Andy Boyer

Category: Marketing

  • Facebook Jails Scrabulous, Worker Productivity Rises 4000%

    One of the most prolific time wasters on Facebook has been sent to Application jail.

    In a move that shouldn’t surprise many people, Scrabulous, the blatant rip off of the board game Scrabble, finally suffered the legal ramifications that everyone could see headed its way.  According to the report from Silicon Valley Insider:

    “Last week, Hasbro, manufacturer of the board game Scrabble, filed a
    lawsuit against developers Rajat and Jayant Agarwall, who founded the
    popular Facebook app two weeks ago. SAI’s Michael Learmonth says that a
    DMCA takedown notice likely
    ended the game’s two-year run. This is the same tactic Viacom used
    against Google’s YouTube last year.”

    Now, if a bunch of medium sized brains from Hasbro were able to sit in the same room, they would offer the developers the cash it would cost for them to redevelop the game themselves, plus some premium for every install they’ve already generated, and simply add Hasbro branding all over the place.  In my experience, while Scrabble is a tedious, obnoxiously long game for the dining room table, it is perfect for an online asynchronous world where you can take a few weeks to complete a match with a friend from across the country.  So here’s hoping someone makes sense of this whole thing before I find another similar way to waste a few minutes a day, like Chess or Risk.

  • The Oddest, Most Uninterpretable, Top 50 List Ever Created

    So, FastCompany, a publication I really enjoy, just released a Top 50 list of “Reader Favorites.”

    In their opening paragraph, they say: “You nominated companies. You rated them. You commented on them. In the
    end, we have the 50 companies that you, our readers, have chosen as the
    most innovative.”

    Now I looked through this list.  And I now have absolutely no idea how I would ever create an ad that could run in Fast Company.  Sure, there are a few companies in here that make obvious sense (like FedEx and Zipcar), and a bunch that I don’t know anything about.  But here are some questions I have:

    • How does a top 50 list of “Innovative Companies” not include Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft or Amazon? 
    • The Boston Red Sox?  Innovation?   Huh? 
    • Weber Shandwick?  A PR firm?  Interesting.

    Anyway, here’s the list:
    1. Marathon Technologies
    2. Data Robotics, Inc.
    3. Sales Spider
    4. Consorte Media
    5. YouMail
    6. Greenplum
    7. Avid Radiopharmaceuticals, Inc.
    8. Slalom Consulting
    9. Persistent Systems
    10. VBT
    11. JVKellyGroup, Inc.
    12. BlogHer
    13. Bluepulse
    14. Our Hope Place
    15. Illumina
    16. Bomgar
    17. Amerikal Products Corporation
    18. Brand Sense Partners
    19. Datran Media
    20. KACE
    21. Ovation Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
    22. Paramount Defenses Inc.
    23. GridApp Systems
    24. The Rubicon Project
    25. Varonis
    26. mSpot, Inc.
    27. Mozilla Corporation
    28. Fenway Sports Group/Boston Red Sox
    29. Operative
    30. Salesforce.com, Inc.
    31. Peanut Labs, Inc.
    32. Validus DC Systems, LLC
    33. 11i Networks Inc.
    34. Imagekind
    35. Fresco Microchip
    36. Canaan Partners
    37. Zipcar
    38. ActiveCare Network, LLC
    39. Lehigh Technologies, Inc.
    40. Citrix Systems, Inc.
    41. BDNA
    42. Allvoices.com
    43. Weber Shandwick
    44. AECOM
    45. The Progressive Group of Insurance Companies
    46. 4Home
    47. Junk my Car LLC
    48. Luminex Corporation
    49. FedEx
    50. SynthaSite

  • Geek Out With Cool Sports Technology

    So, this “marketing” web site is about as cool as it gets if you are into sports and technology.

    Supporting their Olympic effort, Nike has launched NikeLab.com, a place to see all the latest gizmos and gadgets their athletes will be using at the games.In addition to product specs, you see interviews with the actual product designer.It’s a place you could get lost for a while in, so save your viewing for the evening.

    Some technologies you may want to check out include the following:

    • Precool Vest
    • Basketball Uniforms
    • Volleyball Zesti

    • Rowing Omada

  • Real Life Deal or No Deal for the Blogosphere

    So how much are 2,200 women bloggers worth?   According to NBC, about 5 Million Bucks in Series B investment, which nets out to close to $2300 per blogger.

    The deal includes the following:

    As part of the arrangement, iVillage, Oxygen.com and BravoTV.com will feature select BlogHer content, while BlogHer’s network is expected to return the favor to varying degrees.

    Reaching out to the BlogHer Network has been a common strategy of start-ups who don’t have $5,000, much less $5,000,000 for marketing.  The "Mommy Blogger," which as a term delights and disgusts different people, is an incredibly powerful evangelist for certain product groups.  The process involved digging through the network, finding the right email address, crafting a perfect message, sending an email, and praying. If it works, you get free promotion.  if it doesn’t, you burned a few hours.

    But now it will be interesting to see what kind of influence the NBC buy-in will have on this network.  For one thing, I don’t know how much each individual blogger gets from this deal, but I assume it’s a negligble %.  It will also be interesting to see what happens to bloggers in the network if they rip on NBC programming, or promote programming of other networks.

    Regardless, it’s a nice acknowledgment that the BlogHer network has become a powerful piece of the social media matrix.   Congrats on the investment.

     

  • Creative Pricing Based on Scarcity

    So we’re going back to making this a marketing blog rather than a place for me to be mad about losing the Sonics. 

    If you read other marketing blogs, you probably have already come across this pricing strategy.  Seth Godin commeted on it, and it is an interesting concept for an online space – letting people choose how much they want to pay based on how "prestigious" they want their version of a product to be.

    In this execution, it’s t-shirts.  Pay more money to get the #100 in the set than #1.  This artifically inflates the average price of the total shirt run.  (However, I’m not sure I understand why #1 isn’t the most expensive.)

    I’m not sure how applicable that model is for mp3’s, software or anything else that you want to sell 100,000 of.  But is is similar to an industry in the UAE, where people bid on License Plate NUmbers  Here’s an excerpt from a good read:

    Soft-spoken and modestly dressed, 34-year-old Al-Mannaei says he closely controls supply, releasing low-digit plates “almost scientifically.” The result, he says, is a frenzy for even mediocre numbers. In the last two auctions, three-digit plates fetched between $123,000 and $150,000 each, more than double the prices last fall. In the 10 auctions held so far, buyers spent roughly $120 million for 900 plates; the government plans to use the money to build a new trauma hospital for traffic-accident victims.

    So I think the point is that we have a pretty untapped ability to start monkeying around with pricing models in the world of online selling.  And I haven’t seen anyone who has really nailed it yet, so there’s lots of room for good experimentation and clever ideas.

     

     

  • What If…. Google Hadn’t Bought YouTube?

    Adotas has a story today about Google’s problems monetizing YouTube. 

    If you remember, Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.7 Billion, which after complex calucaltions, came out to be a multiple of about $1.7 Billion.  That’s not true, they made some money, but the valuation was shocking.  Revenue this year is estimated to be $200 Million.  A fine amount of money. 

    But, my goodness the costs must be enormous.  How many trillion streams are they broadcasting at what processor and bandwidth cost?   Wikipedia estimates $1 Million per day on Bandwidth alone.

    So now imagine for a second that Google had not bought YouTube, and allowed it to lose money at an astonishing rate.  If YouTube was currently running around the investor community asking people to pony up money to fund the TV watching habits of the next generation.  At some point, the bleeding would have to stop.  Imagine some new scenarios for owners of YouTube:

    1. Comcast:  *Poof* All of a sudden it’s a paid subscription channel, and no copyrighted broadcasts would make it to air.
    2. Microsoft?: YouTube becomes MSN Video
    3. An "Orbitz-like" joint partnership between Disney, Viacom, and General Electric: YouTube meets Hulu.
    4. Fox: The new MySpace Videos?

    I guess my point is that next time you are enjoying some free entertainment, be happy YouTube was bought by a company who thought it was a cool idea, and would figure out how to make money on it 5-10 years down the road.

     

     

  • The Best Seat in Pro Sports

    This comes to us from the Stanwood division of Andy Boyer.com. 

    This is what happens when your marketing team doesn’t check things out with the legal team. Or maybe they couldn’t reach the lawyers, since the whole legal team was in court trying to make sure the Seattle based Marketing team would be out of a job in a few weeks….

    bestseat.jpg 

  • Your Latest Ad Spending Stats

    I hate taking stuff off TechCrunch, since you probably already saw this report there.  But you need to know these ad spending stats, so it’s worth seeing twice.  So, here’s the question I have for you – Will Online ad spending keep going up, or are we about to get nailed by the recession so all ad spending, including online, goes down next quarter?

    adspending.png 

  • Fan Friendly Ticketing

    I promise, if the Seattle Sounders do something like try to move to Oklahoma City, or spend $117 million on players I wouldn’t add to a Fantasy baseball team, I’ll complain about it.  But as long as they keep doing things that impress me as a marketing professional, I’m going to keep sharing how impressed I am.

    sounders.jpgThis week, I went through the pleasurable and fun process of selecting my 2009 season ticket package.  In comparison, I’ve completely given up on using Ticketmaster.com due to its inflexibility and 75% Convenience charge.  It’s amazing that you can’t choose your seats on that site, but instead are held hostage to a weak algorithm that supposedly gives you "Best Available" in a certain section.  Plus, I honestly don’t understand how I can order 5 books from Amazon Marketplace from 5 different people and pay like $15.00 total in shipping, but if I try to use Ticketmaster to buy 4 concert tickets, they want to charge something like $50 just to print out a couple of ducats and stick them at will call.  Why?  Are my tickets taking a limo from TM HQ to the arena? Is the paper laced with gold?  What could command $50 in service charges?  Anyway, now I just take the time to go to the stadium, pick out seats I want and leave happy.

    But I digress.

    The Sounders experience was as close to "Anti-Ticketmaster" as I can find.  Even if you don’t care about soccer, I encourage you to go through the process at http://tickets.soundersfc.com/   .  Choose whether you want to sit or stand during the game.  Or if you want to be in a section that sings or not.  Take a virtual tour of every row in every section.  It’s a very fan friendly experience, and trust me, the fans appreciate it. 

    Let me know if you have found any other ticket places with convenient tools such as this. 

     

  • Proving Marketing Can Be Creative….and Cheap

    I’m not one to think that Marketing is free.  I think you can be effective on the cheap, but you have to commit to at least spending SOMETHING.

    I liken it to a party.  You need one of these to be extremely great – location, people, food or music – to make it worth talking about.  But no matter what, you need to spend some money on booze to loosen things up.  

    Marketing is similar.  You either need extremely great product, creative, design or placement for a campaign to be noteworthy.  Take a boring product, give it a standard design, a few relevant pieces of copy and stick it in tradional media and you have something to put in your portfolio but not much else.

    But I digress.

    Here’s a company who is executing a very nice campaign on the cheap, but they are nailing the creativity and placement attributes.  They spend some cash on shipping, but have potential to have a lot of "free creative." designed for them.  Here is a copy of the email below:

    ———–

    Hey fellow Magnifier –

    We’ve had amazing response to the Mascot’s first week out and about in New York City.   He’s  been on the Subway.  He’s been to Columbia University.   He came to a Magnify.net board meeting.  He event had a night out with Obama Girl!

    Now,  he’s ready to travel the world. So,  invite him to  your place – we’ll pay the way.

    Magnify Mascot will travel first class (fed ex)  to you.   He’ll bring a gift (a brand new American Apparel Magnify T shirt),  and he’s ready to have a photo take with you.

    We’re going to feature some of the best photo’s,  most glamourous locations,   and most creative channel admins on our homepage over the next few weeks.   So,  if you’re looking for a house guest who is flat,  and orange – we’ve got a guy who wants to visit you.

    To apply to be a stop on the Magnify Mascot World Tour:

    1).  Send an email to:  [email protected]
    2).  Tell us the name of your Magnify.net site(s)
    3).  Tell us about some  great photo op (famous tourist destination he can visit?)  or neat photo location.
    We’ve got a backlog of Channel Admin’s who have already invited the Mascot to come to their unique and wonderful part of the world –  so get on the bandwagon now.

     We’re excited about coming to you!

    Best,

    Steve,  Simon and the Magnify.net team

     

    Here’s a picture from our latest Board meeting, with Board Member
    David S. Rose giving the Mascot a ‘Hi Five.’


    PS…  yes,  we know he needs a name… we’re still accepting suggestions for the Name the Mascot contest.  Expect  more news shortly on this.