Marketing Pioneers 2010: Company Pitches

By Kenneth Lim on February 4, 2010

I’m at Marketing Pioneers, a half-day conference on marketing and sales here in Amsterdam. The event just opened with five companies pitching their business in 6+4 minutes.

Brandfighters

This is a video marketing agency that capitalizes on crowdsourced user-generated content for company marketing, i.e. users are asked to create (hopefully viral) videos for a brand. OK, where do we need the agency? Jan-Paul, interestingly enough, mentioned that Heineken was surprised that the quality of the submissions was so good. I don’t see why a big brand wouldn’t and couldn’t just bypass an agency in such cases.

Mober

This company aims at providing a SMS service with which restaurant/cafe patrons can place orders. I think this service doesn’t tie into the overall hospitality industry well. The problem is that whereas it can simplify or create an extra option for consumers, it creates more headache for restaurant/cafe holders. The logistics, technology and process changes may not be worth it. It’s a lot of trouble for fighting a symptom rather than a cause. Bad or sub-par service cannot be solved w/ an SMS ordering system.

Bureau Vijftig

This is a marketing agency specialized in reaching people over the age of 50. Interesting business projections and a growing market. However, I did find it funny that they used a cliche to break a cliche. If it’s more about behavioral properties than demographic properties, it might blur the concept.

Beemway

Social media agency that does brand campaigns with widgets, things and other stuff ;) Focus was on segmentation and targeting, but the ROI question was a bit dodged; Hans said that it should be played “smooth” and that an initial focus on sales/conversion usually fails. “Smooth”? I think value and relevancy are more important. I thought these pitches were about novelty?

31 Volts

Interesting opening, 80% of service providers thinks they’re delivering excellent services yet only 8% of clients feels the same way. This agency aims to bridge that gap. Their service consists of helping businesses make changes to their service provision to make customers more satisfied. Bit disappointed about the business model re metrics and effectiveness. I don’t really see the innovation either, the takeaways contained a lot of basic marketing stuff.

Verdict

The audience will get the chance to vote on the best pitch. Here’s what I looked at:

  • The problem and the solution
  • Market (customers, suppliers, competitors, etc.)
  • Business model

All things considered, here’s how I’d rank them based on only the information they provided today:

  1. Bureau Vijftig
  2. 31Volts
  3. Beemway
  4. Brandfighters
  5. Mober

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Your Private Parts Are Also My Private Parts

By Kenneth Lim on February 2, 2010

A few weeks back, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed that “sharing is the [new] social norm” these days following changes to Facebook’s privacy settings. This is partly true and—as I alluded to in The Social Impact Of Social Media—social media has allowed people to be more open and connect with the people and topics that matter to them.

However, whatever matters to person A might not matter to person B. Sharing information doesn’t imply sharing relevance. Privacy is a matter of context, something that is judged on a semantic scale. Facebook doesn’t control the social norm. We do.

Making privacy something binary results in a decrease of value in privacy and an increase of value in publicity. What if people manipulated these new privacy dynamics to convey only the information that they want people to see? Is that who they really are? Not necessarily. Do other people care? Not necessarily. Does it make them look cooler? Heck yea. As a result, it can spoil authenticity. And that’s not the kind of data that marketers, advertisers and investors are looking for, is it?

An article from last week revealed that only roughly a third of Facebook members changed their privacy settings. If you’re looking for helpful pointers on changing privacy settings, check out this post by AllFacebook.

I welcome your thoughts if you’re willing to share :o)

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Apple’s New iPad: It’s All About Content Domination

By Kenneth Lim on January 28, 2010

In case you hadn’t noticed, Apple introduced a new product yesterday, the iPad. All kidding aside, it’s a tablet computer that has an iPhone-esque user interface.

There are many people who can tell you a lot more about the device than I can so I’m not going to waste time on that. Instead, I’m more interested in the market movement it’ll create.

Apple already has a strong position in digital music sales and that market is expected to only grow in the next few years. The company also offers more than 100,000 apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch in its App Store.

E-books and e-publications are the next big thing. The iPad gives Apple a form factor through which to sell more electronic content and the availability of wi-fi and 3G connectivity testify to that. Moreover, the screen is not e-ink (which is a downer for e-books) but it does allow the iPad to be a suitable video carrier/streamer.

In sum, the iPad is not Apple’s “most advanced technology in a magical & revolutionary device at an unbelievable price”. It is, however, a clever play to carve out a larger share in the content distribution market.

iLeave the comments to you.

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