Month: March 2007

What is your dream presenter?

eirikso16 Comments

I have been asked to come up with names of speakers that would be excellent for presentations on the future of the media industry. At this point I can suggest people from the top of the line, then we’ll have to be more realistic regarding price and availability when we have our list of dream presenters.

I left out Steve Jobs because I guess he is totally and utterly out of reach… But I have suggested Chris Anderson, Cory Doctorow, Seth Godin, Joi Ito and Guy Kawasaki. And I am absolutely sure that I have left out huge amounts of interesting people.

Comments are open. What is your dream presenter for the subject of new media. And why?

What is your dream presenter?

Same old mistake

eirikso4 Comments

In my previous post I forgot to include a direct link to the video I embedded. For the people that subscribe to my blog with my email update from feedblitz or read my blog in an RSS Aggregator that don’t support that kind of object embed they won’t have a quick way to get to the Blendtec iPod video. So here it is: direct link to “Will it blend? – iPod”

…and a bonus link to “Will it blend? – Glowsticks”

Last but not least: is this really a problem? I can see that I now have close to 800 people subscribing to my feed. You are among my most valuable readers and I want to treat you well. NewsGator and GoogleReader support embedded video in the feed, but what about the other readers?

Same old mistake

Will it blend?

eirikso1 Comment

I started following this after Seth Godin mentioned it back in November last year. I think it is interesting how advertisers start spending money on totally new ways to market their products. The fact that the advertisers now have their own distribution channel thanks to the internet change their dependency on traditional media to reach out.

They start spending money that never reach the newspapers, magazines, television channels and distributors that have eaten a part of that pie before.

“Will it blend?” is another example of how you can reach out using this new channel. The idea is simple. Blendtec produce high quality blenders but have a relatively unknown brand compared to the competitors. So, they start willitblend.com in addition to heavy distribution on YouTube and Revver and probably a lot of other sites.

The videos are incredibly cheap to produce (compared to full fledged commercials). And they reach out. With a message that says clearly “we make high quality blenders”. And, “we are a cool company”. And what is it? You just have to watch one video to get the point. One of the most popular. “Will it blend? – iPod”. Here it is.

http://flash.revver.com/player/1.0/player.swf

And the numbers? About 3 million views on the iPod video alone on YouTube?. More than 20 000 people subscribing to the commercials from this company on the same site.

Hundreds of thousands of views on Revver. And by the way, on Revver Blendtec earns money every time people click on any of the commercials after the clips. Interesting, earning money off commercials on your own commercials…

And the traffic? Here is Willitblend.com compared to the total traffic of NBC.com for the last six months.

Remember that this is a site dedicated to the commercials for one company. The fact that their traffic is even visible compared to the total traffic of NBC is remarkable.

And do they sell? I don’t have their numbers, but the traffic on their online shop seems to play well along with the traffic of willitblend.com…

I think this is going to be a huge challenge for the media industry. Advertisers are using traditional media because they want to reach out. Traditionally this has been the only way to do this. Now, there are a lot of new ways to reach out. Blendtec and a lot of other companies are already using them.

Related articles:
Commercials gone wild
BMW does cool marketing (again)
Bud.tv about to launch

Will it blend?

The Shadow IT Department

eirikso5 Comments

Espen Andersen points me to this article about how advanced users build their own set of tools to be more effective. Tools that the central IT department at their place of work don’t provide.

As Mr. Dr. Andersen points out, this is not exactly news, but I think the phenomenon accelerates right now. Because of powerful tools on the internet that tend to be more user friendly and effective than what the IT departments provide. And I think that Ben Worthen is spot on right here:

Users want IT to be responsive to their individual needs and to make them more productive. CIOs want IT to be reliable, secure, scalable and compliant with an ever increasing number of government regulations.

Firefox with a lot of plugins is on the top of my list of tools that never was provided by the local IT department where I work. And, in Firefox our friends at Google provide me with some important tools as well. I am a heavy user of Gmail, Google Reader, Calendar and Docs & Spreadsheets. In addition to this, stuff like IM, Skype, del.icio.us, FTP clients and hardware like my personal digital camera, and a couple of personal computers at home pops up in my mind. And probably a lot of other tools as well.

And yes, I clearly see that there are issues with heavy use of non standard tools. Security issues. Standardization problems. It’s the good old question of security vs. usability.

Do you have other examples? What is your favorite tool that was never installed or supported by your IT department?

The Shadow IT Department