The personal musings of Casper Moller

OLED Really is the Display Tech of the Future

noreply@blogger.com (Casper Moller) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 23:53:00 +0000

Just came across this beautiful little article (and article) from Wired Magazine, showcasing the sturdiness of the new Samsung flexible OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) displays. If we can get to the point of having ultra-thin and flexible displays it will open up untold opportunities for how our media are able to disseminate their content and marketers and broadcasters alike will be salivating at the prospect.

How many times have you broken the screen on your TV? Your mobile phone? Your laptop? For me the number is one of each of the latter two - thankfully no TVs :-). Imagine the idea of a thin, lightweight and flexible screen that is also unbreakable. You would pretty much be able to fold up a 20 inch TV and stuff it in your bag when you go on holiday - just hang it on the wall once you get there. It's going to be interesting to see how quickly they can bring down the price of the technology in order to allow developers of new applications to get their hands on it and bring a whole variety of uses of it to the market.

Check out the full article and video over at Wired, and see how it performs compared with a conventional LCD when you take a hammer to it.

"If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning. I'd hammer in the evening, I'd hammer all day..."

UPDATE: VisitDenmark MD Steps Down

noreply@blogger.com (Casper Moller) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:44:00 +0000

Further to my previous post on the absolute cock up of the VisitDenmark marketing campaign, I was very happy to just read that Dorte Kiilerich, the MD responsible for the fiasco, has taken the consequence of her actions and resigned. I now hope that they can put this debacle behind them and move on with new forces at the helm, who can start to rebuild Denmark's reputation abroad using common sense while not eschewing the use of technology and innovative campaign tactics.

For more on this story (in Danish) click here.

Danish Marketing Reputation Going Downhill?

noreply@blogger.com (Casper Moller) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:15:00 +0000

After I wrote a post in August last year about how Carlsberg made a rather large snafu in relation to their sponsorship of Liverpool FC, we've now had the insanely warped campaign from VisitDenmark trying to increase tourism. The YouTube video of a single mother, "Karen", who was looking for the father of "her" young child was supposed to show Denmark as a liberal and free thinking country. Instead, it managed to alienate a lot of families and people from societies a lot less liberal than Denmark - and excited a lot of young men who suddenly seem to think that Danish girls are easy (at least if you believe some of the comments posted on YouTube).

Dorte Kiilerich, Managing Director of VisitDenmark, stated ”Karen's story shows that Denmark is a broad-minded country where you can do what you want. The film is a good exponent for Danish, independent and dignified women, who dare to make their own choices.” At least that was the official line until the backlash started and the Chairman of the Board had to pull his support for it...

”I don’t understand the advertising agency that has produced this story. What do they think people will think,” says Roskilde University Sociologist and Women’s Affairs Researcher Karen Sjørup. ”They’re obviously trying to sell a type of promiscuous Danish woman and exploit the idea that you can lure quick, blonde Danish women home – without a condom,” Sjørup says, adding however that foreigners who come to Denmark with that idea will be very disappointed.

According to Politiken, a leading Danish newspaper, Peter Helstrup, at Grey, the advertising agency behind the video said it was a major success.

”It is the most successful viral advert ever. We have got through the media noise and it cost the same as a 30-second spot shown a couple of times on TV2,” says Peter Helstrup from Grey’s.

In less than a week, the video notched up 1.9 million Google searches, 773,000 YouTube viewings and is linked to 83,000 websites.

A day after the initial press release containing Ms. Kiilerich's quote above, VisitDenmark were forced to pull the plug and saying "I'm deeply sorry that this film has upset many people. This was not our aim at all. Our aim was to create a positive awareness of Denmark and stimulate discussions about Denmark. To avoid further upsetting people, we have now removed the film from YouTube."

She didn't exactly get any support from her Chairman who stated "VisitDenmark's mandate is to market Denmark abroad and, naturally, has to find new and different ways of doing so. When it happens it's important that your communication is very clear or you risk the opposite happening. And we must conclude that this has happened in this case. Therefore, I am happy to have seen that the film has now been removed."
[NOTE: no, doesn't make any sense to me either. Foot in mouth syndrome?]

Showing Denmark to be a country full of drunk and loose women of dubious morals - and using tax payer money to do so - is NOT the way to market Denmark abroad and as a Danish marketer I'm feeling downright embarrased on behalf of both VisitDenmark and the team at Grey who came up with this piece of junk. After the Danish politicians also started ripping into Ms. Kiilerich, I hope that necessary steps will be taken to remove her from the post as I cannot see how she can continue fronting an organisation responsible for the positive branding of Denmark. Furthermore, it should also be considered whether the organisation's mandate should be reviewed in relation to how tax payer money is spent.

Personally, I just don't hope this will have an adverse effect on the job prospects of the many talented Danish marketers plying their trade abroad.

Sorry about another extensive delay...

noreply@blogger.com (Casper Moller) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 23:46:00 +0000

I've been away travelling for most of August and September so far and when I've finally been around I haven't been able to decide whether to laugh or cry at the mediocrity of the marketing I've seen recently. I know that many of you were expecting me to comment on the debacle, which was the so called "viral" video of the single Danish mother seeking the "father" of her young son on video, but I've decided to hold my breath until the initial outbursts/condemnation/sleazy comments died down before doing so. However, I will now address this in a blog later on today and will also publish a post about a campaign on the London Underground (or The Tube as we locals know it) from Hotels.com, which, at best, is bordering on being a complete breach of all rules regarding ethics in marketing, and why HSBC really have managed to get my goat recently (and why I'm terminating my banking relationship with them after 11 years). Hope you'll stay tuned. In the meantime, you can always follow my latest quick thoughts on Twitter.

BBC Realise Power of Brand "You"

noreply@blogger.com (Casper Moller) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 14:47:00 +0000

According to a piece on the Digital Spy web site, auntie Beeb have hired a brand consultant to help turn their TV stars into global brands. This is a very smart move in terms of increasing the potential revenue streams for their commercial arm - only makes you wonder why they didn't do it sooner. This will probably mean a lot more people following in the footsteps of monsieurs Clarkson, Hammond and May in establishing their names far beyond the borders of Blighty.

Read the full story here.

Is This the Future of TV?

noreply@blogger.com (Casper Moller) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 14:43:00 +0000

I remember growing up in Denmark in the 1980s where everybody was talking about 3D television. My friends and I all rushed out to buy 3D viewing glasses only to be bitterly disappointed by the movies shown on TV, which just seemed blurred and in green and red. Now Channel 4 in the UK are trying to get us in the mood again with a 3D programming week. I wonder if we'll be just as disappointed as last time around or whether this could actually work by now. Thoughts on a beer mat please.

Congratulations to SAS: Mediocre Social Media Campaign

noreply@blogger.com (Casper Moller) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 05:22:00 +0000

People who've known me for years know how much I detest SAS - and also why:
1. They're priced like a premium airline, but have low-cost airline components (like paying for food and drink on the lowest priced tickets)
2. I've been mistreated by them WAY TOO MANY TIMES...

I wanted to give them ONE LAST CHANCE when they ran an online social media competition, where the idea is that you spin a globe (funnily enough departure points are only in Scandinavia) and I never got a destination further away than Athens) and it then selects a travel partner from Facebook (you have to log in/connect) . On my 10th and final try (or so I thought) I finally got an interesting destination and travel partner, but when I tried to submit it I was told I'd already entered. Great way to piss off an already extremely irrate and lapsed customer, guys. I guess this will just reinforce my opinion: DO NOT FLY SAS!!!

If you're adventurous/dumb enough to waste your time, you can find a very crap competion at SASGlobeofFortune.com. Please let me know if you manage to win, as I can't wait to hear the obstacles they place in your way to make it impossible to claim the price (or maybe they don't even respond to your email when you try to claim - nothing would surprise me with SAS any longer)

The Importance of Being Integrated

noreply@blogger.com (Casper Moller) — Wed, 20 May 2009 09:47:00 +0000

I know I have banged on in the past about the need to ensure that your marketing efforts are integrated across all channels, whether they're digital or "old fashioned", to ensure you make the most of "cross-pollination" opportunities and increase brand awareness. However, it is also a good idea to double check that the left hand knows what the right is doing and vice versa.

This was really brought home to me today when I tried to sign up for a new promotion run by Tropicana in the UK, giving consumers the opportunity to collect cheap dining vouchers. A few weeks ago they distributed flyers to thousand (if not millions of households across the UK) inviting people to go to a URL and input a promotional code to collect your first point for free (additional points can be collected from the purchase of Tropicana juice and smoothie packs). There was just one slight problem... somebody seems to have neglected to mention that URLs after the domain name become case sensitive! This means that thousands of people who would otherwise have participated when receiving the flyer have probably just given up (if they are as web savvy as the person responsible for the copy). This is the kind of mistake that just shouldn't be allowed to happen. Thankfully, for the web savvy users, it is a case of just changing it around to lower case and "hey presto, it works!"

However, it does beg another question... Why do Tropicana want users to go to www.tropicana.co.uk/foodlovers when they then re-direct the user to the site: www.tropicanafoodlovers.co.uk? Surely it would have been just as easy just putting that URL in the promo materials - and avoid the case scenario in the first place...

UPDATE: Unfortunately it gets worse. When you try to register you get the following response:

Have agencies and brand owners just given up on quality control? I don't know, but there are too many mistakes in this campaign for my liking...

The Apprentice (UK): The Candidates Are Dross...

noreply@blogger.com (Casper Moller) — Thu, 14 May 2009 18:47:00 +0000

For once, I'm sitting and watching The Apprentice on BBC2 and I can't help but feel that it is great TV, but is so far removed from reality as is humanly possible. If TalkBack Thames, the production company behind the show, didn't pay the £100,000 salary of the winner, would any of these candidates even be considered? I personally doubt it very much.

As a marketing specialist, I found their efforts toe-cringing tonight. The right team lost, though, as the idea of posters with coloured backgrounds and full of text just do not work! Furthermore, the idea of trying to attract the gay community to a town with an older demographic was just downright suicidal in this instance. Imagine anybody trying to do that for Eastbourne. They would have been chased out of town faster than you could say "MY BAD!" I also had to laugh about the winning team as well as they, obviously, had no clue of how to work around the photos, where the backgrounds did not leave space for copy. Erm, I can think of two incredibly easy work-arounds off the top of my head...

I'm sure the casting process was great fun and it was all about un-earthing "TV talent", but I personally would not hire any of the current candidates. They can't communicate/sell/project manage or anything else, which would normally be required by somebody who pulls in a six figure salary, and I would not be surprised if the rumour that the previous winners who did stay on are on a MUCH reduced salary. It would be useful if these people actually had the skills to back up their annoying personality traits...

In summary, I guess it makes for great TV and for crap candidates who might be shooting themselves in the foot as all I see are some young and desperate people who are bordering on being delusional and which I, for one, would never even consider employing.

To "Tweet" or not to "Tweet" that is the question...

noreply@blogger.com (Casper Moller) — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:42:00 +0000

No, really it isn't (having tried to post this story for ages the question maybe ought to be "why is Blogger so ....?" ;-)).

Done well, Twitter can help your marketing efforts. Even though recent research has shown that there is a 60% drop-off rate within the first month, there is still a huge - and engaged - audience waiting to be tapped into. If you're still wondering whether Twitter is for you, I would recommend you read Syed Balkhi's excellent piece on why you should join and his follow-up to those who are already using it: 25 Tips to Increase Your Influence and Gain Followers on Twitter.

One of the key lessons from all of this, in my humble opinion, is really the key point that it's not about quantity, but quality. If you're selling a product or service, it's more important to have actual customers and/or prospects following you than it is to have loads of disinterested "followers" who think Twitter is the new MySpace and want to follow EVERYBODY. Look instead at how you can engage with your audience by adding value in your tweets, answer key questions and concerns and look at how you can build a loyal fan base who will give you good "word of mouth" to relevant others.

Happy tweeting - or should that be twittering...?

And here's how Tesco pulled it off...

noreply@blogger.com (Casper Moller) — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:50:00 +0000

Recently Tesco posted the largest profits ever recorded by a UK retailer and thereby managed to buck a trend in times where one retailer after another is going into administration. Many people have probably wondered how they managed to pull this off and there has been a lot of speculation that as people are not eating out as much, taking fewer holidays, buying fewer luxury goods etc. this would increase Tesco's profits.

However, I recently discovered the secret. It's got nothing to do with ANY of the above factors. Rather, it is a very creative use of one of the 4 Ps of Marketing, namely "Price".

Last week at my local Tesco, there was a special promotion where you could by two bottles of soft drinks for only £1.60. That does sound reasonable, and a lot better than paying £1 a bottle at my local cornershop.

The kicker, though, was that most of the products were priced individually at less than 80p (as low as 67p as seen in the picture above). I know that Tesco think its customers are mugs, but that's just taking the p....

The most expensive product I saw was 97p so if you bundled the cheapest and the most expensive the special offer would have given you the amazing savings of, er, 4p or 2.5%. Yippee! They probably hoped people would buy the Orangina at 79p a bottle and overcharge them on each one as we all know that margins are notoriously slim in retail.

Terry Leahy's business teachers at UMIST would have been so proud ;-).

I've also realised that it doesn't really matter which supermarket you buy your food from as it all comes from the same place anyway. On this picture can see a bag of "Tesco" Organic Pears that I grabbed earlier in the week, with the pears having "Waitrose Organic" stickers on them. Briliant!

Name and Shame #2: British Airways

noreply@blogger.com (Casper Moller) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 01:10:00 +0000

I had hoped, that I wouldn't need to write this post...

I'm actually quite a big fan of British Airways, but there are just too many things wrong with their Internet efforts. I have previously alluded to the problem that they keep on having expired offers on their web site, and since they have not done anything to remedy this problem I believe it is time to "out" them for this mistake.

If you're a member of the On Business programme (for corporate travel), you will probably always be looking at finding ways of earning points. The offers that they've run for the last few months included earning double points on fares and getting an upgrade from economy to either Club Europe or Club World on full fare economy tickets. The only problem is that (according to the current offers page) these offers both expired yesterday - on March 31st, 2009.

In this day and age, it really is not too much to ask that a company which continually runs offers like these, either set an expire date on the content items - or ensure that somebody pulls them off the moment they expire. In this case, the agency responsible for the site should clearly be looking at educating the client - rather than pissing off their customers - particularly as it seems BA themselves still have a long way to go in the marketing department when it comes to understanding "new" channels such as the Internet.

Classic Workplace/Agony Aunt Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Casper Moller) — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 11:25:00 +0000

I have recently discovered, and fallen in love with, Stanley Bing's blog at Bnet: What Would Bing Do?

There are some absolutely classic letters from people and some very funny comments about how to survive in the modern workplace. Recent classics include, in no particular order of preference:

My Company Was Bought By Jerks
Should I Suck Up to Stupid Clients?
I Slept With My Boss And Now He's Acting Weird - made even worse by the fact that I know of a manager who is sleeping with one of his employees. Didn't you learn anything at school?
How Do I Survive a Psycho Boss

Pure class! And a great laugh at the same time. If you want to alleviate the tedium of a Friday afternoon before you kick back and do whatever at the weekend, there are worse things to waste your time on than reading any one of the above letters and answers

(Late) Comment on Virgin Atlantic's 25th Anniversary Campaign

noreply@blogger.com (Casper Moller) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 23:52:00 +0000

There is no point in me discussing the merits of the campaign or whether it is aspirational/historical (but doesn't say anything about the brand today) as all of this has been covered in-depth for months on so many different sites on the net. However, I saw something, which I just felt I had to respond to this as this truly is a fundamental question of understanding marketing/sales/advertising as we are about to enter the second decade of the 21st century.

Earlier today, I just saw an article on Technovia, where they asked one question of the Virgin Atlantic 25th anniversary TV advertising campaign in the UK: why haven't the agency created an official compressed (i.e. high quality video version) for when it's spread online?

Now that's what I call a great, and truly myopic, point of view! The question is not why they haven't created some subset of some type of medium they don't understand. The question is why they haven't done ANYTHING to try and understand other media at all! As a modern advertising agency RKCR ought to have learnt by now that cross-channel effectiveness in media campaigns is REAL - and there is plenty of research to back that up (and there has been for years). Feel free to contact me if you want any data on this... In many ways, I completely understand the question - you have probably seen so many bad video compressions of it on everything from YouTube to anywhere else, but isn't it much more interesting to look at it in a broader perspective and ask whether or not this campaign is effective? Whether it's maximising its potential in relationship to the budget given? Whether it's effective in terms of brand building and direct response? Etc.

At the same time as this campaign broke at the beginning of 2009, the one campaign which had a comparable TV media buy was Comparethemarket with its Comparethemeerkat.com campaign - and the new cult hero of Aleksandr Orlov (see image below right). As this campaign was extended, at a relatively low cost, by creating a fun spoof web site; a Facebook profile and a Twitter profile which is updated - it allows for longer lasting relationships to be established. The Facebook fan page now has more than 255k fans (and more than 5k have been added today alone)!!!

For years, I have been speaking about the need for cross-media integration in my seminars to clients (see a small taster at Slideshare) and I firmly believe that as Marketing Directors get smarter and require to see a higher return on (marketing) investment, they will start to challenge conventional wisdom of p*ssing money down the drain in traditional media. If the campaign had been slanted in such a way that e.g. 35% had been spent on the TV media buy and another 40% (for a total of 75% of the current media budget) had been spent on developing alternative channels and media spend in other channels - the effectiveness would probably have been just as great, if not even better.

As a marketing consultant (and one who has many years of experience on the client side) it is incredibly important for me to stress this point: you really need to challenge the agency on their old fashioned ways of doing things, particularly here in 2009 where we are seeing overall ad spend in traditional channels tumble in pretty much all developed markets. What possessed Virgin Atlantic to follow this strategy? Who is holding the agency accountable? And, perhaps most importantly of all, can we get some numbers to show whether the RO(M)I is there?

At the end of the day, if I look at the 2 campaigns next to each other, Compare the Market have really managed to benefit from all of the cross-media effectiveness they could hope for whereas Virgin's effort seems to be a completely disparate (and ego boosting for whoever signed off on it) brand building exercise, where they will find it very difficult indeed to validate any results coming from the campaign - and there is NO cross-channel integration (to the point where the video wasn't even available on the Virgin Atlantic web site for a long time and don't even know if it is now, but what is the point of checking at this stage?). Both of the campaigns are great examples of traditional broadcast advertising, but only one stands out and shows us the way forward for advertising in the 21st century. For the other, it means a brand owner - and an agency - need to go back to the drawing board and try and figure out what their relevance will be to their clients in the coming years.

Name and Shame #1: OpenSkies (multiple offender)

noreply@blogger.com (Casper Moller) — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:09:00 +0000

As a very satisfied and long standing customer of British Airways, I decided to see if there were any benefits attached with flying their subsidiary OpenSkies, which flies from continental Europe to the US. However, the online experience proved so underwhelming that I couldn't be bothered to try and find the flights from Paris Orly to New York that I was interested in.

It all started out pretty badly when I typed in flyopenskies.com into Firefox (no "www.") and got the image below... It turns out that the security certificate is only valid for the site if the "www." is included(!) Not exactly rocket science to make sure that all subdomains and versions are put on the same certificate. This will take a techie about 2 minutes to sort out, but obviously the people at OpenSkies all still type in "www." when they type a URL (i.e. a web address for the layman) into their browser. Bad, bad, bad! The least they could do in the future is to get at least some half experienced web site users to test the site before letting it go live.

Unfortunately it got even worse when I then typed in "www.flyopenskies.com" and selected France as my country (remember that I was looking for fares from Paris to New York City). On the homepage I see an offer of 1944 Euros in Biz (their business class). Not exactly a great price compared to what I can get ex London, but that wasn't really the issue. The point was that I accessed the site at 11:05 p.m. GMT on February 10th (i.e. 00:05 a.m. in France on February the 11th) - and it states clearly "Book this before February 9th"!

If you decide to build a site using a Content Management System (CMS) there should at least be an option for the non-technical people to update it with expiration dates for stories and offers so it wouldn't even show up. If they update it manually, obviously the pride in their jobs is sorely lacking - or the people responsible for updating are not very process oriented (or worse...)

This is really not good enough. And the worst thing is that these mistakes should be so easy to spot and avoid if you put into place a proper procedure for:

Defining functionality of your CMS
Testing your site

Unfortunately, the example of the expired offer is also something which is incredibly prevalent on the BA.com web site when you log into your Executive Club (BA's loyalty programme) account and wish to see the offers. I would recommend a thorough review of the processes by which BA's web sites are built and maintained - from both a technical and a marketing/customer service point of view as it's very clear that there is room for improvement.

Looks Like "Internet Marketing 101" Is Still Needed...

noreply@blogger.com (Casper Moller) — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 23:43:00 +0000

In recent times (well, for several years actually) I've been astounded by the amount of "big" companies who still haven't sorted out the simplest things concerning their web sites. E.g. I'm amazed by the amount of sites where you still have to type "www." before the name of the site in order for it to resolve (i.e. appear before your eyes). This is one of THE SIMPLEST THINGS TO SET UP when creating a web site but it shows that the people responsible for the site:
A. Either don't know enough about the Internet to even think about it - you would think that their customers would let them know, but either they don't or the complaints just get droned out by the tech, sales or marketing departments.
B. They are not testing their sites well enough. What's the point of spending a fortune creating a web site when the simple things don't even work? It costs nothing to fix and the experience of going to a site which hasn't gotten something like this sorted doesn't inspire very much consumer confidence, e.g. "If this doesn't work, how can I trust them to have sorted out the security when it comes to keeping my payment details safe?"
C. The techies either don't care - or are so blinkered in their thinking (and lack of customer focus) that stuff like this falls by the wayside (also related to sites with very poor general site usability...)

Another problem I still see frequently is the fact that many web sites are not prepared for huge surges of traffic, when it ought to be so simple to set up an agreement with their Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to ensure that more bandwidth can be made available "on demand" at times of high traffic.

The third, and perhaps most annoying mistake, is when marketing departments can't control sometimes unwieldy Content Management Systems (CMSs). There are so many examples of deals being promoted on web sites and when you then click through to read the full details of the offer you will notice that it expired several weeks ago!!! As a Marketing Director, I'd be absolutely livid if I saw something like this as it would be something that really ticks off the customers, but then again... I guess it just goes to show that many Marketing Directors obviously think they have more important things to do than make sure their brand makes on its customers. Hang on a second... NO, actually YOU DON'T HAVE ANYTHING MORE IMPORTANT TO DO! I guess it would be nice if a Marketing Director actually bothered to take some pride in his/her job and ensure that the quality of the work turned out by his/her team is up to scratch - even if it's on something trivial like a web site, which, as we all know, will not be seen by the customers anyway... ;-).

Based on these observations, I'm going to start posting some short stories of what you should NOT be doing. This will take the form of a new series of posts under the tag "name and shame". First up will be OpenSkies (British Airways' new airline operating from continental Europe to the US).

Please make sure you test that your web site hasn't fallen into any of the traps that I will unearth - and remember if you have any examples you'd like to share then drop me an email.

Raincoast Crisps Gets Its Own Fan Page on Facebook

noreply@blogger.com (Casper Moller) — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 17:22:00 +0000

Yesterday I was invited to the brand new fan page on Facebook for Raincoast Crisps. I have to say that if you ever get the chance to taste these delectable little snacks (great with spreads or instead of eating potato crisps) you are likely to fall in love at first bite. I first tasted them about 5 years ago and they just blew me away. I'm fortunate enough to know a couple of the people at the company so have so far been very lucky with freebies, but none of them have been over to the UK recently :-(.

There are five flavours available, including the new Salty Date and Almond, some of them only seasonally. At the moment they are only available across Canada and in some stores in the US (Whole Foods stocks them in some locations). Just wish that they would license them for European manufacture. At present they cannot do shipping across the Atlantic as they are very fragile and you wouldn't really want a box of crackers smashed to smithereens ;-).

If you do a quick Google search, you'll see that the brand already has an evangelical following - and you'll find loads of recipes where people have tried to recreate them at home. If you are on of the fans of the crisps then you might as well share the love with other fans on Facebook.

Bangle Leaves BMW In a (Flame Surfaced) Pickle

noreply@blogger.com (Casper Moller) — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 16:06:00 +0000

The announcement yesterday that design chief Chris Bangle will leave BMW after 17 years means that the brand faces some tricky decisions going forward. Even though the design has been left in the capable hands of his long time collaborator Adrian van Hooydonk, who until yesterday was responsible for the design of the car division at Munich's finest, it does raise questions about what BMW will be doing in the wider arena in which they have worked recently. Under his leadership BMW Group's DesignworksUSA became a key player in many areas of product design which influence our everyday lives and his vision for the future of car design in the shape of GINA was light years ahead of what anybody else has presented.

Bangle was in many ways the enfant terrible of car design, and many of his design challenged long held aesthetic notions of "beauty", but there is no doubt that in trying to constantly challenge consumers' perceptions of cars he also managed to challenge a lot of competitors in the industry - something which we should all be grateful for. Personally I was never a great fan of any of the designs that he oversaw, except for a few concept cars (which were, incidentally, penned by his successor).

It's been an interesting 17 years for Bangle and the rest of us and it's going to be interesting to see what he ends up doing next now that he is leaving the industry. And as for van Hooydonk, he's got some big shoes to fill so good luck to him.

People Are Fleeing the Island!

noreply@blogger.com (Casper Moller) — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 23:29:00 +0000

I just wanted to have a quick look at Expedia's site to see if I could find a hotel for a convention I'm considering attending later on this year and I got the message "Server too busy". Guess that the last few days of extreme weather here in the UK have meant that people are desperate to get away on a break to sunnier climes... and preferably as soon as possible.

Take Your Gmail With You

noreply@blogger.com (Casper Moller) — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 22:26:00 +0000

If you failed to hear the announcement last week (where have you been?), I just wanted to re-iterate that Google have (finally, most people would say) allowed offline access to Gmail, bringing it a step closer to being a fully usable enterprise email solution.

The announcement follows 10 months after Google made Google Docs accessible offline and thereby ensures that users now have a viable no cost alternative to using Microsoft Office. This is great news for small businesses where software licenses can be a big burden on the budgets, and although none of the Google apps are as fully featured as the offerings from Redmond, they are more than adequate for companies whose employees only need to do a bit of typing, emailing and budgeting/forecasting.

User Generated Content Comes of Age

noreply@blogger.com (Casper Moller) — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 22:03:00 +0000

According to eMarketer more than 60% of US online users now view User Generated Content (UGC). It is fair to assume that the consumption follows the prevailing 90:9:1 pattern (90% consume, 9% consume and distribute and 1% create), but what is interesting to see is how big an impact UGC is now making as this shift in media consumption takes away time spent on traditional media to a certain extent.

One of the key points to remember, as eMarketer points out is that the usage is growing, but the revenues aren't necessarily. This might be down to the fact that "user-generated content is affordable, accessible and amenable to mass participation, the delta between creators and consumers is smaller than in traditional media."

One of the more interesting aspects, though, is how this consumption is spread across the various media types. What I personally found slightly surprising was that there was a higher percentage of users perusing blogs than social networks - and that this is unlikely to change anytime soon, with blogs set to experience a higher percentage growth over the next five years than social networks.

No matter how interesting the numbers are from a marketer's point of view (as it showcases rich opportunities to communicate with your target audiences at a much lower cost than traditional media), it also raises some serious questions about the ability of social media site owners to find viable business models going forward as they still struggle to translate those audiences into advertising and other revenues.

UGC might have come of age is a consumer medium, but it is still in its infancy as an industry and we will continue to see new companies spring up to try and find a solution to the cost vs. revenue conundrum, which is particularly prevalent in bandwidth intensive media such as video hosting sites.

Read the full article at eMarketer, where you can also see their reasoning behind the growth forecasts.

Merry Christmas to all my readers!

noreply@blogger.com (Casper Moller) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 14:23:00 +0000

Christmas tree and cupola at Galeries Lafayette, Paris, Xmas 2007
Originally uploaded by caspermoller

In the spirit of the season I just wanted to extend my greetings to all of my readers. I hope that you have a wonderful time with your friends and family.

FREE Book for Entrepreneurs

noreply@blogger.com (Casper Moller) — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:04:00 +0000

Entrepreneur, innovation consultant and former high-level operational executive in several IT companies, Christine Comaford, wrote a book last year called "Rules for Renegades - how to make money, rock your career and revel in your individuality".

On the web site she has had the first chapter available for free ever since it was launched, but now - in a mixture of a fantastic marketing stunt and, I choose to believe, a real desire to help kick-start the economy again, she is giving away 5,000 copies for FREE. That's right, all you have to do is pay the postage & packaging costs of $7.95 if in the US (with sales tax to be added for CA residents).

I think this is a great initiative, and it looks like a very interesting book - as well as one of the better marketing tactics I have seen in a very long time. It all goes back to my previous post about "moving the free line" and is a very strong way of creating evangelism for your product. If it can also help entrepreneurs develop new products and services for which there will be a great demand, and thereby putting more people into jobs, even better.

Read the first chapter online.
Get your FREE copy of the book now.

Bring On the Subs!

noreply@blogger.com (Casper Moller) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 17:30:00 +0000

... sub-editors that is.

Am I the only one to bemoan the sad state of journalism these days? Every single major news site seems to be full of factually wrong content, badly written content and broken links. I don't know if the advent of Internet publishing meant the end of the art of sub-editing, but it really does seem like it. Yesterday I was looking at a picture on the Danish financial newspaper Borsen's lifestyle site and saw a chef carving up a duck. The caption had two spelling errors in it and stated that the picture was of the duck AND a fillet of beef. I could see many interesting things about the picture, but it would have been truly weird if there had been a steak in the picture as well - and sure enough there wasn't. Makes you wonder if somebody just hits the "publish" button without pausing for just a second to see what they have written. Simple errors like this really ought to be simple to catch and weed out, but I guess the pressure is now on the journalists to focus on quantity and speed in publishing - and now they are doing their own sub-editing (yeah, right) they really don't seem to care whether what they have written is wrong or right. It is all about getting it out there as quickly as possible. I just wish that somebody would start to introduce some measures of quality control again or it might be the slow and painful end of well written content and we'll soon find entire articles written in text speak.

What do you think? Are you also annoyed/concerned about the dropping standards of online (and off-line for that matter) journalism?

Royal Copenhagen Keep On Firing Cannonballs Downwards...

noreply@blogger.com (Casper Moller) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 01:51:00 +0000

Recently (October 2008), Royal Copenhagen won the top award in design awarded in Denmark, the annual Bo Bedre "Design of the Year" prize. Unfortunately, they haven't decided to capitalise on this fact yet, and even though they've, finally, decided to open up an online shop, they aren't selling the first completely brand new set of tableware for the 21st century.

It just makes you wonder why somebody at the top of the Xmas tree hasn't figured out the point that the most likely buyers of the new and cool tableware are also the ones who are most likely to be buying online... I hope I can get a really hardcore investor to go in and salvage this company before they go down the drain - and employ me as the Chief Marketing Officer :-). In many ways, as a Dane by birth, this would really be the dream job.