Linux Conform To A Dying Business Model? Yeah, Right...

I didn't know who Georg Greve was 10 minutes ago, but I love him. There's a great story on ZDNet about the suggestion made by a RealNetworks VP that Linux needed to adopt DRM or risk being excluded from the consumer market. Here's a great quote:

"So fortunately, it is up to the consumer to decide what the consumer market wants. And its answer is clear: It does not want DRM!" he (Greve) said. "The sooner we bury the foolish notion of putting each and every use of a computer under control of the media industry, the sooner we can start looking for real alternatives."

Mikey Likes It

How muchya bet this encourages a bunch of rumors along the lines of the Pop Rocks/Coca-Cola/Dead Mikey From Life Cereal Commercials-type rumors?

The Spaghetti Meets the Wall

Eric Frenchman deconstructs Vonage's marketing campaign in two posts. When smacking folks over the head with your ad a kajillion times doesn't "work," maybe try something else - like figuring out if you still have a product that can be differentiated from everything else on the market. I've got Optimum Voice at home, and the offering is nearly identical to what Vonage could give me. But my bill comes along with my cable bill and it works with my existing cable modem, so I didn't have to run out for any additional hardware.

On nothing more than gut feel, I'll postulate that Vonage's problem is differentiation. People probably don't see enough incremental value in Vonage's VOIP product to want to go with Vonage vs. the VOIP offering from their current access provider.

In cases like this, where the product is at best at parity with similar products from competitors, you can have the brand serve as a differentiator, and hope that your customers align more closely with your brand than that of your competitors. But that begs the question - Vonage is all over the place, but are their ads responsible for any brand-building activity? Not by my assessment. The ads seem to be largely DR-focused.

If I were their CMO, I'd first look to existing and prospective customers to find a differentiator (or something ownable to be added to the product), I'd also take a nice chunk of that marketing budget and earmark it for brand-building activity. (As long as you're wasting money on $130 CPAs, there's plenty of money for brand building.) I'd pull out of TV and radio entirely until we latched on to a brand idea and an easily defendable product differentiator.

Someone should do some variable isolation analysis to find out whether Vonage's advertising is actually good for its competitors. I suspect that their advertising prompts consideration, and when potential customers see they can get a similar product from their existing broadband provider, they go with the offer that makes more sense. I bet Vonage is, to an extent, building a business for their larger competitors, especially cable companies offering broadband access.

Today's Spin

Today's Spin makes the point that the good podcasts out there are the ones that interact with their audience. It seems like a simple point, but judging from what I've heard a few people say at OMMA over the past day, one that is sometimes missed. From what I gather, a number of advertisers and agencies think podcasting is niche radio or niche television (in the case of video podcasting) and they look at it through that broadcast lens we all know and love (not). But I believe that the audience has a different expectation of podcasting - one of interactivity.

Look at many of the successful podcasts. How many of them are solely a push vehicle? Not many, huh?

I used Across The Sound as my example in this Spin of where the expectation is for listeners and of how a podcast is properly executed. Why? Joseph is doing the interactivity thing very well. He has multiple feedback channels set up, he spends significant lengths of on-air time dealing with listener feedback, and he happens to be dealing with a subject matter that should be of interest to my Spin readers.

I believe podcasting is best executed as the push mechanism for a push-pull dynamic that is used to engage an audience in a conversation. What I didn't have room for in this particular Spin piece was how this plays out in my own podcast consumption habits:

* Rocketboom - A decent job with interactivity. They have comments, story links and story suggestions for every episode. Probably could do a better job engaging commenters, but at least they're giving viewers a voice.

* The Onion Radio News - Some dork reading quick one-minute Onion-style stories. Tragically unfunny in this medium and not interactive at all. I unsubscribed. Right after they started taking ads from Chili's.

* Across The Sound - Great job.

* The Ricky Gervais Show - Funny as hell. E-mail newsletter, show notes, on-air interactivity. I like.

Notice a theme here? The ones I enjoy tend to be the ones that are actually engaging. There's an audience dialogue going on with the best podcasts, and that's what I hope the marketing industry understands.