discarding people vs using them.

I've been reading Chris Matthews 'Life's a Campaign' while in the bathroom for the last couple weeks. The most important lesson, thus far, is one thrown in the book jacket, which, imho, makes the book worth buying (or receiving as a gift), the gist of which is that people don't mind being used, they mind being discarded.

This, I am starting to think, is a universal truth. How many problems in your life, or in the modern world, can be traced to someone being abandoned and ignored after they were used. A large part of me thinks this is the real issue behind a lot of the war on terror - if you train someone, convince them to risk their lives, and point them at an enemy, they probably aren't expecting abandonment afterwards. So, when abandoned, guess who the new, worse enemy is?

However, I've only recently started considering this in terms of branding and advertising. I complain a lot about the use of 'authenticity' as a buzzword panacea for any failings on the ad front for anyone. And generally, I've thought of authenticity as a bullshit substitute for actual value. The only people I encounter who use the word authenticity work in branding-related fields, for are insufferable hipster-stereotypes who think of it as something conferred by drinking cheap beer, and spending the savings at Urban Outfitters.

But consider authenticity in terms of the using vs. discarding argument. Advertising is about creating associations, and using those associations to create desire. At a base level, it's about creating a desire to be the things associated with the brand in question. So, if a brand needs to maintain a justification for those associations to avoid making the consumer think that their identity, which has, to an extent, become an offshoot of the collection of brands they accumulate, then any glimpse that those associations were a transparent attempt to bring more customers is the same as discarding the originals.

To put it more simply, authenticity isn't the issue. Brands needs to develop organically, in a way that makes sense based on the associations they have claimed in the past, or abandon those who have used the brand as an identifier.

When a brand you have taken on as an aspect of your persona changes inorganically, they have discarded you, and everyone of their previous customer-base.

So. Either I misunderstood, and everyone who was talking about authenticity meant this, or authenticity is still a bullshit buzzword in the world of branding, but one with a hint of truth behind it.

More importantly, take the advice to heart. Using people is fine. Discarding them is where things become problematic.

advertising vs. data collection in monetizing social networks.

I promised to follow up on this post around two weeks ago, but I think I can be excused due to the holiday madness that filled that time period.

In the previous post, my general complaint was that the amount of initiative necessary to elevate advertising in social networks from an annoyance to a service is negligible in comparison to the potential returns, both directly and in terms of reputation. The example at hand was Facebook, and the mediocre targeting that let me know a band I like was touring in my country, but didn't bother to take it a step further and actually point me to venues near me, and a place to purchase tickets.

The problem goes deeper than that, and it's pretty simple to explain. Facebook, like most social networks, has made the assumption that having a business model based on advertising revenue means you are a company that works in advertising. Looking into Facebook's brand promotion 'Fans' pages, etc, there is a lot of useful space in which to inject a brand identity. They've also made a point to keep the structure fairly rigid, which I respect - this feature was, at first, the major differentiator from MySpace. I'm not trying to question the advertiser focused initiatives that Facebook has created. I'm just wondering why they were necessary at all.

Facebook is not an advertising company. Facebook, like all social networks, is more accurately a clearing house of user data. Facebook has a lovely, massive community of people, many of whom are highly engaged with the 'social utility'. Most of whom have made vast amounts of personal information available. This is what Facebook is selling, first and foremost - the ability to identify a useful target market for ads, services, etc.

So why are they taking it further than that? You want fan pages for Brands, sure. This makes perfect sense to me. But beyond that? What you have to offer is a community, and your collected information about them. Leave the rest to people why can actually make creative, targeted advertising work. Don't further the spread of the pseudo banner ad by putting them into the News Feed.

Offer the information. Leave strategy to the same guys who handle the creative in other, slightly less closed systems, all the time.

When reading about advertising and the future, the word that is thrown around a lot is authenticity, because us youth of today have finely tuned bullshit detectors, etc etc. My stance is that it's often quality that's more important - you can't make something an ad, and hide that you are trying to sell me something by coating it in a fine layer of authenticity. But you can make me care, and sit through the ad, because the content is good, relevant to me, and entertaining.

Facebook has the information to be astounding at determining the relevance of a product or service to it's users. But honestly, trusting either quality of content, or entertainment value to a company who openly and proudly has been built on unpaid, personal contributions by users seems more than slightly odd.

Hopefully it's clear that Facebook is interchangeable for any other social network or social utility here. The issue is that if the only thing you are actually bringing to the table is information, why are you trying to sell a full service, rather than just taking money for the information at substantially less overhead?

bundling for good.

This is a random post to start out 2008, but I figure it fits better there than in my informal tumblr account. Here's my question: why does software only get bundled for pain-in-the-ass reasons, and never for betterment-of-service reasons?

This popped into my head the way everything does, by taking multiple pieces of new information, and then looking at either the compatibility, or incompatibility of them. This time it was the final death of Netscape Navigator (due to MSFT bundling IE with Windows for the win) and an article where David Suzuki was discussing how little we actually know about the environment.

Then my mind went to the SETI@home project, which is one of those things I have no issues with whatsoever, to the point where I will actually argue FOR it, although it provides me no direct or indirect benefit.

Imagine if every new computer came with software that dedicated the spare processing time to breaking down information on, I dunno, protein folding in relation to AIDS, or what ever problem out there could be helped by a few million more computers looking for certain flags, and forwarding that information back from said nebulous cloud to home base.

The reason I think this post fits in the brokengent mandate is the potential benefit from a reputational aspect for the company. Instead of offering 5% of profits to a rotating cast of charities, or what have you, imagine being able to say 'oh, and in case you were on the fence? the very act of buying and using our product makes you an active participant in the fight against disease in the third world, for as long as you use our product, with no extra effort on your end.

Project (RED) seems even less meaningful, in comparison.

facebook ads and failures of monetization.

Depressingly, I do not have access to the screen shot I took of the specific Facebook ad that so offended me. If I get to it, I'll edit it into this post in the near future.

One of my issues with monetizing social networks is that it's always done in the least logical model possible. Instead of selling information (which, really, is the only product they have to offer other than the easily offended and fickle masses that make the entire engine run) they inevitably attempt to create a full service perfect storm of failure, that ends up making the advertisers look clueless and stupid, and makes the company itself look like they don't value the community in the least.

Looking at you, Facebook.

Here's the short version of my experience with Facebook ads. On my News Feed, I find an ad for Modest Mouse. I like Modest Mouse, and Facebook knows this. Because I told them, in my profile. Facebook also knows I live in Canada, again, due to my profile.

What Facebook doesn't seem to know is WHERE in Canada I live, or which venues are conceivable accessible to me, despite that information being very available to them. So I get an ad that says, more or less, 'Hey Canadian Modest Mouse fan! Modest Mouse is touring Canada. Now click this and dig through a bunch of crap to find out when they are near you! Then go to ticketmaster and go through more crap!'

I can see why they wouldn't want targeted ads that are actually well targeted. More work, more money, and the assumption that the true fans (the kind who label themselves such) are willing to hunt a little. And I guess that's fine. But from my point of view, it's also a waste.

If that ad had popped up with "Hey [NAME], Modest Mouse is playing at [Venue] and [Venue] near you, on [insert dates here]. If you would like tickets or further tour information, click here [link to ticketmaster page with info on the concert / venues]."

This wouldn't bother me, if the ads were calibrated to my stated interests, and my stated location. This is, I would argue, the whole value of social networks. The idea that advertising can be so targeted that it stops being an intrusion, and starts being a service.

A little more effort on the experience, and a fairly meaningless ad could, conceivably, have driven me to buy tickets on the spot, rather than compose a blog post in my mind.

I'll be following this up very shortly (possibly this evening) with another, more general post on my issue with how social networks are monetized, and how they could generate revenue without disrupting the user experience on which they completely rely.

the doug morris hypothesis.

By now, everyone has read the shockingly idiotic statements of Doug Morris, CEO of Universal Music Group.

If you haven't, here's a fairly accurate and completely awesome summation.

This, for me, raises an interesting question. It's fairly clear that Doug Morris isn't qualified for his current position. What the Wired profile also makes clear, is that Morris is a very experienced and proven A&R guy. He knows about finding that thing that makes an artist salable, and he knows how to push them over the edge, to fame. He more or less directly states that he considers that his real job, and all of the technology related issues are considered an annoyance.

This would be cool, if he was still just an A&R guy. Or even heading artist development, although one would hope the focus would be on a grander scale than breaking individual acts. Morris is a CEO, however. Which, to me at least, seems a lot like hiring the world's greatest car salesman to run Toyota. Yes, it's an important skill set, but it's also woefully unsuited to the issues one would hope a CEO faces.

This leads me to a potential explanation for everything wrong with the current state of the music industry. What we're seeing is an army of content management experts who think they are also experts in content ownership.

The roots of this are pretty simple to see. By the time the major music industry players started demanding ownership of songs, they had created a near-perfect system for creating stars. If you wanted to make it, you had to play by their rules - so why only ask for a percentage of the revenue when they could ask for the back catalogue, which is more or less a license to print money. This was fine when the most important parts of the industry were content management roles, like arranging recording, arranging printing physical merch for sale, building a buzz, media relations, etc. Even the direct content ownership stuff, like royalties and sales, was relatively simple. There was a major approved method of delivery, it was the only viable one, and the legal product was inevitably and noticeably different than any knock offs.

The game has changed. Music is, for all intents and purposes, free. So, content ownership has gotten messy. While competition in music sales was traditionally a matter of attention, fighting with other artists and labels, now it's a matter of fighting pirated material which is 1) free, 2) often easier to use as desired than legal options, and 3) more or less interchangeable with the legal alternative, the inadequacy of the music industry machine to deal with these issues is becoming somewhat clear.

I've, for a while now, been advocating that if music labels want to survive, they should abandon content ownership as a means of making all of their money, and focus instead on content management. This would require negotiating a percentage of revenue with each artist, or a set yearly rate, and offering the ludicrous amount of experience in these companies to break artists, create public interest, manage tours and appearances, promote, etc, all the things that the music industry has always done, and considered essential but secondary to getting paid for the creative creations of others.

A company like universal, to me, doesn't actually sell a product so much as they do a service. That service, in short, is making bands into a marketable commodity, and turning that notoriety into money. What they don't seem to do well, however, is create new revenue streams, deal with the issues related to format and distribution, and adapt to the current digital media landscape.

Everyone is looking at guys like Doug Morris and expecting some bold new strategy that is going to keep the content ownership portion of record label business prominent and afloat. Doug Morris just wants all of that to go away so he can find the next big thing, and teach them how to fill stadiums and empty wallets. Why is anyone asking him to figure out big picture stuff that he considers a waste of time?

democratic panopticon

[This is a work in progress, and it will be either heavily edited (when I am less sleepy), or re-written and re-posted (possibly with better defined arguments). Let's just consider this one workshopping online.]

This post is heavily thematically linked with a previous one, titled Paparazzi Panopticism.

Thing one: Warren Ellis' Crooked Little Vein includes a character who discusses the idea of cellular phones with cameras as a weapon. Any they are, because it allows anyone to create content, news content, information content, disruptive content. If you want the speech, buy the book. Seriously. It's brilliant.

Thing two: My father, who has, over the years, gone from the kind of guy who buys a 286 and convinces his wife that it's good for the kids (which it shockingly was), to the kind of guy who dislikes that blogging gives anyone a platform to say anything, made a compelling comment over dinner. That a world where people have cell phone cameras is a world where corruption is harder to get away with.

These things got me thinking. The effect of everyone being about to record anything isn't the us vs them issue that so many people think it is. The Panoptic reality this creates isn't binary, there is a more complex dynamic than authority vs people. What we're left with instead is a democratised panopticon, where interpretation and evidence can come from all sides, and from all agendas.

The intriguing part of this, for me, is the subversion of the original theory. Panoptic realities are about people policing themselves in fear of an authority who may or may not be watching at any given time. But the current situation isn't just about authority. Now there is reasonable need to fear that any action that would offend a reasonably sized community will be shown, and you will be penalized socially for it, by that group, and groups affiliated.

To put it simply, this isn't just about being caught standing against the whims of authority, now. It's about the possibility of being caught, at any time, for any act deemed against society, or even peace in society. This is more involved than fighting authority, for one simple reason - a democratised panopticon is inescapable.

In terms of fighting authority, it's marvelous that someone can't be tasered needlessly without it being caught on film. Authorities should be held responsible for their actions, because they have power. The same can be said for celebrities, which justifies, to an extent, the concept of the paparazzi panopticon. But a democratic panopticon seems to bring with it a need to better define the limitations of acceptable behaviour, of what acts, statements or opinions are anti-social in a strong enough sense to require response.

Or will the standard reply be something to the tune of 'live like no one's watching'?

fixing subscription model music services.

I've already written at length about what I think Microsoft should do with the Zune. Go read it. It's surprisingly comment free for something I consider a solid piece of speculative strategy. This time, I'm talking about the issues that are keeping subscription based music services unpopular.

People don't like the idea of a subscription model music service, for many reasons. The foremost among them is the idea that they are renting the music, and that other services are offering them the ability to own it. This is undeniably correct in the sense that the music goes away. It's incorrect in the sense that most digital music retailers, including the behemoth iTunes Music Store, would disagree that they are offering to exchange ownership of digital music for money, and would instead say they are selling you a license to use a certain copy of a song a certain number of ways, on a certain number of devices. This is important, because ownership by definition includes actual control over the product. In either case, the user doesn't have it.

At least a subscription based service doesn't lie to you. And, truthfully, it offers you a better deal by leaps and bounds. That is more or less unimportant, however. The issue is public perception. And people care about the fact that the music will go away if they stop paying.

The solution to this is offering a buy-out option for users, something in the vein of a lease to own deal. However, you can't set a standard fee for this buy-out option, because 1) if the price is too high, it may as well not exist. The same price as an individual download is too high, if the user is already paying a sub fee, and 2) if the price is too low, people will sign up and download insane amounts of music in one month, paying the cost at the end of the month, because it will be cheaper than individual downloads.

If, however, the cost of buying out tracks downloaded on a subscription basis decreased over the length of the subscription, there is both a sense of security that you CAN own your music if you decide the service isn't your thing anymore, and a solid reason to stick out the subscription long enough for it to become habit. If, for the first month, buy-out costs the same as an individual download, this is reasonable. Anything less, and the retailer will get screwed. But if the price per song for buy-out decreases over time, then it becomes a good deal. Six months into a subscription, and the buy-out cost could be half the price of a download, approx 50 cents. A year in, 25. Eighteen months, 7 cents, etc.

Obviously, the price drop over time would have to be calculated to take into account the revenue generated by the service per user, as well as the amount of downloading that takes place for the average user. But it offers all of the benefits of a subscription model service, while dealing (at least somewhat) with one of the major drawbacks.

If you wanted to get really difficult, you could offer whole or partial rebates of the subscription cost for the first few months, if a user bought out all songs. This also removes some of the fear that a subscription model service will be forcing you to pay twice for the same music. If you decide to buy-out at full price, getting 2 months subscription fees off of your total purchase means no net loss for testing the service.

And if you have a good product, getting people to test the service is more valuable than anything.

kindle-ing.

I've been reading a lot about Kindle, Amazon's exciting new e-reader type device, and the same thing comes to mind every time a new e-book type device hits the market. Who cares?

I've read several books in electronic format. On a PDA, or on my laptop or (on one occasion) on the screen of an ipod nano, broken into chapters. The major reason any of these things happened? They only required a device I already owned, that did something else useful.

Am I going to pay 400 bucks to read blogs (only some blogs) in black and white on something that looks more or less like a speak and spell spray-painted white? Not when, for the same price, I can get something (still unforgivably restricted but) able to do substantially more (ipod touch anyone?)

I get that the idea of an e-reader is attractive. I understand the appeal. But if something is supposed to supplant the physical book, it should probably be a cross-over device. If carrying the book is too much hassle for someone, carrying a heavier electronic version is probably unlikely. [EDIT: I was wrong, it's actually pretty light]

The display technology has a lot of applications, but not in multi-media. It's more or less only functional for print.

No one wants to carry a device that can only deal with print, when you consider the other options available.

music is already free

Dear Music Industry,

There's something you need to understand, and you don't seem to be getting it. Someone has to tell you, and they have to say it in no uncertain terms.

Stop arguing that music cannot be free. Stop it. It doesn't matter what your justification is, whether it's that the Radiohead model (as it is apparently now known) devalues music for other, less wealthy bands, or whether it's just plain thievery, and nothing else should matter, it's irrelevant.

I'll say it slowly, because I'm obviously not talking to the smart kids: MUSIC. IS. ALREADY. FREE.

We can't go back in time. Bandwidth and Compression made Apple a force in it's industry again. These technological changes made file sharing reasonable. And it made free plausible, not as a business model, but as a reality that cannot be ignored.

It doesn't matter if you can't work your old business model in a world where music is free. It doesn't matter if you feel it devalues your work. It doesn't matter if you think this paradigm only rewards the ultra rich, or those with a dedicated fan base who will spend money without needing to, or whether it just plain bothers you.

Music is already free. The genie is not going back in the bottle, because the holy triumvirate of bittorrent, bandwidth, and compression all have legitimate uses. And not in the NRA style 'guns are for protection, too' legitimate use, but there are entire business models that are only viable due to these innovations.

Music is free. You can't change that, you have to work with it. Radiohead decided that might be an idea - ACCEPTING REALITY - and hoping that, considering it would leak anyway, a portion of fans would be willing to give them a couple of bucks for something that, within minutes of release, WAS FREE ANYWAY.

I'm sorry that a lot of people, Music Industry, are caught in a transitional period where old ways are failing and new ways are undefined. I'm sorry that old revenue streams are falling by the wayside. I'm sorry that so many of you equate changing sources of money with doom.

But it doesn't matter if I'm sorry.

Because music is already free, and you can't change that will anything, even an endless parade of frivolous lawsuits.

With more than a modicum of disappointment,

The Broken Gentleman

watching the sky fall

Does anyone else feel like we're living in the ends times of content ownership as a business model? I've blogged before on my stance on content ownership (and copyright ownership) as a failing-to-failed business model in music, as demonstrated by the good folks in the music industry. Content ownership is only directly useful to content creators - for anyone else it's just a bunch of unnecessary hassle that complicates content management. Fighting over who owns the music is less useful than offering a service that creators are willing to pay for, whether in percentage or in a flat fee.

The WGA strike though, makes this feel like the entertainment apocalypse. Never before have traditional content channels seemed any less useful.

Cost of entry costs what these days? Well, that depends on how you define it. Cost of a decent camera, actors, etc, can scale based on what you want to achieve. But the cost of eyeballs is higher, and infinitely relative. You can either buy them with quality (which is immaterial and transient) or you can buy eyeballs from people who have them (advertising). One is free, technically, and the other is ludicrously expensive. Such is life.

The current structure of the entertainment system is based on a lot of things, arguably chiefly among them star power. But the reason networks and studios developed a power base, is the cost of entry, both in terms of creating content, and distributing it.

The issue is, that system has been running on intertia. And now we've torn down the financial support, and the distribution channel. This strike is both about payment for new content channels, and impetus to improve them.

This is what people do when the world is burning down, they fight over scraps. DVD revenue scraps, online distribution scraps, whatever. The same thing will happen when the actors renegotiate. Then the directors.

It's the same thing that happened in the music industry - when the world is run by guys nearing retirement, there's a lot less risk in looting than in learning how to deal with a new world.

The only real advantages that the film and tv industry have is the experience. Physical albums failed as an art form, but the music still had value. So they were separated. And the industry bigwigs blamed piracy, which is a rational reaction to removing the value from a product. Think about TV, and Movies watched on DVD, or in theatres. Is your experience that much better than it is through illegal content channels? Is that difference something that would be fixed by better speakers, a larger screen or projector, and higher quality digital files?

Although you will never have a home theatre that is better than a movie, you could get one that is better experientially when you include the bullshit of the excessive cost, the ads, the fifteen minutes of crap before the film actually begins. Same deal with DVDs. The extras are nice, so is the image quality. But the often unskippable ads beforehand? I'd rather just take it.

If you want to make money in this situation, you need to offer an experience that beats free as a price. You can't do that by putting restrictions on things.

And you can't make money by pissing off the people who supply the transient and immaterial source of interest, the quality. Because buying eyeballs is popular enough that you need a better hook than omnipresence.