Wonder how many of these there are now? Started in 2006. The three new ones are Customer Care, Elimination and PC Choice Chat (above). I love that they didn’t bother put with mic cord or phone cords. If you’d like to make these stop… get a Mac.
Category Archives: Business & Marketing
Scott Adams: Calendar as Filter
Scott Adams thinks the calendar will be the organizing filter for most of the information flowing into our lives:
“You think you are bombarded with too much information every day, but in reality it is just the timing of the information that is wrong. Once the calendar becomes the organizing paradigm and filter, it won’t seem as if there is so much.”
News: “When I read the news, I’m generally most interested in how stories have unfolded across time. I want to know the “new news,” as in the topics that have never been reported until today, but I also want ongoing charts and graphs about the “old news” such as wars and the economy. My understanding of the war in Iraq, for example, has little to do with what blew up today and a lot to do with the trend lines over the entire war. In other words, I see the news in terms of time.”
Advertisements: “Some time ago I blogged that advertising belongs in your electronic calendar, for your benefit more than for the advertiser. That’s because my interest and desire in certain products and services is linked to timing. If my calendar has a certain birthday coming up in a week, and I’ve checked the boxes saying the person is a certain age and gender, or has certain hobbies, my calendar can start giving me gift suggestions and recommending online flowers and e-cards and the like. In other words, advertisements can move from nuisance to valuable service just by adjusting when you see them.”
I know a lot of folks who use their Outlook email in-box as their primary organizing tool. (shudder) The calendar makes a lot more sense to me, too. Especially working out of iCal that’s sync’d between my desktop, laptop and iPhone.
Listenomics and why things are different this time
Reply
I remember reading Bob Garfield’s The Chaos Scenario as an article in Advertising Age but I’m not sure I listened to the interview Mark Ramsey (Hear 2.0) posted to his website back in March. More on that in a moment. I don’t think the book is out yet but here’s a blurb from the web page:
“What happens when the old world order collapses and the Brave New World is unprepared to replace it…as an ad medium, as a news source, as a political soapbox, as a channel for new episodes of “Lost?” That is The Chaos Scenario.
In this fascinating, terrifying, instructive and often wildly entertaining book, Garfield is not content to chronicle the ruinous disintegration of traditional media and marketing. No, having established the problem, he travels to five continents for solutions.
What he discovers is the answer for all institutions who wish to survive – and thrive – in a digitally connected, Post-Media Age. He calls this the art and science of Listenomics.”
Mr. Garfield is Advertising Age editor-at-large and co-host of NPR’s On the Media. Looking forward to the book. If you spot it before I do, let me know.
Radio Rapture
Jerry Del Colliano (Inside Music Media) on yesterday’s firing of 590 people by Clear Channel Communications and why radio “consolidation” turned into such a bad thing:
“I’m sorry that these virtual monopolies didn’t work, but the reason they failed is because their arrogant CEOs ran up the debt to buy stations at prices that were, frankly, never really worth what sellers pumped them up to. Now they can’t service that debt and even though they could probably survive an economic downturn (radio always used to in past recessions), the debt they ran up during the consolidation years is killing them.”
I think I might have run out of anything more to say about the challenges facing radio.
In my radio fantasy, everyone working in radio today is raptured up to heaven, leaving thousands of empty stations with the transmitters still on and records “chick” “chick” “chick’ing” on the still spinning-turntables. (Okay, I know they don’t use turntables anymore but it’s my fantasy.)
Listeners tip toe down deserted hallways, peeking into empty studios, wondering where Rush went.
Eventually, someone sits down at the microphone and figures out how to turn it on. What do they say? What would radio become? Would they hastily call a sales meeting and begin selling ads? Would they assemble a focus group and put together a tight playlist?
I have no idea. Maybe they’d just stick their ear buds in slip out quietly, locking the door behind them.
Where is the advertising?
Print: Advertising is adjacent to content
Broadcast: Advertising interrupts content
Movies: Advertising is within content
The Web: Advertising IS content
— Terry Heaton
Zombie Jobs
“Real creative urges, those we are meant to express, don’t go away. If ignored, they bother us, affect our health, fester and eventually turn us into the living dead.”
— from Pamela Slim’s piece in NYT
Local newspaper subscription drive
I almost didn’t post this because I don’t want to read anything into the photo. But this young man is soliciting subscribers to the local newspaper. This might be part of an on-going effort. I don’t know and was uncomfortable asking the young man. He did say he had picked up “a few new ones.”
The signs offer a $10 Hy-vee gift card with every new subscription. Or you can just try the paper for free for three weeks.
This reminds me a story old radio “time salesmen” used to tell. They’d give a car dealer a little break on their ad buys if the dealer would tune all the radios on the lot to their station. Sweet!
If I had been given this assignment, I like to think I would have dressed in my best Mickey Rooney outfit, grabbed a HUGE stack of papers, and started shouting (as loudly as store management would allow)… EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT IN THE NEWS TRIBUNE! EXTRA! EXTRA!
When they came over (okay, IF they came over) I’d make my pitch.
PS for the paper webmaster: Dude. This is THE slowest loading page I’ve come across in a while. GOT to get that fixed.
Where do former newspaper reporters go?
Rebekah Denn has posted links to blogs “and other online works” from other staff members from the former Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper. The list included a number of photographers but the thing that caught my attention was the variety of “beats.”
- Reporter, food writer, former restaurant critic
- Features writer, children’s book reviewer
- Art critic
- Restaurant critic
- Freelance classical music writer
- Reporter, specializing in neighborhood sustainability
- Lifestyles editor, former sports columnist and TV critic
- Environmental reporter
- Copy editor
- Business reporter
- Investigative reporter
- Researcher and editor
- Pop music critic
- Photo Assignment Editor
- Illustration, graphic artist
- Aerospace reporter
And that’s probably not a complete list of the positions that went away when the paper folded. My guess is, these folks really knew their stuff. And are good reporters and writers. I hope they find good jobs.
Knowing absolutely nothing about the newspaper business, it’s difficult for me to imagine how any paper could afford have all these. Did the restaurant critic write one story/column a day? How can you make that math work? Is it heresy to suggest the “food writer” also be the “restaurant critic?” Why do you need a “pop music critic” AND a “freelance classical music writer?” “Environmental reporter” and “neighborhood sustainability” reporter?
And I DO understand the same sort of analysis could be done of our business. Or any media business.
I suspect they had all of these niche positions because they could. When the ad dollars were flowing in, why not. Let’s cover everything. But those days are gone.
One final thought. Rebekah’s blog is “Eat All About It: Food, journalism and recipes from the great Northwest.” It’s okay but I’m not sure it’s any better than this one by a former co-worker of mine, Lane McConnell. I suppose Lane is technically an amateur since she doesn’t get paid. And there must be thousands of of these. Probably hundreds in Seattle alone.
When such a wealth of information is just a Google search away, how does a newspaper make the case, “We have the best food stories, read us.”
I think it only worked when they could say, “We are one of only two sources of stories about food in Seattle.”
Google lets me target ads at myself. No more old people ads?
“Not only will Google now target ads at you based on your interest, but it will also let you target yourself. Anyone can go to Google’s Ad Preferences Manager and see exactly how Google is categorizing their interests. Now, here’s the really smart part: Google lets you add or remove any interest. In effect, it is inviting you to declare what kind of ads you want to see. You can also opt out of the program completely.”– TechCrunch
It took me less than 3 minutes to update my interests for Google. And I’m sure I’ll go back from time to time to tweak them.
Are radio commercials spam?
A little preface here: Most of the food I ever put in my mouth was paid for –directly or indirectly– by radio commercials. My father was a radio guy and for many years I wrote and produced radio “spots.” Lots and lots of them. Some were good, some were just the right length, if you know what I mean.
So when Seth Godin –one of the keynote speakers at the recent Country Radio Seminar in Nashville– refers to radio commercials as “spam,” it’s a problem for me. I’m a regular reader of Mr. Godin’s blog and have purchased and read a number of his books. I think he understands marketing in the 21st century as well as anyone.
So what’s spam and what’s not?
When you get your hands on my email address and send me an unsolicited email trying to sell me something (or get me to give you money, or visit your porn site, etc) …without my permission, we call that spam. You invaded my inbox without my permission.
When I turn on my local radio station, I know there will be commercials. They pay for the music/news/weather programs for which I tuned in. I’m giving tacit permission for the the station to try to sell me something on behalf of their advertisers. Value for value. That doesn’t sound like spam to me.
And if every commercial I heard was talking about something I cared about, something of interest… I’d probably pay more attention and the commercials would be worth more to the advertiser.
This is how cable TV programs work. If I’m watching HGTV (House & Garden), there’s a pretty good chance the commercials will at least marginally relevant.
I’m sure a lot of radios stations attempt to do this when and where they can. But it’s tough. They’re trying to reach the largest audience they can and will sell a spot to damn near anyone (preachers and politicians pay in advance).
Given the choice, most of us will choose NOT to listen to a poorly produced or irrelevant message. Commercial or otherwise.
So are are radio spots spam or not?
Only the listener can answer that. And he or she does, every time they punch the button to another station. And keeps punching it until they find a song or talk show they like (at least more than the commercial). Or pull out the iPod.