Oh my giddy aunt. I talked before about how the digital applications of phones will increasingly replace the solid hardware we've grown up used to...
...I used the example of the iPhone camera apps which replaced the functionality of Lomo style cameras and so on.
Now, via Mark, I've just seen Square for the first time...
It's basically a 'square' device that plugs into the standard jack socket of ANY mobile device smart enough, and lets you receive payments for goods or services. Yeah, I know. REALLY.
So anyone from a street vendor to a design freelancer has an instant payment system available to them to receive their money.
Which in turn means everything from the chip & pin systems in shops to the invoice process for freelancers can now change, and be wrapped up in the device folk carry with them anyway.
If this isn't huge, I'll eat my hat.
Then buy a new one, from a guy in the street who's using the system that was even better than Square and hence freed him up to set up his hat stall...
The musician's lot is not a happy one. We know this, we've seen plenty of evidence, but here's another piece (via Dan) that just might give a sense of just how futile the act of making money from music is becoming...
Over on TorrentFreak (a blog covering all things around bittorrent
technology), there's a report on how much money Lady Gaga made from
Spotify for a million plays of her songs...
How much do you think? Go on, guess. A MILLION plays.
How about $167?
Or, if you prefer, 0.017 cents per play, or to bring it back to real money, 0.01p per play.
Now, you maybe don't know if that's a lot or a little, compared to what musicians may be used to receiving for plays of their songs.
Well, not so long ago in 2003, if a song of yours was played on Radio 1, you'd receive a massive £18.44. PER MINUTE (though of course the amount was less if you were on regional or local stations).
But still, one 3 minute play of a Lady Gaga song would make her £55.32.
Or indeed a THIRD of the totally amount of money she's receiving for a million plays on Spotify.
Much as I love Spotify, I really can't see how it's going to continue if the people who're making the content for it only receive such paltry rewards for their efforts. It's barely better than piracy...
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UPDATE...
So, the ever-on-the-pulse Dave Stone points me in the direction of this on Music Ally... a rebuttal, of a kind...
“Firstly, any payment to STIM would only represent a fraction of the payments rights holders receive and only for music played in one country (in this case Sweden) as we pay not only collecting societies, but also publishers and the record company to play their music,” says a spokesperson.
“Secondly, the figure (unrepresentative as it is) is from a short period just after our launch last year, way before we’d established ourselves as a music service and built up a large user base. Specific payments are of course confidential, but this is certainly wide of the mark.”
There's obviously more to this than meets the eye. Yet until someone clarifies how 'wide of the mark' it is, we'll never know whether artists are getting a good deal or not. I wonder if anyone will come out with some real figures..?
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ANOTHER UPDATE
So, Mat has found this... from Steve Lawson's blog, who's also done some quick maths on this, but using some sources suggestion that the real figures are ten times this (as the $167 is just a royalty payment... there are other things to include).
So maybe the decimal point needs to come forward a place... 0.1p per play.
And it points out that's she's also had 20 million paid downloads...
...but that this is a TOTAL figure across every platform, not attributable to Spotify, but rather to the promotional effort as a whole. She's not done badly, either way.
My point on the whole affair remains this though; compared to what they used to receive from listens to a song, there's another whole chunk of musician income that's disappeared.
Here's something cool that Dave told me about earlier. It's called Taykt (pronounced 'Take It'). It's really very simple as a proposition.
Need to set up a text shortcode?
Then just com to www.taykt.com, enter the keyword you want to use, and the message people get when they text... and you're off...
Wow, easy huh? Anyone can do it. None of this set-up fee, faffing with different providers and the like. No worrying about cost, as it's all just '25p+network charge'... so say 35p typically. Not too much at all.
I can already imagine lots of uses for this...
- small independent shops & bars could pick a 'word of the day' that's written in chalk above their counter or bar... if you text that word, you get back a token for half price drink that day, or 5% off your shopping.
- if you want to test the effect of sales by location, just set up slightly different keywords to text in, and monitor which works best
- not sure which offer is more appealing to people... offer a choice of words, and see which proves most popular
A really smart, simple service as far as I can see. Thanks Dave :)
Toshiba sent a chair into space. Yes, yes they did.
It seems that in the last year, lots of people have been 'sending stuff into space'. Students from Cambridge, and Spain.
Then there was the MIT & Canon camera one.
And I've just found out The Sun sent their 40th birthday edition up too.
(It looks kind of doctored, this image. But there's more authentic looking pictures of them doing it here)
Anyway, I'd like to propose that 2010 is the year that nobody sends anything up into space. Space is closed for sending stuff up into. It's been done. LEAVE SPACE ALONE.
It just goes to show you that Moores Law seems to work for Space travel too. It now seems to cost $150 to send something up into space and have photographic proof that you did it. Imagine how much that would have cost in the fifties...
Eh?
Well, I'd put the ACTUAL dullest blog post title ever in, and just stared at it thinking 'who's going to read that', so thought I'd try and distract you with some humour. Of a sort.
Anyway, here's the real title...
"Behavioural Economics and Measurement Anchoring"
(Told you it was dull. The post itself may get more exciting)
A few PHDers and myself have spent the last couple of mornings at the IPA's Behavioural Economics (BE) workshops, run by Nick Southgate.
(As you may or may not know, Behavioural Economics is the focus of new IPA President Rory Sutherland; it's an exciting, innovative way to move the industry onwards I think, hence the continued Feeding The Puppy interest...)
The mornings focused on 'Choice Architecture' (just one strand of BE), and how we (as an industry) could begin to embrace this tenet to help achieve our clients' goals.
The one I was at was very thought provoking, even though I found myself in the 'how does this affect measurement and evaluation' group.
It's quite interesting when you start to think of what we do in terms of Choice Architecture, because it really does make you focus on the 'getting people to make decisions/take actions', rather the much more spurious, disconnected measures of 'awareness' and 'recall'.
But the thing that occurred in the group around measurement was not the BE tenet of 'choice architecture', but that of 'anchoring'.
A quick explanation; anchoring is basically where people are primed to expect prices, years or anything else number based to be at a certain level.
So, for instance, if I kept talking to you about the values of various different smart phones on pay as you go contracts (£400, £500) then ask you how much you'd be willing to pay for a monthly contract, your answer will be higher than if I'd talked to you about the basic entry phones at £50, £55 and so on.
Anyway, when it comes to evaluating marketing activity, why is anchoring important, and potentially troubling?
Well, when you're talking in terms of TV campaigns, you frame things in the language of 'reach'. How many millions and millions of people will we reach with this?
But then when you start talking in terms of online & social activity, it's very rare that you'll get into the hundreds of thousands, never mind millions.
And yet the latter could be doing a better, more effective job. But we've anchored clients, and maybe ourselves, to think in 'millions'. Not thousands. I touched on the 'thousands not millions' point before, you'll remember.
So, what do we do about it?
Well, here's a thought. Rather than simply measure media in 'reach', for our clients we should start to turn the currency into the effect it has...
Rather than a TV campaign being measured in millions of reach, you take the average of the last few campaigns you ran, and work out the average number of sales it delivers. I'm sure all the econometrics that clients use nowadays could give us a rough indication of this per client.
So when we started evaluating which decisions we should make from a communications point of view, the options are all laid out on as level a playing field as possible, and the anchoring issue disappears.
It's the general problem with measuring media in 'reach'... any number with the word 'million' on the end contains a lovely, juicy slice of 'potential' in it... "imagine if we convert just a TENTH of those"...
I had a thought a couple of weeks ago about the Bonfires & Fireworks analogy...
If, as I believe, it's going to be through cross-disciplinary effort that we build successful, conversational communications between people and companies, we should get all sorts of different perspectives from across the board on the principle of bonfire building.
So, to that end, I decided to start asking a few folk whose opinion and work I think highly of about the principle, and their perspective on it.
First up, I'm delighted to say we've got Jake McKee, of Ant's Eye View, Community Guy and Lego fame...
Let’s start with something social… tell us about yourself…
I'm Jake McKee, co-founder and Chief Ant Wrangler at Ant's Eye View (www.antseyeview.com). I've spent my entire career on and around the Web trying to help businesses use new tech, people, and processes to improve the way that customers interact with the company.
At AEV, our focus is the same: helping clients improve customer experience and drive customer engagement by building strategies that tap into those new technologies, as well as age old improvements in people and process to truly improve the bottom line.
Outside of work, I'm an amateur photography, infrequent mountain biker, and a proud dad of an insane smart and funny 3 year old.
How did you get started in bonfire building?
I actually went to college for traditional 3D product design. Even in high school I was fascinated by the idea that people got paid to think about how people used things and to design products accordingly. I graduated about the time the Web started taking off and brought that product design thinking to Web development.
When I joined the LEGO Company in 2000, I lucked into working for a boss who encouraged me to own the relationship between LEGO and the adult LEGO enthusiasts. That led to a full-time gig at LEGO doing community work, helping to form the community development team, speaking about community work, and blogging at CommunityGuy.com.
How do you persuade others of the need to build social bonfires alongside setting off advertising fireworks?
The answer to this question is a bit different if you’re talking about being an employee of a company working inside the enterprise towards change versus working as a consultant helping those folks see change through to completion.
Looking at the work that needs to be done inside the organization (since that's where the buck stops), I've always talked about the strategy of "Success by 1000 paper cuts". Start with the smallest element you can effectively do with minimal budget, little managerial approval, and minor legal team approval.
Nothing breeds acceptance like success. Even tiny successes excite people to see more. Succeed, expand your efforts a little, succeed again, rinse and repeat. Before you know it, you'll be launching huge programs but with far more support than if you tried to launch a big program straight away.
Where do you see the balance between the bonfires & fireworks at this point in time?
Well, there's probably not much of a "balance" at this point! I think largely we're still seeing a vast majority of the social efforts being funnelled through the traditional marketing/advertising lens. With a sadly rare exception, most business people are struggling to get past their own training - we're all programmed to believe that protectionism is a huge business value.
That mindset was passed along in school, and backed up by nearly every business dealing we've had in our careers. Getting past that mental training is going to some time and some serious effort, but it will happen. With an entire generation being raised to expect a direct connect relationship with the companies they do business with, it's seriously only a matter of time.
That said, I don't think we'll ever get away from seeing fireworks. In fact, I hope we don't. Fireworks can be a lot of fun, and can do lots of great things... IF they are a component of a larger, social-infused strategy.
Finally, what do you foresee in the future for the bonfires and fireworks?
It's not terribly exciting, but I think we're going to continue to see the same progression we've been on for the last few years, just with an increasingly accelerated pace.
Companies and consultants alike are certainly still struggling to get to a more social-minded place, but the pace at which things are moving is picking up speed.
Success is leading to success, and we'll be seeing a lot smarter, bigger, more successful campaigns over time...
...success by 1000 paper cuts.
Thanks Jake :)
The perception we always have of the beginning of the 20th century is very much framed by the way in which we see it recalled through the media used to capture it.
So by and large if you think about the 1920s, you'll start thinking in black and white, stuttery images... it's hard to think of it being a time when people even lived in colour.
Which makes this colour of London in 1927 fascinating... it's a weird juxtaposition of the clothing, transport and the like we know is of the period, but it clashes with our perception of that world being 'black and white'.
(via Schmutizie)
And it works the other way around too. There's an iPhone app called Camera Bag which allows you to add a filter on top of your digital photos to give them a more earthy, dated feel.
For instance, here's a shot of my Dad and James sleeping on the sofa...
...and here's the same shot but using the '1974' filter...
...which now, to me, makes it much more of an evocative 'family' shot... probably because I'm used to thinking about the boxes of old seventies & eighties photos that make up the photographic records of my childhood... bleachy, harsh colours, and little white frames around the edge and the like.
I wonder what we'll look back and think of this era as, photograph & film wise?
