A friend of a friend of mine has just received an invoice for £7,000 from Getty Images for the unlicensed use of one of their photographs on his website. Ouch! For a while now, the bigger picture agencies such as Getty, Jupiter Media and Corbis have been marking their copyright material with code numbers which …
Category: Recent Posts
Online Social Networking – for Business
How can creative entrepreneurs benefit from using social networking systems such as MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, del.icio.us, Second Life – and others? Leanda Ryan is the director of Leanda Ryan Graphic Design, in Manchester, UK. Her story is an interesting one: “Flickr was the first service I signed up for 2005. I posted a …
The Message and Medium must be in harmony
The message must be right for the medium – and vice versa. The message and the medium must be in harmony. The “3 Ms of Marketing” are the Market, the Message and the Medium (in that order!). In other words, firstly be clear about the Market you are targeting, secondly decide the precise message for …
Your Creative Business Plan
Let’s make a distinction between planning for a successful creative business and ‘writing a business plan’. The two are not necessarily the same. In my own experience, many people write business plans purely because they are a requirement of investors or funders. These business plans tend to be written without conviction and are then quickly …
Innovating for the ‘Base of the Pyramid’
TÉLO is the first public telephone especially designed for public transport vehicles. Using a card for payment, millions of people using public transport are already using the phone on buses, trains and underground transport networks. Founded in August 2004, by Paulo Lerner and André Averbug, Brazilian company PV Inova (Public Vehicular Innovations) invented the system …
Co-opetition – friendly competition
Combining traditional Vietnamese fine art with pioneering technology has created success for VietnamArtist.com, a virtual online gallery based in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). Tran Thi Anh Vu (pictured, right), an art gallery proprietor, set up VietnamArtsist.com in 1999, seizing the opportunities offered by e-commerce to develop her business. She engaged the services of an …
Leading Creative People
“We say it’s like herding cats!” was a comment about leading and managing creative people when I was a guest speaker at the Munich meeting of MAGNET – the Marketing and Advertising Global Network. My presentation to the owners of advertising agencies from around the world was on the subject of Leadership. One aspect they …
Ideas don’t make you rich
“Ideas don’t make you rich. The correct execution of ideas does.” So says Felix Dennis, poet, owner of Dennis Publishing, and one of the wealthiest self-made entrepreneurs in Britain. I met him several years ago when he gave generously to support a project I helped with at the National Library for the Blind, though he …
Viral Marketing Video
One of the subjects discussed at the meeting of the Marketing and Advertising Global Network (MAGNET) in Munich recently was viral marketing. I was there as a guest speaker and one of the other presentations was from Gabriel Szapiro, whose Paris agency Saphir also specialises in marketing – especially permission marketing and viral marketing. He …
Let’s license works like George Lucas
We can devise business models in the creative industries by learning how to license works of creativity profitably, following the example of George Lucas – and a self-employed commercial illustrator in a small city in Brazil. In this way a business can be devised to transform the owner from a creative labourer to a true …