Consulting rules

Stand out of Crowd / by Paul Likes Pics

If you come to our office or invite us to come to your premise, you can expect serious business.

In order for this not to look like an advertisement, expect us to bring nasty questions to your doors. We are interested into business that brings value to client.

We go after success and bring into our engagement full force. We are in business that brings more money to your desk and hefty lot on ours. And we will listen to your idea.

Sometimes we deliver ideas that got used by clients without any remuneration. That is not OK and we tend to speak about it. Even with lawyers.

Welcome

When to Fire Your Ad Agency?

Some old text found on web, but very fresh and insightful.

As a client, you’re paying your agency to keep pushing your brand and keeping it relevant in a shifting competitive landscape, not to simply take orders.

There are many reasons why a company would fire its advertising agency. Sometimes even agency declines certain accounts.

http://blog.attention.cc/2007/10/01/when-to-fire-your-ad-agency/

Size vs. Quality – and Yes, it does matter

Some random big car in front of office

In the last days in the neighborhood where our office is situated, we notice some really big, really expensive cars.

For these guys, you can really say, size does matter.

We remembered one potential client, from the hood, with really, really BIG idea.

BIG idea

The idea was so huge, that involved serious transcoding – lasting months, storage space – that can be handled only by CDN, and bandwidth comparable to Amazon or Google pipeline.

Anyway, the idea was BIG (notice was), and can produce significant money if implemented properly with carefully calculated steps with serious Project Manager and hard core coders.

Calculation

The value of operational cost for first 6 months, just running the business was approximately as the value of the car he was driving.

This drove potential client away from us.

Wake up call

Now, I can just perceive the moment when wake up call came and potential client realized that start-up costs are expensive as his own car. Quality is expensive, which is true. Size is expensive too.

So, with the balance of size and quality you can start slowly and carefully build up your business, offline or online, using really smart people.

Yeah baby, real cash!

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/02/iphone-myspace-facebook-race-to-micropayments-in-2009/

A Small World (of Ours)

What do you see when you access Hulu outside of USA

Where do you want to live today?

Less and less it is important Where do you live, but still it matters. We will try to explain why old business models, however hard they try to change, can not stand the light of new economy and elimination of old borders in media distribution.

Availability of content

When there is the content, exist the need.

Due to all kind of restrictions, copyright aggrements, country regulations, target markets and profit margins, we have irregular distribution of content. On world scale, some countries are more equal than others.

In this interconnected world where distribution of information is instant, and news, reports and video is available to worldwide audience, premium content like music, movies, television series is very restrained from distribution.

Need for speed

We come back to the need of people. We, the people, have the need to follow our favorite actors, music performers, nice shows, but unfortunatelly live in, as it seems, wrong parts of the world.

This is not limited to “soft” content like movies, TV shows, music, but expands to hardware dimension (think iPhone).

What is your target market? I would go after whole world as fast as possible. Why propose limits?

Present

If you are in USA, television content is ready for delivery over Internet after premiere, but only in USA. (Hulu)

It is illegal to access this content in case you are coming from some other place.

The future (not far from now)

In order to use computer or computerised device you do not need knowledge gained at University. People are not any more forced to learn for years. Interfaces for using devices are more simple and more automatic.

What is more important, they do not care about the cost if it is small enough. (Wired)

If the cost is the issue, person will “liberate” the content in certain way. Clearly there is a bad feeling about this. Even with certain percent of non paid informations, majority of world is ready to pay.

Piracy will not disappear, just try to diminish it with widely available content with affordable price.

What is quality?

People look after quality, but watchable or listenable content, not ridiculously quality material. OK, there are people who require something special, but look after majority. People just want to watch and listen, and be satisfied.

When you are really after special things you tend to pay more.

Delivery networks

Think BitTorrent, iTunes Music Store, Amazon.

Data is shareable and reusable. Everything is digitalised.

Latest CD of local singer came to newstands with the price of 150. The 50m away you could buy the same thing for 200, with shity cover, no lyrics, burned on generic CD of questionable quality.

People bought the CD on the street corner. Why? The street corner guys are just more reliable and have bigger offer.

Punch line

Free the availability of content and offer payment worldwide. You will be the winner.