Handball

If this doesn’t make the case for video review in soccer, I don’t know what does.

Thierry confessed it was a handball: “I will be honest, it was a handball. But I’m not the ref. I played it, the ref allowed it. That’s a question you should ask him.”

Ask the ref? “Parle à ma main” — the Fatal Bazooka video…

 

Just Shoot

“F8 and shoot.” That’s what photographers tell you to do when you want to get your work into one of the last great magazines for photography: National Geographic.

TV Crazy

Broadcast television networks are supposed to be experiencing some audience erosion, and VentureBeat is telling us YouTube will soon be offering 1080p video.

YouTube is going to roll out 1080p high-definition video later this week, as the video portal steps up its quality to compete with other sites. (That’s 1,080 lines of vertical resolution or horizontal scan lines, a notch above the current highest level at 720p.)

“For our content creators, we want it to look as good or better than the source’s quality,” said  Hunter Walk, a director of product management for YouTube, at GigaOm’s NewTeeVee conference in San Francisco today. High-definition video now makes up about 10 percent of uploads on the site.

So how is it that the average American watches 4 hours 49 minutes of TV daily? Wait a minute: nearly five hours every day?! I don’t think I can watch that much in week! What’s your TV habit like? Check out this PDF, with viewing habits going back to 1950.

Now, back to poking around YouTube for quality entertainment — whenever I want to (as long as I have a broadband connection). Here’s one…

iTablet: Saving Newspapers

A couple of weeks ago, the Sydney Morning Herald ran a story on Apple’s upcoming new product, the iTablet:

Apple has sent specifications of the device to Australian media companies in an effort to sound out whether they would be interested in delivering their content to the tablet. None would speak about the device on the record.

But New York Times executive editor Bill Keller seemed to let the cat out of the bag in comments during an off-the-record meeting with New York Times digital staff this month. Footage of his talk has been published online.

The device itself is expected to be another “game changer” for Apple, summed up nicely by John Abell in Wired last week:

The device will have to make readers forget — really forget — the printed page. E-readers, for all that they do, don’t do this yet. There are plenty of them, and plenty more on the way. Much hope is invested in Amazon’s Kindle DX, which hits the market for the holidays. But in the end e-readers are third devices, or at least two-and-a-half (carried sometimes).

Finally — and this is the “my gift to you” part — the unveiling of an Apple Tablet will have to be accompanied by a fundamental policy change. Apple will have to let publishers roll the dice on pricing and cede control of the customer relationship it has jealously guarded. There are precedents which could point to this trajectory; tiered pricing and album-only sales are allowed on iTunes now, and app developers can more or less charge whatever they want.

Having just cancelled my home-delivery subscription to the local daily newspaper, I started thinking what it’s like to rely solely on the online version. My conclusion? I don’t care. All I ever read in that paper was Dilbert. I never liked the way the paper was organized, but I did like flipping through the ads — especially the free-standing inserts. Their Web site is busy, with a dated portal approach. And they don’t have an iPhone app.

The New York Times on the other hand, has an excellent editorial product, with a neat approach in print, an excellent Web site, and I actually enjoy reading it via their free iPhone app. From an advertising perspective, I’ll take the NYT over The Star-Ledger any day. They invested substantial resources in building their own system for targeting ads to segments of their audience, and I hope media planners appreciate it.

Maybe the iTablet will do it for print media after all. Ken Segall saw it perfectly last month:

Just as iPod changed music and iPhone changed communications, iTablet will change the way we consume media. We’ll all say “of course” when we see a simple and elegant way to enjoy newspapers, magazines, books, music, movies and all of the Internet in one painfully cool device. We’ll marvel at the new vision of “the daily paper,” combining print with video and gorgeous graphics that bring stories to life (never mind that it’s all out there on the web already). And we’ll wonder how civilized people could ever have allowed all those trees to be slaughtered, only to be mashed into mega-tons of newsprint that get tossed at the end of the day.

The scope of this revolution requires Apple to recruit partners. Big ones. They’re lining up the major media companies, who will announce new forms of content designed to meet the new iTablet standard, just as they seduced the record companies and movie studios before. Newspapers and magazines, now a dying breed, will re-emerge with new vitality as an integral part of our mobile lives.

It’s not that others couldn’t see this coming. It’s that they didn’t have the will, the ingenuity and the leadership to make it happen. This is a revolution that needed a good hijacking.

//

Copyright Fight

Interesting opinions on News Corporation’s approach to paid content.

Sit back and watch Rupert Murdoch’s interview on Sky News. Although rather long at 37+ minutes, you’ll get something out of it…

He’s got a point: good content takes time and money to produce. It nobody pays for good content, it will go away. Then what?

11-11 Campaign

Help our veterans. Be one of 11 million people who donate $11 or more each to help those who served.

Tear Down This Wall

Here’s the speech from June of 1987…

Snow Cool

My business trip to Denver is proving to be quite a treat. Terrific snow storm with between 12 and 49 inches on the ground.

Nice preview of winter. Can’t wait to ski!

Good Copy Sells

In direct response marketing, a good offer paired with a good list will inevitably become successful. Practitioners in this art/science will rarely share what they found success with, so as not to tip-off competitors. This is the scientific part of the deal.

What about the art? Is it the realistic photo or illustration? Sure, it’s got to get the point across or simply get the audience’s attention. What really makes the sale is the copy. The more you write, the more you sell. Infomercials? They work. How do we know? If they keep running them, then we know they’re moving product.

As marketing people, we should all be familiar with John Caples’s classic piano lesson ad.

As the last notes of the Moonlight Sonata died away, the room resounded with a sudden roar of applause. I found myself surrounded by excited faces. How my friends carried on! Men shook my hand — wildly congratulated me — pounded me on the back in their enthusiasm! Everybody was exclaiming with delight — plying me with rapid questions… “Jack! Why didn’t you tell us you could play like that?”… “Where did you learn?” — “How long have you studied?” — “Who was your teacher?”

Writing a good story around your offer — or your company — is what sells. Direct response sells product, corporate communications sell the company. People like to read stories. It was true in 1926 and it’s still true today.

I happened to be listening to WFMU yesterday when Joshua Glenn was interviewed about his Significant Object project. They buy cheap little things at garage sales and thrift stores, they put them up for sale on eBay, along with a fictional story about the object. Yeah, it sells.

Take this example, the “Cape Cod shoe.” The story, by Sheila Heti, helped sell an item for $77.51 (original cost: $4).

Very interesting experiment. Rob Baedaker’s piece in SFGate.com is worth reading. Experiments aside, I still think good copy sells.

Don’t Cry For Me, Cupertino

David Pogue: brilliant, as always: