How to promote excavator, loaders, trucks and forklifts?

Hyundai Heavy Industries knows.

This is not a Russian striptease club but a heavy industry materials fair. Hyundai might be taking the boys and toys concept just a bridge to far.

Pepsi launched a new controversial campaign using iPhone apps to promote their AMP energy drink.

The campaign is called "AMP Up Before You Score". They got loads of criticism and in the end appologized for the campaign. Tasteless or not? you can be the judge of that.

Another "low budget" film but another strategy. It started off with a creative outdoor campaign. There where bus shelters and bus benches for non humans only, road signs telling you not to pick up non humans and so on. Yet the buzz didn't spread untill recently. Suddenly District 9 is all over my Twitter and Facebook account. It still seems hard to predict when something will buzz over the internet.  Yet I must say that I'm getting more and more interested in checking out this District 9 movie.

Small cities often have to wait a long time to see big films in their local cinema and they have to wait even longer to see small films in that local cinema. If they ever get there that is.

Paramount took a leap of faith by producing a very small budget thriller called “Paranormal Activity”. The film is made with a ridiculously low budget, somewhat 10.000 dollar. Normally such a film would never even get foot on solid ground but due to a new way of distribution Paramount gave it a green light.

The movie has been launched last Friday at 13 college towns. The next town the movie will visit depends on the amount of voters a town gets on an online competition. So the audience can demand to see the movie. The only thing you need are enough people willing to see it.

“Paranormal activity” is again such a case that is harvesting the long tail. The nice thing is that there is a strong mix between everyday life and the online world. The only thing you have online is the website where people can vote and a few trailers. The action is in the real world. OK it is the same basic principle as ordering a book at Amazon but here it is a much more socially connected happening where you need to mobilize people.

I think it is a very nice attempt but of course these can only work when the model is kept for niche content. Imagine that you would be able to demand blockbusters… the chaos would be huge and people would be doomed to follow the strength of numbers.

Steve is back. (Ok he doesn't look that great but hey he is a live and "well")

Apple inc. stocks go up

I wish I had curves like that to control ......

A couple of weeks ago Rupert Murdoch announced that he wants to stop the free lunch principle for all of his news sites. In 2010, he says, everyone will have to pay for online news coming from NewsCorp. This of course as a last resort to find new revenues. In the second period of 2009 NewsCorp made a loss of 2 billion dollars.

Mr. Murdoch has a good point. The free lunch principle isn’t a great match with the media business model. Traditionally a newspaper is paid for 40% by the people who read it and for 60% by advertisers. So the fact that almost everyone can reach behind the net and get news for free is hurting the industry. So why do newspapers offer people the possibility to access news for free? Well due to severe competition from other internet based news sources. They figured that it was a good move because the content was already there and no extra expenses had to be made to offer it online. The online advertising revenues would offer an extra profit.

So far so good. But why did this fail? Well because online advertising is failing. Extremely low click through rates don’t justify the high prices a lot of news sites are charging for advertising space. According to the NYT you need fifteen people reading an advertising online to equal the advertising revenue of one person that reads the paper version. Currently there is only one company that is able to make a profit from online advertising and that is Google. And also for Google this isn’t unconditionally. They offer a huge range of free lunch products plus they have a lot of third party contracts, like for example with AOL.

So we can understand Mr. Murdoch’s reaction but making people pay for content isn’t working either. The NYT tried it but no one seemed interested in paying even a small amount for top content. Even worse was that due to the wall of payment they created a lot of search engines were unable to search the NYT content.

So the main question is whether it is possible to make people pay for something that was free?

The general answer is no. People won’t pay for content that they can find somewhere else for free. The big problem general newspapers have is not that people don’t want to pay it is the fact that their product, general news, has become a commodity. Although there still are a few occasions when people are willing to pay. Heidi Cohen, president of Riverside Marketing Strategies, gives a good overview of them. The most important are:

• Real time data
• Niche content
• Offering extra products

Of course it is obvious that these are most of the time related to news for professional use. The main question remains. When are general consumers willing to pay?

According to me it will be only by rethinking the entire newspaper business model that this problem can be faced. Of course I don’t have the answer, otherwise this blog post would make room for writing a million dollar book. But I think that this problem asks for a creative solution. Making people pay for your content isn’t such a solution. Rupert Murdoch is stuck in black or white thinking. Either they pay or they don’t pay. What is much more important according to me is investing in news beacons. Creating such a beacon is all about branding. Why is the only running shoe I trust a Nike shoe? People shouldn’t be thinking in newspapers they should be thinking in brands. News is not news until it is made by an institution. Your offering might not be premium but when people think it is they will pay none the less. Screaming that people have to pay isn’t helping it is in fact harming your brand.

To quote Charles Kane in Citizen Kane

“I don’t know who to run a newspaper I just do everything I can think of.”

Well I think the people in charge of newspapers can definitely run a newspaper but they do everything they can think of when it comes down to branding. Besides this I also believe there is still a future for the written non-digital paper. You only have to make it part of everyday life again. Of course I don’t have the answer on how to do that either but these are at least two different options instead of screaming that people should be paying.

A nice parody on the iPhone commercials

And lets not forget they also have the tendency to blow up in your face.

This week even also in Belgium a 15year old boy was hurt by his iPhone exploding. What's up with that?

Last friday we saw a lot of black smoke in Brussels centre. We wondered what was burning and so did others on Twitter. It didn't take long before multiple photo's started appearing. Twitter users surely got news out well before newspaper De Morgen did (15h55). Newssites even took over the photo's tweeple provided. So we got a great example of how people serve as journalists nowadays. However one can pose some questions. @bossy_bear wrote "Answer on twitter before the news. The vivaqua warehouse in diegem is on fire."  Well yes the news of the fire was earlier on twitter but afterwards it was posted that it was cosmetic warehouse that caught fire. The problem is that news gets retweeted (RT) often on Twitter without source checking. So we shoudn't always take twitter news for facts immediately. Besides that one has to follow quite an amount or the right kind of people to even know that there is a fire. Unless the news is worthy of worldwide spread, in that case it might end up in the trending topics. So lets say that for now Twitter is faster but that we should always be critical and check sources (as goes for traditional news).

Got to love their header (and their blogposts of course).

When you open up a newspaper, turn on the TV or radio…you probably will hear something about the Mexican (swine) flu. For months now it’s a hot topic.  The number of infected people is rising every day.  You might wonder what an epidemic disease has to do with marketing. I will give you an example that even a flu can inspire people to create products.

By now we all know that one way to protect ourselves from the flu is by wearing a face mask.

The American designer Irina Blok must have thought: “if I have to wear a face mask, I at least should look fashionable”, when she designed the cotton masks which cover the nose and mouth.  These mask do certainly look funnier and cooler than the medical ones.

You can order such a mask online for seven euro’s. The designer said she wanted to do something cool regarding the epidemic disease. The remarkable thing she also said is: “ the masks are not only pretty, they can also save lives”.  Well, her last statement  seems to be false.  These fashionable cotton masks don’t stop the virus, only the medical ones do.  A positive side of the initiative is that Irina Blok will donate the profit to Children International to help Mexico fight the flu epidemic.

Well, if (when) it comes to wearing a face mask it is up to you to decide: to be in or to be sick?