Marketing BS

During my stay in London, I pretty much enjoyed UK Television.
Everything was really appealing to me. I could watch Family Guy, Simpsons, and I discovered some very interesting shows.

Dragon’s Den is clearly one of my favourites. One guy comes in and faces 4 venture capitalists (potential investors), aka The Dragons. The candidate faces excruciating agony while trying to pitch his great idea, while the Dragons destroy his business model, hammering every flaw in their presentations.

Figures not stacking up to the said amount (no notes allowed for contestants), lack of understanding of the market, clenching motivation and mind-numbing stress, the candidates crack like eggs at the end of the show, selling half their company instead of the 10% they were thinking of, for the amount of cash they came for.

I must have become evil, but I do understand the Dragons. They are very frank. And sometimes they say that you should stop wasting your life with your stupid project and try to think about your children, before you gamble their lives on your dream of selling your sunglasses for blind people.
They explain why they will not invest and they make sense. There’s no use investing in something that is not aimed at making money. It won’t make you happy.

By the way, notice the tags that can be used directly on video. That’s a huge potential for interactive targeted marketing. Thats coull.

Targeted marketing…
I just dream that one day, to have all my tastes incorporated in a single set of data and have a robot shop for me. And I could also use that to create a perfect dating website. Once again, that paragraph had nothing to do with the rest of the post.

I was reading an article on “le point”. No I don’t have a link for that. I read it on paper. Yeah, p-a-p-e-r. I couldn’t tag it or save it on my social bookmarking websites to share it with friends. On internet, the meaning of “friends” is kind of fuzzy. It just means that you have a mutual (sometimes unidirectional) relationship that enables you some access rights to their profile.
You can see what they’ve done or you can recommend specific actions.

On digg for example, I never had any kind of relationship or common point with my “friends”, they just accepted a random “be my friend request”, and receive my “shouts”, when I want to say something to my community. Mostly when I request people to vote for what I submitted.

On facebook, we have, most of the times, real-life friends. On linkedin, there are more business relationships.

Looking at my social graph (showing how my network is interconnected),

It is always strange to see how your acquaintances are linked together creating different universes that you connect. I have high school friends, work friends, kung fu friends…

Okay, back to that “le point” article. It was describing the process people were experiencing after suscribing to facebook. It was mostly like…
1) “I can’t believe this guy is also on facebook, what a nerd!”
2) “Wow, time has been nice to her. Let’s add her to friends”
3) “People will think I suck if I don’t get more friends”
4) “Let’s compare our penis length with the Mine is bigger than yours app“
5) “Whoa I got 500 friends… and this one just got married! Who is he by the way?”

And during all that time you were on facebook at least hour per day on average and increasing, following other people’s lives. You feel weird when your ex-girlfriend picture gets tagged and you see that she’s with a new boyfriend (who’s actually a friend of a friend).
You just wander on the web of profiles hoping that you’ll see another face you can add to your friends. You meet people and immediately ask them if they have a facebook profile. People find you boring.

One day, your inbox is full of advertizing.
You open your friends’list, and you just have a strange feeling when you realize that there is noone there you know.

I know barely nothing about the music industry.
But if there is one thing I believe, is that this is a market with supply and demand.
Some people make music, some people like to listen to music.
There are no bad products, but not-well-marketed-enough products.

Some friends I know are trying to get their music known.
Tough.
I asked the generic marketing questions… What’s your message? Can you sell me your music CD in 2 minutes? Who are you addressing? What would you call “success” (What are the critria involved and to what extent)?
Eventually, all of that came down to describing a musical universe. It reminds me how people and especially teenagers need to have music surrounding them, like a protective cocoon. This music is like a clothing brand! The music I listen to, defines my tribe, like brands do!

Then I just realized we were talking marketing, and that I could help. I also like artsy things, and I like them even better when they are profitable.
Media planning, branding, market positioning, I was familliar with all that.
So here I am. I will try to apply my understanding of Internet marketing for promoting them, using traditional Marketing, leveraged by that Web2.0 community concept.

Maybe it will not work, but I am sure I will learn a lot in the process.
I will tell you more about that soon.

Next… multimedia content on this blog, and swithching to another blog provider.

I remember, a few years ago, reading Unlimited Power by Anthony Robbins.
What that guy said, amongst many other interesting things, was that eating less was the key to longevity. Basically, eating food (like red meat), delivers free radicals in your organism. Free radicals are highly reactive molecules and they react with your cells, creating the aging process.
So eating less, delays the aging process.

Proof? In the quoted experiment, underfed mice could live up to 30% longer than normally fed mice! It makes sense, when we think that obese people have lower life span… (ok that’s not that relevant, but…)

But now, a new genetically modified mouse can do more than that, more sexually active, runs faster, longer, lives longer as well, eats 60% more, needs 40% more oxygen, does not get fat.
Scientists have genetically engineered the mouse, so that the expression of one only enzyme is multiplied. Fat being efficiently turned into glucose… That mouse is skinnier than the others!

When you look at all those possibilities, just enhancing the importance of one enzyme, creates so much difference in the body of that mouse, you wonder all the variations that could be made to the human species!
Of course those will happen. Publications will be made and fall into other hands. Some people will get that knowledge and experiment in countries or in places where regulations are not enforced or nonexistant.

Soon there will be successful and less successful attempts. The less succesful we will never hear of. The successful ones will be highly advertized for the first, but if you watch Heroes or X-men, you might fear that people will not react that well to another new human species that would supposedly been superior. Would you like that if an Engineered Human got the job you wanted? And that happened to you all your life? Just because they learn faster, and think faster than you do? Let’s face it… they’ll be a threat, and we’d be jealous. But those “mutants” will breed and soon, we will not be able to make a difference.

We can not compete. Aldous Huxley had it right. To my belief, people will just have to live with the fact that other people will have been better optimized to do specific tasks.
And that’s not a little step.