BOW+ARROW

There have been a lot of rebellions online lately. Not just the ones in the middle east that have been fueled by Facebook and Twitter activity, these rebellions are right here in the US.

This past Monday, The New York Times introduced a paywall for content. Times readers can now view up to 20 items for free – whether those items are articles, slideshows, or videos. However, after those initial 20 items, readers will be charged somewhere in the range of $15 and $35, depending on what device they read their news on.

While, it’s true, I’d rather not pay the subscription, I have to admit that the following headline on TheOnion.com summed the situation pretty well:

NYTimes.com’s Plan To Charge People Money For Consuming Goods, Services Called Bold Business Move

However, that bold business move cost the paper $40 Million dollars to implement. And it can be bypassed by simply deleting 12 characters from a URL. Continue reading »

Yes, this sentiment from a yoga blog I saw recently on Facebook may be going a bit far, but PJA’s partnership with Chugai, Japan’s oldest BtoB agency and the first government-registered Japanese BtoB agency in China, makes us doubly cognizant of the suffering going on in northeast Japan. Suffering that we hope does not spread any further, although our key contact Hiro Mizoguchi has just moved his family out of Tokyo to the south of the country just in case.

From what we’ve heard, dollars and yen go further in Japan (and elsewhere) with NGOs that already have roots set down in the region. With that in mind, PJA has made a donation to the Japan Society of Boston Disaster Relief Fund.

Hiro Mizoguchi, our contact in Japan, reports that the victims may soon top 20,000, and that batteries and bottled water are unavailable right now anywhere in the country.

So reach deep! You could do a lot worse than the Japan Society of Boston’s fund. And if your company matches your donation, even better.

Taihen-Arigato.

Earlier this week I saw some new ads for the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC. The campaign was called “Historically Hardcore” and the ads compare Ozzy Osborne with Andrew Jackson, Bret Michaels with Genghis Khan, and rapper, 50 Cent with Teddy Roosevelt with lines like:

50 Cent got shot and still whines about it on stage.
Teddy Roosevelt got shot mid-speech and didn’t leave the stage until he finished

The ads, which can be seen below, are modern, visually interesting, cleverly written and – in my opinion – just very well done. While they may be specifically geared towards a younger audience, they highlight things that I didn’t know about those historical figures and make me want to learn more. It’s no wonder the ads quickly went viral online. Continue reading »

This innovation highlight comes to you from SxSW in Austin, Texas. If you don’t know about it, SxSW is a gathering of entrepreneurs, coders, designers, bloggers, pundits and just about every and anybody else who takes an active interest in what might happen next in the digital world. It’s a living lab of cutting edge tech, with QR codes, mobile apps and transmedia engagement experiments from little agencies and big brand alike, everywhere you look.

Amid the clutter and decidedly frenetic pace of marketing innovation, this year you can detect an undercurrent of emphasis on readability and control over content – let’s call it “slow content” for the moment, in the spirit of the slow food movement – that hearkens back to Cluetrain and even beyond in it’s emphasis on giving the reader control over what is they want to read. Here are a few snapshots: Publishing platforms such as Treesaver.net that let you publish your content once for consumption on many devices, with an interface that looks more like a cross between the clean look of your Kindle and a well-designed magazine. Plug-ins for your browser such as Readability enable you to turn a cluttered content page into a clean, well-presented page with more in common with a well-designed newspaper than a web page. And iPad apps such as Flipboard,  embody the “instabook” notion – using your own search criteria, for example, the users you follow on Twitter – by publishing an up to date magazine with well-designed, flippable pages.

For marketers in categories with complex buying processes, content is obviously a key resource for the buyer. By 2011, everyone’s on board with that idea. Increasingly, we’re also looking at content curation as a way to manage the multiple voices the buyer seeks: influencer, community and yes, the voice of the vendor’s brand. Last year curation was a big story at SxSW, and this year it’s even bigger. On the cutting edge, though, is the idea of giving the buyer more control over how the content is presented and consumed. With Readability, the buyer can strip out the ads and save any content for consumption later in a more readable format. With Flipboard, a buyer can follow a single Twitter feed that could publish a valuable buying resource on a day-by-day basis. With Treesaver, your buyer can migrate your buying content across any device they choose to use to consume it. And with the evolution of Webfonts and Typekit, along with the capabilities of HTML5, they can get the same well-ordered, easy to read experience they’ve grown used to on their eBook readers.

With capabilities like these, over time, the buyer will learn to expect more than a vendor’s ever-increasing collection of PDFs with their locked-down design and formats. For innovative brands, this may be the time to start re-thinking your content presentation strategy. Experience matters – and from what we’re seeing at SxSW, innovators are working hard to improve the reading experience.

Part of what makes good marketing is the ability to be topical. This is especially true in social media marketing where the topics shift from one trend to another within minutes and, as a marketer, it’s easy to either come across as spam or have your message buried entirely.

Combine this need for ultra-topical content with the fact that a lot of brands – and specifically spokespeople for those brands – are still learning the ropes and the outcome can sometimes be scary…or pretty entertaining depending on your sense of humor. Continue reading »