Adam Pontificating About Things

There is a tremendous amount of focus on what is changing for movies, music, and TV. Their distribution models have been upended over the past 10 years and they’re all adapting now. However, it’s important to understand the ecosystems that spring up around popular brands that originate on those platforms. I remember having t-shirts, action figures, you name it, for my favorite cartoon characters. There’s a lot of money in that industry, and a lot of complicated power dynamics between content owners and manufacturers. This article on Pandodaily highlights how that whole ecosystem is changing when content brands start inside of an app like Angry Birds or Cut the Rope. It’s a very important read.

It’s amazing that this angle on Iran isn’t getting more coverage.

Facebook’s reach generator

• Great for maximum utilization of their ad inventory.
• Takes the technical aspect / science out of online advertising… just give me reach.. you got it.

Facebook Offers

• They just might be able to crack the whole online to offline attribution problem.

Twitter Promoted…

• Account
• Trends
• Tweets

Both companies have done a great job of letting their product naturally create the ad units. I can’t wait to see how ROI compares between Facebook and Twitter ad offerings and how effective they are for small advertisers. 

It’s Friday afternoon, and that means it’s time to pontificate about tech trends.

Some general things that I’ve been ruminating on:

• Local advertising and small business tech - lots of interesting things happening here with Square and foursquare. One goes for payments, POS, inventory management, and customer loyalty. The other focuses on discovery, sharing, loyalty, and soon to be advertising/offers. There’s some overlap here so these two might end up competing over owning customer loyalty. However, hopefully they’ll both play off each other in a virtuous cycle of informing local businesses about technology.
• Highlight - had a really interesting experience using this app last night when I got to LA. So cool - though I doubt most people would be into something like this. I look forward to reading about all the serendipitous run-ins it helps facilitate at SXSW when you have thousands of tech nerds running around with the app on. It might also break from the load, who knows.
• Payments! everyone is super into payments right now. Mobile World Congress had tons of offerings… Walmart is apparently getting into the game. This is the new buzzy/hot area now. It’ll be interesting to see Square and Stripe battle their way in with superior products as incumbents who own the customers and infrastructure try to retain their position (Verifone, Wal Mart, Paypal).
• Pinterest - I didn’t get it before but now I see. I posted something about a friend’s website that launched recently and it got shared, shared, re-shared, and shared some more. By the end of the day it had touched over 20 people! That’s huge! The whole product is built around re-sharing to other users and expanding that beyond your own circle. It’s a great tool for virally spreading any kind of content. Well played, Pinterest.
• Exec - yes. This is awesome. I’m shocked that Taskrabbit didn’t brand themselves this way. It’s essentially the same thing but the pricing model and branding are slightly different. I feel that Exec will be much more popular as it’s a lot simpler and easier to understand. Oh, and it reminds me of Uber which is never a bad thing.
• Facebook advertising announcements - cool! Especially the brand pages for companies like the New York Times. Awesome Awesome Awesome. But your click-through rates suck! This won’t be a threat to Google’s revenue unless they can nail attribution and analytics, two areas where facebook is particularly weak. As far as social goes, Twitter has a much better advertising offering.
• 3D Printing - the more I think about it, the more I realize that this is going to be something huge. There are a lot of areas that are of interesting to me: marketplaces for designs to be printed, DRM for physical objects, reverse engineering physical products at home… lots of cool stuff.

That’s all for now. More ranting next week.