Andy Boyer

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Category: Business (Page 21 of 24)

Ripple TV, and the Emergence of Localized Advertising

August 13, 2007 /

So I have to admit being very intrigued by a company called Ripple TV.  You may have seen Ripple at a neighborhood Tully’s.  The concept is pretty straightforward – a typical High Def TV, displaying canned news and sports information from CBS and ESPN.  But the catch is, the screens are designed to run locally targeted ads that small business can create and upload themselves.

Or to put it another way, the two major pains about advertising are the creative costs and the inability to target effectively.  Ripple TV solves both these problems.  I get to choose which Tully’s my ad runs, and they provide me the tools to create the ad on the fly and upload it.

"Ripple has partnered with many of the World’s leading retail brands to provide a powerful in-store digital media experience that keeps their customers engaged, entertained and informed. Ripple’s user experience is customized specifically for each distribution partner, providing a truly custom experience that perfectly supports the brand, demographic, geographic and user experience requirements of each partner. Ripple keeps your customers engaged with the very latest news, financial information, sports, weather, traffic, local information and entertainment programming from the World’s leading content brands." 

So, the only initial limitation, which I’m sure will be solved soon, is that they have relatively few major partners (Tully’s), and so the audience is not very diverse.  But, that’s hardly a criticism.  Instead, I applaud Ripple for landing such a great anchor partner.  That really is quite a coup.

I don’t this affects agencies at all, because if anything the Ripple system grows the advertising pie, catering to small business owners that agencies didn’t really care about anyway. And the small business owner only needs a rudimentary sense of style and analytical skills to run a test ad for $75 in a neighborhood, so the cost to get started is minimal.

Fascinating concept, and I hope it does well. 

 

Politics 2.0

July 11, 2007 /

So, Hillary Clinton received much press and fanfare for allowing her supporters to nominate what should be her campaign song.  The theme of that seemed to be, "Hillary really connects with her supporters."

So then what do you say about Mike Gravel, a much smaller budgeted candidate who is really using User Generated Content as a way to get his marketing materials produced.  From his MySpace blast:

Please send your Gravel 2008 Flyers, Banners, and Graphics to submissions@gravel2008.us. We will be posting the best ones on the main website for others to use. Please feel free to be as creative as you’d like. Thanks to all of you for your support!

Maybe the Internet can equal the playing field a little.
 

Launch of MyElectionChoices.com

July 9, 2007 /

MyElectionChoices.com%20logo.gifAfter a few weeks of tinkering, we’ve launched the 1.0 version of MyElectionChoices.com.  The site will continue to evolve, but in its current form, visitors get to choose topics they care about in regards to the 2008 Presidential Election, then select positions they agree with from various candidates. 

At the end of answering a few topics, visitors then find out which Presidential Candidates they share political views with.  Since we have statements from 17 candidates, there’s bound to be a couple people that you’ve never heard of.

There are still plenty of improvements to be made, but give it a whirl and let me know what you think.  There’s a Groups option at the end to make it easy to invite others and compare how certain groups compare aggregately to National Averages.  And there’s a survey at the end as well that will help us shape the constant revisions.

Inspiration from an Unlikely Millionaire

June 28, 2007 /

If you had an Internet connection at work in 2000 or 2001, one of your colleagues forwarded you a link to HotorNot.com.  You played with it for somewhere between 5 minutes and 8 hours, helplessly clicking on the neverending stream of pictures of people who wanted you to judge how good looking they were.

About 1% of this crowd probably wondered if the founders were making any money, or if they simply launched the site for fun.  Well it turns out they were making GOBS of money.  Giant trucks were backing up and dumping bars of platinum into their backyard.  In a nutshell, it proved that a simple idea, at the right time, with the right people, was infinitely more powerful, satisfying and worthwile than simply attending weekly staff meetings.

Well, if you read techCrunch you probably already wandered over to this blog post from the CEO of HotorNot. If you have ever considered running off and starting your own idea, here are some wise words to help get you moving in that direction.

Supreme Court Ends 96-Year-Old Ban on Price Floors

June 28, 2007 /

I haven’t seen too much of this floating around the blogosphere yet, and maybe it’s my paranoia kicking in, but this morning’s Supreme Court ruling piques my curiosity.

From the New York Times: The Supreme Court on Thursday abandoned a 96-year-old ban on manufacturers and retailers setting price floors for products.  In a 5-4 decision, the court said that agreements on minimum prices are legal if they promote competition.  The ruling means that accusations of minimum pricing pacts will be evaluated case by case.  The Supreme Court declared in 1911 that minimum pricing agreements violate federal antitrust law.  Supporters said that allowing minimum price floors would hurt upstart discounters and Internet resellers seeking to offer new, cheaper ways to distribute products.

So, why is this interesting to the Internet and Ecommerce world?

What’s unclear from the article is how far the price floor extends.  Let’s use Harry Potter books as an example.  Even though the franchise sells more books than anything else being published, retailers actually don’t make that much profit on the sales.  Thanks to major chains like Wal-Mart and Amazon selling the book at discount as a way to get people into their stores, the retail price hovers below other books. 

But now it seems that the Harry Potter Publisher could set a minimum price if it wanted, effectively stopping Amazon from pricing below the competition.

This has further reaching effects if you start taking into account all the Amazon Associates and Ebay sellers out there.  These companies have done a great job creating as close to a free market economy as you can get.  Now, the law looks like it’s going to allow the stifling of that free market, putting the power back into the hands of producers, who can now decide the prices before they even reach the market.  And I don’t have any idea how this affects the secondary market for items.

Another example is a widget system like Mpire.com whose whole reason for being is to help consumers find the lowest prices on items being sold on the web.  Well, if this "lowest" price is being set by the manufacturer, how does any small discount retailer make any noise to grab a customer?

Unless I’m reading into this wrong, this appears to be a strike at Internet Ecommerce.  Manufacturers don’t like when there is little surplus in their supply and demand graph, and have now artificially manipulated the system to get that surplus back.  I’m sure there will be more to come on this.

TixMob Launches in UK – New Way to Buy Tickets for Events

June 19, 2007 /

An old friend from Manchester sent me news about his company, Tixmob, this morning. Here’s a synopsis:

http://www.tixmob.com/ Is a new concert ticket agent, just like Ticketmaster and Seetickets we work directly with concert promoters and event organizers to sell tickets on their behalf.   Unlike Ticketmaster, Seetickets etc.. A Tixmob ticket is paperless. Upon purchase it is sent to your mobile phone in the form of an sms message with a bar code. When you get to the event the ticket taker will scan the ticket with our scanner to prove it’s valid and it hasn’t already been used. So ticket touting/scalping is more difficult, you’ll probably get in faster since, for a while at least, we’ll usually have our own que.   A big complaint people have about ticket agents like Ticketmaster is all the crazy fees they stick on top of the ticket price. Generally Tixmob will have a booking of 10% of the tickets face value. As some extra incentive for people to try the product, we’ve reduced booking fees on our first few events to as low as 2%.

While it appers to be UK based for now, the US possibilities seem far reaching as well.  I would assume sports teams would love the anti-scalping features.  Anyway, something to keep an eye on.

Lumosity – Something to Play With

June 14, 2007 /

I will take the leap and say that a small company called Lumosity falls into the world of Marketing.  For, positioned one way, Lumosity would simply be entry #3.2 billion in the category of "Ways to kill time online when you should be productive."

But instead, starting with the tagline of "Reclaim Your Brain" and extending through the core messaging, Lumosity is much more than a nice looking version of any casual games portal.  According to their literature, I will actually get SMARTER by spending time on their site. The multi-layered exercises and puzzles are designed to actively stimulate regions of my brain that have gone neglected, enriching my overall intellectual capabilities. 

So far, I don’t feel smarter, but it has kicked my paranoia level to an all-time high, as I wonder if I am simply a pawn in someone’s giant marketing copywriting experiment.  But, I have succumbed to sucker status, and the exercises are fun, so we’ll see where this gets me. 

When You Start to Believe We Are Not Surrounded By Lunatics, Please Refer Back Here

June 10, 2007 /

I’ve been doing some political research for a little project that I hope will launch very soon.

But it’s given be the opportuity to read blogs written by supporters of particular candidates.  And every once in a while, I run across someone so out of touch with reality, you have to think they could bring down an entire campaign just by being a loud, lunatic supporter.  If you were a Brownback campiagn strategist, how do you approach this nut job and say, "Look, we appreciate the support, but Shut the Hell up!  You’re killing us!"

Here’s the loony in question.  Never have a I seen such a well thought-out and researched blog post that contains such ridiculous conclusions from the data in question.

This Company has a Marketing Budget

June 6, 2007 /

Because the blog entries here revolve around marketing, with a little start-up stuff thrown in, I’m pleased to find what could be the stupidest product of all time.  But these guys not only have a marketing budget – enough to advertise in Google Mail – but a Google Page Rank of 4, making their dumb product’s web site 100 times more important than this blog.

Here’s the tagline:

"The Safe Banana Guard will fit most bananas & give protection during your journey."

Yes, apparently there is a market for a product that’s specific job is to protect a banana.  And, the company is funded.

Not only does this product exist, it comes in 9 colors.  Because this is a family blog, you will notice that I am refraining from any jokes that could easily float their way to the surface from viewing the order page.  It’s not for a lack of material or imagination, I promise.  Just sometimes the fruit is so low hanging, you want to let someone else pick the tree.

I think possibly my favorite part is that they have a section called, "Testimonials."   Come on… Seriously?  Testimonials?  Doesn’t something called ‘SafeBanana" speak for itself at this point?  Do you really need to read a quote like, "Dude, this thing like totally protected my banana.  I know it’s called SafeBanana, but I didn’t see how it could be possible.  Now, I’m a believer."

Anyway, as a public service to all you people who have suffered and survived banana trauma, I bring you SafeBanana.  Please use responsibly.

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