In a recent article by Geoff Ramsey, President of eMarketer ( See below), he definitely hit the nail on the head! In the wake of  the financial crisis, will we see a similar media crisis spurred on by the overflow of more and more content, while users still expecting to downloading it for free? We are in an age where everybody is creating, and the world has become  flat for media.  There is just so much out there and it is really becoming more and more available as we envisioned….the on-demand via multi-screens scenario.  I do believe in social recommendations of compelling content, but the market is there for the taking if you do something stimulating and original that really catches the eyes of the consumers. This then could potentially propel it with immense social velocity.

This is why it is critical to have all of your media ducks in a row.  As I say, your RIOTPM ( Radio, Interactive, OOH, TV, Print, Mobile) all working like a purring Ferrari ready to hit the road with your creative “eye-catching, ears-ring”, “Taste buds-swelling” “Fingers-itching” campaigns. The industry word has been coined “Earned-Media”, but I like to think of it as “Emotional-Earned Media”.

If as a marketer you can deliver on this kind of compelling promise to consumers, the last thing you want is for them to try to open that campaign on their mobile phone and the site does not work due to lack of preparation, or poor layout….. Mobile has to be there as well as Social media with the right strategy in place from the start, with its own creative twists….

2011 is the dawn of the new media creative that maps across all the different screens in that unique special contextual way… we are excited  to be part of this…

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2011 Trends: Content Marketing Is Critical

DECEMBER 1, 2010

Geoff Ramsey—CEO, Co-Founder

Next year, marketers will need to rethink their approach to advertising and marketing and intensify their focus on creating magnetic content that will naturally attract consumers, rather than relying solely on the interruption model of advertising, which consumers are responding to less and less. Think pull vs. push.

Magnetic content can include anything created on behalf of a brand—be it an ad, YouTube video, online game, Facebook page, Twitter promo or mobile app—that consumers genuinely want to engage with and pass along to others. This content entertains, amuses, informs, serves a function or satisfies a consumer need. It’s welcome instead of annoying or interruptive.

Marketers, especially those working in social media, have seen the proven value of branded content, sometimes also referred to as “earned media.” Nearly three-quarters of US companies with a social media strategy used such content in their campaigns, making it the most common type of content used, according to a June 2010 study by King Fish Media, HubSpot and Junta42.

Creating effective, breakthrough advertising has always been a challenge for marketers, as well as for the agencies charged with the task. But the classic interruption-disruption model of advertising is moribund. Marketers should ask themselves five questions about the magnetic content they are seeking to create to determine whether it will be truly attractive to their audience:

Is the content unique?
Is the content useful?
Is the content well executed?
Is the content fun?
Does the content make good use of the channel in which it appears (e.g., social, mobile, video)?
Marketers should base their magnetic content ideas on well-researched customer behaviors, attitudes and lifestyles. This entails altering your emphasis in marketing from “selling product” to identifying and solving a consumer need or want that transcends or complements the physical product or service you are selling. Ask yourself this critical question: Besides your product, what can you do for the consumer?

I learned about Delta’s decision to add WiFi now to its regional Jet Service. It appears the Virgin domino strategy has worked!  This is big news for all of us that like to work when we are flying.  I do not know what they will do about Skype or video calls over Wifi, but being connected during those several hours when flying is exactly the service I like as a business traveler.

This will bring a new breath of fresh air to iPad, smartphone Apps as now we will start to see the in-flight entertainment services moving to those opportunities as well.  Just think of the future shopping potential? Duty Free when you fly with one-click of the button….

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Here are some of my favorite links to either help you through the Thanksgiving Holidays or just Apps of Thanks!

1) Top Thanksgiving Survival Apps ( PCWorld)

2) 5 Apps to be Thankful for if you are Flying this Thanksgiving ( RRW)

….more Apps for traveling

3) Some of the top iPhone Thanksgiving Apps ( MacWorld)

4) Great music to listen to over the Holidays ( CareyOtt)

5) Top Apps for Cooking (Blog)

6) Epicurious App

7) Vegetarian Cookbook App

Given the fact that Apple is a true leader in the music industry and in many ways started a great process for artist and labels to make money selling tracks via iTunes as opposed to the illegal p2p downloads ( Lime wire and others still alive), one would think that they would look to the future with the Radio industry as well.

Many companies ( i.e. CBSradio)  have been releasing and bringing amazing  internet radio to the mobile world, but why limit this? What is the real logic? Is it because it is difficult for them to extract revenues from the radio feeds integrated with Advertising?

This announcement today was again a shocking bit of news that really needs to be looked at.  When we think of AM/FM Radio’s from the past, we do think of mobile devices ( Either mobile in the car, or that portable Receiver that we all used to take with us to the Beach, the Base Ball Game.

I myself with my boutique strategic consultancy was amazed by this announcement. Why not let a single radio station build up its own App with a variety of  their own offers and direct consumer value propositions.  Is it like telling an artist they can not launch their own App unless it is a music app with hundreds of other Artists.  Radio stations deserve to grow their own brand in this era of fierce competition and let the market decide.  I am still not clear on their logic and maybe this post can bring some debate and discussion to really understand why this is good for Apple, their customers and the industry.  I am a true believer in cross-media convergence of Radio in a variety of forms.  I do see the value of having Radio Apps with hundred of stations, but in the programming world and with this new era of personalization, having one-station that can evolve to a true personalized station for that fan base in my mind only makes sense.

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Apple bars ‘all single-station radio apps’ from iPhone
‘They’re like fart apps,’ howl Jobsian minions
By Cade Metz in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted , 24th November 2010 21:13 GMT
Apple is now barring all single-station radio applications from the iPhone and iPad, insisting that “single station apps are the same as a fart app and represent spam in the iTunes store.” So says Jim Barcus, the president of DJB Radio Apps, an outfit that has long helped build iPhone apps and other mobile apps for radio stations across the country.

According to Barcus, Apple began rejecting single-station radio apps on November 10, declaring that it “will no longer approve any more radio station apps unless there are hundreds of stations on the same app.” Barcus can’t see the logic. “[Apple doesn't] understand that radio stations are in fierce competition,” he tells The Reg. “[Apple] just wants all radio stations to be on one big fat app, and that’s just not going to happen.”

Barcus is now broadcasting his gripe via an article in Radio Magazine, urging radio station owners to complain directly to Apple and Steve Jobs. “I think after enough broadcast professionals complain and make Apple aware of the fact that radio stations are in fierce competition with each other and listener loyalty makes the listener want to only listen to his favorite radio station, Apple may change this rule,” he says.

Good luck with that, Jim.

As Barcus points out, Apple’s recently introduced App Store guidelines say that “developers ‘spamming’ the App Store with many versions of similar apps will be removed from the iOS Developer Program.” Although Barcus acknowledges that the apps he helps build for radio stations are similar, he says that each station has its own Apple developer account and that each app is named and tagged according to the station’s call letters and location. “If you search on ‘radio station app,’ you’re not going to see these applications,” he tells us. “This isn’t like you’re getting spam. It’s not like keying in ‘Fart app.’”

He also points out certain inconsistencies in Apple’s stance. “Every Pizza joint can have its own app. There are more than 900 flashlight apps. More than 3,000 apps that do maps,” he says. “But radio stations cannot have their own apps.”

Barcus has emailed Steve Jobs directly to appeal for a change of heart. But Jobs upheld Apple’s stance with typical brevity. “Sorry, we’ve made our decision,” Jobs replied.

Fart-app-like ‘spam’ aside, Apple could be angling to offer some sort of radio tool of its own. “This may be about money,” Barcus says. Rumors have long suggested that Apple is building its own FM radio app for the iPhone, and later versions of the Jesus Phone include an FM transmitter and receiver hardware.

Currently, this hardware goes unused. At the moment, apps must tap radio stations via the net, and there are myriad apps that do so. National Public Radio (NPR), for instance, offers an app for listening to hundreds of affiliate stations across the country, and ESPN offers a similar app for tapping some of its affiliate stations. ®

This is something that caught my eye.  With all the talk of 4G, LTE and the present constant search for bandwidth, are consumers in for another cost hit moving forward? Yes- we can always go to Wifi mode when it is convenient, but still the costs of tethering with mobile devices jumps significantly when we get to the 2Gigs and above.  Mobile Video has been the high-light of many discussions as the next wave of killer content delivered to mobile and at a recent event in NYC on the future of Television all of the mobile panelists have said that mobile video is here and 2010 is really the year of mobile!

However,  according to Dr. Reinaldo Valenzuela ( in a RRW article)  director of wireless research at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, the problem is part of what he called the “too-much-data paradox”. Dr. Valenzuela spoke on the topic last week as well at the Texas Wireless Summit, describing a situation wherein the constant push for smartphone adoption will prove unsustainable for carriers ( 50% of users will have smartphones in North America by 2012. Imagine it will be Android version 5 and iOS6?)

“There’s a tremendous amount of relevant content on great devices at reasonably affordable rates,” explained Valenzuela, “however, networks have started crashing under this pressure. It’s no surprise that just in New York, to address the iPhone, AT&T is spending billions of dollars.”

The problem, Valenzuela pointed out, is that just 10% of all smartphone users are using the majority of data. With current smartphone adoption rates, carriers are looking at a situation where soon cost of providing the data being consumed will surpass profit. Dave Gill, the senior director of mobile media at Nielsen, also spoke at the summit and offered similar conclusions.

“You’ve got to somehow throttle the top end of the spectrum here to make money in this market,” said Gill, offering the following chart of mobile data use.

With the main threshold of 2Gigs today, where will this all go when we really start to bring more video and rich media into the mix?

I believe that the key to all of this will fall on some kind of  needed balance with more automatically enabled Wifi services in highly congested areas of NYC and the like.  As Wifi becomes a standard component in mobile devices, the ability to automatically switch between the mobile networks and the Wifi networks in a plan that is best mapped out to a users data plan seems like a logical step.

Will we move to metered pricing?  or will there be a cost increase in data across the board based on the supply and demand methodology of basic economics thus driving up the desire of Carriers to again start to charge more for data.

So even though we can say that 2010 was a significant year in mobile, in my mind until there is more liquidity of the data networks, we still have a bit longer to go before mobile at its prime is really unleashed.

Amazon launched on Monday ( Nov 22) a new iPhone App for with advanced price comparison features on-the-go. Is this the straw that broke the camels back?  Will window shopping now be the only and main behavior for users shopping in the future? Has the Check-in replaced the Check-out?  Consumers look through the merchandise like they would through catalogs, but instead of buying it in that store, they hit the button on Amazon, buy it and have it delivered right to their home by the time you get there. This new change of purchasing behavior has evolved considerably with the growth of Smart Phones. Recently it was published that over 60% of users with Smart Phones will do some kind of product search in-store. Google recently launched its own new shopping product called Boutiques.com, and this wave of new eCommerce sites that incorporate mobile and offers is really exploding.

Recently, I have been seeing a lot of local supermarkets migrating to self-serve check-outs to cut the costs at the cash register  and make the flow quicker for people to move through the check-out lanes when congested.  It took me about 5 minutes to figure out how to use the automated system at Food Emporium and Home Depot, but once I figured it out, It found it quite convenient. But is it more convenient then just doing a quick product search, buying the product and having it delivered to my home.

Like many of the Retail brands, Food Emporium is doing its best to meet these online challenges with its own Online Shop, and FREE Delivery for sales over $75.  They have their own strategy for coupons and they have a great methodology of pick-up vs. delivery for making it convenient for their shoppers, but is it enough?

When I searched on Google for Home Depot and clicked on the link, Google kept me within Google’s index for my first couple of searches and clicks on Home Depot. I thought I was crazy when I was navigating within Home Depot’s site, but the URL string in my search bar was still Google? What does Home Depot thing of this? Google is now doing analysis of the users behavior in the site even after the search that is beyond just the lead. They seem to be pushing the envelop to gathering information that is beneficial for them. Google is trying to build deep information even before you can enter the online site of the Retailer for their own competitive advantage ( see diagram)

Retail brands are going to have to come up with new ways of assuring they not only have the right low price, but also the right “stickiness” in their apps to get users to use them over the Amazon’s of the world.  With Google running the search show, even when users go to the Retail Brand via the Web, Google is hanging on as long as possible to gather information on the user, making it potentially even more difficult for even Retail brands to understand holistically that first step.

In addition, this new era is one of optimized fufillment  where delivery and convenience is potentially the winning card.

2010 seems to be the year of the social promotion. 50% off for this or 90% off for that, if you register for the goods prior is the model that has worked so well for Groupon, but nitche players like Gilt.com, LivingSocial, Yipit and a variety of others are now making it easier for users  to find these promotions and coupons related to a location in real-time. This combined with the behavior of social recommendations and purchase history of your “Friends” will add even another unique dimension on the behaviour of online shopping on the go.

Even though Facebook seems to be quite quiet when it comes to eCommerce and one-click to buy shopping, they did have an unique release that better integrates the social graph as part of a sign-on process recently for mobile.  Once they also add this one-click to buy and make it easier to find products and services on-the-go, they will become another “Guerilla in the Room” that makes it more and more difficult for the Bricks-and-Mortars” to control that check-out experience.

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Amazon Price Comparison App Aims At Brick-and-Mortar Stores
by Mark Walsh, November 23,2010

Amazon will use the iPhone as a vehicle for snagging more business from brick-and-mortar stores this holiday season. With the company’s new price comparison app for the iPhone launched Monday, users can scan a product barcode, snap a picture of an item, or say a product’s name to find out if they can get a better deal from Amazon.

If they choose to go with Amazon, they can then make a purchase directly through the Price Check app and have it delivered to their home. That’s a clever way to try to take sales away from physical store rivals while shoppers are strolling down their aisles.

“For example, a customer may be shopping for a toy in a toy store and decide to compare the in-store price of the item to Amazon.com and other online merchants using Price Check,” explains Amazon in its announcement. But the third-party merchants online are limited to those that sell through Amazon.

That’s not the same as a popular app like Red Laser, acquired by eBay in June, which lets users scan a product barcode to compare pricing and stock across multiple online and physical stores. Amazon’s new app is essentially comparing its own pricing against that of the store someone is shopping at.

“While we love the search and quick purchase options, the [Amazon] ultimately isn’t that useful because it only allows users to compare a single store price with the prices of Amazon and its sellers,” noted Mashable. Once someone has already decided to brave the holiday crush by heading to a local store, there’s also a question of how often they would forgo an immediate purchase for a better price on Amazon.

The most likely instance for opting for Amazon would be where an item was out of stock and a shopper could use the Price Check to say the product name to find out if was available through the online retail giant. Or where the price difference was big enough to switch to Amazon despite adding in any shipping costs.

A report from research firm IDC Monday revealed that smartphones are changing consumer behavior. It found more than one-third of smartphone-carrying consumers (who represent 24% of all U.S. consumers) “are ready to use their mobile devices in ways that transform how they shop everywhere, and in particular, how they shop in retail stores.” That includes searching for price and product information, comparing prices at nearby stores, and buying things.

IDC projected that mobile-shopping “warriors” and “warrior wannabes” will account for 28% or $127 billion of the $447 billion the National Retail Federation (NRF) estimates U.S. consumers will spend this holiday season. Amazon itself said in its second-quarter earnings report in July that its mobile sales had surpassed $1 billion during the prior 12 months.

Brick-and-mortar retailers have released their own apps to take advantage of the smartphone explosion and aid in-store shopping. That includes major chains and department stores such as Target, which Monday was named “2010 Mobile Retailer of the Year” by Mobile Commerce Daily, Best Buy, JCPenney and Nordstrom.

Julie Ask, a mobile analyst at Forrester Research, noted that Amazon and Best Buy — which finished second and third behind Target as top retailer of 2010 — may actually have an edge when it comes to having more mobile-savvy customers.

“Both sell a lot of products that fall into the sweet spot for mobile — consumer electronics (one of the top activities for consumers on mobile devices around commerce is price comparisons — especially in the CE category) and books/DVDs,” she wrote in a blog post Monday. By creating an app patterned after customers’ mobile habits, Amazon is hoping to drive mobile revenues even higher.

Here is the interview of Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, in the Web2.0 Summit.  I had the honor to work with Robin and team with their first mobile search product with Nokia back in 2005 ( 5 years ago). When we met he said the success of Baidu would be to keep focus on search.

Even at that time we discussed the vision of the ” Magic Search Box” that what ever you type in you find and it happen….

It is interesting how Google has left the focus only on search for many different things.  As social is now becoming a key part of search and new emerging opportunities around Twitter Search…. I am sure we will see

There has been a lot of debate recently about whether Foursquare will truly become the main point of check-in’s around places in the future, or our others going to to be the next game in town ? With Facebook’s Places now extending to Blackberry’s and the roadmap growth process for the 600M+ users,  Foursquare only has 4M users is not even 1% the size of its Goliath predator. Foursquare has been growing with brands and starting to bring lots of new value with different promotional relationships and feeds to their platform, but can they grow fast enough as a company focused on local and is their growth  pace enough to be sustainable? Recently Foursquare was compared to Groupon in its efforts to bring value-added promotions around the community, and some say that Foursquare will need thousands of resources to keep the momentum going.   Even though advertising can be considered great content ( if presented in the right way)  is it the right content that will make Foursquare scale with user acquisition?  For some reason, I believe that it is a good direction, but I am not convinced it is really the right focused strategy as it is so resource intensive to do all those deals.  Groupon emerged with a very different business model for user attraction that has been very local, but not as hyper-local as Foursquare.

In my recent visit to conference around local advertising from the perspective of the local directory companies, Foursquare was a hot-topic, but they seemed to be working toward building their own anchor around local advertisers and Foursquare was not the centerpiece.  There was more debate and discussion around social media distribution in general around Facebook and Twitter.  Foursquare’s game got them out of the gate, and they have tapped into the behavior of the check-in, but others are fast to copy this phenomena.   I am really looking forward to seeing how they scale, but they need something more organic wow now to attract users like they did with the first game concept.   I am looking forward to this evolution and see how they balance user focus vs. advertising in the future, with or without that sales force.  My question is can they keep the game going to continue to game users? Can the game concept continue to grow at a local level?