Brady's Admodo

Very Gone (Another local video store vanishes)

2008-05-19T23:22:00.004-04:00

Signs of the times. I'm the first to say that the wisdom of crowds is an amazing thing but sometimes I find myself with a keen fondness towards the wisdom of the few. My local video store Very Video is closing, no longer able to compete with Blockbuster's, discounters, Pirates, VOD and Bit Torrents. While this should not be such a surprise in an age of instant access. The closure means the loss of an eclectic collection which is not defined by the top sellers of the major distributers. It's a loss for our community. Very Video always maintained an interesting Foreign film section. In a world of homogenized content it was important to know that alternative view points were around the corner. I'll miss that.

In a world of collective wisdom what I will miss most is the extraordinary ability of those at Very to make recommendations as to what might be interesting. Sometimes the wisdom of the crowd is beat by the experience of the one - sometimes.

Thanks Very Video - you mattered. I'm starting to fear that small businesses that trade on their smarts more than prices are an endangered species. We are conditioned to purchase only on price, somewhere along the line we lost sight of value as something more than price . Interestingly enough it appears that those cheap goods have an extraordinary cost. The Independent Lens documentary "China Blue" is an eye opener. Checkout the google link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0yfNOkBClI - This documentary will make you pause.

Note to self: There appears to be a big opportunity here to craft a specialty VOD business patterned after the wisdom of the niche players. Hmmm, Foriegn Films with smart people calling the reco's. New ways, news approaches, new profit. A VERY useful model.

Blackberry Tracking Tool - Kinda Cool!

2008-04-28T15:03:00.000-04:00

TTC Meet Angry Twitter

2008-04-26T22:10:00.007-04:00

Ryan thanks for the email and the link. Twitter really is a medium and more and more it kind of feels like the text equivalent of an old CityTV mechanism called Speakers Corner. Today for those of you who are not in Toronto the background is that the union representing transit workers decided to call a last minute strike (they had promised 48 hours notice- oh well - Thug like move). It created major problems but interestingly it was a badly calculated move - 10,000 transit workers have pissed off Millions of tax payers and customers. The tweets coming from people all around Toronto are pretty interesting they reflect the personal disgust most people have for what has happened. Twitter mechanism for taking the pulse of what the influencers are saying.

Tweet Scan

Wii Midi

2008-04-26T01:05:00.002-04:00

Playing with the cool little Live Blog Application

2008-04-25T20:39:00.002-04:00

Sorry Mr. Wanamaker

2008-04-22T13:46:00.003-04:00

John Wanamaker would be amazed. John Wanamaker was the gentleman who complained that 50% of his advertising is worthwhile and 50% was wasted (knowing which was the problem). It’s a good thing he lived 100 years ago because he would be shocked at a recent Forester study I came across. The question was this: “Do you measure the ROI of your lead agency relationships” 76% of Marketers said No and to top that off 69% of marketers feel that ROI is too difficult to measure. What can I say -- WOW! That is insane. If my investment advisor told me he could only tack 24% of my investments I'd tell him to piss-off. As a shareholder - I'd hope this was job one for the CMO's of the companies I've invested in. Once you know what works you know how to make it work better (ie: more profit). In my earlier years I was a commercial bush pilot and I'll tell you flying blind is a very bad way to fly. It's staggering to think that in 100 years the advertising industry has gotten worse at the proof thing.

Hey Madison Avenue, Knock Knock..

Who's there?

Google!

Google who?

Microsoft!

Microsoft who?

Google and Microsoft are talking to your client and your are screwed.

Oh shit! But, I have a big idea.

Proof talks BS walks big ideas are yesterday - client's don't want bigger they want better.

How Social Media can save you a bundle on paid media.

2008-04-21T22:40:00.002-04:00

A social media spend should come before an ad spend. The thing about real paid advertising is that it’s expensive to create and place. Screw up with a real campaign with real dollars and you are in a real bind with a serious confidence crisis on your hands. Social media is a cheap way to float messages as a test to see if people will find them interesting. If I spend a few grand running a campaign to float something to blogs and it gets picked up and discussed positively then I’ve got a pretty good idea that when it comes down to spending real money telling my story on a larger paid media scale there is a good chance my money will be well spent. Social Media is a great tool for doing quantitative research (The gathering and analyzing of measurable data) before you go and bet your farm.

The image above is for a new type of economy seat - it won’t be in service completely till 2010 but from the positive touches it’s getting as the story spreads around the blogosphere I’d expect that any advertising that talks about it will be well received. People like it. Who cares about focus groups when you have Digg and a bucketfuls of blogs.

We all live in a yellow -- no white submarine

2008-04-20T21:50:00.003-04:00

This is pretty much totally unrelated to Admodo but I'm experimenting. In Feb we did a cruise from NYC to the Caribbean for 10 days - great vacation. One of the things we did was a submarine ride a cool experience down to 90 feet. Mila had never been under the water so we figured it would be a good introduction prior to scuba diving. It was. One can never be too surprised about how little we actually know about our small blue planet.

Is that real the reason?

2008-04-20T20:43:00.004-04:00

In Canada these days there is a whack of press about our ISPs throttling broadband through traffic shaping. The target of course are those evil folks who use P2P services. Of course we all know that there is no legitimate reason to ever use P2P (see CBC). What I have a hard time reconciling here is that at this point in time p2p is the only real alternative access option for television and movie content (let's not debate the real legal issues here) which does not require a physical link. It seem very convenient that the folks who are traffic shaping also have a lot to lose if consumer choice moves beyond their Cable and Satellite offerings. It feels like there is a bigger agenda here. In an on-demand society the easiest way to impact demand is simply to make its satisfaction impossible.

The future of media was figured out 40+ years ago.

2008-04-20T20:21:00.010-04:00

Sometimes the past just seems to present new alternatives for the future. With all the news about the decline of newspapers, magazines and printed bits I wonder if the future has already been defined. The image on the left is 42 years and shows how media would be consumed in 2001. There is part of me that is wondering if that is the promise behind the rumored Apple next generation Newton. I'd suspect that the larger form factors are headed our way. My favorite computing area is the idea of ubiquitous computing - the linking of all bits - Ubicomp on wikipedia.

Blackberry crazy

2008-04-20T19:57:00.000-04:00

So like all gadget freaks with a new toy I am busy downloading everything I can for the curve including experimenting with updating my horribly neglected blog. But here goes..
S Brady Gilchrist
brady@bluescience.net

An Impending PR Crisis?

2007-10-16T17:33:00.000-04:00

Here is a very interesting article from the Belfast that claims air fresheners and cleaning sprays can cause asthma according to a study by the European Community Respiratory Health Survey.

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/health/article3056797.ece

It's Tuesday afternoon the story is from Saturday - it hit popular status on digg (271 -- by the time this post was done it was at 287) about 2 hours ago. Lets see how long before the story ends up on the google news front page. Currently there are 22 linked stories in google. Let's see how long it takes to grow. The implications of this story could be bad news for a number of companies. My guess is that by the weekend it will be big news in North America. The story was reported by Fox - What I'd like to see is if Digg can predict the mass media uptake on a story....

Yup, this is going to get my ass kicked.

2007-10-16T16:11:00.000-04:00

Ok as if I actually have time for this and truthfully our Director of Communications Ryan is going to have my thumbnails removed because I'm supposed to be writing regularly for the Fuel blog. But you know we can never have to many things that suck up our time.

Well, I must admit this whole blogger experience is an interesting one...no not the act of sharing your thoughts but the simplicity - I can't believe how easy this is. It tool around 20 minutes from start to finish pretty cool...

Let me tell you a story of the olden days before web 2.0 -

This is not my first blogging experience - back in the Precambrian days (the 90's - back when the original Napster was around and new business models were fun - this of course was pre- RIAA) I was lucky enough to wire a sailboat to the internet and blog about the experience of being entirely on the grid.

It was called adigitallife.net and was one of the early weblogs interestingly the term blog was first used in 1999 but not popularized till 2004 . You can checkout the archive here - man was it primitive. http://www.sbwg.net/adl2000

Those early days were like the early days of the Commodore Vic-20 get a Compute magazine and start typing the code if you wanted to play a game - everything was homebrew. I think that the worst part of the exercise was the cellular modem powered by hamsters, it took forever to upload the bits.

The profound experience from that whole exercise was how people around the world found the site and started communicating with me. It was a Yahoo site of the day. Global internet penpals are something we all take for granted today but back then (less than a decade) the idea was breakthrough . The best part of the gig was that it would lead to another bigger adventure that would have me web logging via satellite at the Cape of Good Hope in the Southern Atlantic...more later.

It's amazing to think that eight years later that blogging has become one of the most important forms of media. Amazing to think that Technorati tracks 106 Million blogs. Those numbers makes the company of bloggers the 12th largest nation on earth, just behind Mexico and just ahead of the Philippine's. Just think of that 106 Million blogs and traditional advertising agencies still pretty much have no clue. 106 million broadcasters and market makers is a fundamental shift in global media power. The next eight years should be fun.