A Book Publisher Feels the Web

Check out this nice little video promoting the kids book group at HarperCollins—and highlighting some of their titles. It’s a nice example of an old-line old media company dipping their toes into emerging media — and using content in smart ways to market themselves. This doesn’t feel like a top-down corporate thing… most likely some young’uns who feel the web in their daily lives had an idea to make a video and put it on YouTube. (If this is a pro job by a  guerilla marketing specialist, I don’t know about it). I felt the ending to be a little anticlimactic … but let’s hope this is just the beginning. More commentary after you watch.

I’m sure the people in the video are not joking when they say most people asked whether they had nothing better to do. And I believe their answer: “no.” Print publishing marketers are notoriously old school, even as digital media threatens them as marketers and in the core of their business. Even if the people who made this video had something better to do in the immediate term (like, I don’t know, file an expense report) I’d argue that this sort of activity is more important than almost anything. The ability to pique interest in a products/brands/companies is hard. Really hard. It gets harder over time. And it gets almost impossible when the old ways of doing it are disrupted by new ways — and the people in charge, like the slowly boiling frog, have no clue until it is too late.

Thanks to 100 Scope Notes … where I first saw the video. BTW, if you guys make another.. keep up the opera. Nice.

“The Study of the Web That Should Have Been Conducted of Television in the 1940s”

The general sessions at the Monaco Media Forum are being shot and posted to YouTube and this one — yesterday’s keynote by Jeff Cole, Director of the USC Annenberg School’s Center for the Digital Future — is absolutely worth showing here in it’s entirety. If you care at ALL about how to communicate with people today, grab a coffee, turn off the world for 30 minutes and watch. Cole shares insights from the center’s eight-year study on media usage. They have been tracking 2,000 people in each of 30 countries. This is by far the clearest overview on this subject that I have come across in some time.