Dec 23
Crowdsourcing lessons from the Guardian
Posted: under Uncategorized.
I’ve been using the brilliant experiment by the Guardian this summer in my trainings – they
Sips from the Firehose
A blog that seeks to filter the internet into a refreshing, easily-gulped beverage
Dec 18
Buying Music to Sabotage Pop Culture: A Webconomics Puzzle
Posted: under Uncategorized.
Music purists who despise the pre-packaged “X-Factor” (British version of “American Idol”) songs always hitting #1 on the charts are buying Rage Against the Machine’s incendiary “Killing in the Name” as a form of protest
I’ve been wondering WTF is going on with Killing in the Name – a track that introduced me to Rage Against the Machine, and which I still use to get the adrenaline flowing. It’s been showing up in Twitter trends for the last week or so, which is unusual for a 15-year old minor hit by a band that no longer even exists. I just figured that the protesters in Denmark were using it for their soundtrack – even though it’s aimed more at the LAPD police culture that got exposed in the wake of the Rodney King beating.
But it turns out that the story is a lot more complex than that. Check out this excellent post by blogger FreakyTrigger that explains it in-depth.
In a nutshell:
- It started with Alterna-punks hating on the type of syrupy (treacly?) disposable pop that gets rammed down our throats by these music contest shows
- To try to prevent the winner of “X-Factor” from dominating the charts, they’ve started buying multiple copies of RATM’s “Killing in the Name” – a song that is pretty much as anti-pop as you can get. A scream of pure fury against The Establishment. Perfect.
- RATM even launched into the heavy cussing chorus live on BBC5 and had to be censored
- Buying Killing in the Name online is actually somewhat convenient, because you can buy as many copies as you like electronically, and it only costs .69euro (99cents)
- But what this really boils down to is paying 99 cents to vote against something that millions of other people are voting for
FreakyTrigger sums it up thusly:
Plenty of people have pointed out that these are good times indeed for
Sony, who make money off both tracks. But it’s also a fascinating case
study for marketers, because it pits two of the big “social media
marketing” ideas of the late 00s up against one another. On the one
hand the crafted, immersive, interactive experience – on the other the
power of the flashmob and the viral. Who’s gonna win?
Is there a business model for media here? Probably somewhere – in some kind of controversy, if you give people a frictionless way to express their anger and resentment, and make the price barrier low enough, you could hit on something.
Check out MoveOn.org raising $1 million so far against Joe Lieberman, ever since he started threatening to filibuster any kind of decent health care reform.
Dec 16
The Music Video Is The Advertisement: Lady GaGa Goes Post-McCluhan On Us All
Posted: under Multimedia, New Marketing, new media, Online Video, Video, Webconomics.
Tags: Bad Romance, business model, fetish objects, infomercial, Lady GaGa, Marshall McLuhan, music video, Nemiroff vodka
Her “Bad Romance” music video features prominent product placement for stuff she designs & sells – and has garnered 38 million views.
The song itself is kinda beside the point – it’s bubblegum synth-disco-pop, about as bland and processed as the stuff the taxi drivers in Moscow used to subject me to on the way back & forth from my gig there. Which may be why it’s getting so many views – this is the kind of stuff that works internationally, since the thumping beat and lyric structure make it sound pretty much interchangeable with everything else on the radio.
Can't wait until she starts marketing the exploding bustier shown here; Madonna's Wannabees all wore their undies over their shirts. Wonder if GaGaEttes are going to be lighting their smokes off their flaming boobs.
But the real action here is in the video to the song. Blew my mind. Didn’t think that people had budgets like this anymore. Costumes that would make Gaultier sick with envy — white latex with “Where the Wild Things Are” shiny plastic crowns, some kinda homage to LeeLoo’s orange strappy outfit in The Fifth Element and a Eastern European mobster/white sex-slave buyer with a steampunk-ish articulated brass chin. Looked to my eye like about a week in production, probably about $500K in total costs of models, locations, crews, lighting, post-production.
The plot seems to be that Lady GaGa wakes from her sleep the way normal people do – by sticking her hand out of a gleaming white Tylenol-shaped coffin – getting forced to drink high-end vodka and the gyrate for & be sold to a bunch of strange pervy dudes.I half expected to see Liam Neeson kicking someone’s ass in the backdrop and telling her, “Here’s the scary part. You’re going to be taken…”
Nobody does these kinds of elaborate music videos anymore, because there is no way to recoup that kinda cash from the moribund music industry.- at least, not until now.As Dan Neil points out in the LA Times
the “Bad Romance” video, which features placements for no less than 10 products: a black iPod; Philippe Starck Parrot wireless speakers; Nemiroff vodka; Gaga-designed Heartbeats earphones (via Dr. Dre); Carrera sunglasses; Nintendo Wii handsets; Hewlett-Packard Envy computers; a Burberry coat; those crazy, hobbling Alexander McQueen hyper-heels; and enough La Perla lingerie to choke an ox.
This isn’t a music video so much as the QVC Channel you can dance to.
I had thought that Madonna and Michael Jackson were about as sophisticated as you could get when it came to figuring out ways to build up a juicy public image, and then squeeze it until rivers of cash started running out. Not so. Lady GaGa has rightly recognized that selling CDs if for chumps; anyone can pirate them, and pretty much does.
No, you need to sell things that people can’t copy – or at least, if they do, it kinda defeats the purpose. So Lady GaGa’s come up with the list of high-end commercial goods to do “Hero Shots” of in the video and obviously done revenue deals with them.
As a business model, I have to say hats off to the Lady. She’s adapted to the draining of value from the content (i.e. nobody actually buys music anymore – at least, not like they used to), and migrated over to where the money still lies.
When advertising no longer works, when information is a commodity in which we all drown for free, then the only things that are left that have any value are physical objects that we can wear, eat, drive or plug in, as well as what cultural anthropologists call “fetish objects” that bestow special status because they signify that we hae enough disposable income so as to be able to waste a couple grand on some gaudy sunglasses.
I’m not sure if this is the way that all news & entertainment is going to have to go in the future. All of it sponsored, with big shout-outs to the guys footing the bills worked into the info-stream every 10 seconds or so. I do know that if this works, we’re going to see a lot more of these “branded videos” online.
Dec 14
Leaf Boats
Posted: under Uncategorized.
The heavy rainstorms of this past weekend were much-needed, and therefore much-welcomed in Los Angeles.
The anticipated apocalyptic mudslides in the fire-ravaged areas never materialized, but that hasn’t stopped the local TV news crews from speculating on how horrible the damage would have been. If only Mother Nature had cooperated. Which it still might. So stay tuned.
Any little touch of fall-like weather always makes me somewhat homesick for the Upper Midwest in October. Even though it’s December in Los Angeles, and that means that the weather there is sub-Siberian.
Dec 03
Facebook Changes Privacy Policies; Notice Shows Reason Why – Spammers Flood Comment Thread
Posted: under Uncategorized.
The note sent out by Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg today showed why there is such a need for privacy control & reform on Facebook & other social networking sites.
Man, this was a real eye-opener for me. Like 350 million other users, I got the notice that Zuckerberg had sent out a mass message to us all, telling us of the reforms that Facebook is making to its service. Wondering if there was anything other than the removal of the long-obsolete regional groups (which had been leaked as a trial balloon weeks ago), I clicked through and read the missive.
Down at the bottom, I saw that there were about 32,000 comments. I figured that there must be some kind of flame war – predictable whenever anyone associated with Facebook changes anything. Or doesn’t change anything. Or participates. Or fails to participate.
But instead I found the comment thread completely overrun with spam.
[NB: The photo uploader for this blog is down, due to Dreamhost moving all our web properties to a new server. But go ahead and click through, and you'll see an amazing profusion of come-ons for free iPods, Macbooks, yada yada.]
It surprised me that even a message from Facebook’s founder is vulnerable to such crude spam. You’d think that Facebook would have monitors on duty to weed out the spammers.
This also calls into question the much-touted “350 million user” benchmark that Facebook announced this week. If there are this many brazen spammers trying to piggyback oin Zuckerberg’s message, how many other user accounts are just there to try to hock us all into clicking through onto some exploit site to turn our computers into part of a pr0n and v1@gr@ bot-net?
I think that the elimination of the regional groups is a step in the right direction. But now that so many of us are spending so much time on Facebook & other social networking sites, it is even more imperative that these sites start policing their userbase.
