The Free Economy Model - Winamp Media Player

In an article entitled “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business” Chris Anderson thoroughly discusses the emergence and development of the “economy of free”. Since King Gillette made a marketing revolution in 1903 by giving away free razors and making profits of the sale of blades a lot of things have changed. We are now living in the technological era, the era of falling costs, the era when free is no longer a benefit but a must if you want to attract consumers’ attention and remain competitive in the market. However, when we are talking about “economy of free” and giving away products for nothing, the question “So how do these businesses make profit out of it” arises naturally. This question has no one simple answer, there are many different ways in which marketers can turn free into profits. If we take media, for example, they are all technically free from radio and TV to magazines and newspapers (even though they charge a price it is much lower than what it actually costs them to make and distribute the products) because they are not selling media to people but rather selling people to advertisers. So there is still someone paying the bill, it’s just not the consumer any more. Chris Anderson breaks down the priceless economy in six broad categories: freemium, advertising, cross-subsidies, zero marginal cost, labor exchange and gift economy.

The term “freemium” refers to free software, services and sometimes content. This is the basis of the subscription model of media and is one of the most common business models. It can take a range of forms: varying tiers of content, from free to expensive, or a premium "pro" version of some site or software with more features than the free version. Sites centered on that model follow the one percent rule – one percent of users support the rest or in other words the revenue generated by one person paying for the pro version allows 99 people to use the basic version for free. The reason this works is that the cost of serving the 99 percent is close enough to zero to call it nothing.

Advertising is part of the free economy in the sense that advertising dollars give media providers the opportunity to distribute their content for free or at a very low cost.

The third category, cross-subsidies, includes any free product or service that entices consumers to pay for something else. An example Anderson uses is cell phones. Your cell phone company may not make money on your monthly minutes — it keeps that fee low because it knows that's the first thing you look at when picking a carrier — but your monthly voicemail fee is pure profit.

With the zero marginal cost model things that can be distributed without an appreciable cost to anyone are free. A good example of that would be online music – with digital reproduction and peer-to-peer distribution, the real cost of distributing music has truly hit bottom.

Labor exchange provides free access to Web sites and services. With this model the act of using the service creates something of value, either improving the service itself or creating information that can be useful somewhere else.

With the gift economy everything is free whether it be open-source software or consumer generated content. Why? From pure altruism – it has always existed, but the Web gives it a platform where the actions of individuals can have global impact. In a sense, zero-cost distribution has turned sharing into an industry.

A good example of a product that is riding the wave of free is Winamp Media Player – Windows Media Player’s biggest enemy.

Looking back at the six categories described above it probably best fits under the definition of a freemium. It has both a free basic version and a pro version that gives users more capabilities and costs just $19.95. But selling the pro version is not the only way in which Winamp makes profits. It also makes good use of advertising in several ways. First there are different skins (the way the player looks; the mask of the user interface) that consumers may choose for their player. This is a good way to give users the opportunity to personalize their media player and also a great way of prompting Wii fans, for example, to state their passion for the game in yet another way – by downloading the Wii skin free. And while the skin is free for the user, it is definitely not free for Wii. Another way in which advertising is present on the site is through banner ads and sponsored content. Winamp also makes good use of altruism and people’s desire to create things and see them being used. The media player gives people the opportunity to develop their own skins and plug-ins that can be then downloaded for free. These plug-ins, designed to improve the consumers’ experience, range from APS presets to games to language packs.

The Web site also serves as a portal to different types of content. It offers an Internet radio powered by SHOUTcast, free music and video downloads powered by AOL Music & Spinner, free movie downloads powered by Moviefone and free game downloads powered by AOL Games and Game Daily. There is an assortment of games that users can choose from including games for PSP, Playstation, Xbox and Xbox 360. If you would like to download a game in any of those categories you are transferred to either the AOL or Game Daily Web sites.

Realizing that consumer experience is everything, Winamp has also created a community on its site. Under the community page, people can browse through different forums, ask for help or choose to become Winamp affiliates and spread the love for the media player. They can do that by either linking their own sites to the Winamp site or by manifesting their love through branded T-shirts or stickers.

It seems this free model is working well for Winamp and is helping it create a loyal consumer base with over 250,000 members to its site and nearly 2,200,000 posts on its forums.

Pandora – Helping the Viral Spread

Ever since my friend told me about Pandora while we were preparing the Thanksgiving dinner several months ago (“Let us just play Pandora and we won’t have to worry about the music”) I have it on every time I am sitting on a computer, regardless of whether I am at home or out. I think it is just great for a lazy music aficionado like me – you need not worry about spending hours making play lists, you just enter a song or an artist’s name and let Pandora do the work.
By definition, since it is an entertainment site, Pandora is geared more towards the experiential users. However, with is clean design the site might also be appealing to task-oriented users that are simply looking for content sites. The site allows you to create a profile where you can enter your personal information and, more importantly, your music preferences. Based on that you can search for stations that play the kind of music you like, or you can create your own station that plays only songs/artists selected by you or those similar to them. If you like multiple styles you can create separate stations for all of them. And if you sometimes feel like listening an eclectic mix of your preferred styles, you can use the “Quick mix” option that allows you to mix any number of stations you like. In addition to helping you find and listen to your favorite songs/artists, the site also has blog where the site users can post any questions and have them answered or simply leave a comment on any topic of interest. Recently, they started a new initiative delivering the responses to users’ question in the form of videos. This tactic is good in helping people create a sense of connection to the site. Pandora also has a video series on concerts, studios and music history, or musicology as they call it.

The site totally delivers on its brand promise – “To play music you’ll love – and nothing else.” If you are as curious as I am, you are probably wondering how it is able to do that. The key to success is called the Music Genome Project. And don’t worry, this has nothing to do with biology, or almost nothing. So what is it? In the most basic sense, the Music Genome Project is attempting to uncover and distill the essence of music. To be able to do that the creators of the project have identified a set of 400 attributes or “genes” that capture not only the musical identity of a song, but also the many significant qualities that are relevant to understanding the musical preferences of listeners. The analysis of each unique genome culminates into the magical musical identity of a song. This identity often has nothing to do with what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like. So every time you enter a song name Pandora scans it library of hundreds of songs to find songs with interesting musical similarities to your choice.

To avoid litigations the site does not allow users to download any content. Instead, while listening, users are offered the ability to buy the songs or albums at Amazon.com or iTunes Store. Since more and more people, and specifically young people, listen to music while they are not on their computers, Pandora is also available on mobile phones for the subscribers to the AT&T and Sprint networks. All they need to do is enter their phone number and they get the application sent to their phone for free in a text message. And while all this sounds great, we all know we live in an era when nothing is absolutely free.

So here is the deal – the service actually has two subscription options – you can either create a free account, which is supported by advertising, or select a fee-based subscription, which is ad-free. As a college student I went for “free,” of course. I was thinking that since I was just going to log in, turn on the station I want and then do something else it didn’t really matter whether they had advertising or not, I wasn’t going to see it anyways. Interestingly, this turned out not to be the case. Well, I surely can’t not name all the companies that I have seen ads for but I know that Facebook, weather.com and Verizon are definitely up there. And what is even better for marketers, I am not annoyed by the fact they are there. Probably because there is just one ad for every log in that is on the side of my profile; it is not inhibiting me, it is not big, bold and shiny, but I’ve noticed it. And I don’t mind it.

And it seems I am not the only one who is in love with the site. According to an analysis on Digital Media Wire, the market share of US visits to Pandora increased by 634% from November 2005 to November 2006, while the market share of visits to the Last.fm website increased by “only” 172% in the same period. According to another report by JP Morgan, in December 2007, the traffic to Pandora grew for sixth month in a row to 4 million. This represented a 4.9% increase over the previous month. For comparison, total traffic Internet pure plays remained flat for the same period.

As every person with online presence I could not stop myself from jealously wondering how Pandora was able to achieve that. How did all these people hear about it? A little Google-ing sheds some light no that. If you try searching for “radio,” “online radio,” “free radio,” or “listen free radio” the Pandora appears on the top of the list as the first or second sponsored link. So probably ad words buy never hurts. But it seems Pandora is doing more than that because the site also comes up in top positions in the organic search whenever you type “radio” (2^nd result), “online radio” (1^st), “listen free” (2^nd), “listen free music” (3^rd), “listen free music online” (4^th), “listen favorite music” (2^nd), “Pandora” (1^st result; even before the mythological Pandora), “genome project” (2^nd result after a biological site), “new music” (the site is still on the 1^st page – 5^th result – but is behind AOL.music and MTV).

It is hard to say how Pandora has been able to achieve such high positioning on Google since the search engine would never reveal the exact algorithm it uses to calculate the relevance of a link depending on your search. However, we can get a broad sense of what Pandora is doing by looking at such things title tags, site content, headlines, URLs and meta tags.

The title tag is the text appearing in the blue frame of your search window. Generally, it should be descriptive of the content on the site and contain words that people might use when searching for the type of content that you offer. Pandora’s title tag reads “Listen to free Internet radio, find new music.” Including the word “free” that tends to be favored among all people is always a good thing, as well as having such category title like “radio.”

As it regards site content, the first 200 characters appearing on the page are the most important ones. One good thing about the Pandora site is that it is very clean and only music related information on it. So the first things that appear when you open the site include “music,” “now playing,” “what’s new” and “genre stations” – words that probably help the algorithm in its relevance search. There is no extraneous stuff, and that is why not only Google but I also love it.

Pandora also uses meta tags. These are words or phrases interweaved in the code of the Web site that are not visible to the visitors but that help in the search engine optimization process. Pandora’s meta tag reads “Pandora radio is the personalized internet radio service that helps you find new music based on your old and current favorites. Create custom web radio stations, listen free.” As with the title tag, key words like “radio,” “free,” “music,” “new” and “favorite” are included.

In addition to these search engine optimization tactics, the site also gives users the opportunity to send a link to their friends via email for the station they have found or created. Personally, I think that word-of-mouth and viral tactics are the main ways in which the site gained popularity. Maybe because all the people that I know of say they’ve heard about Pandora from a friend. And probably the fact that the site delivers on its brand promise helps as well.

Kraft on the Internet – Can tradition and simplicity still be cool

Selecting a consumer goods company that has an online presence turns out to be pretty hard. And that is not because it is hard to find a company that fulfills the single criterion of having a Web site, just on the contrary, the question becomes how to choose one of the millions that are out there. Probably the easiest way out of this dilemma is to select something familiar and what can be more familiar than Kraft. Everybody who has ever walked into a grocery store in the U.S. or elsewhere has seen the red, white and blue logo on almost every aisle in all food categories from frozen foods, to marinades and salad dressings, to beverages, to cereal. In addition, the company also owns such product category leaders as Nabisco, Post, Oscar Mayer and Milka. Trying to name all of the brands that fall under the umbrella of Kraft is impossible but it probably suffices to say that its seven biggest brands rake in yearly revenues of over $1 billion each and 50 of its brands have yearly revenues of over $100 million. In the company’s more than 100 years long history, Kraft products have won the trust of consumers in more than 155 countries around the globe and are now present in more than 99% of U.S. households. The fact that Kraft is one of the most successful consumer goods manufacturers, with revenues of over $34 billion, is indisputable the question at hand, however, is how does such a behemoth adapt to the changing landscape of doing business and establish an online presence?

Over the years the company has used both the house of brands and branded house approaches. Regardless of whether or not Kraft appears as an integral part of the brand name, the main corporate site – www.kraft.com - divided into three sections Recipes & Product Information; Corporate Information; and Charitable Contributions, provides information on each and every one of the brands the company owns.

The Corporate Information section provides information about the company and the various brands. Investors can also find some useful information regarding the company at www.kraft.com/Investor. Information available includes financial news, stock information, SEC filings and annual reports, company fact sheet, as well as investor kit and corporate investor contacts. The site is also a useful resource for the media. At www.kraft.com/MediaCenter interested parties can find the latest corporate news releases accompanied by B-roll, logos and image gallery, as well as recent management speeches and the corporate media contacts.

The Recipes & Product Information link takes you to a different domain – www.kraftfoods.com/kf - where you can find everything you want and need to know about the company’s products, in particular, and food and eating, in general. Information than can be found includes new product developments; detailed recipes that include calorie counts and sometimes even “How-to” videos for the beginning cooks; health and dietary advice; store locators, and many more. Everybody who has ever been responsible for preparing their own food knows that the hard part is often times not the cooking itself but rather coming up with an idea of what to cook. It turns out that at www.kraftfoods.com/kf/Dinner there is a quick and easy solution to this problem, all you have to do is enter three of the ingredients that you want to use for your meal and the site will come up with a list of suggestions for meals that can be prepared using those ingredients. This section of the site also provides suggestions for meals that just take minutes to prepare, as well as budget meals. You can also Kraft’s template to make a well-organized shopping list so that you don’t miss any of the groceries you need to buy. Finally, the Dinner section provides advice for storing and freezing food for those of us who like cooking but can never precisely calculate how much they need to prepare if they don’t want to be eating the same thing a whole week.

At www.kraftfoods.com/kf/Entertaining one can find different recipes for everyday meals, as well as suggestions for holidays and special occasions. The recipes are divided into Appetizers, Entrees, Sides and Desserts for ease of use. Some of the recipes are accompanied by “How-to” videos but I have to warn you that if you are using a Mac you should not rely to heavily on watching those because they refuse to play, or at least on my computer they do. The site also offers tips on planning parties that can help you calculate the amount of food and beverages you will need depending on the number of guests and guide you with the choice of the menu.

The site also provides information on healthy living at www.kraftfoods.com/kf/HealthyLiving. Here the calorie-conscious part of the population can play around with tools like body mass index calculator, fiber & carb and calcium counters, and food analyzer. People can also learn how to burn those extra calories from the Dessert menu, what is their proposed healthy weight based on their height. They can also watch some exercise demos and find recipes for healthy, dietary meals. The site also has articles on nutrition, including kids nutrition; smart snacking; weight management; food allergies and sensitivities; and diabetes. There is an entire separate Diabetes Center for those affected by the disease, who still want to enjoy a tasty and nutritious meal.

There is also a place for mothers and kids on the site at www.kraftfoods.com/kf/YourKids. Here mothers can find kid-approved recipes, as well as recipes that might be appealing to little choosy eaters. In addition to that, visitors to the site can find ideas on how to make cooking an entertaining, enjoyable and safe experience for the little helpers. In this section mothers can also find a lunchbox cheat sheet to help them prepare healthy, easy and fun lunches for their kids. Three lists of lunchbox jokes complete the menu. The site also provides mothers with advice and suggestions for birthday party preparation, including everything from the food and party fun to the invitations and thank-you’s, as well as recipes that can entice little choosy eaters.

Another section of the site is dedicated to making cooking an easier and more pleasant experience for the novices. At www.kraftfoods.com/kf/CookingSchool beginner cooks can find everything from “How-to” videos and step-by-step preparation instructions to advice on product substitutions (if you ever want to bake something but realize there is no baking powder, don’t panic – you can use 1/4 teaspoon baking soda and 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar instead). The site also reveals some grilling secrets and provides advice on how to select the best knife for a specific type of product. Information on baking cookies and freezing food can also be found on this Cooking 101 page.

If you still have any questions concerning Kraft products, food or cooking, you can post them on the sites message board and you will receive a quick reply from the Kraft Kitchen staff. Information on different promotions and sweepstakes is also available at www.kraftfoods.com/kf/promotions. Archived issues of Kraft’s Food & Family magazine can provide further information on numerous topics.

The third section of the main site – Charitable Contributions – provides information on the charity initiatives that the company is undertaking both in the U.S. and globally. As a seamless fit for its products, the company focuses its efforts on supporting programs that help alleviate hunger and promote healthier lifestyles. All causes that want to apply for donations by Kraft have to meet four criteria that can be found at www.kraft.com/giving/united-states.

In addition to the Kraft site the company has also developed a number of separate sites for promoting its products in an engaging way. Postopia is a site where the little fans of the Pebbles cereals can play a variety of games and win PosTokens, online coins that can be used to unlock secret levels, extra lives and bonus points. In order to be able to use all the different features of the site kids should create an account. The registration process asks them to fill in their gender and age, children younger than 8 years are required to get their parents consent before registering for the site. Postopia, however, does not connect to the Kraft main site in any visible way.

Kraft also recently launched a viral site for one of its other cereal products – Honey Bunches of Oats with Real Chocolate Clusters. The site is centered on the idea of introducing a new holiday – the day after Valentine’s Day. A viral music video called “I made you breakfast in bed” by Dawn’s Early Knights entertains the visitors to the site. At the end of the video a coupon for $2 discount on Honey Bunches of Oats with Real Chocolate Clusters is provided. The site links to the “I made you breakfast in bed” microsites on YouTube.com and Facebook.com. If you like the cheesy song, you can download it as a ringtone for your phone or you can email a personalized video to your significant other to remind them everyday can and should be the holiday of love. The site can take you to Kraft’s main site trough a link at the bottom of the page or in the Pantry section of the site.

Overall, kraft.com is is doing a great job with enhancing Kraft's reputation as an irreplaceable helper for those who want simple, tasty meals everyday. However, the experiential sites the company has created for some of its cereal products have been moderately effective in attracting new people to the brand. Probably because there is no obvious connection between those sites and the company's main page - Posotpia and Breakfast in Bed are not mentioned anywhere on kraft.com and there is no visible Kraft presence on the experiential sites, either.

From the Social Networking Frontier?

Users of social networking sites and advertisers seem to have opposing views on the topic of whether commercial messages are needed or wanted in sites like Facebook and MySpace. While advertisers think that these sites are the one best way at the moment to reach the ever-elusive Gen Y, members of Facebook and MySpace are getting fed up of being bombarded with advertisements on their profiles. As BusinessWeek reported yesterday, a lot of social network users are discontinuing their accounts just because they are sick and tired of learning every little detail of their friends’ online shopping activities.

Despite these accounts and the decreasing rate of growth of social networking sites CBS entered into a partnership with Facebook and is launching a microsite that will allow the users of the network to track the NCAA college basketball tournament and make predictions about who is going to win it. The name of the application, which can be found at www.facebook.com/brackets, is NCAA March Madness Brackets. It will allow Facebook users not only to post their own predictions but also to compare them to their friends’ bets. They will also be able to browse through the tournament coverage of CBS Sports, CSTV, CBSSports.com and NCAA.com, including links to watch the games live. The application will also be available on mobile devices so that users can rank competing schools directly from their phone via the CBS Sports Mobile Web site.

MySpace also entered into a partnership with a media outlet last week. The social network with the greatest number of users around the world will promote the digital issue of Spin magazine. Spin Digital was posted for the first time in January in a “soft launch,” the February issue will mark the official launch. As part of the deal, MySpace users will be able to read Spin Digital for free for the first 12 months of the campaign. They will also have access to audio samples, video footage and interactive ads that they can post on other Web sites.

Microhoo – To Be or Not to Be?

The possible merger between Microsoft and Yahoo continues to be one of the most widely discussed topics. Analysts believe that now that it has become clear that there will be no knight on a white horse offering to save Yahoo, decision time has come. Two are the most probable outcomes of the situation: either Yahoo would give in to Microsoft or it will try to make a deal with Google, outsourcing Yahoo's search advertising to its biggest rival. One thing that makes the second outcome less likely than the first is the fact that so far Google does not appear to be interested in offering any deal to Yahoo. According to some this is probably due to Google not wanting to risk being involved in anti-trust issues again, especially after all the clamor surrounding the deal with DoubleClick. While it is clear that a potential merger between Microsoft and Yahoo will not threaten Google’s number one place as a search provider, some observers note that the combined content of Yahoo! and MSN properties yields an impressive list of top sites by industry category. The decision is not yet taken but questions about the future of Yahoo employees and products is a matter of concern to both users and the general public.

An Online Shake-up Is Coming Down the Road

This past week there have been several announcements with potential to shake up the online world.

First, MySpace announced that it is going to become open source, following the example of rival Facebook, and allow people access to its code. The hope is that this way new applications and features will be built into social network much faster.

Today there is another hot news discussed in all media - Microsoft just bid $44.6 billion, or $31 per share, on Yahoo. Microsoft executives say this is the second time they contact Yahoo with a proposal to join Research & Development forces in order to be able to combat market leader Google. In 2006 the offer was turned down with the explanation that it was not the right time. Now that Yahoo's shares have fallen below $20 for the first time in several years, Imran Kahn, an analyst at J.P. Morgan, suggested that the proposal is likely to be accepted.

The Footwear War in the Age of Mass Customization

Supposedly we are entering the era of mass customization so if a company wants to be “cool” and stay on top of the trends, it should offer its customers the opportunity to personally design the products they are to buy. Burton was among the first to let its patrons personalize their snowboards by customizing the graphics for the boards. Soon others joined the bandwagon. Among them the giants of the footwear industry and archrivals, Nike and Puma with the Nike iD and Puma Mongolian Shoe BBQ Web sites, respectively.

So I head on a quest to discover how it feels to be the creator of your own shoe. But before I do that I should probably let you know that I am one of those old-fashioned, boring people that prefer shopping the traditional way. Especially when it concerns clothing and shoes. Somehow I like going into the store, looking around confused, frowning a little, trying this and that with the hope to see the “that’s-so-totally-you” look on the assistant’s (or, preferably, my friend’s) face and then I buy. To do justice to the contemporary shopping style, several times I decided to be extremely modern and venturesome and bought shoes from eBay and I have to admit that for the most part I was very happy with what I got, but I also ended up with several pairs that were either too small or too big, so I came back to the traditional way. This said, I can now share with you my experiences with Nike iD and Puma Mongolian Shoe BBQ. Oh, and one more thing before I begin – I admit being a die-hard Nike fan so I might be a little prejudiced but I think not too much.

I started off with Nike’s site and first thing I noticed is there is no swoosh on the landing page and I do not mean this is necessarily bad, I just noticed it, maybe because in my mind Nike and the swoosh always go together. One thing that made a positive impression on me is that the site itself is available in six languages – English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Chinese – an important step if you want to make your site accessible to the greatest number of people and if you proclaim your company global or international. When I selected “English” it then made me choose between U.S. and Europe. At first I wondered what the big difference was except that maybe “color” will be switched to “colour” but I later realized that it is rather the $ signs being turned into £.

But that said, let me focus on the site itself. And here I have to make my first serious remark – it takes too much time to load, or at least to someone used to Google-fast it does. I also have to say that it falls into the “nothing special” category in terms of design. It aims at being cool, trying to create a team feeling with its locker room theme but somehow it does not cut it. For me. Something is missing, maybe the music. I had to look around for a while to try and figure out how the whole customization thing works but soon I am all ready to go. I am a little surprised that none of the Nike models I own is on the list of shoes that can be customized but I finally select my first shoe and get started. And I have to admit it is pretty fun actually. There are so many things to choose from. I started off by selecting my size (or at least the size I suppose I should be) and then came the base color (I start blank so that I can fully experience the customization process plus I really do not like the orange-green combinations that are obviously quite fashionable recently), followed by a secondary color and colors for my straps, the first time I had straps and not lace), backtab, swoosh, swoosh border, lining, outsole and stitch. There are between 12 and 14 colors to choose from and I have to frankly admit I never thought so much time and effort went into the design of one sneaker. But at the end I have a pair of pretty cute Nikes with my name, or at least an abbreviated version of it since it did not let me use more than five characters, at the fot. It is funny but I am almost tempted to buy them so I cautiously press the “add to cart” button waiting to see how the customization affected the price and I am pleasantly surprised to see nothing changed. But still as I think about it, I decide that maybe I should save them as a screensaver first and then if I still want them after looking at them for a while, buy them. As a matter of fact, I so much enjoyed my first customization experience that I went on to create a pair of male sneakers and then one for kids. As I experimented with the male pair, I first wanted to write on it “master” but it would not let me so I then tried “Superman” which was rejected as well so I assume Nike exerts some control on what goes out in the market with its brand name on it. When this pair was done I decided to save it to myLOCKER to see what that is and I found out that if you are willing to share with Nike your personal information and get an account for the Web site in return you will be endowed to some discounts and early peeks at new and limited collections. I decline the offer and after one more pair of sneakers am ready to move along to Puma’s site.

Puma Mongolian Shoe BBQ’s menu comes only in English, something I personally consider one of the weaknesses of the site. Otherwise, I have to admit it looks very nice and is definitely “cooler” than Nike iD. I like the whole idea of mixing the ingredients of your shoe, here the underlying theme of the site is much more obvious and coherent. And it would have been even better if I managed to convince the audio to play for me but regardless of how many times I pressed the on and off it never started. I am still not too worried because I assume I can listen to my Pandora and work on my shoes but I soon find out this is not quite that easy because the site is very, very slow, compared to it Nike iD loads in an eye’s blink. My second disappointment comes when I open the menu and realize that there are only two models that I can customize and there is no difference between male, female and kids. For comparison, Nike has 38 women’s models, 53 men’s and four kids’ models to choose from. Since there is nothing I can do about this, I select my shoe and then I am presented with the dilemma whether to choose the “Dine In” method of customization and go through what Puma calls the “full customization experience” or to take the “Express Line” to customization. Since I am sure to be making a second pair I decide to go the extra mile the first time. And I soon discover that customization can be not only fun but also… painful! I find it extremely hard to navigate the tongs that I have to use to select my colors and materials plus my shoe is totally dismantled so I cannot get a visual idea of what it would look like. I once decided to use the “Preview” option but after waiting for more than five minutes for it to load I decided that it is probably not worth it and moved along. Finally, I go through all 21 (Who would have thought?!) parts of the shoe that need to be customized and I am ready to see the result of my half-hour long endeavor. But I soon realize that my waiting is not over yet since it takes the chef quite a while to mix the ingredients I have selected and present me with the final creation. I have to say the final result is not bad for someone who initially had no idea of what “fot” and “eyestay” were but I am not very sure whether it was worth the wait. Nevertheless, I decide to experiment with the “Express Line” option and I have to say that if you ever decide to use the site to customize your shoe, this is the way to go about it. It is easy to see what the different options are and to select from them, plus you get the extra benefit of seeing what your shoe looks like while you are creating it. This part of the site is very similar to Nike iD the only difference being that there are many more colors to choose from – the number ranges between 13 and 31. This second shoe takes me mere seven minutes to make and that is just because I am very particular about the color combinations and my sockliner this time. Unfortunately, this site does not have the wallpaper option that Nike iD has so I have to keep on throwing my sneakers in the dog’s bag but it is still fun.

After several hours of virtual customization I feel like I have had enough of online shopping for now. It was a nice experience after all. And I am amazed at the thought that were I to purchase any of these shoes dozens of messages will be immediately sent to all the parts suppliers saying Stefana needs red liners and silver laces. It is amazing how much technology has done the way we do business, the way we live. I cannot help but wonder if twenty years from now the kids would know what traditional shopping once was. Maybe not. After all who ever once thought that people will step on the Moon or be able to make artificial blood.

Marketing Trends

If you searched the Web for definitions of marketing you will probably get tens of different explanations of the word and what it is supposed to do for a business. However, none of these definitions accounts for the fact that in order marketing to be effective it has to be relevant to the consumer – to their current wants and needs, to what they are looking for at the moment. Relevant has become key word in marketing. People no longer want to get the universal messages targeted at the mass market; they want anticipated personal and relevant messages. Delivering this type of messages in the form people want to get them when and where they want to get them has become the main goal of advertisers. For that reason there has been a steady decrease in the utilization of conventional mass media and an increase of the use of the internet and other more personalized media for the purposes of marketing. In this era of e-marketing the concept of permission marketing has emerged. Unlike the traditional form of marketing, permission marketing is all about obtaining authorization from the potential targets of your message to send them this message. It requires that people first “opt-in”, rather than allowing them to “opt-out” only after the advertising messages have been sent. This concept ties really well with the idea that any form of marketing has to first be relevant in order to be effective. Because in today’s hectic world people do not have the time to receive messages they do not care about, they search for meaning and meaning has become the step before action. In order to attract people’s attention, marketers should make something remarkable, something worth talking about that contributes to a person’s unique story they want to be telling other people. Because every product we buy tells other people who we are. So marketers are no longer selling products, they are selling image and people make the buying decisions they make because they want to be associated with the story a particular product tells. For that reason there has been a boom of image and emotional marketing. What this means is that marketers are promoting the image, or general perception, of a product or service, rather than its functional attributes. And by doing that they are trying to stimulate word-of-mouth. The way this works is very simple – the only thing marketers should do is make something worth talking about and then tell people who want to hear about it of its existence then these people would tell other people and so forth. The true value of word-of-mouth is that it is a person-to-person rather than mass media advertising and it is generated by consumers who liked a particular product which makes it more reliable than any traditional form of advertising. In addition, it is unpaid because it occurs spontaneously. However, marketers have no control over what people say, how, where, when and to whom they say it. As a result of all these changes in the marketing world several trends have emerged in the advertising sphere.

Ø Untraditional Billboards
The days of the flat billboard are over. In recent years billboards have become multidimensional, showing characters, buildings, cars and even whole rooms (Absolut or Calvin Klein hanging down from buildings in Manhattan). But now marketers are becoming more creative, incorporating the billboards directly into the environment. In fact, the billboards add to the ambience of the space the consumer moves through. They are part of the reality the consumer feels and experiences instead of just something additional to look at. Examples include LEGO which with a billboard making a whole building look like it was built of LEGO blocks, the toy-manufacturer won the Cannes Lions Grand Prix. LEE Jeans that initiated guerilla marketing campaign and took over an entire city to promote the opening of their new store. LEE Jeans were hanging from power lines over streets and covered parking meters. Manholes were painted with “LEE” and bar coded stickers were handed out as coupons for use at retail locations. The sportswear manufacturer Adidas created a huge overpass billboard at the Munich airport for the Soccer World Cup in Germany this summer. Featuring goalkeeper Oliver Kahn, the board stretched over a multilane road showing consumers the biggest ball they would see during the World Cup. The new billboard campaigns show once again, that advertisements can be a lot of fun. Consumers feel engaged as ads become less of a nuisance and more a part of the daily environment they can respond to with a laugh.

Ø Reality Advertising
Reality advertising takes the idea of consumer-generated media and consumer generated advertising a step further. Marketers are not only looking for input from their target group, they are letting consumers create the marketing for a certain product. Equipped with the product, the selected consumers are asked to document their experience – like a self-made reality show, more or less. Examples include the Chevy Livin’ Large campaign in which Chevy asked 14 students from seven US universities to live for one week in the Chevy AVEO, parked on their campus. Through web cams and daily blog entries the students were visible not only for their peers but for the entire nation. Similarly, Nissan chose a customer to live for 7 days in the new Nissan Sentra. The website features a blog and a short film by “customer” Marc Horowitz which shows him doing everything he would do on a normal day from his car. At the beginning of October Intel launched the Intel Centrino Duo Blogger Challenge,giving six laptops to well-known bloggers and challenging them to share their views on blogging, the blogosphere and technology. There is an expert blogger on gadgets on technology, on family issues, on food, the city, videos, and a mystery blogger. Whoever could guess the identity of the mystery blogger right, received a prize from Intel. Apart from the promotional aspect, the aim of the campaign has been “to stimulate discussion and bring bloggers together regardless of their categories.” With all the hype around consumer-generated media, reality advertising campaigns hit the “zeitgeist”. Furthermore, reality advertising play into the trend of experiential marketing and reality-media both popular amongst consumers so we are sure to see more popping up around global hotspots in the near future.

Ø Marketing on Second Life
Second Life, shortly SL, is a rapidly growing 3D virtual reality, developed by the San Francisco based company “Linden Labs”. Since October the population has increased about 41% and the media hype just began. Like in Massive Multiplayer Games, thousands of users interact in this virtual surrounding at the same time. Instead solving quests, like it is usual in games, the residents of SL are trading among each other and they build up their own surrounding. Only the land is given by Linden Labs. The hype around Second Life has also reached the higher managements of blue ship companies, universities and governments. So settlements of Adidias, Harvard University, the US government and others have been launched during the last months. Other companies and organizations with presence in Second Life include Reuters news agency that now has a correspondent from Second Life; Toyota that offers an official virtual edition of the Scion xB; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) which has created an island in Second Life where they demonstrate fluid dynamics; and many more. Being present in a virtual world can offer quite a few benefits from a marketing perspective. Testing and interacting with (potential) consumers becomes possible in a cheap way. The presence in the virtual world is also a must for companies, which run campaigns concerning their innovative spirit. Besides the marketing aspect, Second Life offers a great potential for social networkers, who are bored by myspace and openbc.

Ø Mapvertizing
This term denotes the use of Google Maps as a marketing platform. Since March this year businesses increasingly have integrated Google Maps to show locations or to help users track something down: Transportation companies offer transit and rail maps, you also can check the traffic and find parking spots via Google Maps. There is a huge variety of weather maps, travel maps and even real estate maps. Statistics and demographics can be tracked via Google Maps as well as history or current events. You can find fitness and recreation spots, dates or specialty stores. There are maps about music, movies and even crime. The integration of information sources paired with Google’s mapping technology is called a “mash up“. And the Google Maps creation tools make it easy for almost everybody and any group to start their own Google Maps tracking service, sharing pictures, locations, information. Some marketers that have already taken advantage of this new fashion in the advertising world are SuperHighStreet, a virtual shopping interface that allows consumers to walk down the street, view store fronts and click on them to go inside, which means in that case to enter their website; Earthalbum – the newest innovation in video and image mashups which uses Google Maps to browse Flickr pictures and YouTube videos; and FindbyClick which helps consumers to find the closest coffee shops in their area. Although there are already many, many websites using the Google Maps interface we probably can expect many more. This easy-to-use interface allows consumers to explore the web in a way they would explore the real world. Services like SuperHighStreet which are adding real-time sound, pictures and videos are definitely going the right way, letting the virtual traveler experience the whole world right from their computer screen. As connections will still become faster and the quality of broadband will increase, virtual explorations via pictures and videos will gain more and more popularity. Maybe the old-fashioned search via words and links will soon not be of any attraction any more.

Ø Skypecasting
Skype’s online software enables users to make free phone calls via the Internet. With 29 million registered users, the company is one of the biggest VoIP providers (Voice over Internet Protocol). A new feature, called Skypecasting allows phone conversations with up to 100 people. Skypecasting is a merger of Skype and podcasting, as the new services allows sharing recorded conversations as well as live conversations via Internet telephony. In general the Skypecast live conversation is controlled by the host, who can mute or blend out disruptive participants. Up to 100 people can listen and participate. If recorded, the conversation, concert or any other audio-event can be shared afterwards via Skypecast like a podcast. But not only private consumers are using Skypecast to share their audio, corporate businesses are starting to use Skypecast for advertisement campaigns, often in collaboration with musicians and other celebrities. Two examples of companies that utilized Skypecasting for their ad campaigns are the beer-manufacturer Heineken and Moodle. In the Heineken Skypecast, the Dutch band Johan played songs of their new album and the up to 100 listeners were able to ask questions to the band members. Supposedly the Heineken campaign was the first live concert broadcasted through Skype. There is also a video online now and, of course, fans can still listen to the recorded Skypecast, win promo-CDs, and get lots of information about Johan and “Heineken Bier”. Moodle is the biggest open source course management system in the world, designed to help educators who want to create quality online courses. It now also incorporates Skypecast as a new feature, which enables the students and their teacher to communicate live. Now they’re not limited to listening to podcasts but also to live discussions and participating in Q&A-sessions. Skypecast has opened a whole array of new possibilities for podcasters, advertisers and educators. Most ideas are even provided and developed by the users themselves. As Skypecast is free we will see it incorporated in a huge variety of open source systems. Also more and more private users, bloggers and podcasters will use Skypecast to distribute their audio content. Although Skype does not especially support uses like private radio stations, the company encourages its users to find possible applications. Another possibility might be to turn an MP3 player into a radio station for Skype users.

It seems fun, interactive, relevant, and out-of-the-box are some the key words in the world of marketing today and we can only wonder where the next place we see an ad is going to be.

Wanna Dance?

If you fell in love with the wingless heroes of last year's documentary hit "March of the Penguins," prepare to surrender completely to George Miller's computer-animated musical/adventure "Happy Feet."

In the year of the animated movie, this one soars above them all.

The Warner Brothers Pictures animation movie, “Happy Feet” relates to the great nation of the Emperor Penguins. Dropped as an egg during a gyration by his Elvis-impersonating father, Memphis (Hugh Jackman), Mumbles is hatched without the ability to sing, a devastating handicap in a culture where couples mate through song. But boy, he can surely tap dance.

Though Mumble’s mummy Norma Jean (Nicole Kidman) thinks this habit is cute, dad Memphis says,” it ain’t penguin! ”. Besides, they both think that without a heart song, Mumble would never find his true love.

As fate has it, his one friend and hoped-for mate Gloria (Brittany Murphy) happens to be the best singer around. Mumble and Gloria have a connection from the moment they were hatched but she struggles with his hippity-hippoty way. Mumble is just too different, especially for Noah (Hugo Weaving), the elder of the flock who casts him out of the community.

Over the course of the movie, which will follow him on a mission to find out why the emperor penguins' fish supply is disappearing, his dancing ability will become a colony-saving asset. The action sequences - in which Mumbles encounters killer sharks, a vicious sea lion, elephant seals and an icebreaker ship, and takes several trips down the slopes of glaciers - make Pixar's "Cars" look like it's standing still. And the music keeps the audience's feet tapping, too.

"Happy Feet" is not only the year's best animated movie, it's one of the year's best movies, period. Go.

The movie was released on November 17 and has already won the hearts of both critics and the audience. To promote the debut of the animation the French agency Megalos has developed the HappyFeet-Dance minisite where people are invited to upload their own tap dance videos to enter into the “Happy Feet Dance Competition” for a chance to win a trip to Australia and a flight over Antarctica.

There is all sorts of fun staff you can do on the website. You can not only read about the movie, watch trailers and other people’s videos and rank them but also download different wallpapers and a screensaver for your computer. Another thing you could choose to download is one of the nine cute, fun Happy Feet characters and animated backgrounds from the brand new Yahoo avatar suite that are guaranteed to get your feet tapping.

The site of course has a link to the official Happy Feet website – www.HappyFeet.co.uk. It also gives you the opportunity to send it as an e-card to a friend. The fact that more than 18 000 people have voted for one of the videos is enough to show how successful viral marketing can be. A great complement to a great movie.