Drums, please…… The guns are out: iconic Radiohead released their latest album for free with the hope that people would pay something for it. I would call that busker-style pricing. You park yourself on a strategic corner, open the guitar case in front of you, throw in some sad, old coins, and you sing for whatever money is tossed at you…. The Radioheads thought they were proving the industry wrong, I guess expecting that the “goodness” in fans would set a price that would make everyone happy… Apparently, the tops people paid for the album was two quid… most geezers just got it for free and strolled into the sunset.
But the record label has not sat around festering hateful thoughts with a you’ve-been-dumped attitude. EMI has new controlling owners, remember? a private equity fund. For those who cannot read between the lines, these are the guys you don’t mess with… And boy, did it show: EMI has just released a special USB stick containing all of the band’s back catalogue. You wanted digitalised music? Here you go, on a Radiohead bear-designed 40Gb sticky… at £80 quid the puppet…
Now, that’s where I sense they’ve missed the boat. Who’s got £80 quid for old albums that you either (a) you already own, (b) you can buy online for less (c) you can buy for even less on the highstreet (the ones you don’t have)?
Pricing is the mother of all evils where it comes to digital content. What’s the added value to something that is just invisible bites? And here, for back catalogue bites, not even unreleased tunes?
I don’t see the iPhone queues here…
My price suggestion: £45
Why? It’s a ballpark figure that enters the lifestyle pricetag of “stuff I don’t need but I can splash on”. This, in marketing terms, is how we price for this segment of the population: people in their late twenties (the average age of a Radiohead fan) whose average salary allows them to, let’s say, “throw away” a specific amount of money without too much suffering at the bank account level. In retail, you go for volume, specially if you are selling “old catalogue stuff”….
November 12th, 2007
BANKSY | Outdoor work, “Girl TV”
Back in 1999 I used to proclaim that mobile phones were a precious personal medium that brands had to learn to respect. In those days, what a phone could do versus what they are now able is like comparing the Pal-system tv sets of the 1970s with the current blue-ray, HD compatible plasma screens people hang over their fancy high-tech fireplaces. The baby has grown and it wants out of the pocket and into the big wide world of mass information. What does this have to do with advertisement? A lot.
The minute you open your desire for external input to come to you, the whole world wants to say hello. And today, brands have learned to do this in a variety of mediums that it’s hard to avoid. You may say you hate ads, but you sit in the cinema and literally swallow countless minutes of pre-film mini shorts courtesy of Orange, Chanel No. 5 and BMW. Ads that come to you as movies, to be shown at a cinema, then TV and finally streamed or even sold on DVD. This is what they’ve finally learned in ad school: that what turns an ad into something cool that you love watching or that you virally send to your friends has got to do a lot with cross-media moving images. The fact that they have finally made it to a phone screen was inevitable…But it’s not for everyone…. just yet…
The first step is acceptance. The second is identity. When I first heard of Blyk, my first reaction was “they better work with a good ad agency” and most importantly, with brands that people truly want to hear from. In the Blyk world, your phone screen is going to announce that so-and-so is calling you – and you may get all excited or send the call to voicemail…. or a given brand is going to show you some fun creative ad that you may think it’s genius, amusing and worth saving or sharing. It does not matter what brand it is (huge controversial point here), but what the message is and how pleasing it is to watch it. And why is this so? Because a brand advert is not just to sell products but to communicate with the audience. In that respect, a brand sending an ad to your mobile or a friend ringing for a catch-up chat is the same thing.
Brands are everywhere, so why not on my phone? I’d be very annoyed to receive unsolicited ads on my mobile, but if some brands out there that resonate with my lifestyle, or that I want to hear from are prepared to pay for my mobile phone bill…. let the games begin, that’s what I’d say. What is the real difference for me, an 18 year-old groover, with not much cash around, if I sit in front of the tv to watch “Skins” on Channel 4 and an array of brands beam at me from my own telly, or I watch my favourite football team and I cannot avoid reading the Emirates logo on their t-shirts? Brands already talk to me through so many mediums that if for once they are going to share the cost of my lifestyle, I’m actually for it.
I said “talk”. Bad advertisement is just pure yakking… and is just as horrible not just on a mobile screen, but specially on TV. I want to be talked to. I want to know when a brand I relate to has a new product that I want to check out, or a cool ad that I want to forward to my friends, so they continue to agree that I must be super-connected because I always know what goes on.
I have no problem with ads. What I would hate on my phone, and in my life for that matter, is mediocrity, cheap talk, and total misunderstanding of me, what my world is and what I want.
November 1st, 2007
