New Media News: Daily Candy Sweetens Up Comcast. Microsoft’s Latest Attempt at Cool –CrowdFire — to Launch At Outside Lands Fest.

August 7, 2008 by admin · Leave a Comment
Filed under: media & publishing 

Media junky favorite, Cynopsis, reports the following tidbits this week:

Women’s fashion and lifestyle email newsletter DailyCandy was acquired by Comcast for a reported $125 million. The site sends out daily emails to some 2.5 million readers in 12 U.S. cities and London, England. Guru’s Note: This simple announcement does not do justice to Daily Candy’s pioneering role in spreading juicy new products, sites, styles, and do gooder causes to a vast network of lifestyle-hungry readers.

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Federated Media Publishing and Microsoft teamed up to launch CrowdFire, a social networking platform for uploading, sharing and remixing music and musical performances with the festival scene as a sweetspot. Federated Media CEO John Battelle describes his vision of it as a happening enabler of sorts. Users are encouraged to send SMS, email and uploads of media directly into the CrowdFire database and media jockeys will create streams of CrowdFire imagery in real time, sent back out into the festival grounds through a network of digital screens. Groovy.

Crowdfire will be on full display at the Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival in San Francisco on Aug. 22-24. Guru’s Note: Naturally, Guru & company are already planning to attend Outside Lands (Favorites Andrew Bird and Wilco are playing on the 24th, and rumor has it that Beck may show up all three days) so uber-cool ticket holders (and me) have already been pinged by Crowdfire.

Granddaddy of web video news shows Rocketboom was acquired by Sony Pictures Television for a seven figure guarantee plus a share of future revenues generated from the show. Sony plans to distribute the show across multiple digital platforms including Crackle and its syndication network, the PS3, the PSP and Bravia internet video link televisions. Rocketboom is already one of the most widely distributed video blogs on the net, available via iTunes, Tivo, Apple TV, Pando, TVTonic and multiple web video portals including YouTube, Metacafe, blip.tv and Vuze.

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“I’m A Focus Group Moderator and I Approved Obama’s New TV Commercial.

June 21, 2008 by admin · Leave a Comment
Filed under: New Stuff, Uncategorized, government, marketing & advertising, media & publishing, politics 


As a veteran market researcher and focus group moderator, I usually can spot Projective Exercises like Perceptual Mind Maps or ‘Design Your Ideal Product’ techniques.  Sometimes smart ad agency creatives, if they’re not too engrossed in either the Merlot or the M & Ms in the viewing room, pluck verbatims from the groups and sneak them into television commercials. There are countless anecdotes about this – like the classic McDonald’s theme “You deserve a break today”, which supposedly emerged during a focus group in Chicago.

One of the reasons to conduct focus groups is the off-chance that an expressive respondent in Cleveland will blurt out something so right on and real that it can quickly be transformed into a tagline or campaign that resonates authenticity. Another reason is to further understand what’s polarizing about potential products — in this case, fully figure out how Obama can satisfy the wants, needs and hopes of Hillary supporters who continued to passionately plead the case clear through to the bitter-end of Puerto Rico and South Dakota. And then there’s grokking to the likely toolkit of Karl Rove-style tricks that are already being emailed 24/7.

The minute I saw Barack Obama’s new television commercial “The Country I Love” now slated to appear in some 18 states starting this month, I knew that market researchers everywhere were nodding. The spot is so tightly targeted even a marketing newbie can’t miss the strategic genius in this commercial. Every sentence and shot, from the very visible flag pin to the neighborhoods ‘devastated when steel plants closed’ is perfectly calculated to resoundingly answer those persistent questions. Not only is the ghost of Hillary most decidedly flickering about but so are other symbols of white America — like Barack’s mother and grandparents. Carefully designed to be warmly reassuring with its message of Heartland working class character and values, this spot is a classic example of smoothly going from Me Media to We Media.

Much of this affecting and effective 60 seconds is subliminal.  While it’s all about heading off the negatives, it never feels anything but positive.

I only wish I’d been the Moderator facilitating those Perceptual Mind Maps.

Here’s the full transcript: (video link above)

OBAMA: I’m Barack Obama.

America is a country of strong families and strong values. My life’s been blessed by both.

I was raised by a single mom and my grandparents. We didn’t have much money, but they taught me values straight from the Kansas heartland where they grew up. Accountability and self-reliance. Love of country. Working hard without making excuses. Treating your neighbor as you’d like to be treated. It’s what guided me as I worked my way up – taking jobs and loans to make it through college.

It’s what led me to pass up Wall Street jobs and go to Chicago instead, helping neighborhoods devastated when steel plants closed.

That’s why I passed laws moving people from welfare to work, cut taxes for working families and extended health care for wounded troops who’d been neglected.

I approved this message because I’ll never forget those values, and if I have the honor of taking the oath of office as President, it will be with a deep and abiding faith in the country I love.

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The Un-Facebook: New York Times Launches TimesPeople Social Network Beta

June 19, 2008 by admin · 2 Comments
Filed under: Uncategorized, entertainment, marketing & advertising, media & publishing 

From the moment you register with your existing New York Times log-in, you know you’re not on Facebook, MySpace, Ning, Linkedin, Bebo or any of today’s rather plebeian social networks.

Here’s the almost graceful greeting: The TimesPeople Team wishes you a pleasant experience.

The site then invites you to “Share and Discover the Best of NYTimes.com” by sharing articles, videos, blog posts, slideshows, comments, ratings and reviews of movies, restaurant and hotels. In other words, all that newfangled social stuff the grown-up media is yearning to make work.

It was a bit disheartening to search and discover NO FRIENDS were waiting to ping me on TimesPeople. However, it’s early on in this new network, with the launch just hours ago. Surely I won’t be alone here long, wanting fervently to share the latest article on Amy Winehouse or Bush in the Rose Garden.

Currently, TimesPeople is only a (easy and quick) beta release of a Firefox browser add-on. Later on, the public launch will work on all browsers without a plug-in.

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