Nothing exemplifies “old media” mass advertising better than the multi-million dollar Super Bowl commercial.With the rise of niche targeting and social media made possible by the internet, this was the kind of profligate ad spending that was supposed to be extinct by now.Critics of “old media” have been predicting the demise of mass-market ads for years, yet NBC still sold out their spots for a record $206 million and many of us paid more attention to the commercials than the game.It appears the big TV commercial still reigns supreme, but on closer examination old media (TV) and new media (internet) may finally be learning how to work together more seamlessly.
For the past few years, I’ve noticed a trend of Super Bowl commercials that directed viewers to company websites.GoDaddy.com was one of the first to use this tactic effectively by making people go to their website to see the end of a story that began on TV.This year, the melding of Super Bowl ads and a corresponding web presence seems to have reached a tipping point.Denny’s, Jack in the Box, Hulu.com, Vizio, Pepsi, and GoDaddy all directed people to visit their websites.But simply sending people to a website doesn’t really take advantage of the two-way conversations made possible by the internet.Oddly enough it was Budweiser, the biggest and most extravagant buyer of Super Bowl ads that would launch a truly interactive social media platform to gather feedback from the audience.
Instead of just a website that continues where the commercials leave off, Anheuser-Busch, consulted social media maven Brian Solis and launched AB-Extras.com.Unlike the other sites, AB-Extras employs a variety of social media tools from YouTube to Flickr, aggregates the relevant information, and helps the A-B marketing team communicate and listen to audience feedback.Built on a blogging platform, Bud’s site encourages engagement instead of just “tricking” people into watching a longer commercial online.
I suspect this trend of using a “mass blast” commercial to jumpstart a social media conversation will continue, and it will be interesting to see if other companies adopt Anheuser-Busch’s more interactive strategy.If you believe the hardcore social media advocates, in a few years Super Bowl commercials might be little more than invitations to come chat with the company online.
I recently read an article that said a recession is a great time to start a business because when times are tight, deals can be found on many of the goods and services needed to grow a company. While this might be fundamentally true, I wondered how many entrepreneurs actually felt that way. Economic realities being what they are, people still need to eat and pay their rent. With the economy in shambles, how many entrepreneurs would take a chance on a start-up knowing it might be nearly impossible to get a job if things didn’t work out? I decided look for an entrepreneur who was actually doing it.
My first challenge was figuring out where to start my search. There was always Starbucks, but living in Los Angeles all I found were struggling screenwriters. I decided to try a co-working space called BlankSpaces. If you’re unfamiliar with co-working spaces, they are apparently the new trend for people who got tired of working alone at home. After chatting with a few of the usual suspects, I met Edward Lujan, a recently homeless entrepreneur, and Firas Bushnaq, millionaire and executive chairman of eEye Digital Security, working together on a new company. At the very least, they were an odd couple so I had to find out how they ended up together.
I often meet “wannabe” entrepreneurs who say things like “If I just had a million dollars then I could start my own business.” Obviously these aren’t the kind of people who would start a company in a down economy. Edward was just the opposite. A one-time Wall Street trader with a big paycheck, Edward gave it all up to start something on his own. After an earlier partnership went awry, Edward found himself living in his car. I asked him why he didn’t go back to a job and he said, “I just knew in my heart this was going to work.” When he took a part time job to get back on his feet, Edward did something extraordinary. Instead of renting a place to live, he spent his first paycheck on office space at BlankSpaces. Most people, including me, would think this is crazy, but in Edward’s case the decision to rent workspace would result in an amazing turn of fortune.
Firas Bushnaq is a curious man. How else would you explain a millionaire serial entrepreneur who leaves his company to incubate start-ups in a shared office? Someone like Firas was the last person I expected to find in a co-working space, and yet here he was looking for entrepreneurs to help launch – entrepreneurs like Edward Lujan. Because Edward put his start-up dreams even ahead of his own well being, Firas took a chance on him and Setstr.com was born. It’s early, and Setstr still has a long way to go before making money, but Edward Lujan and Firas Bushnaq are doing something most people find terrifying. They’ve started a company during a recession.
When I started my quest for an entrepreneur willing to risk it all in a down economy, I never expected to find one who was so dedicated to his goal that he would pursue it in the face of homelessness. Nor did I expect to find a millionaire incubator willing to give a shot to a guy sleeping in his car. Instead, I found them sharing an office and starting a business together. For Edward, the economy was irrelevant to the pursuit of his dream. For Firas, the trappings of success were no replacement for the thrill of mentoring an eager entrepreneur. Recession or not, it seems true entrepreneurs are willing to put it all on the line and go forward come hell or high water. With no end in sight to our economic woes, I wish Edward and Firas the best of luck. We may need more such visionaries to get us out of the current swoon.
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At the close of the TechCrunch 50 conference a few weeks ago, I sat down with Rick Heitzmann of FirstMark Capital and Mark Sugarman of MHS Capital to find out why venture capitalists come to conventions, what they thought, and what advice they would give to presenting companies.
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Have you ever wondered what you would do if your business was hit by a large scale disaster? Sure you have your insurance policy, but what would you do during the weeks or months waiting for the check to arrive. If your office was damaged, how long could you stick it out while it was rebuilt? With the recent hurricanes Gustav and Ike, hundreds of business owners are facing this exact scenario. Even with insurance I suspect many of them will never be able to come back because they can’t recover from the downtime.
For a handful of “lucky” companies this won’t be a problem. By working with a company called Agility Recovery Solutions, they had mobile office trailers with complete phones and Internet service in place within 48 hours. In Galveston, a credit union was even able to disperse money to account holders using an Agility trailer, which obviously was a godsend to the people who needed cash to buy emergency supplies.
I talked to Bob Boyd the CEO of Agility and asked him why businesses needed this service. He explained that large Fortune 500 companies spend millions on disaster contingency plans but up until now smaller businesses had very few options. Like the AFLAC commercial, small business insurance would cover the loss but there was really no supplemental help for getting the business back up and running quickly. Agility doesn’t just write a check, they show up like the auto club to bail you out. Bob told me that during hurricane Ike, Agility was able to put over 45 mobile office trailers on-site and get their client companies back in business within 48 hours. Obviously this helps the companies, but in many cases such as the credit union, it also helps the people who are relying on these companies to be there when they need them.
I watched a short video of people talking about how Agility stepped in after Katrina a few years ago and I was moved by what a difference this company could make in the lives and businesses of the people they helped. Agility operates nationwide and you can learn more about them here.
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Last weekend I attended the annual Blogworld and New Media Expo in Las Vegas and was struck by how much “real world” time the new media people spent with each other. It was almost as if all the blogging and new media tools are just a way for real world friends to get together. For those who came to Blogworld trying to unravel the mysteries of social media, the most important lessons came during the evening parties over dinner and at the bar. While the Blogosphere might have it’s own lingo and more than its share of insider jokes, contrary to the perception of the general population it is not a mysterious 5th dimension twilight zone. It’s made up of real people who eat and drink and talk together. Find these people, learn from these people, and soon the world of new media/social media and the Blogosphere will be as welcoming as a bar where everybody knows your name.
There are probably a couple of hundred people in the inner circle of the new/social media world, but if you want a head start on who’s who. Join Twitter and look for the following people: queenofspain, briansolis, garyvee, jackiepeters, scobleizer, chrisheuer, pistachio, seanpercival, mashable, ozsultan, nicolejordan, stephagresta, gregarious, jasoncalacanis, ericaogrady, and technosailor.
A couple of weeks ago, I attended the NVISION 08 visual computing conference and sat down with Nvidia’s Sr. VP of Marketing, Dan Vivoli. Watch the interview and find out what’s in store for the future of visual computing.
I caught up with Ashton Kutcher at the TechCrunch 50 and got the scoop on his new www.BlahGirls.com web property. Check out the interview and see how I got punk’d.
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When I was a kid the only phone books anybody had were the ones they delivered when you ordered your phone. Then came the Donnelly yellow pages, the Smart Yellow Pages, and the yellow pages from competing phone companies on the other side of town. With so much competition, most people would assume yellow page advertising would get cheaper, but anyone who has placed an ad recently will tell you it’s still several hundred dollars a month for a tiny ad. This is what frustrated Brandon Muth, a web developer in Albuquerque New Mexico. When his local yellow pages promised him guaranteed clicks and targeted placement and didn’t deliver but still charged him $600, Brandon figured he could do it better and launched www.clickbricks.com. Part yellow pages, part review site, ClickBricks offers features such as full page listings, photos, cross marketing with other businesses, and printable coupons for as little as $9 a month.
Brandon gave me a site tour of ClickBricks and I was impressed, but like any new website he faced the challenge of building traffic. I asked him how he could expand beyond his new home base in Tampa Florida, and he explained that dissatisfied yellow page salespeople were contacting him about marketing ClickBricks in their home cities. As it turns out, not only were advertisers unhappy with the yellow pages but the sales reps were too. From this discovery, Brandon created a clever new sales model that may change the way new websites build traffic. Brandon is franchising ClickBricks by the city to former ad salesmen. Franchising on the Internet seems counterintuitive, but since ClickBricks still needs sales reps on the ground, this model gives Brandon the sales coverage he needs to grow the business without the hiring and payroll cost of a sales force. As Brandon explained his plans for growth, I realized his real innovation wasn’t the ClickBricks site, but the business model that he is using to expand.
The ClickBricks site has a 30-day free trial and if you want to try some new media advertising it’s definitely worth checking out, but I think the bigger opportunity for those looking for something new might be the ClickBricks franchising model. It just might be the hottest new trend on – and off – the Internet.
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Coming soon to Fast Company Buzz, 1-on-1 video interviews with Ashton Kutcher, who is launching a new web property, and Guy Kawasaki of Garage Technology Ventures, as well as in-depth VC discussions with Venrock and CMEA Ventures.
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Most people wouldn’t dream of trading a high flying career in television to work with fledgling digital content producers, but Jordan Levin, former CEO of the WB network, did exactly that. I caught up with Jordan and one of his producers, Sean Masterson, at his new company Generate, where I asked him why he gave up TV, what he looks for in a show, and how his company can take a small online content producer and help turn them into a star.
Twin brothers Evan and Eric Edwards grew up in constant fear that the next thing they ate would kill them. Diagnosed with severe food allergies, they knew that with one wrong bite they would have only seconds to react if they wanted to live. To prevent disaster, they monitored their diet carefully and only had a handful of close calls in their lifetime, but this actually presented a different problem. As years would pass between allergic attacks, their friends and family would forget how to administer the epinephrine shot that would save their life. Fortunately, for the 12 million Americans at risk of suffering an anaphylactic reaction from food allergies, Evan and Eric set out to solve this problem.
Their invention, currently awaiting FDA approval, is called the EpiCard. In a nutshell, it’s a small credit card sized auto-injector with a built in voice chip that gives step by step instructions on how to give an epinephrine shot. For those at risk of anaphylaxis from food allergies or insect bites, the value of the EpiCard is obvious. You no longer need to give yourself the shot before the reaction becomes debilitating or rely on a friend who knows what to do. The built in voice instructions means a stranger only needs to know how to open the wrapper and follow directions.
If you follow this blog, you know about my disruptive innovation series with Scott Anthony. Scott wasn’t available to join this call, but as I interviewed Evan I realized that his company Intelliject (EpiCard is the product name) was a legitimate disruptive technology that had far reaching potential to change the way medicine and vaccinations are delivered. I asked Evan how else might Intelliject’s voice instruction technology be used and he gave me the example of pandemic preparedness. If a wave of avian flu swept through a city, hospitals and clinics would be overwhelmed. Intelliject can easily make voice instruction injectors for bird flu inoculations that people can administer to one another at home. One of the key components of a disruptive innovation is it brings a skill or product to people who were previously unable or unwilling to access it. Intelliject’s voice instructions effectively give a non-medical professional the ability to administer a shot. While this may seem insignificant if you don’t suffer from severe allergies, imagine how many lives this would save in a biological terror attack.
Intelliject’s technology seems almost simple. After all, you can find sound chips in three-dollar greeting cards. But in a drug delivery application like the EpiCard, it has the potential to save hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives and turn anyone into a hero. That is definitely buzzworthy.
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