Category archive: Podcasting

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Social media as advertising replacement/supplement

The Center for Media Research has some interesting figures on ad spend on blogs, podcasts, and RSS. Audience fragmentation and demographic fervor are two big drivers for advertisers who are exploring these new areas.

What the research doesn’t address is how many companies are looking beyond the traditional ad placement model and at using social media as a way to reach key audiences without actually advertising. Providing valuable information and services to potential customers and existing customers can be much more effective than merely flashing an ad in front of their faces. (An exception to this, of course, is search engine marketing, where searchers are actively self-identifying themselves as looking for your products and services. The search engine results they receive constitute that valuable information.)

To that end, I see that British tabloid The Sun is now offering RSS feeds of their site content. Are you going to wait for even the white van man to turn into a subscription fiend - podcasts on his iPod, RSS feeds in his Bloglines account - before you start looking into these engaging forms of marketing? (Hint: Many of the white van men already are using social media.)

Thursday, April 06, 2006

"Narrowcasting"

Chris Yeh blogs on Adventures in Capitalism about a crazy-brilliant niche marketing scheme dreampt up by a women’s soccer team in New Jersey:

The New Jersey Wildcats (a women’s soccer team) has realized that they can use today’s new technologies to launch their own broadcast network, essentially for free. They’re uploading broadcasts of their games, including embedded commercials, to Google Video. Their fans get a notice whenever a new broadcast is available, and can watch on their PCs or iPods at their convenience.

This is brilliant. They already have a brand and a strong audience, and this scheme allows them leverage both those assets at no cost to generate a new and potentially exciting revenue stream.

The team has lots of name stars, and lots of girls aged 6-20 have iPods. And little girls who love soccer also have soccer moms. And soccer moms have disposable income. Get all the fascinating details at Adventures in Capitalism.

Saturday, March 25, 2006

Woot? Woot! We say W00t!

A new entry in the category of online niche marketing--even, shall we say, novelty marketing--meet Woot!, which sells one cool electronic gadget a day, with a new item posting at midnight Central US time. If you don’t buy it by the following midnight, it’s gone for good. And if it sells out before the following midnight, you turn into a pumpkin.

What Woot! lacks in inventory it makes up for in personality, with Weird Al-style podcasts for each item and design contests--recently readers were invited to re-design the logo of a joystick manufacturer, the results being rather ribald--and shockingly professional. If you can inspire a customer to spend several hours in PhotoShop just to send you a visual pun based on your product, I’d say you’re having quite a conversation.

Woot! has also turned their lack of customer service into a selling point, by having a sense of humor and making you, the customer, feel like you’re too sophisticated and witty to need a bunch of hand-holding anyway. From the Woot! FAQ (where the short answer to almost every question is “No."):

Will I receive customer support like I’m used to?
No. Well, not really. If you buy something you don’t end up liking or you have what marketing people call “buyer’s remorse,” sell it on eBay. It’s likely you’ll make money doing this and save everyone a hassle. If the item doesn’t work, find out what you’re doing wrong. Yes, we know you think the item is bad, but it’s probably your fault....

The lesson here is that in an online marketplace, constraints and limitations may actually give you your differentiating edge, if you’re clever and brave enough to exploit them.

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

BMW's Audio Books: Beyond Product Placement

I like to listen to moody, noirish mysery novels while driving around in the Southern California sunshine. It’s a sweet-and-sour thing. Never gets stale for me.

Which is why I was intrigued recently when I stumbled upon BMW Audio Books. The company has commissioned original fiction by some unexpected authors, and to judge by a first listen, they’ve done it right.

This weekend I downloaded and listened to James Flint’s Outer Limits-ish Master of the Storm this weekend while winding up the Pacific Coast Highway. The production was impeccable, far better quality than most of the books I’ve purchased on Audible.com, the story performed (rather than merely read) by Forbes Masson, a Shakespeare-trained Scotsman with an intoxicating, single-malt voice. Flint’s work has a distinctive style, and like the other authors BMW has engaged, he has enough edge-dwelling credibility that there’s precious little chance anyone will mistake him for a shill… even though the story does take place in a car--a BMW.

The presence of the car in the Storm has a nudge-nudge, wink-wink quality to it, and little to do with the story itself. But any expectation that the story would be advertorial in nature is quickly dispelled as the protagonist gets behind the wheel after one champagne too many and plows into an innocent bystander. Not a particularly safe plot point for a car company, but a turn that had the effect of instantly earning my trust and attention.

When you’re a successful luxury brand, your job is to keep your profile up and not lose your cool--all the while acting like you have nothing to prove to anyone.

That’s not an easy prescription to follow. Just ask Jaguar, which, under Ford, ran a series of banal suburbanite ads that left one wondering whether the product were a car or a washer-dryer set. Sales of the Tauruses--er, Jags--predictably suck.

Publishing slightly off-color, risk-taking fiction is a brilliantly safe way of owning the edge, I think. Unless you start slandering mullahs, literary fiction isn’t likely to upset anyone, even pretty out-there fiction. And it’s an art form in serious need of patronage.