Andy Boyer

Author: Andy Boyer

  • Walk Now, for Cure Autism Now

    This Saturday, the people from Cure Autism Now are hosting ‘Walk Now" at the University of Washington.  Autism attacks more children at a faster rate than any other disorder out there today, and Cure Autism Now is singularly focused on finding cures and treatments.

    Autism suffers an invisibilty issue at times, because parents with Autistic parents are often confined to their home and long therapy sessions.  Current treatments can run as much as $90k a year, with many not covered by insurance who call them "Experimental," so think about how much spare time you would have trying to make $200k a year and care for an autistic child at the same time.

    Anyway, Walk Now is a great event and gives you a sense about the real effect of Autism.  You can get more info at the Web site, or just show up at the UW this weekend. 

  • Evil Evil Marketing

    I am honestly offended when people have negative things to say about marketing people.  When done well, marketing campaigns bring joy and deliver products to people who genuinely want them.

    Who among us have not been uplifted by ads such like the Geico Cavemen, Bud Light Real Men of Genius, Lite Beer’s Men of the Square Table, any of the iPod ads, and the Mac vs PC campaigns?  This is why Marketing is a great profession.

    Then there are the other marketers.  The scumbags, the scourge, the absolute low-lifes. 

    if you’ve known me for any time at all, you know that for 6 or 7 years, I have placed Zango/180 Solutions on the very pedestal of scumbag marketing.  For the life of me, I cannot figure out how anyone can continue to fund these guys.  I thought they would live at the top of my list forever.

    But now, we have a new winner.

    Celebrity Calculator is the lowest of the low.  The most despicable form of bait and switch marketing ever to combine itself with a mobile subscription service that I can only assume is almost impossible to get out of.  I won’t even give you a straight link to their site because it will help their Page Rank.  But copy and paste http://www.whichcelebrityami.com/ into your browser.

    This site is obviously targeted at teens who don’t know any better.  All of the legalese is below the fold.  If the teen fills out all the survey questions, and enters their phone number, then they are automatically signed up for a $20/month bill from these scumbags.   

    This is worse than slimy.  It’s just gruesomely ugly.  I wish these guys ran ads on Google, so I could click on them all day long and run their ad budget into the ground.  But all I can do is tell you about these vermin.  Maybe you can come up with a way to punish them. 

     

     

  • Do You Need Cable Anymore?

    So, like everyone lese in the blogosphere, I wanted to make sure I passed along the news that Joost had finally come out of hiding and was in a public beta.  If you don’t know, Joost is the new venture from the guys who built Kazaa and Skype.  It’s a real attempt at "TV on the Internet."   But, I wanted a different angle, so I’ve been waiting a few days as I figured it out.

    Well, after scratching my brain a while, I believe Joost may be the straw that allows me to ask this question. "Do you need cable TV anymore?" 

    Let’s think about what I would watch on my Cable TV:

    1) News: Realistically, I can read online everything I need to know.  And every story that matters generally has a local or national feed I can watch.

    2) Live Sports: I may not be typical, but I rarely watch sports by myself.  If I care enough about it, it’s generally a social event.  So, it sucks that I can’t host a party for the Seahawks game, but I certainly can find a place to watch it.

    3) SportsCenter:  So far, this is not replicable online.  Score one for Cable TV.

    4) Movies: $4 for a DVD.

    5) Prime Time Shows: Many are now available online the week they air (or the week after). Since my TV Drama and SitCom watching has already shifted from "Live" to "Tivo," waiting a week isn’t a big deal.  

    So now let’s do a dollar for dollar comparison.  For my $70 per month to Comcast, I would probably let the news run about 40 hours in the background, catch 2 or 3 movies, watch about 4-8 hours of Tivo’d material and catch a few episodes of Sportscenter.   Without Cable, I lose out on the background news, am forced to the Video store for movies, have to go to a bar to watch the MLB playoffs, and have my selection of sitcoms and dramas cut down by some percentage, unless I want to buy them from iTunes.  It really probably comes out a wash.

    So is Cable dead? No, of course not.  It’s a wash, not a landslide.  And I’m probably atypical.  But the fact that it’s a wash should be somewhat scary to Cable companies.  Which is why this whole Net Neutrality thing becomes an important issue for us to keep an eye on.  The Cable guys aren’t dumb, and they aren’t going to just let $70/month from 100 million households walk out the door.  But that’s a different topic.

  • Check out Widget Bucks

    I’m going to give a big ol’ plug to my friends over at mpire, and congratulate them on the launch of Widget Bucks.  Here’s the straight skinny from one of their promotional emails:

    Are you earning $2 – $15 CPM on your current ads? Do you wish you had more control over the type of content being displayed on your site? Are CPA ads frustrating because you can’t control if a user actually does make a purchase?

    After years of dealing with ad networks, we saw too many ads that sucked and networks paying too low of CPM’s to effectively monetize people’s sites, we decided to do something about it. We’re proud to announce the launch of WidgetBucks.com a shopping ad network. With our widgets displaying contextual product offers in an engaging format, we’re seeing $3-6+ CPM on thousands of sites.

    Today we have made our beta available for you to try it for yourself and start earning more money. Configuring the widget for your site is quick and easy and you’ll see immediate results.

    I will be playing with Widget Bucks tonight here on AndyBoyer.com, and we’ll also be testing it on MyElectionChoices.com.

  • New Site for the Blog Roll – Sports Economist

    I just stumbled across The Sports Economist, a collection of business related sports stories.  Seemed like a good one to add to the blogroll.

    http://thesportseconomist.com/ 

  • A Plug for Proper Direct Marketing

    I sign up for a lot of things to check them out, so I’m on a ton of mailing lists.  I’m not complaining, because it certainly doesn’t take me very long to zap through my inbox and delete 25 emails from Shutterfly, Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, Art.com, etc… who obviously have a spreadsheet that says, "If we send 1 million emails per week, 10,000 people will open them and 100 will buy something."  Such is the world of anonymously blasting your email base.

    But today I got an email from the folks at Lumosity, a "brain games" site I wrote briefly about a few months back.  I had forgotten about them.  They sit in my favorites bar, but the link is dusty from lack of use.  So getting an email from them was an actual pleasure.  I *wanted* to read that email because I had forgotten about them. And they had new things to tell me, so I appreciated hearing them. 

    So here’s a lesson to take from everyday life and apply to Direct Marketing. "Don’t talk unless you have something to say."  After all, it’s free to talk too, but you rarely see people coming up out of the blue to start a conversation about nothing with you.  And "Special 20% off sale" is not something to say. "New package discounts to Fiji" does not count as something to say either.  Lumosity’s message was, "You joined our beta program, now we have new games for your brain, do you want to check them out?" That counts as news in my book.  Now if they hit me every week about their newest game, they’ll go in the "Annoying yet not Spam category."  But for now, they get a plug.

  • Targeting the Young (and Single?) Voter

    Young crowds, a charasmatic performer, a lot of hype, affluent people – it has all the makings of an event or concert designed to drive single people to a bar or show. 

    But this is not a bar promotion, it’s a polical event.

    If you believe the New York Daily News, there are more than a few undertones from the Barack Obama campaign team that Obama rallies have become the new *it* scene for young single people tired of the bar scene, office romance or match.com.

    According to the article, "Like-minded city singles are looking to tonight’s Barack Obama fund-raiser as more than just a politically charged soiree: It’ll be a raging pickup scene."

    With a web site featuring social networking (complete with photos), events that seem to purposely weed out the old and stodgy, and a candidate that can almost be described as "hip and cool," it’s hard to think this is an accident.  It seems like the campaign team developed a smart strategy of, "Smart single people don’t have a great outlet for meeting other smart single people.  Let’s have our campaign be their meeting place." 

    If it works, it won’t be the first time someone used sex to sell a product, but it might be the first time it was done for a political campaign.

  • Things To Expect When You Do A Satellite TV Interview

    So, I thought I’d throw a few tips out there for any of you about to do a satellite TV interview.  This is all based on the half hour I spent yesterday, shooting at KCPQ 13 in Seattle for a interview with Orlando TV station WOFL Fox 35.

    1) You might expect that they will take you to a closed door studio, where you have plenty of privacy in order to make you feel more comfortable and less nervous.  Not so much.  Plan on having a camera and a backdrop situated in the middle of a bustling newsroom, where no one is actually paying attention to you, but they all can hear every word you say.

    2) I brought about 7 shirts, 4 ties and 3 jackets so that I could get advice on the best color combo.  Don’t expect much more than, "Don’t wear white," and "I like the blue one." 

    3) There will be a camera pointing at you, and a monitor as well, so you will be tempted to use this monitor as a mirror, since you can see yourself.  Except, it’s not a mirror, it’s a monitor, so everything is in reverse.  If your tie is off a little to the right in the monitor, and you do the natural thing and move it to the left, all you have done is basically take your tie halfway off your neck.  So now you must start over.   

    4) Most importantly, when you are there to shoot in a 15 minute "window," if it is running late, start figuring out who needs to get something fixed.  Our window got cut short because we started late due to a technical issue that each station thought the other one was fixing.  So, just be aware that 15 minutes means 15 minutes, but only if you start on time.

    5) Don’t fidget.  I haven’t seen the tape yet, but apparently I slowly drifted my chair a few inches to the right every minute or so.  So by the end of the shoot I had drifted pretty significantly off center.  It probably won’t be noticed, but try to sit still.

    6) It’s a little weird when you can’t see the guy asking the questions but he can see you.  But not nearly as weird as the realization that you are talking to a camera pointed at Orlando, and even though they can all hear youir answers, no one else in the Seattle newsroom klnows what you are being asked.

    7) Prepare an opening answer, and nail it.  Then, no matter what the first question is, answer it with your opening statement.  That makes sure all your talking points get across.  If they need to, they’ll go back and edit the question so it sounds more relevant, but chance are they won’t even notice. 

    Ok, so now I’m officially a media consultant.  I’ll fire up the WOFL-TV url when the story gets posted.  Thanks to WOFL-TV anchor and old friend Cale Ramaker for the chance to embarass myself, I mean promote MyElectionChoices.com. 

  • Whoops Marketing, or “Watch Your Acronyms”

    Seattle just got a Trolley.  Excellent news.  The Trolley will run down South Lake Union. And so imagine the guy painting the acronym on the side of car.  Bay Area Rapid Transit = "Bart";  South Lake Union Trolley =

    Uh oh.  "Uh boss, can I ask you a quick question?"

    So now we have a street car instead.  SLUSC.  Not really much better….. If it was shortened to Lake Union Street Car (LUSC), you could pronounce it "Lucy." Any other ideas?

  • User Experience Vs Revenue in a Socially Networked World

    So, once you take out porn and gambling, no Intenet industry is as profoitable as Fantasy Sports.  In fact, you can make a pretty legitimate argument that no industry was helped by the Internet more than Fantasy Sports Leagues.  I mean, people were always going to buy books, and go to garage sales, but were they really going to drop $100 on Fantasy Football?

    So now all the major sports players have built established fantasy leagues, and it’s interesting how it’s evolved.  Since people play in multiple leagues with different groups of friends, and different league "commissioners" who set the whole thing up, there’s not really an easy way to establish brand loyalty.  I’m going to choose to play in whatever league my friend Matt sets up, not Yahoo or Sportsline.

    But immediately, people can email friends about who i shaving a better experience.  Some sites, like Sportsline, give away everythng for free, including real time scoring.  I will happily recommend Sportsline to my friends.  But over at Yahoo, they want to charge a few bucks for everything.  The user functionality is such that my Sportsline league gets more attention.

    How do you balance this as a Product Manager?  Do you chase down more transaction revenue, like Yahoo, or do you give away the store and have more ads and sponsored content areas, like Sportsline.  (I can’t remember what ESPN does.) 

    So from a marketing perspective how do you decide?  Is Fantasy Sports a commodity that is simply best for generating eyeballs and sticky customers?  Or is a powerful transactional revenue driver?