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Groupon, the Super Bowl, and Buzz

Thursday, March 3rd, 2011

This is a companion article to “Groupon Really a Super Bowl Traffic Loser?”.

In a previous article, I took a look at the assertion that Groupon’s traffic lift from its Super Bowl ad was inconsequential.

Here I want to take a look at a different part of the Fast Company article on Groupon’s Super Bowl performance: Buzz.

The article shows a graph put out by Nielsen showing that Groupon had a very large amount of buzz relative to other digital brands that advertised during the Super Bowl. While I’m not a huge fan of sentiment (it’s still very much an inexact science), it seems clear that some concept of sentiment is missing from the FastCo article. If the majority of buzz is bad, then it wouldn’t be surprising to find that actual direct response to the ads was low.

More importantly, however, this reinforces how important it is to not live by buzz metrics alone. It’s easy for people to say something about your brand one way or another. What is more telling is what they actually choose to DO. Lots of talk (even very positive talk) doesn’t guarantee any impact on your brand. People may have had an interaction, fired of a tweet about it, and then totally forgot about it. Sure, there would appear to be more opportunity for people to do something, and certainly more opportunity for brand impressions on a person’s followers, but the relationship between buzz and actual response is not straightforward, and likely differs not just between brands, but between kinds of efforts inside a brand.

It’s best to measure not just what people say, but what you are trying to get from a campaign so that you can get a sense of what kinds of buzz actually move the needle on your business, and what kinds are just hot air. And, of course, if you can’t do that, we can do it for you ;)

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Groupon Really a Super Bowl Traffic Loser?

Thursday, March 3rd, 2011

I was just reading this article on Fast Company comparing the response to Groupon’s now infamous Super Bowl ads to that of other advertisers (notably GoDaddy), and thought it was worth pointing out a couple of things.

First, the article uses % increase in traffic week-over-week as the primary metric. That certainly makes for a dramatic looking metric, but it probably doesn’t give you the insight into “success” that you might think it would. First of all, for this kind of performance, you need to be looking at raw numbers. Percentages are great for comparing things that are directly comparable, but if we’re looking at direct-response-type metrics (which site visits would be), then what you care about is how much you had to spend to get a volume of response. So knowing that Groupon’s 3% increase – which seems paltry next to HomeAway.com’s 27% – accounts for 420,000 visits (as pointed out by commenter Rob Day) compared to HomeAways’s 230,000 provides a more meaningful comparison.

And if you’re looking at direct response, then what you need to know is what the cost of the effort was versus its value.

Assuming that the cost of a Super Bowl commercial is $10 million (and I have NO idea what the actual cost was), then we’re looking at about $29 per visit. Is that worth it? Well now we’re into the realm of things we probably can’t know. To know for sure, we’d need to know what percent of visitors Groupon is able to convert on their site, and what the lifetime value of each conversion is.

By way of a hyperbolic example, let’s look at Groupon’s numbers versus GoDaddy’s. GoDaddy (again, according to commenter Rob Day) gained 4,100,000 new visits compared to Groupon’s 420,000. If they were both able to convert 10% of visitors, then GoDaddy will have gained 410,000 customers, where Groupon gained only 42,000. But if the lifetime value of a customer is $10 for GoDaddy, and $100 for Groupon (again, numbers pulled out of thin air to make a point here), then GoDaddy has added $4,100,000 in revenue, and Groupon has added $4,200,000, making their overall performance about equal, despite very different seeming traffic percentages.

A final note on this: If they each paid $10 million for their spots, then their ROI is going to be the Return divided by the Investment, or $4,100,000/$10,000,000 for GoDaddy, and $4,200,000/$10,000,000 for Groupon. That’s 41% ROI for GoDaddy, and 42% for Groupon. If neither got any additional value out of the ads, then they are both underwater on this effort – that is, they spent more than they earned – making this not a good candidate to repeat for either one of them next year.

I also want to talk about the “buzz volume” metric in the FastCo article, but I’ll do that in a separate article.

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A couple years ago, Master Lock reinvented the padlock

Thursday, September 30th, 2010

The padlock, with is numerical dial, is a classic. How do you improve upon a classic?

We were trying to play off of simplicity. We wanted the appearance of the lock to match that simplicity. It’s really basic—up, down, left, and right—and easy to remember. So nothing too fancy. – Lea Plato, lead designer

Just four directions to make your lock sequence? Awesome. I am going to make mine ‘up up down down left right left right’.

Read the rest of the interview to see what else Lea Plato had to say about their goals and inspiration for the project.

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GitR 3: The Big Idea

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

Here’s another entry in the info-snacking firing line that we call “Get in the Ring”.  The topic that I had 3 minutes to cover (without any prep) was: The Big Idea.

For the uninitiated, the Big Idea is what advertising companies (and, increasingly, all marketing companies) sell: The OMG moment, captured in a 30 second commercial, magazine spread, web site, or banner ad.

We’re big fans of the Big Idea, as a rule.  The problem is that it is typically the end of the conversation about reaching an audience, where as we believe that it’s really just the beginning.

Anyway, here’s me taking a shot at this unexpectedly after I drew it from the 60-odd other topics that we had to blindly draw from.

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Posted in Advertising, Fight, Naked, Strategy, Thinking, agencies, brand | View Comments

Dear GE: Own the Innovation Layer

Monday, June 28th, 2010

The other day trusty Project Manager Ned spied an article on TechCrunch about how General Electric is crowdsourcing ideas for digital ad campaigns. This is interesting for a couple of reasons:

  1. It’s another example of a major brand looking to crowdsource ways of making themselves better
  2. In this case it’s focused on marketing (even though it says advertising, their definition of advertising is over-broad)
  3. We like to use opportunities like this to flex our brains with, poke at our process, and generally have a good time
  4. We had not heard of this program from anywhere other than TechCrunch (see The Target Audience, below)

There’s actually precious little information to go on for GE Ads. In the best scenario, this is because GE is treating this not as a one-off contest, but as a long-range funnel for innovative work from unexpected places. In a less-good scenario this is because someone at GE thought that the idea was fun and went ahead with it with little thought (which is not a bad idea in itself).

In any case, we felt we were game, so we spent 120 minutes on it. Here’s how it played out.

Who’s Your Client?

GE has a HUGE breadth of products. We considered focusing on specific products, or even just specific major product categories, but, since we didn’t have any collective expertise in any one area, digging in to any one of them and trying to really understand what GE was doing and where the opportunities were, was beyond the scope of the time limit that we had set for ourselves. Besides, the scope of the request, while open-ended, seemed to be about GE as a brand overall, and not particularly about a product category.

The Target Audience

Again, not having done any sort of discovery (beyond what 30 minutes of web searching will get you), we decided to focus on the average consumer as the target. Business-to-business relationships are tricky to quickly understand if you don’t have some experience with what the target audience wants. On the other hand, we all have experience being a consumer, so it seemed like an easy headspace to get into. Ultimately we narrowed the audience down to Advanced Digital Literates because:

  1. We are them, so we have some idea of what’s going on there
  2. This project so barely made our radar (only due to Ned’s keen attention to things like this), but was so squarely targeted at people like us that it seemed to point to an opportunity that we could take advantage of
  3. It turns out that, not having any information to the contrary, we thought that the broad consumers were probably being served quite well, actually, with the campaigns that GE is currently running (see below for more on this). We’re sure that someone in GE could give us evidence that there is a serious failing somewhere – in which case we’d tackle that more head on – but, barring that, we had to go with what we knew

The Goal

Again, given that there is not much to go on in terms of this project, we took a fairly generic goal:

  • Increase brand affinity volume with broad reach

What We Know

At first we didn’t think we knew much about the umbrella brand that is GE with respect to marketing. But it didn’t take us long to realize that GE’s advertising had actually reached us (which was especially surprising to me, as I’m nearly unreachable with advertising – a fact that I’ve decided to take as amusingly ironic). The ad campaigns are broadly inspirational, speak to the positive idea of “imagination” and talk about how GE improves the world. We’d seen ads on TV, and their digital ads were pretty solid. In fact, a campaign that they ran a few years ago, where you could create new ideas on a shared whiteboard, seemed downright inspired (though, of course, we can’t speak to its success).

Insomuch as umbrella advertising doesn’t seek to sell anything directly, these all seemed to be on the right track. And reflecting on our own feelings we came away on the positive side of neutral on GE, which is pretty good for a brand that we don’t knowingly consume on a regular basis (unlike, say, Coke).

Our Key Insight

GE has the opportunity to own a real concept of “imagination” in the marketplace, beyond what they currently do.

Our Strategy

GE creates the groundwork for inspired ideas. GE should provide the digital infrastructure for digital natives to bring new wonderful things into the world. Inspiring innovation and providing the framework in which it can grow.

By doing this, GE reinforces, in a very concrete way, its ownership of “imagination”. It creates affinity for GE in the people who are actually using their imagination to make the world a more interesting place. It also provides an interesting opportunity for GE to expand its business into a new space that is consistent with the image it projects (see the tactics section, below).

Tactical Approach

Specifically, we would like to see GE collect, build, foster, and own tools to help people spark new ideas, nurture those ideas into deeper concepts, and bring those concepts into reality. GE should be the company you think of when you want to figure out something new to bring into the world.

We envision a web site called imagine.ge.com which would provide a range of tools that GE has actively helped develop. Most tools would be free. This would include tools such as:

  • Mind Mapping (e.g. FreeMind)
  • Brainstorming tools (shared whiteboards and the like)
  • Prediction Markets (e.g. Foresight)
  • Community Ideation Platforms (e.g. Salesforce’s Community offering, which powers Dell’s Ideastorm, or, ironically, Google’s Moderator, which is what GE is using for this project)
  • Community Idea Acceleration Platforms (I don’t know of any in the wild, but have built a couple: systems that allow people to see other people’s ideas and get involved to the degree that interests them)
  • Startup funding finders (e.g. Kickstarter)

Basically an entire ecosystem devoted to the imagination/innovation process from creating the initial spark to making the idea a reality. We see this infrastructure as the “ideas” equivalent to Amazon’s Web Services, which provide essential services for new web applications without the need for a company to build the infrastructure themselves.

We imagine GE expanding upon these layers and integrating them into a more complete workflow.

The kicker would be for GE to make this infrastructure the foundation of how ideas grow within GE. This provides added incentive to improve the tools and added credibility to both the tools and to GE as a company that practices what it preaches.

In our biggest version of this concept, GE creates a new business unit around creating “imagination” infrastructure of all kinds (potentially capturing the brand space that Disney evacuated after Walt died), they create a global incubation program, get involved in 3D printing (maybe through the RepRap or MakerBot projects), and buy Adobe both for its creative and technology development tools.

All of this provides additional emphasis on GE’s classic jingle “We bring good things to life”.

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A Q&A With Nelson Farris – Nike Director of Corporate Education

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

Nelson Farris Nike PAF North Portland

Portland Advertising Federation presents a Q&A with Nelson Farris, Nike’s Director of Corporate Education and the company’s Chief Storyteller. Farris is Nike’s longest tenured employee and he will be giving a talk about Nike’s unlikely rise from garage experiment to global brand dominance.

“Our stories are not about extraordinary business plans or financial manipulations,” explains Nelson Farris, 57, Nike’s director of corporate education and the company’s chief storyteller. “They’re about people getting things done.” Link to Fast Company

Nelson Farris – If The Shoe Fits, Wear It.
Nelson Farris – Nike Air Interview [YouTube]

Date: April 13th, 2010
Venue: North, 1515 NW 19th Ave, Portland, 97209
Time: 5:30PM – Presentation at 6PM
Tickets at PAF.
Refreshments by: Deschutes Brewery

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We Are All Distracted

Monday, March 8th, 2010

Iterative Marketing Fight Portland
The 11,500 year old Gobekli Tepe temple near Sanliurfa, Turkey. [photo: Berthold Steinhilber]

“Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase.” – The Long Now Foundation.

We no longer consider the future. We apparently don’t have time for that. The Long Now Foundation and its 10,000 Year Clock project should at least make us find the time to again consider the future.

As Michael Chabon wrote about the Clock in his wonderful book of essays, Manhood For Amateurs, “…the Clock may accomplish its greatest task before it is ever finished, perhaps without ever being built at all. The point of the Clock Of The Long Now is not to measure out the passage into their unknown future of the race of creatures that built it. The point of the Clock is to revive and restore the whole idea of the Future, to get us thinking about the Future again, to the same degree we used to, if not in quite the same way, and to reintroduce the idea that we don’t just bequeath the future – though we do, whether we think about it or not.”

The Long Now Fight Portland

How many of us even consider the future of 500 years from now, of only about 6 future generations of our families from today? And then consider 10,000 years. As Chabon points out, that’s about as long a time span as separates us from the first makers of pottery….11,500 years ago some people built the Gobekli Tepe temple near Sanliurfa, Turkey.

We all have, and have had, the future in our hands – just yesterday for instance – yet by definition the future doesn’t exist. Some of you reading this post, when you consider technology and how we now expect new developments in technology to bring us the “future,” may consider the iPad the future; it’s coming soon after all. And with that example, let’s consider the outpouring of rage from the Flash developer community over the iPad’s lack of Flash… they chose to ignore that the iPad will change the way people interact with computers in the future, instead they got all hysterical over the lack of a multimedia platform on the device; short term thinking in other words.

It’s interesting to note that one of the Long Now’s founding board members, Brian Eno, seemed to suggest that the lack of long term future thinking was an American problem. When he moved to New York City, he found that “here” and “now” meant “this room” and “this five minutes” as opposed to the larger here and longer now that he was used to in England. Because of that, he wanted the Long Now foundation to focus on stretching out what people consider as now.

I’m not sure what year it was when Eno considered the “here and now” issue, but I don’t actually believe it’s an American problem, it’s a global problem. We can see it when humans get all worked up about saving the Earth, without realizing that humans haven’t been on Earth long enough for the planet to care. We may or may not be destroying the atmosphere via global warming, but either way, when the Earth is truly done with us it will rid itself of us. We may not be around to witness the Clock Of The Long Now in 10,000 years; we need to be ok with that.

Here’s the Long Now guidelines for a long-lived, long-valuable institution:

Serve the long view
Foster responsibility
Reward patience
Mine mythic depth
Ally with competition
Take no sides
Leverage longevity

And here’s some food for thought; the Future, as considered over just the last few decades, was not all shiny bright advances in technology that improved our lives. It also brought the fear of Armageddon, of destruction by nuclear weapons. Chabon again – “…the Future…can be unremittingly and wryly bleak..”

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Posted in Anthropology, Fight, Strategy, Technology, Thinking, brand, social web, society | View Comments

An Update on The 30 Coffees Project

Friday, March 5th, 2010

You may or may not know that in February, Fight kicked off its 30 Coffees project. 30 coffees is an idea conjured up by Fight partner, Rob Shields, and at its heart it’s a simple social web exercise. As Rob said at the beginning – “Fight has an awesome community of supporters, so we thought: Who better to turn to to help us make a good thing better? We believe that Fight is a different kind of company from other marketing strategy firms, and we’d like to get some practice talking about ourselves to people in the business, marketing, and agency worlds so that when we talk to potential clients we can really shine.”

I have already met with 16 people since we started, and along the way the concept became elastic enough to include meetings I have had with some of the heads of Portland’s advertising and marketing agencies. It’s been a fascinating discussion, and I stress the word discussion as this was never intended to be an opportunity to pitch people, it is intended to help Fight form its own internal and external narrative. The feedback from the talks has been extremely useful. And more importantly, by the end of the project [it looks like it may run over a bit because of scheduling plus my speaking engagement at SXSW,] I am certain we will have honed our story along with our elevator pitch, and have them nailed down. 14 more to go and then I will be writing up the whole endeavor very soon…

I wish to say thanks to the first set of participants. I’ve included their Twitter accounts where possible, so if you use Twitter I encourage you to follow these good people:

Erik Johnson
David Burn @davidburn
Brandon Schoessler @transport_1
Denny Mcentire @dfatouchi
Dian Crawford @diancrawford
Aaron Day
Jennifer Day-Burget @portlandwater
Jennie Fitzhugh @sasquatcha
Stephen Landau @stlandau
Ed Borasky @znmeb
Bryan Rhoads @bryanrhoads
Jay Cosnett @jaycosnett
Amanda Bernard
Jim Woolfrey @informative
Charlie Quirk @CharlieQuirk
Emanuel Brown @emanuelbrown

And honorable mentions to the following for being involved, somewhat unwittingly!

Ashly Stewart @AshlyStewart
David Ewald @motorcoatdave
Justin Yeun @jyuen
Rebecca Armstrong @rebeccamary
Arve Overland @ArveOverland
Jerry Ketel @JerryKetel
Dennis Hahn

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Posted in Advertising, Fight, Process, Strategy, Thinking, Twitter, agencies, brand, social web | View Comments

Design War – Down With Corporate America

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

“If one factors in all the world wars, diseases, poverty, illiteracy, and natural disasters, a well-designed hangtag is silly. But I don’t think the responsibility for the visual environment of our society is silly or trivial, and collectively, that is our charge.” – Paula Scher: “The Devaluation of Design by the Design Community: I Have Seen the Enemy and He Is Us”

“Designers who win awards for edgy design they did for a friend’s business, with a print run of one hundred or something like that? They’ve got no art director, no creative director, no client’s representative, no agency person. Where’s the obstacle to good design there? But take something like a cheese. When I see a really good package for a cheese, I know what that designer went through to get there. It makes me want to fall on my knees and kiss that designer’s feet, that cheese.” – Ernesto Aparicio.

An interview by Paula Scher with Josh Berta of Pr*tty Sh*tty:

Scher: I use a couple quotes of yours to sum up some of my own motivations and philosophy behind this blog. When I contacted you about this interview, you said those quotes were never more true than now. Why is that?

Berta: Many talented young designers today have abandoned their roles as improvers of the general visual environment. Many only want to work on cultural work, or not-for-profit work, or on projects they perceive as “good-for-society” which may have a high profile within the design milieu, but don’t really reach ordinary people. These designers are afraid to get involved in mainstream packaging, promotion or corporate work. They forget that these are the products and messages that most people really encounter in their daily lives, that these products and services are at the heart of the American condition, and that there is responsibility for us as designers, always, to raise the expectation of what design can be. We are responsible for that daily experience. These “ivory tower designers” leave the job to others (ad agencies, schlock shops, etc.) who are simply doing it for the money, and are often cynical about the outcome.

Scher: What do you think has perpetuated that pattern?

Berta: I think the design community has caused it. The “First Things First” manifesto inspired a lot of young people to move away from corporate branding, advertising, promotion, packaging (except for books and magazines, as if they are somehow more noble). If “responsible” designers who care about society and our environment refuse to work on branding, advertising, promotion and packaging, then just consider, who will? This line of design-thinking has been perpetuated in so many design schools and grad programs and it is perpetuated by the AIGA and other design organizations. It’s easy to inspire young designers this way as it creates a real calling for them: “down with corporate America”, etc.

But, ultimately, it creates a design society where it is OK for designers to
abandon most of American communication.
Good God!

Read the rest of this interview here.

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SXSW Magazine Interview with Dave Allen

Monday, February 15th, 2010

SXSW Fight Portland

At last count, if I’m correct, I’ve attended the SXSW Conference at least 17 times, and on many of those visits I have been very grateful for the opportunity to speak on a panel. When Brian Zisk, a co-founder of the SanFran MusicTech conference, invited me to speak again on a panel in December, and also to join him on his panel at this year’s SXSW, I gave pause. 17 years is a long time, therefore that begs the question – what has all the talking, presenting, networking and mingling at SXSW achieved for the music industry/community at large? The answer to that is simple – it’s hard to know what, if anything, changed and even harder to quantify. Yet change came along anyway.

In that 17 year timeframe we all saw the rise of the more public face of the Internet, the nascent World Wide Web. And as Chris Anderson of Wired points out, “… the Internet is the once-a-century invention. The Web is just one application upon it. There are, and will be, others.” For music, as we know, this was a serious game changer. The labels blinked. Some musicians learned to use the web well and at SXSW in March 2007 David Byrne warned record labels that they must act very quickly and adapt much faster to the web’s promise. He predicted that by 2012, sales of music as downloads or through streaming services would strip the sales of CDs. He was very prescient.

I share his views but I also now lay the blame at the feet of the musicians themselves. There is so much more they could be doing if they fully embraced the social web with a strong, well planned digital strategy. Or, as I put it in this essay – Dear Musicians, Please Be Brilliant or Get Out of The Way.

What follows here is the full version of an interview I gave for SXSWorld Magazine. An edited version appears in the print and online magazine on page 58. The discussion centered around our company Fight and its approach to brand strategy and iterative marketing. Our ideas would work just as well for bands and labels. After all, they are brands too.

For the layman, how would you describe what your company does, and how it functions in relation to the changing online and media landscape?

Fight is a brand strategy company that works with clients to help them align their brand strategy both online and off. For too long, advertising agencies have been struggling with the asymmetrical online world. It puzzles them because they consider the web like TV, as if it has multiple channels. They see the web as packed with eyeballs all wanting to see their clients messages – that is totally untrue. Getting attention online is the key. One-way, controlled messaging is not the answer.

Fight approaches this problem by working with companies, setting realistic goals and targets, then moving ahead in iterative steps to see what is working. If all is well, we move to the second stage of the campaign – based on results. If something isn’t working we move back to the previous phase. We continue testing and analyzing throughout the campaign. The old adage of “build it and they will come” doesn’t work on the web. We want to show results and actual $$ ROI for our clients.

How does the social-networking aspect fit into this, and how can musicians make better use of it?

What needs pointing out is that “social media” is just an idea. [Edit: I prefer to use the term, Social Web] The term “social media” feels like it was dreamed up by marketers, who, believing the web is like TV, wanted to create “channels” to reach people online. Remember, as Chris Anderson of Wired wrote in a Tweet recently “the Internet is one of those ‘once in a century’ inventions and the web is just an application that sits on the Internet. There are, and will be other applications.” 

Social networks are simply places where people gather online. Anthropology takes care of the need for humans to be constantly in touch, technology just shortens the distance between us via, say, the web or mobile devices. Therefore, I’d argue, that bands need an online digital strategy worked out in advance. Having a MySpace page or Facebook fan page is not a digital strategy for musicians. Now that Google has delivered Google Music Search and Twitter provides real time search, I argue that musicians must now have their own url. If they did, then they would benefit from those searches by having their url come up in the results. If they don’t then their MySpace url will come up first. A digital strategy would ensure that the intended actions of a fan landing on the musician’s web page might include buying some music, a T-shirt or signing up to an email list. If you are just one of millions of bands on MySpace I’d say those are difficult result to achieve. All those social network tools should simply be used as part of a strong digital/online strategy.

How does your background as a musician and [former] label owner influence the way you approach these issues now?

I developed my thoughts and ideas about online music distribution over the last 15 years. I reached my current phase of thoughts and ideas after attending SXSW 2009 and realizing that musicians were using the web because of its zero barrier-to-entry model, but I felt they weren’t using it wisely. That was when I wrote “The End of The Recording Album As The Organizing Principle” 

In your SanFranMusicTech essay, you lay much of the responsibility for the current state of the music industry on musicians, rather than record companies, for not taking better advantage of the branding and social-networking opportunities available to them.  Could you expand on this a bit, and on what musicians can do to function more efficiently in the current climate?  Should artists be focusing more on building and developing their brand, rather than focusing on record sales?

I’m not sure that you’ve grasped the big idea behind the essay. I’m not saying that musicians should necessarily be using the web for branding and social networking opportunities, I’m saying that merely releasing a CD in 2010 will be a bad idea. The web should be used as one part of musician’s strategies for the music-release-as-an-event idea. Big thinking is required and unfortunately the thinking still remains small and cloistered around the old way of releasing a CD, as part of a release/reviews/tour campaign that is still a label mindset. The web isn’t suited to a ‘campaign’ strategy. Labels will argue “oh, but we use the web by posting videos to YouTube and getting MP3s to music blogs” but that is small potatoes I think. I know it’s a cliché, but Radiohead and NIN gave everyone pointers to how it can be done. Embracing those ideas is now up to musicians. If they don’t start to embrace bigger thinking, then musicians will definitely not make a living from their recorded works.

What are your goals and objectives for your SXSW appearance this year, and what issues do you plan to address?

I believe I have attended SXSW at least 15 times and I have been fortunate enough to have been asked to speak on panels for many of those visits. I always look forward to SXSW [especially now, as it has expanded into the Interactive world] and I arrive expecting to learn something new, which does happen occasionally. One example was being able to sit in and hear Clay Shirky remind a panel of journalists, book publishers and newspaper folks that “the internet is the largest group of people who care about reading and writing ever assembled in history…” 

That phrase of his could also be paraphrased as “the internet is the largest group of people who care about music ever assembled in history…” When musicians, labels and others paint music downloading as ‘piracy,’ ‘stealing’ or ‘illegal’ they are creating a “Fog of War” that is intended to serve one purpose that can be summed up as – We don’t understand how music lovers want to access music, nor do we understand how an eight year old girl today will want to access her music in future. Therefore we will continue to speak out in media catch phrases, instead of doing deep research that will allow us to understand, via real data, how better to serve new generations of music fans. 

My goal? That’s easy. I would love nothing more than to have a forward-thinking record label or band manager hire Fight, to help them be successful in a shifting online music world. Talk is cheap, action is required based on real information.

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Posted in Advertising, Business, Fight, Strategy, Technology, Thinking, Twitter, brand, facebook, social web | View Comments

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