*michael parekh on IT*

ON REALITY ADVERTISING

TRUTH IN ADVERTISING

Here's a truly eye-opening online ad from Madison Avenue.

Reality television has worked in prime-time programming, why not a little reality in our advertising? 
Apparently the ad's been pretty successful to date. 

Ad Age reports the ad is giving Super-Bowl advertising a run for it's money:

"With not a penny of paid media and in less than a month, "Dove Evolution," a 75-second viral film created by Ogilvy & Mather, Toronto, for the Unilever brand has reaped more than 1.7 million views on YouTube and has gotten significant play on TV talk shows "Ellen" and "The View" as well as on "Entertainment Tonight."

It's also brought the biggest-ever traffic spike to CampaignForRealBeauty.com, three times more than Dove's Super Bowl ad and resulting publicity last year, according to Alexa.com."

What's also refreshing about the ad is that is conveys it's empathy with it's mainstream consumers.

Selling soap by companies like P&G and Unilever  turbo-charged what is now traditional media over half a century ago. 

They may be doing it again.  With a little help from the likes of YouTube and Google of course.

P.S. It's worth checking out is this video response to the ad above.  It's a little over two minutes vs. the minute plus for the ad.

If you want more, also worth reading is this critical, but balanced review of the ad by Ad Age's Bob Garfield.

ON HONEYPOTS AND RICE KRISPIES ADS

TEST OF TIME

The New York Times is running a story titled "YouTube is Purging Copyrighted Clips", citing a wholesale purge of clips from The Daily Show, featuring Jon Stewart of the Comedy Channel, among many others.

So for tradtional media, the fear of losing control over it's content, seems to be winning over the greed of wider, inexpensive promotion from distribution, via services like YouTube (see my earlier post on this here).

The purge seems to be deeper than just prime-time television shows. 

They also seem to be going after the ads.

For example, Fred Wilson has a timely post on honey pots and Rice Krispies ads. 

Apparently, the latter phrase is an actively searched for term on Google, and it leads to a post by Fred this April titled "The Best Rice Krispies Ad Ever " (image source).

Unfortunately, the ad he referred to on YouTube has been removed, likely because it involved a background music clip by the Rolling Stones.  Thus, a high-profile copyright violation.

But do not fret, a quick search on YouTube yields this "Second Best Rice Krispies Ad ever", done in Walt Disney style animation.

It's from 1939, so likely is immune from being yanked off YouTube for copyright violations. 

But you never know.

P.S.  Yes, this post is also a Honeypot experiment inspired by Fred's post.  Thanks for indulging :)

ON CELEBRITY ADOPTIONS THE WORLD OVER

GOOD INTENTIONS

"Taz" at SepiaMutiny has a post on Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt:

"...Angelina Jolie is adopting an Indian baby to add to her growing international brood, according to US reports.

Sources say the big-hearted actress and partner Brad Pitt have already applied to adopt a tot from an Indian orphanage.

An insider said: "They hope to be able to bring the child home by Christmas.[...] She has said: "I want to create a rainbow family. That's children of different religions and cultures from different countries." [link]

And the disturbing cherry on top...

The source told US magazine Globe: "Whichever they end up with, they'd like to name the child India to honour its homeland." The pair are rumoured to have visited the Priva Darshini orphanage in the last month. [link]

Seriously?!?! It's not like they went around and named the other kids 'Cambodia' and 'Ethiopia.' How come they get cool names like Maddox, Shiloh and Zahara, and you want to name the desi kid 'India?' Like she isn't going to be teased enough..."

This obviously follows in the wake of the controversy over Madonna's adoption of a child from Malawi.

I'm just waiting for some paparazzi stories on a major celebrity from Bollywood and/or Hong Kong/China adopting orphans from the U.S. and Europe. 

It's only a matter of time.

After all, Globalization is not just about economic trade the world over, as I've noted before.

Despite all the potential issues, these adoptions do strike me as giving children in need a turbo-charged, lottery win of a shot at a better life.

So net, net, a good thing. 

The parents in question though do need to constantly focus on how to give their adopted children as much of a normal life under such "abnormal" conditions.

ON A NEW, BIG OPPORTUNITY FOR DISNEY

POSSIBILITIES

Here's a new gadget of interest from the house of Mickey Mouse, as reported by the New York Times:

"With the recent flurry of devices that play both digital music and movies, it only makes sense that content companies like  Walt Disney get into the act, wrapping their branding, or in this case mouse ears, around the gadgets themselves.

The Disney Mix Max Personal Media Player is slightly larger than an iPod Nano and can play MP3 or WMA music files. But the hallmark of this player is the 2.2-inch screen, created especially to display TV-quality Disney videos and movies. The movies, including “High School Musical” and “Ella Enchanted,” are available on specially formatted memory chips that sell for $15 and slip into a side port that also accepts standard SD memory cards.

The device, which will be available next month for $100 at www.disneyshopping.com, is made for Disney by Memorex, and has 512 megabytes of internal memory and a battery that charges through your computer’s U.S.B. port."

The gizmo seems to have been introduced by Disney with a minimum of marketing effort.

It strikes me that this could be a lot bigger for Disney with even a fraction of the effort that Apple and Steve jobs put in to make the iPod and iPod.

As the Times article notes, the key appeal here is the ability to play content with a minimum of fuss...in particular, no computer required to download stuff as with an iPod.

And of course, it's from Disney, so it has a perpetual, global, always renewing, built-in market of kids.

So I checked the  above to see the range of content, aka known as "Max Clips", available for purchase.

On a separate note, it wasn't easy to find on the Disney site...you first had to search for the "Mini Max" player, which offered no direct links to the "Max Clips" content, aka the "razor blades" that make this $100 piece of hardware hopefully profitable for Disney.

So you search for "Max Clips" on the site, and get this page, with a grand total of 6 videos, mostly aimed at the teen demographic.

What was particularly surprising was that so far, there are no Disney cartoons, or animated films.  And particularly, no Mickey Mouse.

In a post last year, I noted that Disney had not bothered to produce new Mickey Mouse movies and/or cartoons for the 21st century generation of kids.

The Max Player looks like it'd be an easy device with which to introduce a whole generation of kids to Mickey Mouse content to go.

It's a heck of a lot more fuss-free than a portable DVD player, which most parents now pack for a trip with a kid or two.

Disney, it's time to ramp up some content for this player. 

Not to mention amping up the marketing for the player itself.

Who knows...it could be the iPod of the under ten set in fairly short order.

Especially now that Steve Jobs is Disney's largest individual shareholder, and a board member to boot.

ON END OF THE SEARCH FOR SEARCH

NEVER SAY NEVER

BIll Burnham has a provocative, new post worth reading titled "Search Startups are dead, long live Search Startups ".  As he explains it:

"Any start-up trying to displace Google, Yahoo, or even MSN or Ask (or for that matter any VC trying to fund them) should just get in their car (or hop on a plane) and go look at Google’s new server farms at The Dales in Oregon. And if that doesn’t convince them they should head up the Columbia river a bit and check out Microsoft and Yahoo’s digs.   The costs to compete in core search , are now simply to high."

He goes on to argue that:

"One can imagine a world in the not to distant future in which an application designer can easily leverage the billions of dollars being spent by Google, Yahoo et. al., by having programmatic access to what is essentially a custom crawl list and a highly filtered index. 

In this way search engines, in some respects, may become an infrastructure layer not too dissimilar from the telecommunications networks and internet standards that they themselves are built upon."

In a foll0w-up comment to the post, he goes on to outline why even with the on-going improvement in the price-performance in hardware/bandwidth infrastructure costs, the price of entry into search is high, and will likely remain high.  I summarize his five points here...read the full comment for exposition.

"What has changed since 1999 that has made entry into core search so much more expensive? I would say five main things but others may have more. These include:

1. Size of the web.
2. Frequency of crawl.
3. Size of index.
4. Complexity of indexing algorithms.
5. Query response."

He makes a very persuasive case that's worth reading, along with the various insightful comments by readers.

However, it does remind me a bit of the time Francis Fukuyama proclaimed "The End of History" in his controversial book at the end of the 20th century, predicting a world of global, liberal democracies in the 21st century following the end of the cold war.

As insurmountable the obstacles seem to a new company being able to do search with the kind of pervasive adoption and economic success of a Google, I can't help but feel that someone can find a way.

After all, it wasn't long when the tech world proclaimed that startups focused on productivity applications on the PC were dead.

I mean who would invest the hundreds of millions or billions it would take to go up against Microsoft?

And for a long time, no one did.

But technology continued to evolve, changing the current realities and future possibilities.

And now, many believe the formerly impossible may be possible after all.

Bill may very well be right in his thesis for quite some time. 

But "never' is a long time.

To paraphrase fictional mathematician Ian Malcolm from Crichton's Jurassic Park, "Technology will find a way", with a little help from technologists, entrepreneurs, and investors.

ON THE "OBVIOUS" EVOLUTION OF INTERNET "HITS" BIZ

HITS AND RUNS

The number one discussion thread on Techmeme this morning is around "the birth of Obvious Corp.".  As Om Malik at GigaOm explains:

"Odeo, a San Francisco-based podcasting start-up has decided to call it a day. The company started by Pyra Labs (Blogger) co-founder Evan Williams has completed a management buyout. Evan Williams, Biz Stone and other Odeo employees have started a new company called Obvious Corp¹., which has acquired Odeo assets from podcasting company’s venture capital backers..."

"Williams’ very public mea culpa⁷ at the Web Apps conference was an example of his willingness to zig, when everyone zagged. In private conversations, he had expressed doubts about the current model - where everyone wants to sell to an Internet giant. He wanted a model that was different - small, experimental and almost lab like. Future plans, according to those close to the company, include charging for all new things they come-up with."

TechCrunch also has a good summary of the events to date.

Two questions of real interest in all this from my perspective.  In order of increasing importance, they are:

1.  What does this imply, if anything, for the future of the podcasting business?  In recent months, podcasting has received almost the same amount of buzz and interest bewtowed upon social networking businesses by investors large and small, public and private. 

There is a faint echo of the "Sevin Rose VC firm implication that the traditional VC business is broken" (via Fred Wilson), in the withdrawal of Odeo from the podcasting business.

Something to chew on.

Here's how Evan Williams describes the changes in his thinking:

"The New Model

We are attempting to create a new model for building and running web products. Nearly everyone I know in the Internet business is either at one of the giants, wishing they were at a startup, or at a startup that hopes get bought by a giant.
 
The models for how these types of companies build and launch products is fairly well-known—although some certainly do it better than others. My theory is that a confluence of factors are paving the way for a different type of company:

Sites are cheaper and faster to build

The consumer web is increasingly hits-driven and increasingly crowded, which makes it more difficult to predict what's going to work.

Sites that do get attention can make money with advertising and/or subscriptions.

2.  What does the above description of the "New Model" for Web 2.0 remind you of?  Especially the bit about "the consumer web" being "increasingly hit-driven"?

Evan may be describing the emergence of a production company model borrowed from the traditional media (TV and movies) business and the software games business, where the development of "hits" is separated from the distribution.

Using that metaphor, Evan may be trying to build the equivalent of an independent, small studio here.

Here's how Evan describes his new company's modus operandi:

"The Obvious model goes something like this:

Build things cheaply and rapidly by keeping teams small and self-organized.

Leverage technology, know-how, and infrastructure across products (but brand them separately, so they're focused and easy to understand)

Use the aggregate attention and user base of the network to gain traction for new services faster than they could gain awareness independently.
      As services mature, the goal is to get them to profitability with advertising and/or subscriptions, so they can add to the network (and fund more building)."

This description has shades of what 37Signals is focused on in the Web 2.0 online consumer software space (see this post by TechCrunch for more).

In some ways, one can argue that we're already at the "new "hit" production separated from the distribution model".

Most of the Web 2.0 startups today are taking on the risk of creating a hit "feature", be it user-generated videos like YouTube, or communities like MySpace or Facebook, or tags like del.icio.us.

Then the "internet giants" sweep in to acquire the hits, after the risks of developing the new feature have been mitigated somewhat, and add massive distribution.

Thus turning the feature into a product hopefully, as Google is newly focused on doing.

So the New Model may just be a more formalized, systematized, and standalone version of the Old Model. 

Obvious when you really think about it.

ON A MID-WEEK ROMP THRU ITALY

BON APPETITO

Reading this article on Italy in today's New York Times, turned a Wednesday into a Sunday for this reader.

Titled "Just how good can Italy get?", it's one of the best travel pieces I've seen on Italy in some time.

It transports the reader to a corner of Italy I've yet to visit and savor. 

Here's how writer Frank Bruni kicks things off:

"MY kind of pig heaven looks a lot like Bologna’s fatty heart.

In the shops along and around Via Drapperie, haunches of cured ham dangle far into the distance. Coils of pork sausage spiral high into the sky. Bologna is the capital of Emilia-Romagna, and the region of Emilia-Romagna sees the beauty in swine, as the affiliation of one of its cities with a world-renowned delicacy makes clear. Here lies the plump mother lode of prosciutto di Parma.

And of Parmesan cheese. Wheels and wedges of it cram Bologna’s food stores, which allowed me to choose among Parmesan aged one year (not enough) or two years (just about perfect) or even five (oops). Looking up from the cheese, I was dazzled by the array of vegetables and fruits, their vividness reflecting how fertile this region is and how finicky its inhabitants are."

He sets up a faux culinary competition between Emilia-Romagna and Piedmont, that is marvelous to read through, regardless of who "wins". 

The whole piece uses over-the-top metaphors and piquant phrasing that makes the brain do multiple double-takes over and over again.

For example, here's how Mr. Bruni describes a ham he finds delectable (bolding mine):

"I had certainly eaten culatello, the Lamborghini of cured ham, produced around the Emilian town of Zibello, along the foggy banks of the Po River."

It made me Google "culatello", even though I'm not particularly fond of cured ham.

If you like Italy, and if you like good food, the piece is worth reading and saving. 

It'll almost make you put Italy back at the top of your immediate travel list.

ON LINUX PCs ON A STICK

CHEW ON THIS

It's been over a year since I've touched on USB drive based computers on a stick becoming more real and practical over time. 

Gizmodo today posts on a Linux-based computer the size of a stick of gum:

"At bout 1 inch by 5 inches, you're floored at the thought of this little PC chomping away at bits in your pocket, aren't you?

Their 400xm-cf is a french fry-size computer capable of connecting to a network and letting network admins test and diagnose to their hearts content. It's Linux based and has a 400MHz Intel processor coupled with 64MB of RAM. And that slash you see there is a CompactFlash slot for expanding memory."

But I'm still holding out for Apple to put a Mac into an iPod.

ON AN AOL/TIME WARNER "DE-MERGER"

ABOUT TIME...

Looks like the powers that be at Time Warner (CEO Dick Parsons et al), have given their AOL division CEO Jonathan Miller the green light to utter the words many have been waiting for some time, including AOL founder and former CEO Steve Case.  As the Sunday Telegraph reports today:

"Time Warner, the giant US media group, is considering the sale or demerger of AOL, the internet business it merged with in 2000, at the height of the last stockmarket boom.

In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, Jonathan Miller, chief executive of AOL, admitted that the Time Warner board is already mulling over a break-up of the giant conglomerate. Asked about the possibility of AOL separating from Time Warner, Miller confirmed that the issue is now on the agenda following the sale of the group's broadband businesses in Europe.

He said: "It's possible, going forward. It's not a discussion that Time Warner has a problem with understanding or engaging in. Until we were on this present course, it wasn't even the right discussion. Now it becomes more interesting."

In a post back last December, I'd said:

"I've been of the opinion for some time that the best alternative for AOL is as a standalone company again.  With the right, focused management, AOL as a standalone has some potent opportunities given the current "Web 2.0" trends and the broader Internet technology tail-winds, EVEN at this seemingly late date."

Since then, AOL within Time Warner has made some big moves, including a proactive push away from it's subscription business, to a web-based, ad-sales driven model, announced in early August.

So now that the trial balloon to "de-merge" AOL from Time Warner has been released, it's only a matter of time for an AOL transaction sooner than later.  As AOL CEO Jonathan Miller put it:

"I don't believe there is a scenario whereby we could have an independent AOL. I think we would be bought as fast as we could draw up the papers," he said."

Better late  than never, I'd say.

ON NEW WAYS TO APPROACH IRAQ

SKIN IN THE GAME

Watching the Sunday morning talk shows this morning and perusing the Sunday papers, yields nothing encouraging again in terms of new insights and/or approaches to the situation in Iraq, from either party. 

Of course Iraq is the political football of the day given the approaching mid-term elections.

The most interesting new idea on Iraq I've seen in some time, came from former Presidential candidate Steve Forbes a few weeks ago.  Here's an excerpt from the International Herald Tribune:

"Forbes, the CEO of Forbes Inc. and editor-in-chief of Forbes magazine, said the country should create a fund similar to Alaska's permanent fund, which annually distributes dividends to eligible residents.

"Imagine if something like that was done in Iraq. Suddenly, everyone would want an address in Iraq," Forbes told about 350 people at the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce/Associated Industries of Arkansas luncheon in Hot Springs.

"Suddenly, the bulk of the population would be on the side of fighting the fanatics who are trying to disrupt oil production."

Established in 1976 after North Slope oil was discovered, the Alaska fund's dividends have been paid since 1982, ranging from $331.29 to a record high of $1,963.86 in 2000. This year, eligible Alaskans will each receive $1,106.96 (€872) from the fund."

Granted, Alaskan politics  are a far cry from Iraq, but the idea nevertheless is interesting.

The idea is interesting because it introduces long-term greed at the grass-roots level, to try and take the place of short-term, crippling fear for almost every Iraqi today.

It's not a silver bullet for all the problems in Iraq, but could be an interesting way to change the debate within Iraq.

It encourages thinking about the country as a long-term cohesive whole, rather than the current visions of separate pieces split along sectarian lines.

And it introduces a potentially out-of-the-box constructive course of action instead of the current stale debate of whether to stick-it-out until local forces are strong enough to maintain order, or to get the hell out of there and leave the mess for Iraqis to sort out. 

The former path of course means continuing to watch daily loss of life for our troops, that is almost too much to bear looking forward.

The latter course of action could likely result in loss of civilian life that may be too much to bear looking back.

It may almost be too late to try something like the Steve Forbes idea in Iraq, given the current state of affairs. 

At the same time, the debate both here and over there, need to include options not considered to date.

Some thoughtful new ideas could be a good thing right about now.