By Francis Moran
Who’d have thunk that my self-professed word nerdiness could come together with my social conscience on a single web site with a terribly addictive premise?
Well, in the world of the web, all mash-ups are possible, and the quirky but fascinating site Free Rice manages to marry these seemingly disparate interests of mine with a little game that sees rice donated to feed hungry people with every correct answer visitors give to a vocabulary question. For every word you get right, the site’s backers donate 20 grains of rice through the United Nations World Food Program to help feed hungry people. The money to buy the rice is generated through banner ads on the site.
Twenty grains of rice doesn’t sound like much, but since launching the site in October 2007, Free Rice has donated more than 41 billion grains of rice to people in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Uganda, Nepal, Bhutan and Myanmar. That’s an amount approaching 900 metric tonnes of rice!
And the game is dangerously addictive. You rise through levels as you play, climbing one level every time you correctly answer three questions in a row. Get one wrong, though, and you slip down a level. A little counter at the bottom tracks your progress. I got to level 48 before having to quit yesterday evening so I could join my family in that other highly addictive current preoccupation, the Olympics.
(I am indebted — I think! — to Nicole Ferraro over at Internet Evolution for bringing this site to my attention. I am afraid, Nicole, to go anywhere near the other great time-wasters you list…!)
By Francis Moran
I originally wrote this post for DangleTech, Canada’s largest community-sponsored website dedicated to the issues surrounding Canada’s technology sector, where I contribute a weekly blog called “In the media: It’s where you need to be.” But my editor here at inmedialog, who’s been itching all week to see a post on this subject, decided we should also post it here.
One of the most frequent and, to tell the truth, most boring and least helpful, themes in the blogosphere is the all-too-common declaration by one blogger or another that PR is dead. With all the authority of his well-read blog, Robert Scoble started the ball rolling again this week with a post Monday that celebrated the fact that he actually heard about a new company – more of a raw beta concept, really – from some source other than a PR or corporate flack.
Leaving aside for the moment the question why this should be so noteworthy – Hey, Robert: It’s a rare day I don’t learn something new or hear about a new company, product or service with no involvement whatsoever from a PR or corporate flack. I call it waking up, opening my eyes and walking down the street! – he went on to extrapolate from this that PR is dead.
I’m not going to weigh in with comments on all the arguments raised both pro and con the silly idea. If you really have nothing better to do, if Canada’s not doing well enough at the Olympics to draw you in to all the TV coverage and you have time to kill, then you can see a good round-up here.
Notwithstanding the tediousness of this apparent fixation on the part of a lot of the blogosphere to bury PR and speak its eulogy, two useful points emerge.
The first is that when it comes to understanding public relations, the full scope of activities that fall under its rubric and the even fuller scope of marketing activities of which PR is merely a subset, Robert Scoble is strictly a blind man touching an elephant. Like many of his blog brethren, all Scoble ever sees (touches) is the story pitch. And since they are on the receiving end of a staggering number of poorly written and badly targeted pitches, it’s no wonder these guys see no value in what most PR people are doing with them.
In fact, the pitch is the very end of a lengthy and intensive process that, if done properly, creates tremendous value, both for the idea being pitched and for the person to whom it is being pitched. It’s merely one arrow in a PR quiver that, in turn, is merely one weapon in a marketing armoury.
The second useful point is that in many ways, Scoble and his colleagues are right. PR is dead. At least, PR – as it has been practiced by too many for far too long – is dead. That old way saw (mal)practitioners source huge lists of so-called contacts from commercial media directories, mail-merge them with their news release or story pitch, and then blast it out to hundreds, if not thousands. It didn’t work in the old days any better than it does now. All that has changed is that the targets of those useless pitches are naming and shaming those who do it. (I did weigh in on the death of the media directory.)
Far from the blogosphere sounding the death knell for PR, it has focused attention on the most egregious practices of the industry. While I still find most of the arguments tendentious and silly, at least they’re serving this one useful public service.
By Francis Moran
I have been an enthusiast of the Clover coffee brewing machine ever since the new Bridgehead café a few blocks from our ByWard Market offices opened up a year or so ago, featuring one of these shiny devices that brew a perfect single cup of steaming hot Java exactly to my taste and specification. I’ve become so regularly devoted that my morning cuppa is often being brewed before I even get to the cash to place my order!
And now, courtesy of a Wired magazine article on how Starbucks has gobbled up the maker of this impressive machine so it can have it all to itself, I learn that Ottawa’s Bridgehead, with two of the roughly 200 machines in the market at the time of the Starbuck’s takeover, represents fully one per cent of all the Clovers anywhere in the world, and will continue to hold that share of all Clovers not owned by the bean-burning Goliath of the coffee trade.
It’s a coup for my favourite coffee shop coming on top of this innovative chain’s already laudable business approach that sees it support a broad range of community initiatives here in Ottawa and buy most of its fair-trade, shade-grown beans directly from small grower-owned cooperatives throughout the world.
By Francis Moran
Many, many years ago, I worked at the then-decidedly down-market tabloid Halifax Daily News. (See my post on the closing of the News earlier this year by Transcontinental.) It was not unusual for our newsroom to receive odd missives, their senders clearly counting that our bent sense of humour, appreciation for the scandalous or unmitigated curiosity would drive us to investigate.
But nothing from my Daily News days compares with the letter that arrived here at inmedia this week. My colleague Leo, who was not without his occasional peculiar piece of mail when he worked with Ottawa Business Journal, has also never seen anything quite so strange.
In a plain brown manila 5¾x9½-inch envelope accurately addressed to the company rather than an individual (but with the peculiar second line, “The Public Relations General”), I found a single sheet of 8½x11-inch paper folded in half and a Canadian five-dollar bill. The envelope bore correct postage and a generic Canada Post frank with the H4T 1A0 postal code, corresponding to Montréal, near the airport.
The sheet of paper seemed to be a colour copy of an original, which may mean additional copies were sent to other people. (So far, I have been unable to find any Google references to clumps of the text for which I searched.) In block capitals, and with all the spelling, grammar, punctuation and paragraph breaks faithfully reproduced here, the text read:
The Bell Canada Express Vu Satellite Dish Startments.
When The Customer Indicates The Desired Programming Has Not Yet Released Payment Maker lings. If A Ten Percent Mathematical Root For A Special Turn Key.
A Perma Frost 700 Perma Lock. Or A Short National Mail Out.
August 1, 2008
That’s it folks. Colour me utterly bewildered. If anyone out there can shed any light on this, please do.
By Francis Moran
My wife and I were listening this morning to a local CBC radio story about a filmmaker who had invested very large sums in the production of short video clips intended for viewing online or on mobile devices. I was only half listening, so please excuse the lack of more precise details. The point is that he was quoted as being “hopeful” that an arrangement he had forged with Canadian ISP Sympatico would eventually pay dividends for him if his content drove higher viewer numbers that, in turn, drove higher ad revenues for Sympatico.
Good luck, my wife commented, adding that the nut of getting web content to pay is still, to a very large degree, yet to be reliably cracked. Besides adwords, what’s your play?
Well, for some time now, I’ve been hearing about the growth of internet advertising, especially its growth outside adwords. Our family breakfast discussion this morning was timely given a research report out of IDC just today that said, “Worldwide spending on Internet advertising will total $65.2 billion in 2008, which represents nearly 10% of all ad spending across all media.” The researchers went on to predict, “this share will reach 13.6% by 2011 as Internet ad spending grows to $106.6 billion worldwide.”
This is good news for our filmmaker and others seeking to monetise their content through advertising revenue. Still, IDC said, spending on display ads would not outstrip spending on adwords anytime soon, with display ads expected to account for only 20% of all online ad revenues, compared to fully 33% for adwords and just a shade ahead of the 19% share claimed by classified advertising.
This, I believe, is where internet advertising is missing the boat. And it’s a point I have not heard made by most of those talking about advertising on this medium.
Research consistently shows that as much as 80% of the purchase decision-making process takes place within one metre of the product itself; in other words, in the store aisle while the consumer is eyeballing her or his array or choices. At that critical stage, most advertising is but a dim memory.
The internet is the only place, outside of in-store or point-of-purchase advertising, where the opportunity to promote a product lives cheek-by-jowl with the ability to actually purchase the product. This incredibly powerful cohabitation of promotional message with the product itself is the very force behind the planet’s most successful e-commerce sites such as Amazon, but it is a force seemingly only dimly understood by too many of today’s online advertisers who fail to grasp that the internet is not just a medium, it’s also a marketplace.
Until these two elements come together — medium and marketplace — the full potential of internet advertising will not be realised and our local filmmaker will never become rich.
