Marketing

Using Flickr photos: is it social media’s carte blanche?

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Interesting story of a controversial use of someone’s Flickr photo by Virgin Mobile.

AdRants reports that the family of someone is suing Virgin for using his photograph grabbed off Flickr for the ad campaign .

Which brings up the question: is it OK to use/link to someone’s picture because it is out there on a Creative Commons license? Or the larger question: Is the model release form in need of a re-write?

I have put up some of my photos here on my blog, via Flickr. I have not deemed them private, and they fall under the Creative Commons license –meaning they could be used for commercial reasons as long as they attribute the source. But I have to be careful. I don’t use pictures of my friends or family in that album. I know some others do.

CC Chapman (above) for instance, the epitome of all things in the new media space, a huge advocate of the commons and networking has loads of pictures up there. Robert Scoble’s photos of family and colleagues are everywhere.

Note, I am not copying or uploading this image of CC. I am simply linking to the URL, using the WordPress “insert image here” field. (I’ve previously used the image upload feature, but apart from it being cumbersome, it’s never seemed fair to copy someone’s logo or image onto my hard drive and upload it without their permission.)

But to get back to Virgin, consider the medium the campaign is promoting: phones. Virgin’s agency could not have been ignorant of the copyright envelope they were pushing. My guess is that it half expected this to happen and like all things Virgin, decided it was just “doing a Branson.”

And just to capture a delicious irony of how a Flickr lawsuit could end up, there’s a picture of a settlement check one photographer received after suing a company that had used her Flickr photo. Yes, that settlement and the check is on Flickr !

Pricing as a strategy, Sri Lanka style

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

If you’ve never heard of this dessert that’s priced at $14,500, you soon will. No after-dinner mint, this.

It’s a special treat that’s designed more to when the appetite for buzz. Served up in a resort set in a colonial town of Galle in Sri Lanka.

If you take a closer look, this is more than what the menu describes as “A combination of a gold leaf Italian kasata, flavoured with Irish cream and served with a mango and pomegranate compote and a bubbly-based sabayon…”

All yours for the $14,500 price tag, but please don’t choke on 80-carat aquamarine. It’s balanced on the chocolate sculptured stilt fisherman that happens to be the logo of the resort.

Ah, the resort. That’s the whole point of this. It’s called The Fortress, because this beautiful city by the sea does have the ramparts and remnants from a Portuguese era that goes back to the 14th century.

Pricing as a strategy is not new.

I came across a similar (fun) ad this week in Time magazine for the Sprint Blackberry,s 8830 World Edition smart phone. It is advertised as “The first$10.5 M Cell Phone.”

To be sure, it’s just Blackberry, but it does have a picture of an exotic island on the small screen, and the “island gift”is described as an optional $10,499800.01 when you purchase a $199.99 phone. The small print is really funny. “Island offer only available to the wealthiest 100 people on planet Earth.” It’s really a waste of a double-tuck ad just to get the headline noticed, but people do try…

Stealth PR from infant formula manufacturers exposed

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Some PR agencies will never learn. There have been plenty of cases where ‘flogs’ (fake blogs) have shown up, only to be traced back to PR agencies attempting ‘stealth PR.’ (Google Edelmen + Walmart and see.)

The latest one is for a group calling itself Babyfeedingchoice.org exposed by the Center for Media and Democracy as the front of the Infant Formula Council.

The site is very well done. It has areas such as “Moms and the media” with great quotes for lazy journalists wanting to get the other side of the story –people offended by seeing a mom breastfeeding an infant– and Resources with links to other similar sites. Looks very credible, until you dig around, and compare it to the saga of the fake Walmart blog.

Five people to hangout with.

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If you’re a writer, designer or a ‘creative marketer,’ who would you list as your top five influencers/friends? Whom do you bounce ideas off? Whom do you not mind sharing your ‘dumb ideas’ and secret projects with?

An IABC-er in Trinidad and Tobago, Judette Coward-Puglisi has a post that speaks to this from an entrepreneurial angle. It’s called Five Persons Every Entrepreneur Should Know. They are:

The Cheerleader, the Mentor, the Networker, the Nay-sayer, and the Tech-guru. Definitely worth a read.

Why sell (or buy) when you can rent?

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

petrental.jpgNetworks, and the ability for people to buy or rent have disrupted many old businesses, and given rise to new business models. Netflix was the epitome of this, taking on the Blockbuster‘s of this world. They had to respond with Netflix-like Blockbuster Online.

But the rental model is blossoming in many unexpected areas beyond furniture, art, office plants and cars.

The weirdest is called FlexPetz if you want to rent, not own a Vet-whetted, obedience-trained pet starting at $49.99 a month (plus an annual maintenance fee). It’s a sort of a time-share model for pets, says Business 2.0.

Time shares of course were the classic rental business, more specifically fractional rental. Riffing on that model is FlexCar, a way to rent a car for a fraction of the day. You sign up online, pay your fees, and receive a magnetic key in the mail. Then when you want a car you reserve one online, or on the phone, and pick it up at one of the locations. One neat features is you don’t pay for gas; the cars are refueled (by the renters.) How so? There is a gas card in the car that can be used at Arco, Costco etc.

To serve a completely different need, there’s BookSwim that works like NetFlix.

And it gets more creative, with a handbag and jewelery rental site, perfectly named BagBorrowSteal.

Take time to ask. Take time to get to know.

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

As a freelance writer I get pitched a lot. I don’t hit the delete
key unless it’s totally irrelevant. But I have to say there are several
people who do take the time to ask if whom they represent is relevant,
and they do their homework.

I had a pitch from a PR firm in the UK recently that really stood
out. He promised he wouldn’t flood my inbox, and offered an RSS feed as
an alternative –something I opted for.

On a macro scale, how do you get to know an organization, its
priorities, its strategic goals?

On Wednesday I was asked by a local firm
to speak to a group of incoming account managers about strategic
thinking and solutions selling. I used an example of how as
‘transparent’ as it may seem, a company’s web site is the last place
you’ll find that kind of useful information. A Google search would be a
hit or miss, unless you find a corporate blogger giving the inside
scoop. Nor would a site map reveal the inner working groups, the nodes
and the unofficial networks. Taking time to get to know this
“inner-net” means putting our digital smarts aside, and falling back on
our analog skills. I use the phrase “Think digital, act analog” (first
used by Guy Kawasaki, I believe) to illustrate the point.

A good article on this also appeared in Fortune magazine
last month (titled “The hidden workplace.”) “There’s the organization
chart,” it said. “And then there’s the way things really work.”

Bottom line: Take time to understand the analog networks. These power brokers, access points, nodes and human routers may not have a LinkedIn profile, but they sure make things happen!

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Is it live, or is it on ShootLive?

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Liveearth
What technology would PR companies, the police, and the paparazzi want to get their hands on?

It’s delivery that basically sends raw images from a video camera direct to the consumer. It is a service from ShootLive,  news agency for the digital age based in Nottingham, UK. The ShootLive service was used in the coverage of David Beckham’s game in July.

Why does this change the game? Because of the need for speed. In journalism and in PR, or even in law enforcement, seconds make a difference. The scoop, the intervention of a criminal, the ability to relay instantaneous pictures of a tragedy such as an earthquake can impact lives.

Images from camera are streamed (as an XML feed) to a mobile phone in less than 60 seconds, the company says. What I like about all this is it doesn’t make the end-user jump through hoops to receive it. Images could arrive as a multi-media text alert.

What could this do for marketing? Apart from the obvious ones that ESPNs of this world will jump onto, and be able to monetize, marketers could get users to opt-in to premium content. Think: Olympics, stage acts such a Live Earth, and even regional ones. The McDonald’s and IBM’s could sponsor XML feeds . Down the line when the genie is out of the bottle, cell phone carriers will use the technology too. Already, AT&T has a similar service called VideoShare where subscribers could stream video with a camera phone to another phone –while talking! These are both low-end ($29.99 and $79.99) Samsung phones not some souped-up smart varieties.

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“Cult of the Amateur” argument, sounds like Maurice Saatchi

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Andrewk_book
"These busted boomers," writes Constance Lavendar, "are clinging to an argument based on authority, hierarchy, and privilege; they
despise digital democracy because it threatens their existence, challenges their
authority, and breaks down their well-preserved hierarchy."

She is commenting on a post in the Chronicle, about The Cult of the Amateur argument by Andrew Keen in his book about how "experts" are more valuable than the chattering masses, and the internet is killing culture.

She could well have been commenting on Lord Maurice Saatchi’s "Google Data Vs Human Nature" in The Financial Times in May. The core of his argument is in this sentence

"It is an inconvenient and stubborn fact that outside Newton’s universe,
where physical laws govern reality, the world is conditioned by
perception."

Attacking the predictive model of marketing is not different from dismissing the hoi polloi who are suddenly on equal footing with experts. The old guard wishes it –and wikipedia, and blogs, and the ability for non-agency folk to come up with hugely popular Diet Coke/mentos uncommercials– were not so.

In a later column, Mr. Saatchi wrote: "Sometimes I feel as though I am standing at the graveside of a well-loved friend called advertising." You know he is troubled by this algorithm thing. It must be tough watching the digital natives over-run the place.

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Sri Lankan Tea firm, Dilmah, in Fortune magazine.

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Kudos to Dilmah Tea, a Sri Lankan company I know very well.

Fortune_july07
I just picked up this copy of Fortune magazine (July ’07) and there’s a good feature on this maverick tea company. There’s no link to the article on Forbes Online, so let me paraphrase. It’s a story of how a independent company is making the big guys sweat. Big guys meaning the Lipton’s and Twinings of this world. What’s special about them? 

First, Dilmah makes a claim to product quality that no other tea marketer could -a single source of the leaf. Most people don’t realize that when they dip a tea bag in boiling water, the tea inside  is ‘blended’ — meaning it comes from several countries in one big, tasteless mash-up! I could attest to that — as a huge tea drinker I stock and drink many varieties, including the real thing from Dilmah which I store and serve like, um, wine!

Dilmah_2 Which brings me to the second point in their marketing differentiation. They position the brand somewhere between a wine and a heath drink. As Fortune reports, the multinationals pooh-pooh the wine analogy, saying it is ridiculous. That’s expected (beyond sour grapes!) because they don’t appreciate the nuances of tea, the climatic differences, and the soil etc in Sri Lanka.

Third, and this has to worry the multi-nationals, Dilmah is getting into the experiential retail business of "tea bars" –hipster Starbucks-like hangouts for the other caffeine crowd.

The Fortune article didn’t mention Dilmah’s other major promotional thrust: cricket! The firm is a big promoter and sponsor of the sport, and in some ways synonymous with it in Asia and Australia. No accident, when you think about it. Tea and cricket. Two British exports that now have a distinctive ‘Ceylon’ flavor.

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Harry Potter’s social media impact on branding

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Potterbook
Harry Potter is an extended tale of no, not just wizards and magic
but the wisdom of the crowds in action. But that story got buried in
the hoopla around the launch of Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows last Saturday.

Very predictably, the traditional news media covered the event in
the same way they did, say, the iPhone. Too much attention to people
queuing up for the book, the parties, the ‘education’ component, but
very little about the phenomenon itself.

The fact is, the Harry Potter franchise just doesn’t belong to J.K. Rowling
anymore. The books may be in 200 countries and 63 languages, but the
Potter brand goes beyond that geographic reach. It’s been open-sourced
in more ways than you could imagine; the wisdom of the Potter crowds
has always ruled when it comes to creating their own message channels,
cranking out their own Potter-esqe stories etc. Despite the fact that
this is a book, and not a digital product, the fans are all over the
social media map. There is:
    * The Mugglecast podcast run by high school students, that has some 50,000 listeners a week, and features Elton John and Bono.
    * The Leaky Cauldron leaks news about the books and carries a disclosure that it is in “no way affiliated with J.K. Rowling.”
    * No shortage of Potter blogs, including one that suggests a Bollywood storyline for an Indian audience.
    * The Harry Potter Fiction store, that’s not managed by Scholastic, the book publisher; it’s also “unofficial.”
    * The Academy of Virtual Wizardry, at “Caledon Highlands” in you guessed it, Second Life!

I could go on…

So I wanted to track how the raving fans were behaving. I had a
haunch that there would be an equal outpouring of passion on Saturday
the 20th July around midnight not in front of the bookstores where the
TV crews were waiting in hoardes, but on Wikipedia. At 11.00 pm Pacific
Time the discussion (on the “comments” page of the Harry Potter Wikipedia showed
signs that things were heating up. The Wikipedians had been discussing
the value of locking down the Wiki, since everyone knew the book had
leaked and the plot was being discussed elsewhere.

“Just wait until the official release time. Then we can put
everything up in 5 minutes or so, considering the number of wikipedians
interested in this.” said one editor at 11.03 pm. This was clearly a hard core editor, but also a big Potter fan. “Most people, me included, will be too busy reading the book on Saturday to check the article.”
Others like him (or her) were unhappy that some editors had moved to
freeze the pages until a week after the launch. Fan passion was
expressed in the form of outrage that some newspapers’ reviewers had
created spoilers by discussing the plot before the launch. Reading
through their discussion gives you a glimpse of not just how these
unpaid wikipedians work, but how fans operate late at night, doing a
thankless job for what? To them this isn’t JK’s book. This is theirs.

If only other brands let their customers work their magic this way!

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