Thanks to Phil Birchenall for sending me this article about the Flip Video camcorder. It’s about a simple and inexpensive camcorder that’s “good enough” rather than being “the best”. It has just the right range of features to be usable and useful, at a reasonable price. It’s opened up a new market of ‘ordinary’ users, …
Category: Marketing
CCTV = PR
Manchester band The Get Out Clause used CCTV as PR – and then were publicised on Sky News! With the help of public relations expert Liam Walsh of AskMe PR, the band performed under Closed Circuit TV cameras in various places around Manchester – then demanded the footage from the CCTV operators under the Freedom …
Cate Blanchett ‘Sparkles’
Congratulations to one of my client creative businesses, Sparkle Media on their successful projects in Australia ! The visual effects and animation company has recently worked in Australia with Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett and Joseph Fiennes, producing video footage for the multimedia theatrical performance Minutes of a Separation. Sparkle Media also worked for Reebok whilst …
The Price of a Bed
Would you pay 50,620 Euros for a bed? (That’s over £40,000 GBP, about $78,000 USD) Probably not. But apparently some people do. Why? What’s going on here? I’m fascinated by pricing strategies and run workshops for creative businesses on the subject. There are different ways to decide on your pricing strategy and I’ll be writing …
Paul Arden RIP
Advertising genius Paul Arden died on 02 April 2008. Some of his most influential work was done while he was executive creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi for 14 years. Paul was responsible for advertising campaigns for clients such as The Independent (“The Independent. It is – are you?”), Toyota (“The car in front is …
Freemium: Give it away free!
Creative entrepreneurs often ask me how they can make money from their music or computer games when MP3 files and software is so easy to copy. One answer is to use the fact that people copy your stuff to change a threat into an opportunity. Banda Calypso’s music is copied onto CDs and sold on …
1,000 True Fans
Instead of dreaming about having millions of fans, nurture one thousand ‘true fans’. That’s the advice for creative individuals from guru Kevin Kelly. He writes: “A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 …
Selling stories (“We don’t sell beer…”)
The Duvel Cafe in Stockholm is a bar which sells a range of Belgian beers. They are tasty, strong and expensive (compared to England). I was fascinated by the beer glasses as much as the beer itself, so I took a couple of photos. Part of what I was buying and enjoying was the packaging …
Selling cheese: an error of marketing strategy
An incident in the the BBC TV programme ‘The Apprentice’ provided an excellent example of a marketing error. It also demonstrated how the term ‘marketing’ is often misunderstood and used simply to mean ‘advertising’ or ‘selling’. In fact the marketing process goes much deeper than selling. In one episode, Sir Alan Sugar sent his teams …
Telling Africa’s Story to the World
Telling Africa’s story from Africans’ point of view is the mission of Africa Media Online, the agency representing African media professionals to the global market. “In the ‘information society’, if we are to create some semblance of global information democracy, it is important that Africans are heard from their perspective,” says Africa Media Online’s David …