Just ran across this interesting nugget in the NYT – “the NPD Group now counts Apple as the largest seller of music in the country, ahead of Wal-Mart. Apple, in fact, is on track to have greater revenue from selling music (and accessories) this year than the entire revenue estimated for the Warner Music Group.”A technology company now is a leading music company. It’s similar to what I’ve been telling people about Google – it’s the largest ad agency in the world. Music, advertising…what’s next?
Thomas Nelson is one of the biggest book publishers around, and a major player in the Christian book industry. CEO Michael Hyatt posted on his blog, From Where I Sit, about their recent decision to drop out of two major industry trade shows and what they’re doing instead for existing customers. His post also includes links to other media coverage about this brave new marketing decision.
Heard during an e-metrics webinar by longtime web marketer Jim Sterne: HIPPO – Highest Paid Opinion. HIPPOs can overwhelm any sensible advertising or marketing effort, online or off. Always be on the lookout for signs of them and take appropriate action.
If you’re not familiar with the concept of Turing’d, tune in to this post on Kevin Kelly’s provocative blog The Technium. Much of what he says applies to marketing and advertising, particualrly in research and media. But creativity is not immune. As evidence, I offer this website: theadgenerator.org. It’s rudimentary, I admit, but there’s something unnerving for a creative type like me when you see a program that can generate concepts every 3-5 seconds. I have no doubt that refinements are in the works.
“Data Trumps Intuition” – Ronny Kohavi, general manager for the experimentation platform at Microsoft. He was previously the director of data mining and personalization at Amazon.com.
For ad and marketing types looking to understand how to survive the digital changes taking place, Irishman Gerry McGovern is not a bad place to start. He writes and lectures about the need to understand customers and the words they care to hear in the Internet age. Check out his latest column: Finding is the new advertising One of my favorite quotes: “Bringing TV ads to the Internet is like the Pony Express trying to breed faster horses in order to compete with the telegraph.”
In another sign the good old days are now just plain old, one of the pillars of advertising is going with the flow. Check this out from Mitch Joel’s blog Six Pixels of Separation: When GM Shifts 1.5 Billion From Traditional Advertising To Digital Marketing… As Joel asks near the end of his post, “Is this the Perfect Digital Marketing Storm?”
From comScore via TechCrunch, some of the latest web trends in chart form. Examine at your own risk: The Web in Charts—Google vs. Microsoft-Yahoo vs. China