Alberta Business Marketing

Gab Goldenberg feels that Seth Is Wrong On Paid vs Free Journalism.  I am not clear on his reasons for saying that since I feel that Seth Godin would agree with much of what Gab has written.  For example Gab list the reason journalists used to get paid was that:

1. They didn’t mostly leverage the branding that broad distribution got you. Only syndicated columnists typically did well enough to have book deals and speaking gigs that made them any decent money. This was wasted branding, imho.
2. They covered stuff that most people would find it a chore to write up, like municipal politics (Oh no, they’re moving trash day to Sunday!) or that others were not vying to report and for which there was thus no competition (eg Watergate).

He goes on that nowadays, newspapers are mistakenly filling their pages with wire content. This commodifies them. As suggested previously, the path to saving newspapers is more journalism, not less! More research, less rehash!

It all sounds like the same hymn sheet to me.  Perhaps the title was to catch the eye just as that of Seth Godin’s was with Malcolm is wrong.  Seth Godin starts off as follows:

I’ve never written those three words before, but he’s never disagreed with Chris Anderson before, so there you go.  Free is the name of Chris’s new book, and it’s going to be wildly misunderstood and widely argued about.

The Malcolm referred to is Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink, and someone who is always worth listening to. Seth Godin too is a little wide ranging in his diatribe but his final paragraph is the real meat:

Neatness is for historians. For a long time, all the markets for attention-based goods are going to be messy, which means that there are going to be huge opportunities for people (like you?) able to get that most precious asset (our attention) for free. At least for a while.

Indeed I think messy will now describe the Information space for ever.  There is essentially zero cost and zero barriers for anyone who wishes to add to this Tower of Babel. Two factors will dictate whether anyone can make money out of this. 

1. Some (authors) will do it because they can stand out from the crowd and gain a following.
2. Others (search engines) will make money because they can highlight what others may wish to find. 

Unfortunately for so many others who cannot get anyone’s attention, they will waste their sweetness on the desert air.

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Tags: Chris Anderson, free, Internet, Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin
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I was meaning to blog about the European Union’s “public diplomacy” tour through Western Canada (an area the EU’s trade delegation in Canada has hitherto neglected) tied to the launch in May of the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement, a long overdue bilateral trade initiative between the EU and Canada. But instead I want to tell a story about a European company I am in awe of right now.

Most of the EU presentation in Edmonton June 12 reflected things we already know: that Canada and especially Western Canada have a “significantly undertraded” relationship with Europe, as EU representative Fred Kingston put it; that the relationship is more significant in terms of investment (Canada is the fourth largest foreign investor in the EU; the EU, No. 2 in Canada – the thousands of Albertans who work for Shell and Total and Schlumberger certainly know that); that there is a great opportunity to increase trans-Atlantic trade, especially in agricultural products.

Nope, I’d rather talk about what we can learn about harnessing the power of new media from Lego Systems.

I have a six-year-old son, Alex. In the viral (all senses of the term) environment of the school playground he heard tell of this website, lego.com. Here you can find entertainment related to licensed properties such as Lego Star Wars and Lego Indiana Jones. But the real marketing and merchandising genius is to be found in Lego’s own franchise, unveiled last January, called Power Miners. Never heard of Power Miners? Obviously you are not a male in grade one.

Power Miners are gruff-voiced heroes (no super powers as far as I can tell) who drive rock-pulverizing contraptions with names like the Granite Grinder and the Crystal Sweeper through mine shafts collecting energy crystals and fighting these rather ridiculous (certainly not nightmare-inducing) villains called rock monsters. You can watch them in animated movies, download or upload home movies of the toys (user-generated content, to use the catchphrase) and “play” them in video games. Lego seems to have discovered something that escaped Walt Disney: kids this age want their movies to be five minutes long (perfect for a web download), not 90! They’ll watch each video several times at a sitting and memorize the macho dialogue.

Alex could spend hours on this site if we let him. And it’s all free (consistent with Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson’s thesis about the future of business). Lego makes it all back and more selling the construction sets surrounding the characters and vehicles for anything from $10 to $70, each set produced from maybe 50 cents worth of plastic. We of course won’t buy these for our son. But he has an allowance and is willing to save up for extraordinary periods to buy them himself. He’s talked his little brother into pooling their funds for these purchases. They worked out a deal whereby they take turns getting to sleep with the toy in their room on alternating nights.

I say this with some dismay, being a hapless investor in Lego’s Canadian-based competitor, Mega Brands, but what the venerable Danish toy giant has done is brilliant. Best of all, it has no royalties to pay to George Lucas or Stephen Spielberg. It has created its own entertainment hit below the radar of Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, and is giving it away free.

Tags: BizBeat - Editor's Blog, Chris Anderson, European Union, Lego
Posted in Alberta Business | | Comments Off