Brand Noise

Profile of a Music Pirate

It makes for some interesting dinner conversation when when one of your friends is an intellectual property lawyer (he used to represent Apple Records while going through the DJ Dangermouse fiasco).  The topic certainly gets people's blood going.  It represents the shift into a whole new way in which companies and consumers relate to the value of goods and services.  And like other industries before them like cars and tobacco, reveals an attempt to dictate control over how the market functions. We must go through them.  The consumer sees things differently. The struggle to change gets ugly - and often results in singling out folks for litigation. In this week's BusinessWeek an article focuses on a 45-year-old single mother who, after being sued by the record industry, is now taking the record industry to court. Tanya Andersen is going after the recording industry under conspiracy laws. She argues the Recording Industry Association of America, the industry's trade group, and its affiliates worked together on a broad campaign to intimidate people into making financial payoffs.  Read more

Good Placement Fat Boy

I managed to catch the new film by David Schwimmer called Run Fat Boy Run this last week.  Pretty harmless and amusing with some cameos from top Brit comedy folks like David Williams and Stephen Merchant.  Another cameo I didn't expect though was Nike.  The film focuses around the Nike River Run and places the brand rather well in the story.  There is even a scene in which the main character is given a pair of top Nike trainers to motivate him to run.  A small story - but a very simple human story that places the brand in a less "pumped up" context.  This is good - and it left me liking the brand in a different kind of way. 

The Method Behind Pep Band Music Choices

Who knew to ask? It can seem that the pep bands are forever behind the times, playing from song lists borrowed from classic-rock radio stations and wedding-reception D.J.s.

But there is a method to their madness — “We try to play songs that not only appeal to the blue-hairs in the crowd, but also to our students,” said Jim Hudson, director of athletic bands at Arizona State.

Updating the songbook is an annual tug-of-war. Most bands hold year-end votes for band members. At U.C.L.A., the bottom five songs are dropped. Five new ones are added.

Most pep-band arrangements, designed for timeouts, range from 100 seconds to 2 minutes. Raps, with their repetitive hooks, are increasingly used for 30-second timeouts.

Choosing the right mix has legal complexities, too. Music is copyrighted, so bands typically cannot simply choose a song and start playing it — although many do.

Read the whole story.

Funneling is Not Sustainable Branding

Mekanism recently announced the launch of the Rockband.com social network. We first heard about the plans for the network back in October. We were hoping for a bit of evolution in that time. Rock Band is a great game. Rock Band as a social network is not. Not to say there is anything wrong in its execution, but the premise of a destination channeling people is not the direction to head in. Conde Nast came to that realization with Flip.com, which is now available as a widget on Facebook. And American Greetings approached its Kiwee brand from the get-go as one to work in tandem with existing, fabulous properties. Even Second Life only becomes something interesting when it becomes part of things outside of itself. Hmmm...maybe Guitar Hero is getting a handle on that now that it has launched Guitar Hero 3. Sustainable branding means working with resources that exist and function well among their users.

(Photo: 'Rock Band' set-up with 110" screen from a Panasonic PT-AX100 Projector. Onkyo 605 feeds the sound from the Xbox 360.)

Reality TV Moves Beyond Trash

Hardisty is a Canadian Pacific Railway town about 200 kilometres southeast of Edmonton with a population, according to the entry sign, of 743.

Last June, 117 women - about 85 per cent of Hardisty's female population - were whisked away on buses sans cellphones to set the stage for a 10-part Canadian reality series. Their destination? A luxurious week last June at a Canmore resort in the Rocky Mountains. They left their husbands, fiancés and boyfriends behind to fend for themselves and care for their children.

Hardisty accepted its role in hopes of gaining a bit of marketing exposure. Replete with farmland, essential services, a recreational lake and nine-hole golf course, Hardisty has lots for sale at $1 per square foot (prices negotiable by town council) and is keen for new residential, industrial and commercial development, officials say.

CBC said The Week the Women Went attracted an encouraging 770,000 viewers, comparable to Royal Canadian Air Farce, but not quite in the same league as Hockey Night in Canada, which gets more than one million viewers on average.

"All of a sudden we're not a small little community nobody knows about," Mr. Kulbisky said. "Everybody in Canada and beyond knows about us."

As reality tv matures and participants get more savvy as to what they can get out of it, the nature will change, bringing it closer to the participatory experience audiences are requiring from all avenues of entertainment.

Read more.

Kid Robot, Secret to “Yo Gabba Gabba!” Success?

“Yo Gabba Gabba!” began appearing on Nickelodeon in August, and with remarkable speed it has acquired fans who are preschoolers and fans who are old enough to be their parents...Charles Rivkin, the president and chief executive of Wildbrain, which produces the show, says, “I challenge you to find another preschool show that four months after going on the air is actually selling adult apparel at Barneys.”

While plenty of shows for children have also appealed to adults — “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” “H. R. Pufnstuf,” even “Sesame Street” — “Yo Gabba Gabba!” updates this idea for a generation that, it has been argued, is ambivalent about letting go of its own youth.

The real deal came when the original creators hooked up with Wildbrain. Back in 2006, Wildbrain acquired a majority interest in Kidrobot, which makes and sells high-end “designer toys” and apparel that appeal to fashionable young adults (who may or may not be parents). Thus “Gabba”-related products arrived in exclusive retail settings much faster than usual, demonstrating consumer demand to other merchandise partners.

You couldn’t ask for more perfect serendipity in partners, which goes to prove that authenticity starts at the drawing board. Had “Yo Gabba Gabba!” been conceived under other premises, it wouldn’t have been strong enough to bring into the Kid Robot world. On the other hand, if “Yo Gabba Gabba!” merchandise went straight to big box retailers you would’ve had a watered down product. The Kid Robot connection offers the brand longevity, with more staying power than it would have had on its own.

(Image: T-shirt recrafted into dress by JinJur.)
Read the article.

Scrabble Pirates Back Its Game

Scrabulous, clearly a knockoff of the board game Scrabble, was developed by two brothers in India. Its popularity is a major driver of traffic to Facebook, where a reported 500,000 members log on to Scrabulous each day.

Dozens of Facebook groups have been created to “save Scrabulous.” The biggest had more than 23,000 members late this week, days after the letter from Hasbro and Mattel was made public. Most group members seem to understand that the companies are merely protecting their rights, and many think that the game makers will reach some sort of understanding with the developers of Scrabulous, allowing the game to stay. A Hasbro spokesman said as much in a statement, asserting that the companies are seeking an “amicable solution.”

Josh Quittner of Fortune magazine’s Techland blog thinks that is just what should happen. “If I were an evil genius running a board games company,” he wrote, “I might do this: Wait until someone comes up with an excellent implementation of my games and does the hard work of coding and debugging the thing and signing up the masses. Then, once it got to scale, I’d sweep in and take it over. Let the best pirate site win!”

There's defending your intellectual property, and then there's admitting that you dropped the ball. What we have here are two companies focusing on the negative, annoying their consumers, and ignoring an opportunity.

Read more.

Successful Entertainment Requires Participation

As the writers’ strike has made clear, art and entertainment in the digital age are highly collaborative, and none of it can thrive without engaging audiences more actively than ever before. Fans today see themselves as doing business with television shows, movies, even books. They want to rate, review, remix. They want to make tributes and parodies, create footnotes and concordances, mess with volume and color values, talk back and shout down.

Case in point: “Friday Night Lights”

Grown-ups cry — DVR-owning grown-ups especially, according to Media Life magazine — while watching “Friday Night Lights.” They also pine for more and deeply dread the show’s extinction. However, viewers have to keep watching or the show might die...the show’s numbers are lousy.

The fault of “Friday Night Lights” is extrinsic: the program has steadfastly refused to become a franchise…It generates no tabloid features, cartoons, trading cards, board games, action figures or vibrating brooms.

This may sound like a blessing, but in a digital age a show cannot succeed without franchising…It’s a mistake to see this imperative to branch out as a simple coarsening of culture…Without a sense of being needed or at least included, fans snub art — at least when it takes the form of prime-time TV. They won’t participate in online dialogues and events, visit message boards and chat rooms or design games. As a result, platforms for supplementary advertising aren’t built, starving even the shows fans profess to love of attention, and thus money, and thus life. Aloof and passive fans kill their darlings.

Read the whole article.

Joost: Early Users Hold Highest Standards

The Moral: Early adopters (in this case 40,000 beta testers) are key in pulling brands through as their word resonates ever wider. Don’t short-change them. Make them part of the evolutionary process.

The Story: The peer-to-peer powered Internet TV network, created by the founders of Skype, has been in private beta for over a year. Starting today, any user can visit Joost.com, download the newest version of Joost software and watch television shows and movies.

Joost offers an odd and incomplete mix of new shows (“CSI”, clips from “the Late Show,”) old ones (“Lassie”, “Babylon 5”), music videos and a truly random movie selection, among other stuff.

The biggest challenge for the London-based company: convincing people to put their Web browsing on hold, lean back in their computer desk chairs and tune in.

This is not the Joost you saw in spring…My guess: the company saw a wave of users trying out the service back then, many of whom, like me, didn’t stick around. They’ll have to bring us back if Joost is ever going roost.

Read more.

Will the Students be Allowed to Surpass the Teacher?

Here you go...Martha Stewart, the paragon of expertise as content, is adopting the style of social media for her next Web site -- to be called "Marthapedia." (Oh, heck, why not?)

The site initially will be seeded with existing content from Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, but will open for information and suggestions from the public...with editors at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia checking to see if the public's ideas are better than their own. (Well, at least, she's being honest, folks.)

It's still an enterprise fueled by instructing customers. (But maybe that's just what Martha's followers want and expect.)

Read the whole AdAge piece.

(Photo: Martha Stewart's Halloween Costume.)