Selling Nostalgia.
One of my major problems with the publishing industries, and the content industries in general, is a refusal to fully leverage nostalgia.
If you own a newspaper, or magazine, or network, you have history. And if you’re going to continue fighting tooth and nail for longer, stronger copyright, the very least you can do is try to make money off that history. Sell the past to the people who fetishize it. Reprint old (very old, not 6 months old) issues of your magazine on demand, at a premium. Sell people the newspaper as published on their birth date, if they want it. Sell a copy of your entire publication’s history, because digital storage is cheap, and because you already paid for that content long ago.
What’s the downside? If you have an archive, you’ll never sell it. Will people stop buying magazines or books or newspapers if they never go out of print? Of course not, because at the end of the day, making copies of anything is easier than it has ever been. And while physical copies will always have cost, tapping into nostalgia makes it very simple to offload that cost, plus a small profit, on to your consumers.
Whenever anything goes out of print, some money is left on the table. Whether it’s a lot of money is meaningless, because you can store the information so cheaply that any profit has value.
Periodical content is often seen as having a short shelf-life, but that’s inaccurate. Content depreciates in value quickly, then slowly accumulates value over time. An article, or radio broadcast, or news program that was minorly entertaining 20 years ago is now interesting specifically because it was average 20 years ago.
Stop leaving money on the table, as carve every last sliver of value out of your archive. Make it searchable, sharable, make it alive.
Sell the past, secure your future.
Haha… Kat has a mom phone.
Honestly, the whole “devaluing things by associating them with mothers” trope is more than a bit tired. Not to mention foolish, given the purchasing power of women in many households.
Not to excuse this, but very often this problem boils down to demographic targeting. Applied socially, demographic targeting is essentially stereotyping, and everyone more or less agrees that it is negative. I seriously doubt the intention was to devalue, and even the Giz coverage focused more on the absurdity of gendering a phone.
Demographic targeting, much like contextual advertising, can be a bitch to pull off without sticking your foot in your metaphorical mouth.
“It’s got to be so annoying to compete with Apple, at anything really, because it’s not like they’re doing something fucking crazy. Everybody’s had these ideas before. The difference, and this is grim if you are a competitor, but the difference is that everyone else spends a lot of time (and often, money) determining why those things aren’t possible. And then it comes out, for real, only you didn’t make it. Some other guys did. And when you come out with what is (on paper) a better version of the same thing, maybe even multiple times over, it’s too late. You made a “product” to compete with their “product,” tastefully arranging your regiment, only to discover that they hadn’t made a product at all - they made a narrative. A statement about how technology should interface with a life.”
We made this. It’s pretty awesome.
Brilliant. Click around, it’s worth it.
via Blankanvas
Be nontraditional. Delight is at least 50% surprise.
Put in generic terms, this makes a lot more sense:
“Consumer products corporation made irrelevant by technological progress arranges an association with provocative and popular entertainer of the moment”.
Can we all stop being impressed by death throes now?
“The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.”
—
Stephen Jay Gould (via butdoesitfloat) (via jeremyturner) (via merlin)
Hijacking this tendency is my current obsession, FYI.
On the Baffling Durability of Notifications.
Facebook recently updated its iPhone application, and the most disruptive feature, in my estimation, is the inclusion of push notifications as an option. Up until this point, I’ve received certain Facebook notifications via email, to be sure I didn’t miss important information, invitations, or messages from personal and business contacts.
The thing is, notifications are just that - a notice. And via email, especially for gmail users like myself, the fact that they exist after reading is somewhat counter intuitive.
Push notifications are perfect for this. My phone vibrates, and more or less says ‘if you care, check this area of your Facebook account’ at which point I have the option of viewing the content on my phone, or ignoring the message.
This has me reconsidering the point of notification emails. Email is used not because it fits the job, but because it is constant: nearly everyone has an email address, and they will check it more regularly than they will other messaging platforms. Where text notifications wouldn’t provide enough utility (for me) a push notification sends home a very clear message - this information should not be durable, and in fact, shouldn’t be sent in a durable medium.
I’ve turned off all of my Facebook email notifications, to see if there is actually a downside for receiving these messages to my phone in a non-durable fashion. But off the top of my head, this is a simple way to eliminate a lot of the inbox clutter I (and probably you) face on a day to day basis. Push notifications to a mobile application, from all of my social platforms, would probably cut my email by about 25%.