DigitalSpritz

The Depths of Linsanity

This is a bit of a follow-on to my post about the Susan G. Komen social media firestorm.  Andrew Leonard writes in Salon about how a Harvard-educated, Asian-American point guard named Jeremy Lin has become an online phenomenon in just a single weekend, by playing two great games for the New York Knicks. (Lin is #4 on Google's list of today's hot searches, BTW.)  Leonard observes that "the mainstream media now seems to be adapting its coverage of events on the basis of whether something blows up in social media as much as it does from the perceived newsworthiness of the event itself."

The comments on the Salon article are interesting, too.  One writer asserts that the movements attributed to social media (the Komen flap, OWS, Arab Spring) have actually achieved nothing; another suggests that, with the Internet, we are quickly arriving at a hive-mind state. 

For me, there is a single, resounding point in all this:  know thy audience.  If you don't understand the digital media consumption habits of your constituency - whether you're addressing consumers, businesses, or the media itself - you're SOL. 

With Lin, the NBA now has an opportunity to bring two audiences into the fold:  1) Asian-American kids who'd like their very own role model in the sport, and 2) the Chinese market, which shed some of its enthusiasm when Yao Ming retired.  We'll see if the league fans the flames of "Linsanity" into something sustainable.

As for Komen, so far the organization shows few signs of having arrived at an effective, transparent social media strategy, so that tale is still being told.  Stay tuned.

Jeremy Lin photo from Wikipedia.

 

Time Shifting the Super Bowl

Now, I will freely cop to the fact that when it comes to sports fandom, my heart belongs to basketball and tennis.  This is partially a reflection of time spent at my glorious alma mater, where football is kind of an afterthought.  And there's also my status as parent to a thoroughly-Angeleno daughter, who shares my affection for shirtless Rafa's, and who'd rather spend Sunday at the flea market than watch a footballl game.

Don't get me wrong:  I like football.  But when it comes to the Big Dance, I will 'fess up -- I'm in it for the commercials. 

The Super Bowl is still two days away, and I've already seen 1) The Honda "Ferris Bueller" commercial (extended edition), 2) the Elton John Pepsi commercial, 3) the Budweiser hockey commercial, 4) the Pepsi Max commercial with Regis Philbin, 5) practically everything else set to air. 

With all these commercials available online, I'm going to ask the obvious question:  Why pay $3.5M for a 30-second Super Bowl spot?  Is it worth it?

Well, yes.  But that may not remain true, unless more brands follow the footsteps of a curent crop of innovators, who are using the confluence of online video and TV broadcasting to their advantage.  The goal:  To extend the reach of those $116,6667 per-second broadcast investments with the free carriage provided by online media, and to provide a reason to actually watch a commercial during the game itself. 

Doritos, of course, jumped on the online video bandwagon a while ago with its annual "Crash the Super Bowl" contest that invites consumer-generated ad submissions.  The contest has proved so popular that this year Doritos upped the ante, adding Andy Samberg's Lonely Island crew to the mix.  The winner of the contest will not only receive $1M, but he/she will have the opportunity work with Lonely Island on a commercial project.  Excellent reason to look forward to the debut of the winning spot during the game. 

Coke has brought back their popular winter icons, the Coke polar bears, and has created a couple of commercials for possible airing.  The circumstances of the game will determine which commercial is actually shown. The ads will also be paired with an online stream at CokePolarBearBowl.com, which will show the bears in team colors reacting to the game. 

Volkswagen released online video teaser ad "The Bark Side" - featuring dogs barking out the Darth Vader theme from Star Wars - which has racked up more than 11M views on YouTube, and which provides a link to Volkswagen's actual game-day ad ("The Dog Strikes Back"). 

Mobile app Shazam has also jumped into the fray, enabling nearly half the commercials to be aired during the broadcast to be "Shazam'd" for interactive features and special offers.  [You actually don't have to wait until the game - I tested the app on the Teleflora commercial today, and handily received a coupon code for a "Secret Shazam Special."  Who needs some flowers?]

Has it really been only a year since Audi became the first brand to use a hashtag in a Super Bowl ad? 

For those who want to vote on ads, there are two other spots to participate in addition to USA Today's annual Ad Meter -- Mullen and Radian6's Brand Bowl 2012, and YouTube's AdBlitz.

Image from the San Francisco Chronicle

 

 

Renaming the Kodak Theater

To me, no greater development has highlighted the new world order in the entertainment business than Kodak's blockbuster news today:  The company has asked to be released from the agreement that placed its name on the iconic theater where the Academy Awards are presented. 

If you've ever been in the theater, you also know that there's a small room  - the George Eastman Room - dedicated to the technical advances in filmmaking that were driven by Kodak, which as a company, has received nine Academy Awards. 

Those days are over.  But what's not clear is who's up next.  In a universe where the creator of a computer company became the largest shareholder in the world's most iconic movie studio, it's apparent that the next power player in Hollywood may just be based in the Valley - and by that, I mean Silicon Valley. 

So ... with that in mind, let's vote on some new names for the Theater-Formerly-Known-As-Kodak.  If you don't see one you like here, put your nomination in the comments. 

 

Online poll from GoPollGo

Apple's iBook Textbooks - Finally.

 

My daughter is a junior in high school.  She takes seven classes, the maximum her school will allow.  I believe she weighs 115 lbs.  Some days I think her backpack weighs 112 lbs.  Not to mention the fact that, on many days, she also lugs her laptop to school in a separate bag. 

Why has this taken so long? 

The obvious answer is that there is a lot of friction when it comes to change in our education systems.  My first gig in consumer technology was to market Brøderbund's vaunted software products to educational users.  While individual teachers were often enthusiastic adopters, their hands were just as often tied by bureaucracy and institutionalized SOP's.  The effect is magnified when it comes to something as basic as textbooks.  (I am proud to say that my fabulous alma mater, Duke University, has been using iTunes U - which is also getting an update today - for some time.)

Apple's step today is a rather small one on the surface -- high school texts only, and only eight books in total at present -- but as we all know, small steps at Apple tend to have giant reverberations in the marketplace.  Steve Jobs regarded this as "The Next Big Thing," and there is little doubt that he was right on the money.

Of course, the revolution will not be confined to iPads.  And eventually, it will not be confined to affluent kids whose parents can afford tablets.  If you need convincing, take a look at One Laptop Per Child's tablet initiative, which is producing a Marvell-backed tablet capable of running Android, Windows Mobile and Ubuntu, which also operates as a WiFi hotspot, and which is expected to cost $75 per unit. 

Personally, I'm looking forward to living in a portably literate world.  I hope JanSport is taking a look at some new markets, as those ever-present college-campus backpacks may soon become a thing of the past.

(Image from Gizmodo.)

The Real "Plus" of Google+

Facebook? Twitter?  No, with G+, Google is targeting … wait for it ... wait for it ...

Microsoft.  By making social sharing via the cloud the defacto path for everything, including business. 

Google’s introduction of Google+ into search results set Twitter all, well, a-twitter yesterday.   And while Facebook has yet to show its, er, face on the issue, the pundits populating the blogiverse seem to think that this is merely the next step in Google’s plan to master the social networking environment.

Except this pundit begs to differ.

A competitive footprint in social networking would seem a worthy goal.  Analyses conducted by some very smart folks have put the near-term value of the social networking market anywhere between $5B and $27B, depending on how you measure things.  Deloitte goes a step further to predict that fully one-half of the world’s wired community – a cool 1B people – will be members of social networks in the very near future.   And while social network advertising revenues currently suffer from some weaknesses relative to traditional media, the opportunity presented by cracking the code on social search is sizeable – an opportunity that Google is very well-positioned to take advantage of.  This, of course, is the source of Twitter’s very public angst, economically expressed in 140 characters (or less).

But let’s take a look at the market for cloud-based productivity applications.  It’s already a very nice $13B, with huge room for expansion given that current market penetration is low – unlike pure social networking, cloud-based productivity tools users number in the tens of millions, not billions.    Google has established a robust presence in this area with Google Apps, as well as its online productivity tools.   And guess what?  Both are already integrated with G+, and activity is reported and available for action via Gmail.   As well as accessible from your Android mobile device.     

Google’s second – and ultimately perhaps more important – announcement in the past two days attracted relatively little attention:  G+ updated Hangouts, adding screen-sharing to its list of features.  Microsoft-owned Skype also offers screen-sharing, but only on 1-to-1 calls, unless you have a Premium Skype account, which costs money.  Hangouts is free.  And with past participants like the Dalai Lama, it’s also very sexy.  

In short, with G+, Google has laid the groundwork for group communications and information-sharing in a well-integrated, low-cost-to-the-user framework that doesn’t require a bunch of expensive IT guys and an Exchange server.  It also just happens to be a framework that you can also use to share pictures with Grandma or debate 4K vs 3DTV's  with Robert Scoble. 

In June, USA Today reported that the launch of G+ had added $45B to Google’s market cap – nearly twice the value of the highest estimate for the entire social networking market quoted above.  Does anyone really think that taking on Facebook is the reason for this huge leap?   IMHO, the game’s afoot.  And the winner will do more than help you share lewd jokes with your college friends – it will also help you design a breakthrough drug protocol with your coworkers in Duluth and New Delhi, or hold your annual earnings call with analysts via Hangouts.  Dalai Lama optional.  

The Day Twitter Broke the News: Update

NPR reports that an Abbottabad resident live-blogged the whole event via Twitter, not knowing what was happening: http://n.pr/iMy4qd A new form of public record.

The Day Twitter Broke the News: Bin Laden's Death

This month's issue of Fortune carries a cover story on shenanigans at Twitter -- claiming rotating executives, Board power struggles, and a flattening growth in users.  Those things may be true, but they're irrelevant, as tonight's events have proved.  Because, once again, the big news was not broken by traditional media outlets in traditional broadcast mediums -- it was broken by Twitter. 

The New York Times has published the details:  A tweet from the White House communications director set off a firestorm of speculation online, which was eventually confirmed by Keith Urbahn, Donald Rumsfeld's former chief of staff, also on Twitter.  The news kicked off what, for me, became the latest iteration of the multi-screen media experience:  Cable news (in my case, CNN), augmented by Seesmic desktop loaded up with Twitter and Facebook feeds, and text messages on my iPhone. The resulting stream of details, analysis and humor more than made up for the fact that CNN's commentators were forced to blather on to fill up airtime until the President finally appeared to make his masterful formal statement.  (AAMOF, I put the TV on mute while I was waiting; Twitter was infinitely more interesting.)

After the President appeared and gave his statement (which no doubt will be the leading video on both broadcast and online outlets for the next 24 hours), I got word that there was already a Facebook page called "Bin Laden is Dead" with 120,000 "likes." 

My point:  In just a few short years, we are no longer able to imagine a world without Twitter, smartphones and Facebook. They've become our collective unconscious, and our conscience, capable of alerting the world almost instantaneously to events both big and small, and in their power, also forcing corrective behavior.  Particularly with Twitter, it's becoming harder for the bad guys to get away with stuff.  It's become so ingrained that, even if Twitter in particular fails, some other service will rise in its place, uniting us in a world-wide network of instant information. 

By the way, kudos to the White House communications team for continuing to beautifully manage news in the age of fluid information.  I may have to tweet about that. 

Content Curation: The Big Boulder in the Digital River

Big news in the entertainment world last night:  YouTube (Google) is finally entering the world of video-on-demand  (VOD) in a competitive way.  “Competitive” means by offering contemporary movies near their DVD release dates, rather than only catalog titles, which have actually been available on YouTube via an innovative variable pricing model for some time.   Now YouTube has apparently inked a deal with several major and independent studios to offer movies for download about the same time the DVD’s hit retail. 

However, none of this news is official, and the deal is apparently incomplete, as rumor has it that Paramount, Disney and Fox are currently holdouts.   The reason?  Well, there are two:  1) Google continues to point traffic towards and provide advertising services for sites that practice piracy, and 2) Viacom (Paramount’s parent company) has been locked in a lawsuit with YouTube over copyright infringement for several years. 

All of this is the result of fundamental mistrust centered on one principle:  content curation.  For those who may have forgotten recent history, YouTube sprang to prominence on the back of a single piece of content – Lazy Sunday – that was recorded from a broadcast of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, setting the stage for the explosive growth that followed, much of it driven by what traditional media considers illegally-uploaded entertainment.    However, non-traditional media doesn’t see it that way:  digital presents an unparalleled opportunity that should be mined.  If the situation doesn’t fit old paradigms, bend the paradigms.  Hence, YouTube applies advertising against content that belongs to studios and shares the revenue, and Google supplies services to sites that promote piracy. 

However, the world has evolved, and traditional media practitioners are now skilled at serving their content over the internet and via mobile devices – often leaving Google and YouTube out of the equation.  The problem has evolved from one of content deficit to what Seth Godin calls attention deficit  -- someone needs to aggregate all this content and point people to the good stuff.  YouTube, with its audience and bandwidth, bolstered by Google’s traffic skills and deep pockets, is well-positioned to perform this role, and is ready to a bend a few of its own paradigms to do so.  However, the friction remains:  Can studios come to believe that the online network famous for cat videos and bootlegged TV show clips will evolve into a premiere VOD destination?   And can YouTube honor the concerns of its studio partners without blowing apart its own ecosystem, which is built on the philosophy of wholly independent media?    

Brains in Our Pants

When I first acquired my iPhone, I had two jokes I liked to tell.  The first was that I loved my phone more than some people I knew.  The second was that the phone had actually become an extension of my brain.  Like all good jokes, these little asides were humorous because they contained a seed of the truth.  Just how big a seed didn't become shockingly clear until recently.

First, there was the story about Stephen Furber, who is building a synthetic brain -- dubbed "Spinnaker" -- out of thousands of smartphone chips.  He's estimated that he will need about 50,000 chips to simulate 1 billion neurons, which should be enough to control a robotic arm.  He has already built a small 50-neuron version of his proposed brain, which can control a Pac-Man style video game.  If a version this small can do what many beer-fueled college students did for four years during the late 80's, imagine what the 1 billion neuron version will be able to do.  Solve global warming (or, for the conservatives among us, prove that it exists)?  Keep Wall Street bankers from manipulating the economy?  Send a man to Mars? Send a man to the grocery store and have him return with the right item? 

The goal, of course, is to build something that can be planted in a humanoid body.  If you read the comments in the linked article, they immediately begin referencing Skynet, Isaac Asimov and, for some reason, duct tape.  (Oddly, no Cylons.)  When faced with the prospect of synthetic people, most humans think only of violence and murder -- "us" against "them."  I prefer to posit a more warm and accepting future:  what if, finally, my iPhone (or 50,000 iPhones) actually became my companion?  Then I wouldn't have to feel guilty about liking it more than some humans I know.  

The second story is the theory that human brains actually function like smartphones:  Apparently, we have multiple "apps" that control different activities, and the act of running two apps at once is likely to produce inconsistent behavior.  (In my case, that behavior would be continuing to eat Ben & Jerry's Phish Food despite an active case of lactose intolerance.)   Unfortunately, our wetware apps don't come with exit buttons.  But there are some groovy behavior-modification apps for the iPhone (and probably Android phones) that can help you out there, resulting in a situation where interaction with your smartphone is clearly modifying your brain. 

For now, I remain happy in my loving relationship with my iPhone, safe in the knowledge that, even in the wilds of New York City, that little extra set of brains in my blue jeans will help me find a subway stop, order movie tickets, take a message, or even let me play some Pac-Man.  If, later in its lifespan, a larger version emerges that can do all that while folding my laundry and making dinner resies, well, bring it on. 

The Deepening Digital River

 
Two big pieces of news about digital content delivery in the past two days:  The Digital Entertainment Group, a Hollywood-based consortium dedicated to the home entertainment market, announced that for the first time ever, digital delivery outpaced Blu-Ray discs in consumer spending.  Indeed, digital delivery (including video on demand) posted year-over-year gains of 23% for the first half of 2010, topping $1B for the first time.  During that time, Blu-Ray sales rose 83% to $733M, but sales of packaged media overall (DVD + Blu-Ray) declined by 7%. 

The second surprise came from Amazon, which announced that, for the first time, digital book downloads outsold hardcover books - by 80%.  Amazon's Jeff Bezos was quoted thus: "Astonishing when considering that we've been selling hardcover books for 15 years and Kindle books for 33 months."  Granted, Amazon a price cut on Kindles that coincided with Apple's iPad launch may have contributed to this amazing lift, but the trend is clear:  Digital content delivery is NOT the future -- it's the status quo.   

Granted, this is not big news to Millennials who've been consuming their TV on Hulu, downloading their games from torrents, and loading movies on their iPods and iPhones for some time.  What is a surprise is the speed at which the rest of the rest of us are catching up:  witness my digital partner Tom Goff, clearly not a Millennial, who admitted this morning that he now streams all his movies on Netflix, with infrastructure courtesy of Time Warner.

Studios, networks, cable and satellite operators, CE manufacturers-- even Google and Apple -- are all over this "trend."   A hodge-podge of boxes, delivery systems and formats make for confusing sledding for consumers.  But somehow, we've muddled through the madness enough to vote with our scarce dollars for options that award us with timeliness and portability. 

Where are you placing your bets?  How about Apple?  The iPad is a pretty revolutionary device -- simple idea, incredible execution.  If Apple vertically integrates filmed home entertainment and literature the way the company streamlined digital music ... well, let's hope that a few folks give them a run for their money.  (I'm talking to you, Big G.  And you, Verizon and AT&T.)  

Photo by Flickr user Natha1308