Be an artist

I spent today reading The Icarus Deception. 

I have always and will continue to be inspired by Seth. His generosity is contagious.

Here are a few of my favourite insights from the book:

Art is the act of pointing a light at the darkness. Before you turn on the light, you have no idea what you're about to see, and once you know what you're going to see, it's no longer dark. 
Art is the truly human act of creating something new that matter to another person. The only refuge left, the only safe path, is to be the one who makes art.
The connections in our life multiply and increase in value. Our stuff, on the other hand, merely gets cheaper over time.

My hope for your 2013 and my own:

Be an artist. Make connections. Start something worth starting. Be vulnerable.

Every day this next year you and I will have the opportunity and the choice to approach something differently. I hope for both our sakes, that at least on one day ... we seize that opportunity and chose to make a difference.

Video ads - will we click now?

I occasionally browse through the ads on the right-hand-side of my Facebook page and most of the time they are not really relevant and so I'm not interested. Today, I noticed what you see below ... 

You will see that I conveniently used Microsoft Paint's spraypaint tool to blur out my friend's personal information, but I left the main part of what caught my attention.

A video ad.

After doing a bit of reading, I've found that Facebook does offer video as an option to potential advertisers:

With the rise in online video and even mobile video could we start to see a rise in video ads? How will this affect the notoriously low click-thru rate on ads in general?

Will supermarkets become extinct?

Or at least be frequented less?

Walmart Labs recently launched a new initiative called Goodies, which is a subscription based food discovery service. It's not the only one of it's kind, in fact there are a whole slew of subscription based discovery services out there, including: Birchbox, Glossybox, ipsy and a whole bunch of other competitors.

I think this model is really neat because it represents an evolution of Seth Godin's permission marketing principle. Many companies have been using a monthly subscription model to offer services for some time now (mostly software companies) and it is interesting to see how packaged goods companies are getting involved.

As usual, I am interested in what the future of this will mean. Right now, if we use Goodies as an example, Walmart is acting as the middle man between packaged goods manufacturers and end-consumers. Will we eventually see a disintermediation in this space?

Will you one day be getting the newest and coolest products directly from giants like Unilever and P&G every month? If so, where will their store fronts be? Where could they possibly reach a massive global audience ... Facebook perhaps?

Walmart is massive and has now set a really neat precedent. I wonder who will follow suit.

American Express makes your TV a store

How can you incorporate relevant marketing messages into something consumers already find inherently interesting?

This is not the only example of how American Express is making your television into a virtual store.

The insight and innovation here is something to admire. Consumers would not consider these to be 'commercials' or 'ads' but yet they are still very much marketing messages. Television is huge and still very relevant medium; however, we no longer interact with TV like we used. The rise of the 'second screen' is giving marketers a whole new opportunity to deliver highly relevant content again and it will be very interesting to see how marketers take advantage of that.

iRevolution | The Digital Marketing Lounge


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Episode Summary:

On this episode, I am happy to be joined by old friends, Dave Silva and Andrew Baskerville. The three of us decided to get together and talk about a brand that has truly become one of the most iconic in history ... Apple. We tried to look at things from a marketing lens and identify the components behind Apple's marketing machine. It certainly turned out to be an interesting conversation, hope you enjoy the show! (Runtime: 38:45)

Sources for the discussion:

Interesting sites to check out:

Andrew's Blog

Dave's Blog