Car Music Project, a true ‘or-car-stra’

Bill Milbrodt (in the image with an air guitar) is known as an eccentric avant-garde music innovator capable of making music from car parts. Recently he has lead a project for Ford Motors where he has built 31 instruments -from Focus car parts- in a record time of four weeks. A wonderful campaign idea for an abominable (aren’t they all?) car manufacturer. It’s not the first time Milbrodt does it, but Ford took a very great marketing stride in commissioning this project to him.

    

The fender bass in the images, made from a Ford Focus wing (United Kingdom) or fender (United States). It looks elegant, and it sounds good!

Check out some of his videos at the project’s Myspace page

Images courtesy of the Car Music Project and it’s mentors

Is SOFTWARE business becoming MEDIA business?

And if this is an undeniable truth: should media business become software business?

 

Read a very thought provoking take on it from media thoughtster Nicholas Carr in this Forbes.com article

And a definition for the road, from Wikipedia, your everyday CC encyclopedia ;-) Cloud computing is a new (circa late 2007) label for the subset of grid computing that includes utility computing and other approaches to the use of shared computing resources. Cloud computing is an alternative to having local servers or personal devices handling users’ applications.

Illustration care of Dough

More value, less products: the innovation radar

The Innovation Radar, first described in 2006 by professor Mohanbir Sawhney and 2 peers, tries to identify innovation beyond product development and R&D, where it is normally silo-ed in traditional analysis. For that they have built a radar which covers 4 major dimensions or business anchors:

What: Offerings a company creates
Who: Customers it serves
How: Processes it employs
Where: Points of presence it uses to take its offerings to market

It’s a nice tool for companies concerned about their capacity and depth of innovative exercise, as it broadens the spectrum beyond product delivery and into value creation.

Spread across these, a company can innovate way beyond product or technology and can also track the status of it’s innovative capacity well beyond them. Infact, from these 4 key anchors the radar provides a vision enabling companies to innovate in these 12 areas:

Offerings, platform, solutions, customers, customer experience, value capture, processes, organization, supply chain, presence, networking, brand

More on using the innovation radar to drive organic growth. Image courtesy of Enterprise Leadership

I wanna be a management booklet (or do I?)

Today I was reading one of those visionary presentations that you always wonder if the author wrote under the effects of some opiate. But I came across a slide that addresses exactly the 3 questions I was asking myself in the morning when I woke up in the same anxious anticipation that wakes me up every morning since I moved here.

Those 3 questions where masterfully articulated by the author as follows:

Strategic decisions: what business are we in and where are new opportunities for growth?

Operational decisions: how do we structure our business units to most effectively compete for and win market share?

Tactical decisions: which customers are available to us and how can we convince them to chose us over any and all functional equivalents?

Nicely put. Now I continue to rake my mind and scrutinise my peers to answer these questions in the most value adding manner for the business ;-)

More information in AuroraWDC and also in ReconG2

Illustration courtesy of Pay Attention or Pay

Bogardus and the ungrophobic rising

The Bogardus Social Distance Scale is a psychometric scale created to measure, in an empirical way, people’s willingness to participate in social contacts of varying degrees of closeness with members of diverse social groups, such as other racial and ethnic groups, homosexuals and so forth.

The scale asks a person to what extent they would accept a certain group. An average result of 1.00 for a group indicates no-social distance. The scale is cumulative (Guttman-esque?) as each item implies acceptance of all preceding ones.

• As close relatives by marriage (score 1.00)
• As my close personal friends (2.00)
• As neighbors on the same street (3.00)
• As co-workers in the same occupation (4.00)
• As citizens in my country (5.00)
• As only visitors in my country (6.00)
• Would exclude from my country (7.00)

The reason this drew my attention is that I just read about the Roma community in Hungary and found, not to my surprise (unfortunately), the following:

They account for 10% of the population (largest Roma community in any European country)

80% of them are unemployed (In Hungary the average unemployment rate is 7,7%)

In 2005 The Decade of Roma Inclusion was declared

Photo: winner of the Decade of Roma Inclusion Photo Award, 2007. Tunde Erika Palose, The World of Information

Narrowcasting and the behavioural target

Behavioural targeting (BT) anonymously targets Internet users based on observed previous behaviour. It works, some experts say, under a rule based model whereby if a user does X, he is presented with Y, based on application of recency and frequency as key indicators.

Recency informs of how long since the user performed a certain action; Frequency establishes how often

The 3 basic questions BT asks are: where is the user now? where was the user before? what did he do there?

However, what I see as a clear challenge for the model, is that it will need to predict between intent based actions and routine based ones. How to predict intent is something I cannot answer ;-) I like the fact that it is a narrowcasting model versus a broadcasting one, it should no doubt deliver higher relevancy if the rules are efficiently designed and implemented. On the other hand, I still would like to see how to achieve and fine tune this efficiency: recency matters, but what about behavioral profiling; editorial adjacency; media utilisation models; depth of content versus vertical industry consumption…?

Narrowcasting illustration courtesy of Qeam. More information on this topic can be found in OMMA Behavioural

Online display advertising more in than out

All the noise is made around search advertising, but despite all the hoopla and the rise of video ads and rich content, display advertising online is still fore-casted at 1/5 of all online advertising sales in 2011.

The source of this statement is eMarketer

For an interesting view of ad spend per channel in US Internet until 2011 have a look at the chart below.

Hope you all have a lovely and sunny spring, like Eero.

Classified resilience, economic downturn

This is an interesting comment, especially for someone like me who works in classifieds and, in many of the business areas I am involved in, depend on micro formats, contextual ads and, in general, smaller text link type ad revenues much more than display intensive and hyper graphic ad environments.

“Some believe that Google, which is largely dependent on text ads it places alongside search results, is likely to be more immune to an advertising recession than rivals like Yahoo and Microsoft, who earn a greater share of their revenues from display advertisements” (New York Times, 31.01.2008)

Of course I do not believe anyone is immune to a recession, but it’s interesting that micro formats (like classifieds) always seem to fare better in recession-ist advertising environments.

Nevertheless it seems that even the big heroes such as Schibsted, are suffering the impact of the slowdown. I think a good proof of this is the way the Spanish online real estate operations (namely Fotocasa) have shown slower growth in Q4 of 2007. There is no comment yet on what could be the impact on Spain’s Internet darling for the company, the traditionally very profitable and leading Infojobs portal. Print revenue for International Classifieds has gone down 25% versus Q4 2006 and online has increased 56% in the same period.