Andy Boyer

Category: Marketing

  • Qvisory – “Tools for Life”

    I encourage everyone to take a quick trip over to Qvisory.com,.a extremely socially conscious and responsible project headed up by Eileen Quigley, the former head of RealNetworks’ philanthropic arm, RealImpact.

    Dubbed, “Tools for life, ” the site helps young people (and old ones too) achieve their work, money and life goals.  Here’s what they said in a recent email:

    Our mission is to help young people build their economic future and
    gain more control over their lives. Today’s 18 to 34 year-olds face
    significant challenges in our evolving economy. We’re providing them
    with information and tools to help manage and meet their money, work,
    and health goals. And we’re advocating for change to ensure that their
    voice is heard in Washington, DC, in board rooms, and in state capitols.

    I have long been an advocate of our school system shifting gears and actually teaching things that people need to know – little things like how credit card companies make money, how to fill out tax forms, why interest only mortgages are a bad idea, what happens if you eat fast food and chips every day, etc….So, I think this is a great project.  Check it out and let me know what you think.

  • Big Move in the Scrabulous vs Hasbro Battle

    So, just when you thought Scrabulous was dead…..when you thought they had no letters left to play, the team of Rajat and Jayant came back with “Quartzite” for a Bingo Triple Word Score.

    It seemed like the war was over when the guys behind Scrabulous bowed to the legal pressure from Hasbro and pulled their wildly successful application from Facebook.   I stated that I hoped Hasbro would simply pay the guys what the game was worth and buy the application – and the users – from them.

    But instead, the tables have been turned and the guys from Hasbro must have the same look as the Seattle City Council Members who were shocked that Clay Bennett was moving the Sonics.

    In a Kasparov-ish type move, the Scrabulous guys have relaunched Scrabulous as “Wordscraper.”  Now at first look, the board and the game sucks.  Then you look at the rules, and you see that in Wordscraper, you have the ability to create your own board.  You can create ANY TYPE of board you want.  Maybe you want 20 Triple word score spots.  Or…….maybe you want the board to look just like a real Scrabble board…….In just a few minutes, if I wanted, I could make a board that looked like a real Scrabble board and use that for every game moving forward.

    This my friends, is what it looks like when 2 smart guys take a winnable battle against a board room full of people without a creative thought in their head.  Congrats to the Scrabulous – I mean Wordscraper – guys who just played the death blow in this silly Facebook battle vs Hasbro.

  • Bonanzle Review – “The Best eBay Alternative We’ve Seen”

    Bonanzle, a young and exciting company we recently started working with, just received a fantastic review from Ecommerce-Guide.com.

    An alternative to Craiglist and Ebay, Bonanzle is designed to make it easier for people to buy and sell products online.  Given the state and direction of the economy today, any way to make it easier to move used merchandise is positioned to do well.  Some choice quotes from the article:

    “You get Bonanzle
    — an eBay alternative that is quite simply, the best I’ve seen in my
    four years of reviewing and writing about start-up marketplaces aimed
    at taking sellers away from eBay.”

    The Bonanzle platform was designed in-house from
    the ground up, so not only does the site look very different from other
    alternative sites, but this is the reason why the tools and features on
    this site are so radically different.

    The best way to experience Bonanzle is simply to log
    on and try it. What you will find is that Harding and his team of
    self-titled “action-minded experts” have managed to offer sellers more
    features in this one site than any alternative to date, yet keep the
    entire site and selling process simple, compact and super-easy to use.

    Check out the whole article, and please Digg it or add it to Delicious if you would be so kind.

  • 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