Category: marketing

make your own posters

internet marketing media

National Geographic had a nice idea.

HP or Canon or any color printer manufacturer should have done this a long time ago. Before yhey should have given you a DVD with lots and lots of images in super high resolution and a decent and fast way of browsing them. Gets you in the habbit of spreading that ink generously. But no, good ole NG had to come up with this one. And it might never dawn on Canon and Co what they are missing out on.

Beats me why HP has not signed deal with deviantart for instance.

Box office year 2005

communication daily life economy marketing media

It has been a bad year for the US movie box office.

Now everybody jumps to conclusions. Me too. Of course the theatre owners point to everything but themselves. I think they share much of the responsibility for their demise.

People stop going to the movies, and theatre owners blame the bad Hollywood product for it. Maybe they should buy some diversity instead. Maybe -gulp- they should take some risk? Only few theatres have more character than a chain restaurant. Most of them are generic as it comes. And then they show dismal ads.

Cinema also lost the arms race in quality: For the average consumer the picture at home can look as good as it does in the cinema. And this is mostly pre HD DVD we are talking about. The audio at home already is as much 5.1 as it can be in a cinema. Plus that the volume will be always right, and there is no talking person next to you. Or if there should be then that is your own choice, and there is always the pause button.

During the 50s TV took away the cinemas monopoly of showing moving images. Colored movies got a boost from this, but Hollywood and the theatres went one step further: They changed their own format to widescreen. This was costly for production and theatres. But seperated the movi experience from the pale 4 by 3 Black and white TV set. Content adopted to what worked well in cinema. Some Movie genres surrendered to “I Love Lucy” and the likes,
new ones like the Cinemascope Western thrived.

Nothing like this happens right now. The movie theatres have the same whinning tone that we heard from the recording industry for years. They seem equally unable to adopt. Media habbits are changing. Games, DVDs, Internet are booming.

Just like the recording industry the Theatres blame piracy for their demise. Which is the classical looser argument. It’s not going anywhere. It does not help to search your audience for camcorders.

Theatres would have a chance though: They could make movie going an experience. Something that is fun and cool. With bad projection, bad seats and dirty theatres you will loose against any big screen TV. If movie theatres don’t make the show an event again, then they will go away. With the advent of color TVs in the early 70s many cinemas in Europe started showing porn in their struggle. I don’t think that this strategy would help US theatres right now.

If (young) people would start dressing up to go out and to the movies then theatres would have a market that nobody could take away from them. People want to celebrate an evening. Current multiplex generic mall type popcorn outlets are not the right offering for this.

Air France // inflight entertainment

daily life marketing

Flew with Air France from Boston to Paris. I wasn’t a fan before, but this time the food was actually allright. Maybe 30 Atlantic crossings with KLM created a “oh – please – no – nothing – thanks” reflex whenever somebody asks me “chicken or pasta”.

The A340 had an ok inflight entertainment with a medium choice. My current ranking of inflight entertainment options:

1. Lufhansa LAX / MUC A340
Wifi / Internet with the Boeing Connexion system
It does cost 20US$ but it is worth it. Internet on the plane, nothing can beat that.

2. KLM AMS / NY Boeing 777
Inseat Video with on demand library. Decent Selection of movies. Unfortunately
not letterboxed.

3. Airfrance BOS / CDG A340
Inseat Video. 8 movies Loop. Similar systems I saw in the mid ninetees in business class. Back then the movies were hi8 based.

4. JetBlue (only by heresay)
Cable TV including premium channels. It’s TV, but at least there is HBO from wha t I have heard. Inseat.

5. Song
Cable TV without premium channels. Inseat.

6. Inflight TV on monitors
Most have it. Usually worth avoiding.

7. Inflight domestic
Projection screen, colors and contrast are all over the map. United wanted some money
for headphones. The “Feature presentation” was a very mediocre US family movie.
The worst of the worse.

lego global differences

marketing politics

Whenever I return to Germany my kids get some gifts. My son wanted a Lego Dino Hummer, I picked one up in LA. Interesting that the US Version is featuring a shooting device where the german one has a cage. Kill or capture. That’s the Euro / US choice.

song thong bong

daily life marketing

flying song. They have baby colored plastic utensils, colorful plastic seats, and the TV in front of your nose. 24 channels of not even basic cable channel line up. No HBO nor Showtime. The aspect ratio on those LCDs is not 4:3 so everything is squeezed and everybody looks real fat. Movies on demand are five dollars, the soso turkey sandwich is 8. Not much more choice on the menu. I remember ads with sushi. There are supposed to be 1600 mp3 that you can add to a playlist. The interface for this is beyond dismal, and the music choice looks rather dull. at best. NWA says you can not collect miles on ‘Song’. So far the general song impression.

My specific one was even more horrible:
The flight was supposed to leave at 10:30am, we entered the plane at 4:30pm and took off an hour later. During those 6 hours they pushed the departure time hourly and requested that we stay at the gate. In the first 3 hours
I had once the opportunity to get a drink served, despite the decimated passenger count of forty people. All that nice marketing money: Down the drain. Song simply sucks. Just in different plastic colors.
When I got to get a drink myself I realized why the flight attendants never showed up: I found them both being maniacally engaged in a minesweeper/tetris like game that they must have discovered on their iPaqs. Those Song had given them to process all those food purchases.

easy

daily life marketing

Watching commercials: ‘easy’ is a very prominent word these days. Maybe stuff becomes too complicated for the average consumer so that now things need to be ‘easy’.

fony sony

internet marketing

Let’s call Sony a brand in motion

how news is made

internet marketing media

Boingboing I didn’t like as much as I used to for various reasons lately. But they score for publishing this.

And no, it’s not about the recently discovered efforts of the US Army to teach those Iraqi’s a lesson in media and democracy.

generation @

communication internet marketing media

Business Week writes about MySpace and the likes. The article is better than the usual hype-treadmill-word-boilups that you can read when people from traditional media try to get a handle on yet another internet base phenomen. They write that 15 to 18 year olds spend six and a half hours a day with any form of visual media on CRT/LCD sccreens: the big 3 TV, games and internet. When I was that age, we spend that much time having sex. Probably only on three or four of the 1424 days that you have between fifteen and eighteen. The rest of time we tried to get there. I have never looked at mySpace but I suspect that the basic motivations in the lifes of teenagers have not changed that much. They are so basic that they are not worth mentioning I guess. Or, maybe, times really have changed?

Well Murdoch payed almost half a billion dollars for MySpace. Better than twenty bugs on friendster. Which one of the things I liked about this article: It does not only cite events that supports one underlying current. Friendster tanked. They still mention it, even though this would not fit into the rosy ‘social networking’ boom picture that they paint otherwise.

p&g allegdedly started a social network around a scent or spray. No, really. They spent some money on that. The really sad part about that is, that those responsible probably still occupy their corner office, despite the fact that they burned millions on a project that was as viable as, well, hm. I really tried to come up with something that would be as stupid. Couldn’t find anything.

crowds

communication marketing technology

Don’t tell George, but you can create masses of people in the computer. Pretty easy:

Massive is a software that will generate crowds for you.

Of those commecial I really only like the this PSA . Otherwise it appears as if digital crowd duplication is this years ‘frozen moment’. A visual effect that is nice at first, but if not backed up with content or meaning it becomes a yawning experience as long as it serves a replacement for an original idea.

In a supportive role it certainly can save some money by replacin lots of people.

The Carlton ad is alright as well. Carmina Burana. Like in the late eighties. But that one I have seen too often. It’s made it’s rounds.

The Aids PSA reminded me of another PSA. That one did not use Massive.