www.micropersuasion.com/2008/04/trust-in-peers.html
Nielsen Stumbles Over Network Metrics: Bad Omen For New Digital Measures?
Giving some 20 small networks -- which Nielsen didn't name -- higher than normal coverage area, allows those networks to sell more viewers to advertisers.
Nielsen said: "Our field procedures, which require manual assessment of channels received, were not followed in all cases in DBS homes."
Manual assessment? Definitely a problem of analog dimensions.
Nielsen also says it can't keep up with the many new networks on satellite distributors: "Given the rapid growth and the increase in the number of packages and channels available, this process no longer provides the necessary level of reliability to accurately define household channel receivability."
No comments:
Post a Comment