Brutal Clarity is Retiring
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Well, it was fairly obvious, what with the long breaks between posts...but Brutal Clarity is being retired. I’ve started a new blog, focused on my current passion, which has moved from loyalty and advertising to brand integration and the convergence of media, marketing and technology. Thanks for reading, and look forward to seeing you on the other side.
My new blog is called Televution, and can be found at televution.com.
A Put Pilot!
Friday, September 29, 2006
CBS made a put-pilot deal on my new show (working title “The Genius Bar") yesterday, and my producing partners and I are happy as punch. The story was picked up by Reuters, and has more details.
Updated 10/07/2006
I’ve received a lot of mail asking for more details. I thought I’d clarify a few FAQs and provide a bit more information.
So, the show is a half-hout sitcom, set in a small slice of an upscale mall, where our primary ensemble happen to work in two different stores. One is an Apple Store-like “chic geek” place and the other is an A&F-like trendy apparel place. The construct is simple: we’re defined nowadays more by what we own and what we wear than by what we say or what we do. Our class structures and personal boundaries have become more retail-driven than ever before. “Genius Bar” (working title, will almost definitely change) simply explores what would happen if people started crossing over those self-imposed barriers and found love, friendship and life on the other side.
This show was neither discussed with nor endorsed by Apple or A&F when it was conceived, sold, or bought. While we think it might give the concept a bit of authenticity were we to get real brands to show up in the show, in the end, its really about the characters. If we can find a way to incorporate specific brands in a non-salesly, organic way, that’s what we’ll do!
Thanks again for all the mail!
Angara Launches
Friday, August 18, 2006
A few months ago, I mentioned that I was helping create and launch a new luxury brand focused on a speciality area. This week, we launched Angara, what I hope will become the world’s leading online luxury retailer for diamonds and fine jewelry.
Angara’s value proposition is simple: diamonds are industry-driven purchases, and its hard to differentiate between all the offers out in the marketplace. Our research showed that consumers were intrigued by the concept of buying diamonds online, and loved the idea of lower prices, but they don’t want to compromise on the intangibles: feeling good about their purchase, great packaging, classy presentation, and friendly customer service. Angara, through all of its services and features (some are forthcoming) aims to provide the simplest, most inuitive and classiest way to buy quality diamonds and jewelry online.
From a marketing perspective, we ended up finding some really interesting mechanisms to make the value proposition come to life. For example, we convened a team of diamond experts and consumer novices to understand how to enhance the construct of the “4Cs”. Historically, the diamond industry used the 4C’s to set prices and create comparability. In reality, there are several other parameters used to determine the quality of a diamond: symmetry, polish, girdle, table, etc. That’s why two diamonds that have almost identical 4Cs may differ in price. Keeping all this in mind, Angara created a rating system for the quality of diamonds that’s based on the 4Cs (well, 3Cs since “carat” is an indication of weight and not quality) as well as a dozen other parameters that affect the quality of a diamond. The result is a Zagat-style rating on a scale of 1-100 called The Angara Rating.
It feels like I’ve given birth! Lots more work to do, but it really does feel good to have it out there and living!
Look who’s in Forbes.
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
This is silly, but I had to plug it. We’ve been busy with several projects at Phenomenon, not the least of which is a new joint venture with Tyra Banks. So, the latest issue of Forbes which lists the 100 most powerful celebrities has a feature on Tyra. I was pleasantly surprised to note that our venture is specifically mentioned.
See, Jeff. I told you so.
TiVo and American Idol Predictions
So, I’ve spending a long time thinking about TiVo and its applications to the future of television. Last year, I waxed on about how TiVo could localize television advertising by providing hardware-based coupons to consumers in specific areas.
In the heat of the continuing American Idol juggernaut, I had another idea. I caught myself doing something interesting during the performance last night. I wanted to skip the commercials, so I watch the show an hour after it has aired. I noticed that I would skip the performances I didn’t like, and I would re-watch the ones I loved. Often, my distaste for a particular performance was so instant, I would start skipping within the first 10 seconds.
Looking at my TiVo privacy policy, I saw that they allow for the aggregation of anonymous content to help enhance the service. If that’s so, why couldn’t they track the skipping and rewatching habits of 5,000 users who watch American Idol post airing, and use the aggregate data around each contestant to predict their potential position in the voting lineup? Of course, for this to work, we’d have to work with the assumption that American Idol voting follows the general likeability of a performance, and that discounts for personal favoritism couldn’t be included. Or, could they?
What if we tracked each TiVo user’s behavior anonymously across multiple weeks, and created a weight-based system for their specific proclivity for a particular artist. For example, if user A rewinds every performance of Paris Bennett, but the majority of other users tend to skip her, we can under-weigh this user’s affinity to Paris in order to calculate the aggregate. I think.
The applications for this, by the way, are enormous. Because even though it is fun to predict who is going to get kicked off, the more powerful information is that of who continues to get the most viewership, and therefore (using our assumption,) the most number of votes. This means that the executives at TiVo could know well beforhand who is potentially going to win the entire prize...which, for marketers, could mean contacting their managers and getting endorsement rights well before the finale, for example.
Or, betting in Vegas. Do they have a line on Idol?