Mediaboss Marketing

Jonathan Gardner is director of communications at ad company Vibrant Media. He has spent his career as an innovator at the nexus of media and technology, having worked in communications leadership roles and as a journalist around the world.

Digital marketing is a discipline in flux. We face an onslaught of shiny new technologies and platforms that promise to change everything. Marketers are creating similarly breathless headlines, proclaiming the next revolutionary devices/apps/social networks.

[More from Mashable: 3 Innovative Business Uses for the iPad]

Yet, even smart marketers dont know what changes the future will bring; but they do need to be aware that their industry is changing every day. For instance, to reach consumers marketers need to be increasingly mobile, engaging, relevant and aware of the contexts in which we currently operate.

I dont pretend to know the future. But the decisions and products of Apple, Amazon and other innovators will affect how we live in the years to come. As we anticipate our connected, Minority Report-style future, here are five big marketing ideas to embrace now to get ahead of the curve.

[More from Mashable: Power Pinterest User Chosen to Live Pin Event for Fashion Label]

Consumers are out there and many want you to find them. Location features of social apps such as Foursquare, Ban.jo and Path are potential goldmines of important consumer data. The near field communication (NFC) technology in products like Google Wallet is just starting to show its potential. And while privacy issues surrounding location services will need to be resolved, consumers are still demanding that marketers understand all of their daily contexts and find ways to make their lives easier. If the rumors are true and the iPhone 5 has NFC embedded, expect these features to go from leading edge to mainstream.

While new online video and mobile platforms are -- unsurprisingly -- attracting a lot of heat, their marketing spend is still way out of whack, compared to the amount of time consumers spend there.

Dont just throw money at these new channels. Instead of pre-roll video ads and other "forced view options, look to user-initiated solutions that respect the user's time and interests. Research new ad formats that help brands look beyond clutter and banner blindness, such as in-image ads, which integrate brand messages elegantly within relevant content.

User-generated curation (UGC) is powered by content discovery apps such as Pulse, Flipboard, Fancy and Foodspotting. Content producers and merchants provide the feeds, and consumers tweak them to suit their interests and contexts, filtering data and curating personalized information platforms.

More here:
5 Huge Digital Marketing Trends You Can't Afford to Ignore

Greg Satell Digital Tonto: What is a business model? Yesterday at 11:04 | Greg SatellHow do you expect to make money?There is probably no more important question in business.

If you cant answer that, youre not likely to get very far or, in fact, anywhere at all.

Of course, conditions can change and very quickly, so the question is a fluid one. A highly competitive approach ten years ago might not be viable today and companies that are barley five years old are commanding valuations in the billions.

Thats why theres so much talk about business models. Somebody claims to have new one, while another says that an old one is defunct. But what is a business model really? As innovation researcher Tim Kastelle points out, there a multitude of definitions representing different points of view. That can be confusing. Its time to clear things up.

For instance, Henry Ford realized that by using an assembly line to manufacture cars, he could take a very niche product, a curiosity really, and make it into a product for the masses. Lou Gerstner transformed IBMs diverse product line into a powerful consulting model. More recently, the Google guys realized that the same logic that conveys authority is an academic setting could create a better search engine.

Sometimes, the innovation isnt about the product itself, but merely the way its sold. Tim Kastelle gives a great example in the story of Xerox, where they failed when they tried to sell copiers but then when on to great success when they began leasing them.

In other words, a business model is a lot more than just a key insight (Jon Kleinberg of Cornell had an idea for a search engine that was very similar and, some believe, superior to Googles concept, but it never really gained traction). You need to also figure out the mundane stuff, like how much your product will cost to make, who youll sell it to and so on.

However, even after you have all that figured out, you still need to get some idea if your business will be steady for years, grow very quickly or whether its likely to decline over time. For that, youll need more than just clever ideas, youll need to plug in some numbers.

Thats fairly obvious with a start-up, but its also true of an established business. As Ive pointed out before, prediction is a tricky business, even if you have a wealth of data at your disposal. The past cant be automatically extrapolated into the future.

Read the rest here:
Digital Tonto: What is a business model?

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By Adam Dachis, Lifehacker

You share music, rip DVDs, make Hitler whine about your first world problems, and much more in the course of your regular online activities and more often than not, you do these things without giving a thought to the fact that you're actually breaking the law. Here's a look at how you're inevitably circumventing copyright law and what you can do to protect yourself.

Why it's almost impossible to avoid breaking copyright law Copyright law is extremely complex. It's so complex that lawyers, lawmakers, and experts heavily argue over how it's interpreted and applied. Nonetheless, if you commit a crime, you can't use ignorance as an excuse. The law doesn't (officially) offer leniency for misunderstanding or lack of knowledge. So how can you comply with convoluted copyright laws when you can't realistically understand them all? You can't, and so you may end up breaking these laws on a regular basis without ever knowing it.

To make matters worse, a spectrum of illegality makes it acceptable to break the rules in some circumstances yet not others. Experience tells us that uploading a home video to a video sharing website (e.g. YouTube) that features a copyrighted song is sometimes okay, but downloading a television episode is not.

Both of these actions are similarly illegal, but the first example is regularly tolerated while the second can lead to a loss of Internet connectivity, a fine, or even jail time (depending on the number of offenses and how often copyright holders decide to "catch" you).

Just as it's easier for us to circumvent copyright law online, it's easier for copyright holders to come after us. I spoke with Derek Bambauer, assistant professor of law at Brooklyn Law School, who explained this is particularly problematic because infringement is often only a byproduct of the way we communicate and bears no intention of doing anything illegal:

The tricky thing is, if you and I want to share a recipe then I photocopy it and then come over to your office and give it to you so it's just you and me. If I want to do it online, the odds are pretty good that we're going to do it on a social network or a blog or something like that. That means that the blog is all of the sudden a choke point something that people who want to keep us from doing this can exert control over. The way the law deals with this is with the notice of takedown under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), but that's just on the copyright owner's say-so. The copyright owner says "That's infringing!" and the site should take it down. You can get it back up, but you have to file a counter notice and it takes somewhere between 10 and 14 days. It's a lot of hassle. Copyright owners, through the DMCA, have a good deal of control over the way we communicate.

But because rights holders are often fickle about what they choose to have removed and what to leave alone, it's difficult to rely on the law for guidance. The result is that we the average users and consumers of the Internet are unsure of how to proceed when dealing with copyrighted works and either have to assume we have no rights or make our best guess and hope it doesn't lead to legal consequences.

It all comes down to this reality: you will often have to circumvent or ignore copyright law to go on with your regular activities. Fortunately, there are ways to handle these circumstances better and keep yourself out of trouble. In this post, we're going to look at specific situations you encounter on a regular basis and what you can do to protect yourself.

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How you break digital law daily (and what to do)

STEVE LADURANTAYE MEDIA REPORTER Published Monday, Mar. 05, 2012 9:59AM EST Last updated Monday, Mar. 05, 2012 10:58AM EST

Newspapers desperate to shift their businesses online are earning $1 in digital advertising revenue for every $7 they are losing in their print products.

The Pew Research Centers Project for Excellence in Journalism studied 38 newspapers in the United States, and cited cultural inertia for the papers inability to seize new revenue opportunities.

The industry is caught in a trap, the report states, where declining print revenues provide most of the money but digital revenue is the only category seeing growth.

Its reflected in their sales forces where print ad reps outnumber digital ad reps 3-to-1.

The shift to replace losses in print ad revenue with new digital revenue is taking longer and proving more difficult than executives want and at the current rate most newspapers continue to contract with alarming speed, the report stated, adding that the executives they interviewed considered replacing print revenue an existential issue.

The biggest challenge, the report stated, is that managers are convinced the old way of doing things will salvage whats left of their ad bases.

Newspaper executives described an industry still caught between the gravitational pull of the legacy tradition and the need to chart a faster digital course, the report stated. A number of them worried that their companies simply had too many people whether it be in the newsroom, the boardroom or on the sales staff who were too attached to the old way of doing things.

The study focused on smaller papers, since most U.S. papers fit in that category 22 have circulations under 25,000, seven have circulations between 25,000 and 50,000, and nine have circulations of 50,000 or more (including three with circulations more than 100,000).

While the study focused on American papers, Canadian newspaper owners face the same challenge.

Read this article:
U.S. newspapers slow to grow digital ad revenue: survey

STEVE LADURANTAYE MEDIA REPORTER Published Monday, Mar. 05, 2012 9:59AM EST Last updated Monday, Mar. 05, 2012 10:58AM EST

Newspapers desperate to shift their businesses online are earning $1 in digital advertising revenue for every $7 they are losing in their print products.

The Pew Research Centers Project for Excellence in Journalism studied 38 newspapers in the United States, and cited cultural inertia for the papers inability to seize new revenue opportunities.

The industry is caught in a trap, the report states, where declining print revenues provide most of the money but digital revenue is the only category seeing growth.

Its reflected in their sales forces where print ad reps outnumber digital ad reps 3-to-1.

The shift to replace losses in print ad revenue with new digital revenue is taking longer and proving more difficult than executives want and at the current rate most newspapers continue to contract with alarming speed, the report stated, adding that the executives they interviewed considered replacing print revenue an existential issue.

The biggest challenge, the report stated, is that managers are convinced the old way of doing things will salvage whats left of their ad bases.

Newspaper executives described an industry still caught between the gravitational pull of the legacy tradition and the need to chart a faster digital course, the report stated. A number of them worried that their companies simply had too many people whether it be in the newsroom, the boardroom or on the sales staff who were too attached to the old way of doing things.

The study focused on smaller papers, since most U.S. papers fit in that category 22 have circulations under 25,000, seven have circulations between 25,000 and 50,000, and nine have circulations of 50,000 or more (including three with circulations more than 100,000).

While the study focused on American papers, Canadian newspaper owners face the same challenge.

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Newspapers slow to grow digital ad revenues: survey