Category — Media

Six years ago, a printmaker and a web developer teamed up to enable anyone with a story to capture it in a 32-page sketchbook, reports Liz Robbins in the New York Times (5/13/12). What Steven Peterman and Shane Zucker started then in Atlanta is today a collection of some “12,500 sketchbooks from more than 130 countries,” housed at the Brooklyn Art Library. An additional 7,502 sketchbooks “will join the permanent collection when they return from a 14-city tour, currently in Chicago and ending in Melbourne, Australia, in November.”

Anyone can participate: “For $25, any doodler, student, parent, graphic designer, architect … or would-be artist can fill a 32-page sketchbook and add it to the collection.” Located in a storefront, the Brooklyn Art Library “fits neatly on its block, an upscale artistic corridor with an architectural studio across the street from apartment lofts, an art gallery, a bar, a barbershop and a used-book store.” It’s also possible to sign up online — or simply peruse the many sketchbooks by applying for a library card, which entitles you to review two sketchbooks at a time.

“This is personal, this is someone, these are moments,” says Thanassis Petropoulos, a comic-book artist from Athens who recently checked out the collection. “It’s like you’re having coffee with your girlfriend and you’re going to do a sketch of her. When you’re done, this ends up here and someone from around the world can see moments from your life.” Thanassis hasn’t created a sketchbook himself yet, but is thinking about it. “We don’t have these kinds of things in Athens,” he says. “We don’t have a place to hang out with total strangers.” The library also sells “art supplies and vintage goods” as well as “dark chocolate bars, with custom wrappers that match the library cards, for $9.”

Maya Stein is bike riding and typewriting her way from Massachusetts to Milwaukee, reports Liz Leyden in the New York Times (5/12/12). Her inspiration is a typewriter her father kept “in the hallway between bedrooms for the family to use, an exercise in creativity that changed her life.” Her inclination is to ride her bicycle from her home in Amherst, Massachusetts to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, “where the design for the first mass-produced typewriter was developed in the 1860s. Along the way, she is delivering a manual typewriter to public spaces and inviting people to take a turn at the keys.”

As Maya explains: “I want to bring that communal hallway back … I want to make a space for collaboration and creativity, to invite people to contribute their voices to the larger story of the community we’re all in.” Her journey, which began on May 5th and coincides with her 40th birthday, is “to ride 40 miles a day, typewriter in tow, for 40 days until she reaches Milwaukee.” Her typewriter of choice is a turquoise Remington Ten Forty.

She funded her project with $16,000 raised on Kickstarter and it “is providing inspiration for her own writing, which she is doing daily at type-rider.com. “I saw a man mowing his lawn and I loved catching that moment,” says Maya. “All that I see in between my stops, that’s a treat. That’s my gift to myself.” Maya sets up in front of shops or cafes, her typewriter alongside a chalkboard that beckons, “Write Yourself Here.” She doesn’t try to sell anyone on taking a turn, but rather just waits to see what happens. Some folks prefer to talk to Maya instead, which is fine with her. “There are moments you cannot capture on paper,” she says.

Turning brand names into verbs or vernacular “may be as important to a new company as sleek site design or a sophisticated set of algorithms,” reports Jenna Wortham in the New York Times (5/6/12). After all, we live in an age when LOL (laugh out loud) and OMG (oh my God) are defined in the Oxford English Dictionary. We don’t look things up; we Google them. We don’t call friends; we Facebook them. We don’t post photos; we Pin them. We don’t share our thoughts; we Tweet them. Twitter, in fact, has spawned an entire microsyntax (follow, @, and #hashtag) to a point where you don’t necessarily need to be a Twitter user to know what these terms mean.

“People are trying to understand what market they own in an industry that is flooded with similar companies,” says Jordan Cooper, a venture capitalist. “If you can take a piece of language that is commonly used and be associated with it, it’s a very powerful way to say you’re leading in your space.” Andrew Kortina and Iqram Magdon-Ismail say they were acutely aware of this when they named Venmo, their payments company. “We were playing with different root words for buying, selling, paying,” says Andrew. “Eventually, we were talking about Latin, tried Venmo, it was available and felt like a verb. We tried it, ‘Just venmo me for it.’ It worked. So we got it.”

The challenge is that it can be difficult to impossible to make a fabricated term stick. “It needs to feel more organic than strategic and tap into a human impulse,” says David Lee of SV Angel, an investment firm. “If something catches on, it can translate to a human behavior that becomes part of the language of the web.” Or, as Jordan puts it: “It’s not something a company can force. It happens on its own because a company has created a new behavior that has penetrated the industry.” Bing didn’t make much of an inroad against Google, for instance, while “Pinning” on Pinterest caught on easily. “When they go viral,” says Susan Etlinger of the Altimeter Group, “they’re naturally lightweight and unpretentious.”

If trust is the bedrock of a great brand, then some of today’s hottest brands seem to be built on pebbles. The latest Hub Magazine survey detected considerable doubt among readers that the online brands they know and use can be trusted with their personal information. We listed eight popular online brands — Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Twitter, Bing, Amazon, Zappos and iTunes — roughly an even mix of social media sites and e-commerce leaders. We simply asked readers to indicate whether each brand was “trustworthy” or “not trustworthy.”

Zappos and LinkedIn scored highest by far, with Zappos earning the trust of 82 percent of respondents and LinkedIn trusted by 80 percent. Amazon, at 73 percent, was next highest on the trustworthiness scale, followed by iTunes at 63 percent and Twitter at 58 percent. The other three brands were under water. Bing — the Microsoft search engine — was trusted by only 42 percent of respondents, with Google trusted by just 37 percent. Facebook fared the worst, with 82 percent of respondents saying the brand was “not trustworthy.”

On the positive side, Zappos, which recently endured a hacking incident in which user information was compromised, apparently weathered the storm because its customers love the Zappos brand of customer service. LinkedIn is trusted because it publishes only professional information (i.e., “nothing too exciting”), and has not ventured into targeted advertising. Amazon scored well primarily because its business model is premised on selling merchandise, not customer information. To the extent Amazon tracks users, most feel this is benign. “Amazon learns my book and music preferences, but I don’t feel like my personal details are being sold,” said one respondent. “Their sales would be zero if there were any security breaches,” another said.

iTunes scored perhaps a bit lower than expected, possibly because the survey coincided with news that it had allowed certain apps to collect personal information about users, despite a stated policy otherwise. Twitter is reasonably well-trusted because it imposes relatively fewer rules, allows users to remain anonymous, and generally affords more control to the user than other social-media sites. On an open-ended basis, we asked which brand was most trusted with personal information, and Amazon came out on top. Banks and various credit card companies also were frequently mentioned. As to which brand is least trusted — that would be Facebook — and yet very few said they had stopped using the site because of it. You can access complete results of our suvey here.

Sam Kopper is bringing back the Rock of Boston from an "electric green school bus" parked outside his home, reports Elizabeth Jensen in the New York Times (4/16/12). It’s a safe distance from Sam’s heyday as program director and on-air personality at free-form rock radio station WBCN-FM, a favorite of college students, among others, from 1968 until the late ’80s. Sam, himself, left the station in 1991, disillusioned as the radio business "became more corporate and consolidated." CBS acquired BCN in 1996, and killed it "in 2009 in a complicated switch to make room for a sports station." Now, CBS wants to revive the format on HD radio and has enlisted Sam and his "biodiesel-burning bus."

HD is a digital radio format, introduced in 2006 to compete against "the static-free signals of satellite radio." It is set up so that existing FM radio stations can "broadcast their original analog station on HD1, with additional space for differently formatted substations, known as HD2 and HD3." The challenge has been that listeners need to invest in "expensive new radios" to access HD, although the cost of the radios has come down and "most automakers" now offer them. "It’s the frontier-land of our industry right now," says Mark Hannon, svp of CBS Radio Boston. He’s betting that good programming will "drive the new technology, just as the 1968 WBCN prompted students to buy FM receivers."

The new BCN has some "1,500 songs as various as classic rock, reggae and country in rotation and 4,5000 in its library, far more than most commercial competitors." Sam Kopper says the station "is not a nostalgia trip," calling the approach "radio theater, the human voice put together with every other element that you can use for sound" — not only the music but "ambient street sound." He says that "radio is all about the human connection." He’s mostly promoting the station on Facebook and he’s not entirely alone: Former BCN deejay Carolyn Fox has invested $10,000 in equipment so she can transmit from her Manhattan apartment, picking up on a career she left behind ten years ago. "I saw some possibility to connect with the listener," she says.

Pandora is predicting that it can compete for ad dollars by pinpointing listeners with greater precision than traditional radio, report Ben Sisario and Tanzina Vega in the New York Times (4/16/12). "A dollar spent on Pandora is better than a dollar spent on terrestrial radio," says Tim Westergren, Pandora’s founder. His point is that, unlike traditional radio, Pandora’s internet-based service "can pinpoint listeners by age and (gender), zip code or even musical taste." Tim sees a day when "Pandora will be the top station in many cities."

The service has indeed grown rapidly. Launched in 2005, "it has gone from 45 million to 125 million registered users" over the past two years. Pandora’s revenues have also grown "from $55 million to $274 million" and last month it "streamed a billion hours of music." The one thing it doesn’t have is profitability — in no small part because Pandora’s music license requires it to pay "54 percent of its revenue" in royalties, far more than terrestrial radio must pay.

But William Feinstein of Planet Honda, a car dealership in Union, NJ, is sold on Pandora’s ability to target listeners. He says that iPhone traffic to his website has "more than tripled" since he started advertising on Pandora. "A light bulb went off," says William. "We don’t need to buy five radio stations. We can buy one." He has doubled his Pandora buy to $20,000 per month since January. Tim Castelli of Clear Channel still doesn’t see Pandora as a threat, however , mainly because it can’t provide local news, traffic, weather and chatter. "It’s a playlist generator," he says. "It does not really deliver what radio does, which is that rich, personal experience."

Every day is Cyber Monday for packaged-goods brands. By Jason Katz and Angela Edwards. Sales jumped 18 percent on Cyber Monday, according to a USA Today headline this past holiday season. Clearly, online shopping has arrived and it’s here to stay. Purchasing books and electronics online is now the norm and recent trends suggest that packaged-goods categories, with compound annual growth rates at 20 percent, are the next to explode online.

Amazon has capitalized on its first-mover advantage, featuring strong consumer value-propositions to gain market share and lock-in loyalty. In many packaged-goods categories, Amazon has more than 50 percent market share of US online sales. This poses a significant threat to traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, especially for “center store” items … read >>

Five tips for connecting with a branded app. By Richard Swain. Much research is being published around technology and emotional engagement, specifically with smartphones. For consumers, the smartphone is a ubiquitous companion that provides a gateway to the digital universe. For brands, it’s an opportunity to get closer to those consumers than ever before by way of branded apps.

Obviously, it should be personalized and easy to use, as well as work seamlessly across all devices. In addition, here are five basic tips that can help your app not only get downloaded, but be used time and again, building a stronger relationship with your customers … read >>

Social media is becoming the court of first resort in trademark disputes between entrepreneurs and corporate giants, reports Laura Petrecca in USA Today (3/13/12). Bo Muller-Moore, for instance, is locked in a dispute with Chick-fil-A. Bo has been selling “Eat More Kale” T-shirts and bumperstickers since 2001, which was fine with Chick-fil-A until Bo tried to trademark the slogan. Chick-fil-A feels that “Eat More Kale” sounds too much like “Eat Mor Chikin,” which it has been using as its ad slogan since 1995. Bo thinks this is ridiculous: “If they can produce one customer who has bought one thing from me thinking they were getting a Chick-fil-A product, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.”

Traditionally, Bo might have hired a lawyer, or simply folded up his tent if he couldn’t afford one. Instead, he keeps his nearly 9,000 Facebook followers (link) updated on his case “and urges them to sign an online petition that asks Chick-fil-A to not block his trademark application.” So far, he’s attracted 29,000 signatures. Chick-fil-A meanwhile posted its own statement on Facebook. Eric Goldman of Santa Clara University School of Law, says Facebook and other social media have “totally changed the dynamics” of trademark disputes. “People who don’t have access to mass media can get their messages out to larger audiences,” he says.

Matt Nadeau, founder of Rock Art Brewery and maker of Vermonster beer, used Facebook support to force a settlement with Hansen Beverages, makers of Monster Energy drinks. Under the terms, Hansen agreed to allow Rock Art to continue to market Vermonster as long as it didn’t line-extend into energy drinks, while Rock Art had to agree to allow Hansen to use the Monster brand if it decided to enter the beer category. But Bo Muller-Moore continues to fight on, and is now appealing to Kickstarter (link) to raise money to fund “a documentary on the trademark battle.” So far he’s attracted more than $30,000, with a goal of raising $75,000 by March 25.

How do smartphones and tablets impact purchase decisions? With countless apps downloaded daily, we know mobile is an important part of consumers’ lives. But we need to know how consumers have integrated smartphones and tablets into the shopping experience — not just for digital purchases but also in store. So, Moosylvania commissioned a study to find out how mobile usage impacts the path to purchase.

The study includes how mobile usage impacts each stage of the path to purchase, such as: Responses to advertising on smartphones and tablets; usage of mobile to research prior to purchase; use of reviews via mobile prior to purchase; mbile search while shopping in stores; QR code usage; usage of mobile to research prior to purchase; use of reviews via mobile prior to purchase; mobile search while shopping in stores; general tablet and smartphone usage; and content consumption habits using mobile. (more)