New DRM Strategy

Over a Chinese food lunch, I solved all of the Digital Rights Management woes of all online research companies who release information online (eMarketer, Jupiter, Forrester, etc.). Here's the gist of it: 1) Completely fabricate 50% of your releases. ("Mobile Devices Reach 15.7% of U.S. Adult Population," "Google Unknown Brand to 74% of Internet-Connected Men," etc.) 2) Release all reports to the Internet-At-Large 3) Announce that a certain percentage of reports on your site have been pulled out of your ass. 4) Simultaneously announce that a subscription entitles you to know which reports are real and which are fake.

You'll note that this takes care of the problem of what levels of detail need to be released to potential customers in order to give them enough of a "flavor" to actually PURCHASE the research. You can give them the whole thing! Except that they don't know whether it's fake or not...

This strategy also has the added benefit of creating situations in which freeloading agencies and marketers will base entire presentations and marketing plans on erroneous intelligence, which will result in funny stories for industry insiders to mull over at the bar after work. ("Did you hear Burger King executed a mobile campaign against seniors?" or "I heard OMD lost the McDonald's business after recommending a CRM program for Filet-O-Fish enthusiasts...")