In us we trust

 Manifesto, Reviews, web 3.0  No Responses »
Sep 152008
 

So it turns out that people trust what they say to each other much more than they trust what marketers tell them. Do I hear gasps of amazement? I’m not deeply surprised.

A friend of mine recently shared some research she’d found about levels of trust in various media. It deeply re-inforces Sandlines opinions about the shift in the balance of power from marketer to consumer in forming opinions. It makes for interesting reading, I thought. Turns our that our faith in Fleet Street is a little less than we hold in what a complete stranger with no credentials tells us in a blog.

What price your banner ad now?

What price your banner ad now?

Now, I’m tempted to give you a PO Box number and asking you to send me money – just in the interests of updating an experiment that was tried in a newspaper in the US last century…(which worked by the way). But maybe that’s where it all started to go wrong for that industry?

Seriously though, it does re-inforce why dedicated review sites and customer reviews on retailers sites do so well…

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 Posted by Sandlines at 18:03  Tagged with: , , , ,

Universal Music answer Sandlines call to action on MP3 downloads

 DRM, mp3, music  2 Responses »
Sep 022008
 
MP3 = Universal Music format

MP3 = Universal Music format

… and it’s a yes!!!

Well, perhaps I shouldn’t really try to claim credit for this, but right after I blogged (below) about how Universal and Sony should embrace the brave world of DRM-free music and allow their catalogue to be sold as MP3, I found myself looking at the 7Digital site and lo, there’s a whole swag of Universal’s various labels all offering MP3 format downloads.

That means artists like U2, The Killers, The Cure, Amy Winehouse, Sam Sparro, Kanye West, Jay Z… quite a long list.

I feel a spending spree coming on…

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2.5
 Posted by Sandlines at 15:01  Tagged with: , ,

Opportunity knocks… off

 engagement marketing, Manifesto, web 3.0  1 Response »
Sep 022008
 
Game over

I drew attention to the Scrabolous/ Hasbro debacle over on Brand Republic a short while ago – and how

Hasbro/Mattel were seriously missing a trick. You might call in dis-engagement marketing.

As an old friend of mine has blogged over at the Cheeze Blog, (oh, and as discussed in olde worlde media sources too…) Scrabulous is officially game over. Jamie calls it a goalless draw, but surely own goals were scored on both sides. But the result is the same – no winners, only losers – who’ll buy a Scrabble set now?

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2.5
 Posted by Sandlines at 11:12  Tagged with: ,

Nokia ‘comes with music’ plants DRM time-bomb

 DRM, mp3, music  No Responses »
Sep 022008
 

Our friends over at Nokia have announced their ‘Comes With Music‘ subscription service is going to launch here in Blighty first.

Comes with DRM Time Bomb

Comes with DRM Time Bomb

I’m a huge consumer of music – have been one way or another all my life – and I’m old enough to remember buying music in Vinyl (before it became cool again), cassette tape, CD, MiniDisc (remember that?) and now of course I buy most of it via download sites – MUCH prefering MP3 to the complexities and frustrations that DRM has inevitably brought to the process. So I come with baggage.

The only good thing about DRM (and there’s not room here to talk about all the bad stuff) is the opportunity for subscription services – rental of your content. And Nokia’s offering here is an interesting move ahead on what the likes of Napster and Vodafone (amongst others) already offer: this time the DRM is linked directly to the purchase of the device – so you buy your pay-as-you-go nokia phone, and you can download ‘all you can eat’. Then, 12 months later, the bomb goes off. You need to go out and buy another phone.

Neat trick: Nokia just turned the PAYG market into an annual subscription, of sorts.

D’you think they have people standing outside schools flogging these things?

Personally, Ihave an eclectic mixture of devices: a Sony Walkman music phone, an iPod Touch, a couple of other mp3 players – and I like my stuff to be playable whereever… so I MUCH prefer my music in MP3 format, thank you very much. Thanks to the mix of eMusic, 7Digital and Play.com, *most* of what I want to buy comes through in MP3 (legally!). I’m just waiting for (most of) Universal and for Sony to get with the programme… Come on guys!

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2.5
 Posted by Sandlines at 10:38  Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
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