Obama says Yes We Can to Digital Music

The Obama presidential campaign will be remembered for its many first. The first bi-racial presidential candidate, the first presidential candidate to acknowledge his black children, the first presidential candidate with an African first name and the first presidential candidate to release a digital CD.

The compilation was put together by the good folks at Hidden Beach Recordings, best known for removing the arsine ramblings of ignorant buffoons from popular rap songs and making them palatable to anyone with a 5th grade education, in the UnRapped Jazz series. The CD is only available from the Obama campaign store, and will set you back $25 bucks for the digital download or $30 bucks for the physical CD. All proceeds from the the CD will go to the Obama/Biden ticket. After the election the CD will be released to retail stores around the country.

Starfish and Prisms: Visualizing conversations in Social Media

The vision of communication in the digital age is one of two way conversations, sometimes lead by brands and sometimes lead by users but always distributed across services, niches and purposes. Brian Solis of PR 2.0 has an excellent update to the classic social media Starfish visualization. He calls it the Conversation Prism and in true which attempts to capture the conversation flow across services and sites. Both visualizations highlight the plethora of tools and services that continue to disperse audiences and the stories they carry about your brand, product or service, across the Interwebs.

Use the Conversation Prism to help discover new services and sites, where conversations about your client’s brands are happening. Begin by observing the conversations you find and as you discover ways to add value and truly contribute to the conversation, jump-in participate in them. Identifying and understanding these services, how to leverage them and build strategies around them is the real challenge facing communications companies

Technobabble: The Language of Web 2.0

This is part of the presentation I gave in Chicago, it started off the sessions and was intended to give people an understanding of the terms, phrases and language of Web 2.0 pundits and users. In a strange twist, all the audio from this session was lost and so the presentation is sans audio.

The story on the first two slides is that those words were literally something I heard during the Start-up Riot here in atlanta. I use that as an example of both the extreme nerdiness of which I am sometimes a part as well as how every much the language of Web 2.0 has moved beyond MBA speak. The point I try and drive home with these slides is that you need to know the lingo to be a part of the game and you need to understand the lingo to play it. I no longer include The Long Tail in presentations because it is so hard to convey the idea, the controversies and rebuttals without either spending 10 minutes on it or getting uber geeky and referring to power laws.

Auto makers reducing spending and switching to digital

With gas prices through the roof and sales of gas guzzlers in free fall it really shouldnt come as a surprise that the big auto makers are readjusting plans and making changes. Besides blue-collar layoffs and office cut-backs, it seems that even the folks on Madison avenue may also have to worry a bit as auto-makers shift their spending to Digital or reduce spending altogether.

A couple of days ago Ad Age ran a story about Ford taking $20 million off the table as it reduced it’s ad spending from $300 million to only $100 million due to the free fall in truck sales. Another article that caught my eye, also on Ad Age, highlighted that GM has shifted close to 25% of its advertising from traditional platforms to digital media venues. Thats everything from SEO strategies to CRM implementations slated to get a 25% chunk of GM’s multi-billion dollar ad largess.

If you’re a traditional advertising agency this is the point where you get to quaking in your boots and if you’re a digital shop, my resume is up-to-date and ready to send.

UK Internet ad revenue more than TV revenue in ’09

This week Ad Age published an interesting article on the growth of Internet ad spending in the UK. Despite shrinking ad budgets across other sectors, the article reports that online ad budgets grew 38% to $5.6 billion in 2007. They are expected to add another 30% this year for total ad budgets around $7.28 billion. UK advertisers spend some $8 billion on TV ads and at the current pace online ad spending will exceed this number in early in ’09. The other noteworthy item in the article was how very short-sighted some people in the ad industry remain. Despite the witting on the wall, Bob Wootton, pr flack for the ad industry in the UK, uttered the following quotable:

“Internet is thriving because it’s the refuge of small and medium-sized enterprises in hard times. It empowers and enables a new kind of advertiser to come to market… There is no surge of big brand advertisers towards the internet.”

In other words, real advertisers with real budgets arent moving their money online so we dont need to be concerned with small businesses spending their meager pennies on keywords. Classic luddite mistake #518, thinking scale is the only measure of importance.

Pandora and the Future of Advertising

This morning while listening to my Feist radio station on Pandora something unusual caught my eye. Like everyone else, I’m fairly ad-blind and tend to ignore everything on the right edge of the screen but for some reason this ad caught my attention. It could have been the sultry looking brunette, but I like to think I’m a bit more evolved then that.