If the record business needs a lesson in how to make money, then the former Governer of New York has one for them.
Think about it - within 48 hours of the public discovering that Ashley Dupre, the high priced call girl who took him down, was a budding singer with two moderately good hip hop songs on the 'Net, she sold something like 200,000 downloads.
This is truly a first. Hookers didn't used to sing. And if they did, they almost certainly didn't have a record contract.
Now you don't need a label and a scandal is worth more than a record deal.
The moral of the story is this is: this truly an attention economy and you have to be ready at any given time with monetizable product. We, of course, prefer you stick to more distinguished efforts but the principle is there.
More importantly, it explains why someone like Edgar Bronfman was willing to put up $2 billion for Warner Music. The record business may be dying, he said in a Daily Deal conference, but not the music business. So when an Asian star has a hit, his company has 400 SKU’s from ringtones to keychains, to sell.
The question for everyone out there is:
1. What do you have to sell at your moment of attention?
2. How do you get that moment of attention (without quite that moral turpitude?)
To be discussed at our Wikinomics iBreakfast on Wednesday, and many more to come........
Monday, March 17, 2008
Friday, March 14, 2008
Wikis & UFOs: The "Rodney King" Moment in "Star Land?"
Here I stick my neck way out and instead of focusing on Digital Media, I talk about what it has enabled.
UFO's, right? Has the power of the 'net made a difference to this great controversy?
You’d think by now that the prevalence of camcorder phones and other cheap image-capturing devices would generate a lot of videos. And with Youtube, they could be seen from anywhere in the world. No possible government or media intervention to worry about.
So, has there been a Rodney King moment? The kind where something we've been talking about for years is captured right there for everyone to see.....
Is that happening with UFO's.?
Perhaps. Not only that, but it may be happening every day.....
Top of that list is aol.com with this little picture:
This picture of a UFO over London was shown last month on the front Page of the London Sun.
This picture of a UFO over London was shown last month on the front Page of the London Sun.
On Youtube, UFO's are so plentiful and convincing that you would not have enough time to see them all in a week. Not only that, but many are shot in broad daylight or with digital camcorders that somehow pick up infrared or other parts of the light spectrum not otherwise visible to humans.
Here are a few that simply bowl me over:
Usually, it is the user reaction that sells it even though its the easiest part to fake. In any case, the highlights include great still images, video on live TV and credible-looking images over world cities. In January 2008, there were widespread reports of a mass sighting of a UFO Fleet in Stephensville TX.
Then, there are compelling documentaries with the testimony of credible people like Fife Symington, former Governor of Arizona, describing the famous mass Phoenix sighting in the 90's in a CNN special. Even video from NASA - which includes the famous "Tether Incident" displaying dozens and dozens of UFOs, are appearing, making it clear that something is going on out there.
Air Force video clips from all over the world are appearing on the 'Net. China is full of UFO Clubs and high levels of sighting are reported in Latin America.
Increasingly, these craft are being seen in formations. There just aren’t enough Photoshop hours in the day to make all of them fakes.
So the question is what’s going on?
As it happens, an old school friend who lives in Hong Kong contacted me a few months ago to answer that. The big word is Exo – as in Exo Politics and Exo Worlds and Exos of all kinds.
The short story is - there certainly are other intelligent life forms out there from other planets. Why, for heaven’s sake, wouldn’t there be? Thinking of mankind as unique has to be the highest form of self-flattery - of the delusional kind, that is.
But aside from that, these forms have technology that enables them to move at amazing speeds and at very high levels of maneuverability. They may pop in and out of other dimensions or wormholes and they can be huge - the size of several city blocks. Some are as big as a whole neighborhood.
They are usually saucer-like and some have a recognizable cut-out making them look like Pacman. But they also come in chevrons and oblong shapes.
Naturally, there have been encounters and experts have patched together a storyline from the collected reports.
Since the first major sighting in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 seems to have occurred within a few years of the first nuclear weapon, people think they are connected. The gap in time gives us an idea of how far they traveled though we think their tech may have improved so more can get here quicker. It may also be that the escalating nuclear threat could be an issue.
If they are truly here, they come at a very good time because they know how to use free vacuum energy from the universe. So there could be economic interests at play. Also, their technology is more advanced, so the military is deeply interested. They are generally more highly evolved beings using, more of their brains, and they can access telepathy. They don't seem to suggest war although they do abduct us - but only if we are willing to go through with it.
They come in what has been identified as over 50 races. Some look like us - others really don't. And there may well be a federation. Since their craft do crash and leave bodies, we have reports that their anti-immune system doesn't work well here.
So what are we to do? There really may be Star People and aliens and a Star Land - if the evidence really stacks up.
So we need to get a heads up on the other side. The government does have knowledge of them. Why wouldn't they - since they are responsible for dealing with any invasion to the land. There are reports they not only classified the races but actually kept a little colony of "Tall Whites" as they are known, in Nevada caves. These beings are a paler version of us, are intelligent, have higher consciousness and so on. However, if the Nevada story is true, then they may have been left behind in the home furnishings department.
Then there is the question: so why are they here and what should we be doing?
My friend Neil Gould, has plenty to say about this in an English language news interview.
He claims to have seen them since he was a boy. I have known him since then and can only say that even if true, he never mentioned it to me!
In any case, this calls for a conference…….Exo-Con.....coming soon!
And here's the best part about this conference we are planning - skeptics and believers pay different prices.
My question to you, dear reader, is: who should pay more, the skeptic or the believer? Who should subsidize who?
We welcome your comments. Or just the vote: skeptic or believer? Who pays more?
(C) 2008 Alan Brody
UFO's, right? Has the power of the 'net made a difference to this great controversy?
You’d think by now that the prevalence of camcorder phones and other cheap image-capturing devices would generate a lot of videos. And with Youtube, they could be seen from anywhere in the world. No possible government or media intervention to worry about.
So, has there been a Rodney King moment? The kind where something we've been talking about for years is captured right there for everyone to see.....
Is that happening with UFO's.?
Perhaps. Not only that, but it may be happening every day.....
Top of that list is aol.com with this little picture:
This picture of a UFO over London was shown last month on the front Page of the London Sun.
This picture of a UFO over London was shown last month on the front Page of the London Sun.
On Youtube, UFO's are so plentiful and convincing that you would not have enough time to see them all in a week. Not only that, but many are shot in broad daylight or with digital camcorders that somehow pick up infrared or other parts of the light spectrum not otherwise visible to humans.
Here are a few that simply bowl me over:
The Live Turkish Broadcast
The Chinese Shakeout
Usually, it is the user reaction that sells it even though its the easiest part to fake. In any case, the highlights include great still images, video on live TV and credible-looking images over world cities. In January 2008, there were widespread reports of a mass sighting of a UFO Fleet in Stephensville TX.
Then, there are compelling documentaries with the testimony of credible people like Fife Symington, former Governor of Arizona, describing the famous mass Phoenix sighting in the 90's in a CNN special. Even video from NASA - which includes the famous "Tether Incident" displaying dozens and dozens of UFOs, are appearing, making it clear that something is going on out there.
Air Force video clips from all over the world are appearing on the 'Net. China is full of UFO Clubs and high levels of sighting are reported in Latin America.
Increasingly, these craft are being seen in formations. There just aren’t enough Photoshop hours in the day to make all of them fakes.
So the question is what’s going on?
As it happens, an old school friend who lives in Hong Kong contacted me a few months ago to answer that. The big word is Exo – as in Exo Politics and Exo Worlds and Exos of all kinds.
The short story is - there certainly are other intelligent life forms out there from other planets. Why, for heaven’s sake, wouldn’t there be? Thinking of mankind as unique has to be the highest form of self-flattery - of the delusional kind, that is.
But aside from that, these forms have technology that enables them to move at amazing speeds and at very high levels of maneuverability. They may pop in and out of other dimensions or wormholes and they can be huge - the size of several city blocks. Some are as big as a whole neighborhood.
They are usually saucer-like and some have a recognizable cut-out making them look like Pacman. But they also come in chevrons and oblong shapes.
Naturally, there have been encounters and experts have patched together a storyline from the collected reports.
Since the first major sighting in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 seems to have occurred within a few years of the first nuclear weapon, people think they are connected. The gap in time gives us an idea of how far they traveled though we think their tech may have improved so more can get here quicker. It may also be that the escalating nuclear threat could be an issue.
If they are truly here, they come at a very good time because they know how to use free vacuum energy from the universe. So there could be economic interests at play. Also, their technology is more advanced, so the military is deeply interested. They are generally more highly evolved beings using, more of their brains, and they can access telepathy. They don't seem to suggest war although they do abduct us - but only if we are willing to go through with it.
They come in what has been identified as over 50 races. Some look like us - others really don't. And there may well be a federation. Since their craft do crash and leave bodies, we have reports that their anti-immune system doesn't work well here.
So what are we to do? There really may be Star People and aliens and a Star Land - if the evidence really stacks up.
So we need to get a heads up on the other side. The government does have knowledge of them. Why wouldn't they - since they are responsible for dealing with any invasion to the land. There are reports they not only classified the races but actually kept a little colony of "Tall Whites" as they are known, in Nevada caves. These beings are a paler version of us, are intelligent, have higher consciousness and so on. However, if the Nevada story is true, then they may have been left behind in the home furnishings department.
Then there is the question: so why are they here and what should we be doing?
My friend Neil Gould, has plenty to say about this in an English language news interview.
He claims to have seen them since he was a boy. I have known him since then and can only say that even if true, he never mentioned it to me!
In any case, this calls for a conference…….Exo-Con.....coming soon!
And here's the best part about this conference we are planning - skeptics and believers pay different prices.
My question to you, dear reader, is: who should pay more, the skeptic or the believer? Who should subsidize who?
We welcome your comments. Or just the vote: skeptic or believer? Who pays more?
(C) 2008 Alan Brody
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Web Video: Is There Money to Be Made?
Report form the Feb 2008 iBreakfast
Marcien Jenckes, Voxant
John Lumpkin, Heavy Media
Bryan Thatcher, Empressr
TV may be going the way of Web Video but according to Marcien Jenckes, a former AOL exec, “TV dollars are only giving us Web Video pennies.”
So how do you make a pile of pennies, these days?
It turns out that YouTube and IPTV in general has attracted thousands of competing sites but in order to stay alive, they have had to reinvent themselves.
Heavy.com which was originally just a destination site for young men has become a kind of media aggregator and sales that sells and syndicates young male-oriented content to its major ad partners.
Voxant redistributes high value video streams for free to new viewers who mind wind up as subscribers to the premium sites.
Empressr is a hybrid video and slideshow site that enables viewers to communicate in new ways.
For the most part, however, whatever money is being made is through advertising and there, pre-roll, those annoying ads that run prior to the video, are king.
At the end of the day, the challenge video is arbitraging the half-penny or so a stream into a profitable cpm. For many, the solution, at least in part, may come form Google's recent introduction of Adsense for Video.
Long Live the Pre-Roll (for Now)
ClickZ News, NY - Feb 27, 2008
Heavy Media's John Lumpkin and Voxant CEO Marcien Jenckes both made that assessment today at an iBreakfast program, "Web Video, Where's the Money? ...
For VideoEgg and Its Platform, Ads Trump Content Delivery
ClickZ News, NY - Feb 28, 2008
The company's shift was pointed out by Alan Brody, organizer of an iBreakfast panel discussion in New York City about the Web video business. ...
Marcien Jenckes, Voxant
John Lumpkin, Heavy Media
Bryan Thatcher, Empressr
TV may be going the way of Web Video but according to Marcien Jenckes, a former AOL exec, “TV dollars are only giving us Web Video pennies.”
So how do you make a pile of pennies, these days?
It turns out that YouTube and IPTV in general has attracted thousands of competing sites but in order to stay alive, they have had to reinvent themselves.
Heavy.com which was originally just a destination site for young men has become a kind of media aggregator and sales that sells and syndicates young male-oriented content to its major ad partners.
Voxant redistributes high value video streams for free to new viewers who mind wind up as subscribers to the premium sites.
Empressr is a hybrid video and slideshow site that enables viewers to communicate in new ways.
For the most part, however, whatever money is being made is through advertising and there, pre-roll, those annoying ads that run prior to the video, are king.
At the end of the day, the challenge video is arbitraging the half-penny or so a stream into a profitable cpm. For many, the solution, at least in part, may come form Google's recent introduction of Adsense for Video.
Long Live the Pre-Roll (for Now)
ClickZ News, NY - Feb 27, 2008
Heavy Media's John Lumpkin and Voxant CEO Marcien Jenckes both made that assessment today at an iBreakfast program, "Web Video, Where's the Money? ...
For VideoEgg and Its Platform, Ads Trump Content Delivery
ClickZ News, NY - Feb 28, 2008
The company's shift was pointed out by Alan Brody, organizer of an iBreakfast panel discussion in New York City about the Web video business. ...
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
From Barack-Clinton to Google: Could You See The Tipping Point?
Can Hillary vs. Barack teach us something about the Internet marketplace?
Everyone seems to recognize the tipping point after the fact. But can you see one coming?
My view is fairly simple – look for the bases to be somehow loaded and then watch out for something outstanding or outrageous to happen.
In politics, the bases are always loaded, so the key is: what would set your own people against you?
Right now, the Obama campaign has a tremendous momentum behind it. Coming off 11 straight victories, Obama has the upswing in his favor. But where did this momentum start? What was the tipping point?
Conventional wisdom has it that the appearance of Bill on the attack worked against the Clinton campaign.
But my view is a little different.
"Attack Bill" is nowhere near as loaded as a veiled racial attack, and I think that is where Hillary's campaign began to fall apart.
When Hillary accused Obama of working for a slum landlord, she almost instantly lost the black vote. If Obama had been deeply involved with the slumlord it would have been one thing, but his involvement was slight. People of color were asked to choose: a gender-correctness or a race-correctness. Tough, until the gender candidate did a little racial attacking; point tipped.
What can the market learn from this? Be careful about your face-offs? Know what people really think you stand for?
Let's take Google vs. a possible Microsoft-Yahoo combo. Let's forget for a minute that Microsoft is like the Giuliani candidate; we respect them, someone might actually love them, but for the most part, they're so last year.
Can anyone really take on Google? Do they have a tipping point loaded against them?
Of course, they are not running for office, but we vote with our clicks.
So here's the question – and there's a free iBreakfast in it for anyone with a good answer – what would make the market tip against Google?
My guess is that it's something that lets more people keep the money Google generates from its clicks.
Personal outsourcing at a click. More wisdom of crowd solutions……
We're going to find out at our next iBreakfast when we look at solutions that ask the world to help companies find tipping points against big problems that face them. They could be science problems, they could be ad problems, or maybe even the next big hit. But in all cases they will be about using the net and the collective wisdom of crowds to figure it out….
Look out for our "Wikinomics - Idea Markeptlaces" iBreakfast in March
Everyone seems to recognize the tipping point after the fact. But can you see one coming?
My view is fairly simple – look for the bases to be somehow loaded and then watch out for something outstanding or outrageous to happen.
In politics, the bases are always loaded, so the key is: what would set your own people against you?
Right now, the Obama campaign has a tremendous momentum behind it. Coming off 11 straight victories, Obama has the upswing in his favor. But where did this momentum start? What was the tipping point?
Conventional wisdom has it that the appearance of Bill on the attack worked against the Clinton campaign.
But my view is a little different.
"Attack Bill" is nowhere near as loaded as a veiled racial attack, and I think that is where Hillary's campaign began to fall apart.
When Hillary accused Obama of working for a slum landlord, she almost instantly lost the black vote. If Obama had been deeply involved with the slumlord it would have been one thing, but his involvement was slight. People of color were asked to choose: a gender-correctness or a race-correctness. Tough, until the gender candidate did a little racial attacking; point tipped.
What can the market learn from this? Be careful about your face-offs? Know what people really think you stand for?
Let's take Google vs. a possible Microsoft-Yahoo combo. Let's forget for a minute that Microsoft is like the Giuliani candidate; we respect them, someone might actually love them, but for the most part, they're so last year.
Can anyone really take on Google? Do they have a tipping point loaded against them?
Of course, they are not running for office, but we vote with our clicks.
So here's the question – and there's a free iBreakfast in it for anyone with a good answer – what would make the market tip against Google?
My guess is that it's something that lets more people keep the money Google generates from its clicks.
Personal outsourcing at a click. More wisdom of crowd solutions……
We're going to find out at our next iBreakfast when we look at solutions that ask the world to help companies find tipping points against big problems that face them. They could be science problems, they could be ad problems, or maybe even the next big hit. But in all cases they will be about using the net and the collective wisdom of crowds to figure it out….
Look out for our "Wikinomics - Idea Markeptlaces" iBreakfast in March
Friday, December 14, 2007
Advertising 2.0 iBreakfast Report: Follow The Customer
If there is one simple conclusion to this completely sold out iBreakfast, it is not whether online is more important than TV, or mobile; or whether Madison Ave. can handle the onslaught of the big tech guys - it is, as Ogilvy’s digital gurus are showing, about tagging the message to the customer wherever they go.
In this continuum of media it means that agencies have to think of how a message on TV ought to pop on a website and then on a cell phone (more of those to come, experts say) and at any other point along the viewer’s trail to purchase.
In this view, the onslaught of media digitization, as exemplified by Google’s buyouts and other appearances on Madison Ave. and the emerging media exchanges (the topic of next Wed. Dec. 19th iBreakfast), not only makes perfect sense but is a prerequisite of the next wave of the Ad Business. We think Madison Ave. will prosper on but not without a few palace coups. It is clear that the young blood is all digital while the old guard is still wary and has traditionally compartmentalized the digital services. Clearly that has to change and you can be sure that some agencies will and others won’t and there will be much upheaval. Think how Rumsfeld combined the three armed services and then think what that did for him and the country. Yet, the first part of it had to be done……
As for cellphone advertising. At first this seems like a horrible idea. Such a personal item infested with such knowing ads! But if you want the free searches, the special offers, the music, the TV shows and so on, you will be getting them on your cell phone soon and if the agencies are smart, it will be in away that serves the TV campaign. For this MoPhapp will be happy explain
This is just a hint of the actual conversation and amazing presentations at this iBreakfast – if you are hungry for more you can request these presentations by emailing us at ad2@ibreakfast.com
In this continuum of media it means that agencies have to think of how a message on TV ought to pop on a website and then on a cell phone (more of those to come, experts say) and at any other point along the viewer’s trail to purchase.
In this view, the onslaught of media digitization, as exemplified by Google’s buyouts and other appearances on Madison Ave. and the emerging media exchanges (the topic of next Wed. Dec. 19th iBreakfast), not only makes perfect sense but is a prerequisite of the next wave of the Ad Business. We think Madison Ave. will prosper on but not without a few palace coups. It is clear that the young blood is all digital while the old guard is still wary and has traditionally compartmentalized the digital services. Clearly that has to change and you can be sure that some agencies will and others won’t and there will be much upheaval. Think how Rumsfeld combined the three armed services and then think what that did for him and the country. Yet, the first part of it had to be done……
As for cellphone advertising. At first this seems like a horrible idea. Such a personal item infested with such knowing ads! But if you want the free searches, the special offers, the music, the TV shows and so on, you will be getting them on your cell phone soon and if the agencies are smart, it will be in away that serves the TV campaign. For this MoPhapp will be happy explain
This is just a hint of the actual conversation and amazing presentations at this iBreakfast – if you are hungry for more you can request these presentations by emailing us at ad2@ibreakfast.com
The Secret – as Applied to Business
Stand back Oprah, I've got something to say......
Since I have spent the season speaking with investors and prospective entrepreneurs who ask about what we really do, I have had to boil it down to a few principles. We’re in the business of helping companies understand what makes their business plans works, what trends are going to drive the industry and occasionally, the true nature of being.
Savvy early stage investors know what I am talking about because they even have terms for this – “the secret sauce” or the “thumb on the scale” but like the concept of a tipping point, few of them have a way to really articulate this quality.
That’s really where the iBreakfast Entrepreneur Club and the bimonthly Innovator Evenings kick in.
One of the things we do is help people understand the critical element of their business. And that gets into another area that you don’t learn in business school. As a journalist I once covered Artificial Intelligence, and I know from the art of Knowledge Engineering, the interrogative process programmers use to create the rules driving the system, how you gather and order the intelligence. Generally it requires interviewing a domain expert and getting them to explain it in the form of rules of thumb. Often, these turn out to contain strangely mundane little secrets. There are famous storiees like the old Italian immigrant who ran Campbell’s soup tomato vats who had all kids of ways to figure out when the boiling was just so.
So I learned to become a great believer of “The Secret”, but not really in the Oprah way. She may have something though I don’t it believe it works in the way it is hyped. i.e. “learn this secret and everything happens.” But in a particular context where everything else has been prepared, a secret can make all the difference in the world.
It definitely happens in business and I believe it underlies many great businesses even though the secret is usually something quite mundane. It is really the context it makes all the difference. Agein, if you’ve read The Tipping Point you’ll know that big differences can take place from very small issues. Consider them the keystone in an otherwise unformed edifice. The question is how to find them, better yet, which is what we try to do, how do you predict what they will be?
Some of my Favorite Examples of Business “Secrets”
Starbucks – What Exactly are we Buying Here?
How do you get people to pay $4 for a $1 cup of coffee? Do you just make it better? But 4 times better? And how can you support one on just about every corner of the country? Maybe you need to look at the history of the Opium Wars where the British brought cheap opium from India for sale in China. Or just check with the local pot dealer…….of the local convenience store with cigarette ads at counter level. What Howard Schwartz learned in his incubation years as a coffee grinder was how to get more caffeine out of a bean. Starbucks sells the highest caffeine content coffee in the country and his customers, all lined up first thing in the morning, are caffeine addicts. Forget the arguments about taste, the real issue is when it comes to addictive products is whether or not it hits the spot. Starbucks does and it makes them the true successors to the tobacco cartel, the Cali Cartel, the rumrunners. They treat their staff well, they support the arts and if they weren’t so legal and downright acceptable they would probably support organizaed religion too.
For all I know, Schwartz got his ideas from Phillip Morris (remember, mundane secrets are fungible) who learned how to up the nicotine content in Marlboros through a combination of specially cultivated strains of tobacco and the addition of nice, fresh ammonia. He might have read David Ogilvy’s classic “Confessions of an Adman” where we learn the secret of how the young Ogilvy, as a cook, charmed an old dowager on a strict diet of one stewed apple a day by mashing up the content of two apples and shoving into the shell of one…… Or, maybe he just have stumbled upon it. But you can see how it worked - it took Americans a few years to get hooked……and then wham! My guess is that if anyone ever buys Starbucks it will be tobacco company……..or a drug company.
MacDonalds: Getting You Out in 20 Minutes.
The story goes that the founder came up with the combination of fast food and free diner seating in the army. The camaraderie of the cafeteria in wartime was deeply compelling and that became the basis of the MacDonald’s brothers fast food concept. Don’t just sell hamburgers, give people a nice place to sit down and eat ‘em. The problem was, how do you get these happy customers out of there in 20 minutes or less so that you could maintain the turnover necessary to reach profitability. How do you get rid of seat-hoggers? The obvious answer is - uncomfortable seats. But that wouldn’t look good besides, you still want the initial experience to be comforting, you just don’t want it to last that long. So they came up with molded seats that forced you to sit in such away that your spine would tell you to leave in less than 20 minutes. Even my chiropractor laughs at that one as he forces me out of his office in 20 minutes…….
The funny part is that when the fast food co.’s first started taking over midtown Manhattan with 24 hour free seating in a nice warm place - the winter tramp community paid attention. Turns out they understood the principles of ergonomic engineering too and to get around the forced spinal subluxation, they simply piled up freely available old newspapers in a way that voided the back-aggravation, enabling them to stay all night and long enough into the morning to enjoy a nice Egg MacMuffin. Is it any wonder then, that one of the biggest franchise holders in midtown is a former cop. What are the odds he came up with a secret of his own for getting rid of the bums? Just wondering……
The Secret in Sports
No question, sports has its secrets too. Not the chemical ones, although there clearly is a huge market for that. (And of course, no ever guessed those bulked up hitters were doing anything other than Exercise Made Simple or 5 Minute Abs.) I am talking about all kinds of subtle ones that again, only really work in the context of a particular talent. Everyone knows Wayne Gretzky’s mantra, “don’t be where the ball, be where it’s going to be.” But that’s easier said than done. Did Gretzky major in calculus or did he just have a sixth sense? I’m guessing he would do well in options trading too.
We know that Muhammed Ali won through talent and mind games. But did you know that Michael Jordan’s genius also had something to do with a special skill he mastered. According to a recent TV interview, he showed how we able to imperceptibly tug or push the limbs of his opponents so that he could manipulate them and amazingly, always seem to get the ball away form them. Why did it have to be imperceptible? Because its illegal. But what the camera couldn’t see, the refs couldn’t either. Now that Michael is retired, he is happy to talk about it….Turns out, talent has tricks too……
I would argue that in each case, these geniuses, especially the ones giving the $1500 motivation courses, are leaving out this critical element. For example, Tony Robbins wants to unleash the giant in you. But it helps to be giant in the first place and you don’t get that from seminars. Donald Trump wants to make you rich, but no book of his can help you grow up with a father who taught you everything about the building industry, hand you off to all his contacts and then leave you a few hundred million to get you on your way. By the way, I consider the fatherly training and credibility-building more valuable than the cash which he would have lost anyway, if it hadn’t been for the former.
In another context, lots of people want to be the next Bill Gates but aside from his privileged background (his parents got him a gig debugging minicomputers while still in high school), it helps that he has something akin to a photographic memory.
The secrets are really something specific to a certain person a certain management or even a certain time and space. Our passion at the iBreakfast Entrepreneur is really to help people find their own. Usually, it encounters great resistance and denial of the sort…..”I already know….blah….blah…blah….” Sometimes they do. Usually not. Wish it were easier but when you come down to it, that is why we’ve been dong the iBreakfast for 10 long years……..
Since I have spent the season speaking with investors and prospective entrepreneurs who ask about what we really do, I have had to boil it down to a few principles. We’re in the business of helping companies understand what makes their business plans works, what trends are going to drive the industry and occasionally, the true nature of being.
Savvy early stage investors know what I am talking about because they even have terms for this – “the secret sauce” or the “thumb on the scale” but like the concept of a tipping point, few of them have a way to really articulate this quality.
That’s really where the iBreakfast Entrepreneur Club and the bimonthly Innovator Evenings kick in.
One of the things we do is help people understand the critical element of their business. And that gets into another area that you don’t learn in business school. As a journalist I once covered Artificial Intelligence, and I know from the art of Knowledge Engineering, the interrogative process programmers use to create the rules driving the system, how you gather and order the intelligence. Generally it requires interviewing a domain expert and getting them to explain it in the form of rules of thumb. Often, these turn out to contain strangely mundane little secrets. There are famous storiees like the old Italian immigrant who ran Campbell’s soup tomato vats who had all kids of ways to figure out when the boiling was just so.
So I learned to become a great believer of “The Secret”, but not really in the Oprah way. She may have something though I don’t it believe it works in the way it is hyped. i.e. “learn this secret and everything happens.” But in a particular context where everything else has been prepared, a secret can make all the difference in the world.
It definitely happens in business and I believe it underlies many great businesses even though the secret is usually something quite mundane. It is really the context it makes all the difference. Agein, if you’ve read The Tipping Point you’ll know that big differences can take place from very small issues. Consider them the keystone in an otherwise unformed edifice. The question is how to find them, better yet, which is what we try to do, how do you predict what they will be?
Some of my Favorite Examples of Business “Secrets”
Starbucks – What Exactly are we Buying Here?
How do you get people to pay $4 for a $1 cup of coffee? Do you just make it better? But 4 times better? And how can you support one on just about every corner of the country? Maybe you need to look at the history of the Opium Wars where the British brought cheap opium from India for sale in China. Or just check with the local pot dealer…….of the local convenience store with cigarette ads at counter level. What Howard Schwartz learned in his incubation years as a coffee grinder was how to get more caffeine out of a bean. Starbucks sells the highest caffeine content coffee in the country and his customers, all lined up first thing in the morning, are caffeine addicts. Forget the arguments about taste, the real issue is when it comes to addictive products is whether or not it hits the spot. Starbucks does and it makes them the true successors to the tobacco cartel, the Cali Cartel, the rumrunners. They treat their staff well, they support the arts and if they weren’t so legal and downright acceptable they would probably support organizaed religion too.
For all I know, Schwartz got his ideas from Phillip Morris (remember, mundane secrets are fungible) who learned how to up the nicotine content in Marlboros through a combination of specially cultivated strains of tobacco and the addition of nice, fresh ammonia. He might have read David Ogilvy’s classic “Confessions of an Adman” where we learn the secret of how the young Ogilvy, as a cook, charmed an old dowager on a strict diet of one stewed apple a day by mashing up the content of two apples and shoving into the shell of one…… Or, maybe he just have stumbled upon it. But you can see how it worked - it took Americans a few years to get hooked……and then wham! My guess is that if anyone ever buys Starbucks it will be tobacco company……..or a drug company.
MacDonalds: Getting You Out in 20 Minutes.
The story goes that the founder came up with the combination of fast food and free diner seating in the army. The camaraderie of the cafeteria in wartime was deeply compelling and that became the basis of the MacDonald’s brothers fast food concept. Don’t just sell hamburgers, give people a nice place to sit down and eat ‘em. The problem was, how do you get these happy customers out of there in 20 minutes or less so that you could maintain the turnover necessary to reach profitability. How do you get rid of seat-hoggers? The obvious answer is - uncomfortable seats. But that wouldn’t look good besides, you still want the initial experience to be comforting, you just don’t want it to last that long. So they came up with molded seats that forced you to sit in such away that your spine would tell you to leave in less than 20 minutes. Even my chiropractor laughs at that one as he forces me out of his office in 20 minutes…….
The funny part is that when the fast food co.’s first started taking over midtown Manhattan with 24 hour free seating in a nice warm place - the winter tramp community paid attention. Turns out they understood the principles of ergonomic engineering too and to get around the forced spinal subluxation, they simply piled up freely available old newspapers in a way that voided the back-aggravation, enabling them to stay all night and long enough into the morning to enjoy a nice Egg MacMuffin. Is it any wonder then, that one of the biggest franchise holders in midtown is a former cop. What are the odds he came up with a secret of his own for getting rid of the bums? Just wondering……
The Secret in Sports
No question, sports has its secrets too. Not the chemical ones, although there clearly is a huge market for that. (And of course, no ever guessed those bulked up hitters were doing anything other than Exercise Made Simple or 5 Minute Abs.) I am talking about all kinds of subtle ones that again, only really work in the context of a particular talent. Everyone knows Wayne Gretzky’s mantra, “don’t be where the ball, be where it’s going to be.” But that’s easier said than done. Did Gretzky major in calculus or did he just have a sixth sense? I’m guessing he would do well in options trading too.
We know that Muhammed Ali won through talent and mind games. But did you know that Michael Jordan’s genius also had something to do with a special skill he mastered. According to a recent TV interview, he showed how we able to imperceptibly tug or push the limbs of his opponents so that he could manipulate them and amazingly, always seem to get the ball away form them. Why did it have to be imperceptible? Because its illegal. But what the camera couldn’t see, the refs couldn’t either. Now that Michael is retired, he is happy to talk about it….Turns out, talent has tricks too……
I would argue that in each case, these geniuses, especially the ones giving the $1500 motivation courses, are leaving out this critical element. For example, Tony Robbins wants to unleash the giant in you. But it helps to be giant in the first place and you don’t get that from seminars. Donald Trump wants to make you rich, but no book of his can help you grow up with a father who taught you everything about the building industry, hand you off to all his contacts and then leave you a few hundred million to get you on your way. By the way, I consider the fatherly training and credibility-building more valuable than the cash which he would have lost anyway, if it hadn’t been for the former.
In another context, lots of people want to be the next Bill Gates but aside from his privileged background (his parents got him a gig debugging minicomputers while still in high school), it helps that he has something akin to a photographic memory.
The secrets are really something specific to a certain person a certain management or even a certain time and space. Our passion at the iBreakfast Entrepreneur is really to help people find their own. Usually, it encounters great resistance and denial of the sort…..”I already know….blah….blah…blah….” Sometimes they do. Usually not. Wish it were easier but when you come down to it, that is why we’ve been dong the iBreakfast for 10 long years……..
Why Big Media Really Doesn’t get Google.
I was at a media conference where a number of TV execs lamented first that the Maurice Levy, chairman of the giant European ad agency, Publicis, said there wasn’t enough ad money to pay for TV-like ads on the internet. Also, that Google was up to something that threatened the ad industry in their new relationship with Simon Cowell of American Idol. Then, one of the execs showed off this new TV Networks’ website along with an ad for a national brand. I asked that if they realized that Google’s market cap was about 10x all of Madison Avenue’s simply because they had found out how to make themselves accessible to millions of small, non-national brand advertisers. So, in the spirit of responding to Maurice Levey, what would they be doing to address this issue.
“Nothing,” said the exec.
“So you’ll be coming to the next iBreakfast,” I said.
The point is that big media is really the handservant of big business. The guys with the pinkie rinks only know how to go after fat cats just like them. Same with the flashy media saleswomen. Google advertising is open to all comers, is mostly self service, requiring little sales support and therefore is worth much, much more. In order for these old media guys to prosper they are going to have to reinvent themselves at a completely different level.
“Nothing,” said the exec.
“So you’ll be coming to the next iBreakfast,” I said.
The point is that big media is really the handservant of big business. The guys with the pinkie rinks only know how to go after fat cats just like them. Same with the flashy media saleswomen. Google advertising is open to all comers, is mostly self service, requiring little sales support and therefore is worth much, much more. In order for these old media guys to prosper they are going to have to reinvent themselves at a completely different level.
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