MattCreamer.com

• How to Buy a Flash-Based MP3 Player - Reviews by PC Magazine
  (tags: tech mp3)

I have two pieces in this week’s issue. One’s a recap of last week’s Venice Festival of Media and the other is a news piece about the third installment of Millward Brown’s ranking of the world’s most valuable brands. I’m coming up short in finding a thread that winds through both stories so I’m not even going to force it.

On a personal level, I’m all full up on ad conferences. I go to about a half-dozen a year–and that’s not nearly as many as a lot of folks I know–and the returns are now severely diminished. To sum up: Too much jargon, too many cliches, too many 30,000-foot analyses at the expense of talking about things that are actually working in the marketplace, little back-up of big swinging digital blather. In practice, Venice was no exception. As a symbol, however, the fact that the folks who determine where to place ads and who are architects of overall communications strategies can turn out in force for a two-day event in an old European city does represent something of a power shift that’s gone on in the ad world. Once famously relegated to the last 15 minutes of the pitch, media is now front-and-center. Media fragmentation has made the planning and buying of ads a trade unto itself, that stands apart.  In just its second year, the conference–and it is a conference, notwithstanding the “festival” part of the name–has scale and a level of buzz you don’t see around many industry events. Still, it’s not going to upset the center of balance now located in Cannes, where creative types descend every June to give each other awards and drink heavily. Cannes is an institution; Venice, now, is a curiosity, a meaningful curiosity, but a curiosity all the same.

More on the Millward Brown ranking in a separate post.

• Windows is ‘collapsing,’ Gartner analysts warn
  Calling the situation “untenable” and describing Windows as “collapsing,” a pair of Gartner analysts yesterday said Microsoft Corp. must make radical changes to its operating system or risk becoming a has-been.
  (tags: microsoft windows software gartner)

• How to save money running a startup (17 really good tips)
  Buy second monitors for everyone, they will save at least 30 minutes a day, which is 100 hours a year… which is at least $2,000 a year…. which is $6,000 over three years. A second monitor cost $300-500 depending on which one you get. That means you’re
  (tags: business entrepreneurship tips productivity Money planning startup)

• Relax, Chill and maybe Blog - GigaOM
  My doctors told me that if you are going to spend an inordinate amount of time in front of a computer screen at night, you might have a tough time going to sleep. The screen flicker makes your eyes, and your mind, think it’s daytime, hence you have trou
  (tags: life lifestyle blogging blog)

• The Believer - Interview with Luc Sante
  The con is a kind of jiu-jitsu that turns the sucker’s own greed into its principal weapon. The greedier you are the more likely you are to be conned, and for the greater a sum. Since people regularly dispose of their intelligence in their rush to be sw
  (tags: history writing literature books newyork nyc)
• Who Walk In Brooklyn » Blog Archive » Luc Sante: Walloon For The Hell Of It
  I reviewed Mason & Dixon for New York mag during my year-long tenure there as book critic, and everything had to be topical, so I got one week in which to read and review the 900-odd-page slab. Needless to say it wasn’t profound.
  (tags: books)

Whenever I talk to non-industry people about hot topics in advertising, the boom in Internet ads comes up. As I’m describing all the hope that the publishers, agencies, and advertisers are putting on the web as an ad-friendly successor to TV or magazines, a look of incredulity usually washes across their face. Invariably, they ask the question: Who clicks on those ads anyway? Those ads–they’re boring, so easy to avoid and, unless we’re talking about search ads, they just get in the way of whatever you’re doing. Yet these same people might be using Nike+ to chart their running performance or using Johnson & Johnson’s Babycenter for information on, I don’t know, diaper rash. They’re not oppose to brands communicating with them, they’re just not into getting pounded with ads.

This is the disconnect when it comes to web marketing. It’s a great marketing medium, provided your definition of marketing includes providing content that’s useful or entertaining. As an ad medium in the traditional sense, as a way to interrupt consumers with your message, it’s lacking. I guess you could say that whole marketing-as-interruption mindset is lacking. I’ve been thinking about it for a while and wrote it about in today’s Ad Age, which happens to be an issue dedicated to digital. Here’s an excerpt:

But for the marketer, it’s a whole different story. First off, there’s reason to be skeptical about online’s effectiveness, long its point of differentiation. To be sure, any web ad is more addressable, more measurable than its equivalents in broadcast and print, but, at the same time, there are big questions about how to measure them. One old way, the click-through rate, has recently come under fire in studies suggesting that a large percentage of clicking is done by a small segment of less-than-desirable consumers, i.e., the kind of people who spend a lot of time doing online gambling and sweepstakes and who don’t boast big incomes. Bad credit is about the only thing missing from this portrait of the heavy clicker as rabble, a portrait, by the way, that answers the question we’ve all asked ourselves with equal parts wonderment and pity: Who clicks on these things anyway?

Second, and much more important, is that the marketer, once at the mercy of a locked-up media landscape, can now be a player in it.

“The big difference is that marketers are in the same competitive set as media owners,” said Matt Freeman, CEO of Tribal DDB. He cites Pepsi, one of Tribal’s clients, as an example of a company that could be a giant media player if it wanted. It doesn’t want to because the big traffic it gets at its corporate websites has nothing to do with how it’s valued. But the twist on media and marketing convention is clear: “Before there was an investor and a recipient of that investment. I think today you have much more of a triangulation where marketers can invest directly in going to consumers, obviating the need for media owners. They are not necessarily the client of owners and, in some cases, they are their competitors.”

In other words, marketers can build website that do cool, useful stuff. There are any number of marketers, from Amazon to Papa John’s, working to monetize their corporate websites traffic by selling ads there, but that, of course, is only the most mundane way. Better examples include Johnson & Johnson and its BabyCenter, a deep repository of information about raising a newborn that’s a clear competitor to Bonnier or Meredith, the publishers of Parenting and Parents magazines respectively. Nike Plus, whose sharp interface connects runners all over the world, is a real threat to any traditional media owners who wants to engage with that running population.

“I keep talking about there being paid media and earned media,” Mr. Freeman said. “In television there’s really no such thing as earned media. Sure, there are press mentions, but you’re not on even footing. It’s not a fair fight with the media owner. On the internet, it is a fair fight.”

Read the whole piece here.

• Gary Gygax, ‘Father of D&D,’ Dies at 69 | The Underwire from Wired.com
  “I don’t think I’ve really grokked it yet,” said Mike Mearls, the lead developer of the upcoming 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons. “He was like the cool uncle that every gamer had. He shaped an entire generation of gamers.”
  (tags: games news gaming)
• Pitchfork: Pitchfork to Launch Online Music TV Channel April 7
  So today, we’re proud to announce the April 7 beta launch of Pitchfork.tv, the first-ever music video channel dedicated to documenting independent music as it happens.
  (tags: music video pitchfork)
• Firebrand Burns Out - TV Decoder - Media & Television - New York Times Blog
  Firebrand, a television and online service that since October has been presenting commercials as content, is being shut down as its major investors decided to stop providing more money.
  (tags: Advertising brand)

• Wal-Mart Tastemakers Write Unfiltered Blog - New York Times
  Corporate blogs are nothing new — General Motors, Dell and Boeing have them — but Wal-Mart’s site, called Check Out (checkoutblog.com), turns the traditional model on its head. Instead of relying on polished high-level executives, it is written by l
  (tags: blogging walmart brand)

Here’s a really lovely claymation video that charts the evolution of Adidas from Adi Dassler’s workshop through global domination. (Well, maybe not domination. There is that whole Nike thing.) Anyway,  Jesse Owens, Mark Gonzalez and, those anti-athletes, the Brit pop band Oasis make cameos.

adidas | Originals