I left my job at a small town radio station in 1984 (now I’m retired) but I often reflect on what might have been. Had I stayed in “radio.” I had the title of Program Director and was making about $14K in 1984. Whew.
Category Archives: Business & Marketing
IBM’s intranet radio station
IBM Radio is a live-streamed intranet community station cofounded by Azis and a few other company designers in Austin. Over the last year, the station has blossomed, and now anyone else in the company can either listen in or record their own show. Those who take part consider it a community hub for the company, and IBMers around the world tune in every day. […] Today, IBM offices throughout the globe have radio “studios,” although Austin is its headquarters. The station heads have a conference room there that’s been soundproofed and filled with recording equipment.
Employees from around the world contribute their own shows that include call-ins about career advice, a show that features weekly guests who talk about what’s going on at the company, and even shows where upper-level executives just tell interesting stories. The station tracks unique listeners—the number of individuals listening in—and found that it reaches between 5,000 and 6,000 people daily.
Fast Company
People are deleting advertising from their lives
“People are deleting advertising from their lives. Many simply don’t like or want it and now for the first time they have a choice in the matter. With the shift to streaming, the so-called ‘millennial’ has abandoned linear TV and, in turn, the ads that grace it. Higher-income consumers are more able to afford an ad-free existence by paying subscriptions for ad-free service experiences such as YouTube Red, Hulu+, or Spotify. This further erodes the pool of young, upwardly-mobile consumers that the ad industry so covets. In the future, only older, poorer people will experience advertising.”
And those ads you “see” online?
“A display ad is considered as ‘viewed by the visitor’ if “at least 50% of its pixels were displayed on the visitor’s browser for at least one continuous second.”
Above-ground pools suck
But a lot more expensive. And harder to install. And remove. I’ve never had one of these pools but I see lots that have been abandoned. They seem like a good idea, for that first summer. But it soon becomes obvious that you can’t really swim in one of these things so you just stand around in chest-deep water, scooping out dead bugs and leaves.
So here’s my idea for a business (that someone has already thought of): a temporary above-ground pool. Bring it in on a flatbed trailer; fill her up; install the support gear and BOOM, you got a pool. In September you call the truck back, drain the pool and take it away. You have your yard back. (“Hey, mom! Can we put the trampoline back up?”)
Can Learfield fetch $1Billion or more?
That’s the question posed in a recent edition of Sports Business Journal. Before retiring three years ago, I worked for Learfield for 29 years. Not sure how many employees they had when I started in 1984 but in 1989 there were only 49 of us. Today, more than 1,000.
I’m guessing a billion dollars is not that much for a national media company but when I remember the little house on McCarty Street that was HQ when I started, it sound like a lot of money and I’m proud of the former co-workers who made it worth that much.
Taking Social Security benefits early
Many Americans Opting To Take Social Security Before Full Retirement Age
- more than 4 in 10 Americans who are 50 and over say they’ll dip into the program before reaching full retirement age.
- 44 percent report Social Security will be their biggest source of income during their retirement years.
- The average age at which people expect to start or have started collecting Social Security benefits is 64. Just 9 percent said they would wait until after they turned 70.
- the average American still retires relatively early, at age 64 for men and age 62 for women, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.
- a quarter of workers over 50 say they never plan to retire, a sentiment more common among lower-income workers.
The Internet Is Using Us
Media Theorist Douglas Rushkoff explains how the need for rapid corporate and economic growth has always been great for aristocracy, but bad for everyone else. My notes (PDF) from Mr. Rushkoff’s book, Throwing Rocks At the Google Bus. Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus – Douglas Rushkoff
Surveillance Capitalism
“What if, when I write down a thought on my phone to remember it later, what I am actually doing is extending my mind, and thereby extending my self using the phone. […] we extend our biological capabilities using technology. We are sharded beings; with parts of our selves spread across and augmented by our everyday things.”
“My iPhone is not like a safe any more than my brain is like a safe. It is a part of my self. In which case, if you want to get into my iPhone, what you really want to do is to violate my self.”
“Personal data isn’t the new oil, personal data is people. […] The business model of mainstream technology today is to monetise everything about you that makes you who are apart from your body.”
The nature of the self in the digital age » – Surveillance Capitalism – Part 2 »
Little Rice: Smartphones, Xiaomi, and the Chinese Dream
Amazon: “Smartphones have to be made someplace, and that place is China. In just five years, a company names Xiaomi (which means “little rice” in Mandarin) has grown into the most valuable startup ever, becoming the third largest manufacturer of smartphones, behind only Samsung and Apple. China is now both the world’s largest producer and consumer of a little device that brings the entire globe to its user’s fingertips. How has this changed the Chinese people? How did Xiaomi conquer the worlds’ biggest market” Can the rise of Xiaomi help realize the Chinese Dream, China’s bid to link personal success with national greatness? Clay Shirky, one of the most influential and original thinkers on the internet’s effects on society, spends a year in Shanghai chronicling China’s attempt to become a tech originator–and what it means for the future course of globalization.”
A few excerpts:
The mobile phone is a member of a small class of human inventions, a tool so essential it has become all but invisible, and life without it unimaginable.
There are only three universally personal items that someone will carry with them no matter where they live. The first two are money and keys; the third is the mobile phone, making it the first new invention added to that short list in three thousand years.
The number of mobile phone users crossed 4.5 billion last year, and because of dual accounts, there are now more mobile subscriptions in the world than there are people.
A smartphone is as different from a standard-issue Nokia 1100 as a computer is from a typewriter.
Mobile phones are a funny product, midway between commodity and luxury. They are a commodity in that everyone needs one. They are a luxury in that a phone makes a significant personal statement.
Status is a bigger feature of the iPhone (in China) than in the U.S. Electronics stores display phones running Android with the screen facing out, as usual, but iPhones are often displayed case out, to show off the Apple logo.
Nokia went from being the world’s most important mobile phone company to an also-ran in three years, collapsing into Microsoft’s waiting arms after another three, a generation of dominance undone in half a decade
If you make something that appeals to 5 percent of the Chinese population, you have a potential market the size of France.
Humans out at advertising agency
Marketing communications firm (plans) “to utilize technology-based resources such as software, virtual robots, and media algorithms to create and implement advertising and marketing programs for its clients.” Excerpts below from The Ad Contrarian:
”We will need to keep a few tech people on staff to insure that our systems are functioning well and are properly integrated. But that’s it. Last-century resources like account managers, copywriters, art directors, and media planners — in other words, people — will be replaced by digital resources.”
”We have developed what we call ‘virtual robotics’ that can actually understand a client brief when it is converted into code via a proprietary algorithm we have developed. The robot program then goes online and hunts down previously created advertising and marketing campaigns in similar categories which it ‘borrows’ from — much like a traditional creative team does,” he explained.
I wrote a lot of radio commercials (we called them “spots”) over the years and while I wrote a few good ones, many were of grind-it-out-get-it-on-the-air variety. Yeah, I can imagine software doing those as well as I did.