Who is Farhan Lalji?

SAI had a post the other day talking about how much the US presidential candidates were raising and spending online. The bottom line was that they were spending little but raising lots.

That’s been my whole argument around interaction and brand advertising. The candidates don’t need to spend money to get their messages online, but online is a powerful channel to make money.

Did a back of the envelope type analysis of the 3 main candidates still in the running and how they were doing on one of the most powerful channels online, YouTube. A search on “Barack Obama” brings up over 50,000 results. Just looking at the first five, there have been over a 1.2 million views, and they all average 4.5 stars. For Hilary Clinton, again over 50,000 views, the kicker here was there was one video with over 4.6 million views and nearly 25,000 comments, but the video was a mash up from the community taking the apple 1984 superbowl ad and using Clinton’s message as Big Brother, ending with a mashed up Apple logo for Barack Obama. The other four messages are fairly positive for Clinton though.

That’s the Democrats, the Republican candidate (or likely candidate, I still don’t get how this works fully) John McCain has over 11,000 videos. The first five videos all paint him in a pretty negative light.

What’s my point? It’s that you don’t need to spend online to have a huge presence online. The candidates have over 20,000 videos online, many of them put together by the community. Then there are the tens of millions of views of these videos, and hundreds of thousands of comments around these messages. Putting display ads on sites for this many views would have cost the candidates hundreds of thousands of dollars at moderate costs per thousand impressions, but they don’t have to spend this amount online. Because the message their pushing, because interaction with these brands, because the user base community driven campaigns online are much, much, much more powerful then a banner ad could ever be.

Now if only companies could focus on delivering engaging user focused interaction rather then trying to spend money on improving the brand maybe they could leverage or harness the real power of the internet.

News from the blogosphere hit one of my favourite tv shows today, ESPN’s Pardon The Interruption – I say TV show, but I listen to the podcast here in the UK. The news was that Greg Oden(GO), a basketball center with the Portland Trailblazers, had publicly endorsed Barak Obama on his blog. The post was followed by over 170 comments (mostly positive) and a bunch of other blog posts like this (mixed results).

Both hosts from PTI were giving GO dap – i.e. credit –for taking a political stance and being vocal about his political leaning. I was born during the later stage of a time when many athletes were thought leaders, to a certain extent, in the US. On PTI Michael Wilbon rattled off the names Jim Brown, Muhammad Ali, and basketball players like Bill Russell, Bill Walton and Bill Bradley (who’s now in politics, not just talking politics in the locker room) who were all vocal about their political beliefs. Before these athletes there was Jackie Robinson, the black power salute at the Olympic Games, and other acts of politics and sport mixing. Whether you agreed or disagreed with these athletes you had to respect their strength in character to discuss their views. Some, like Ali, even suffering financially and reputationally (yes I know it’s not a word, don’t care) because of their views.

Today, I can only think of one other athlete, the Canadian 2 - time MVP of the NBA - Steve Nash, who also has made his political views known on occasion and has suffered some backlash for some of his views.

Personally, I think there’s too much money in endorsements for professional athletes today, and an athlete today can suffer significant financial set backs by saying the wrong thing or upsetting the wrong person. Being like Mike meant drinking Gatorade, wearing Air Jordans and buying into Brand Jordan not believing in some of the things that Mike believed in. Being like Tiger means wearing an expensive watch or investing a mutual fund or whatever else Tiger’s associated with. I’d love to see GO’s stance to be seen as a new trendsetter, one of athletes speaking their minds.

Maybe I’m a little partial to this as I’m reading Obama’s Dreams of my Father right now and I like the fact that he comes from a diverse background, something I can really relate to. Not to mention that I think he could do a whole heap of good for America’s reputation across the world and… well this wasn’t meant to be a political post so I’ll stop there. Maybe I’d feel differently if GO had endorsed McCain or Clinton on his blog. Don’t know, can’t say. But I like it in this case.

So Google’s the biggest brand in the UK as well as the world (pdf 800+ kb). To me this signals a huge shift in advertising.

I think Umair nailed it when he wrote about interaction being so cheap that building a brand through traditional advertising is no longer necessary.

For new technology products interaction is dirt cheap, even free, for traditional products access to these products is cheaper but information about the product is so accessible that if you have a crap product people will not only know they’ll tell other people.

We – technologists, marketers etc – need to focus more on creating phenomenal experiences and less on advertising perceived benefits through ads. If you focus on building great experiences the brand and the market come cheap, just ask GOOG.

If someone offered you a widget for free would you try it and then if you wanted a bigger widget later you would have to pay for it or if you wanted 1000 widgets later you’d have to pay for it would you agree to the deal?

I started thinking along these lines when I came across Fred Wilson’s blog this morning where he pointed his readers to a great article on Wired today, “Free! Why $0.00 is the future of business”. It’s a decent article, well worth a read. The money quote for me is where he takes on Milton Friedman’s “No free lunch” concept, with “a free lunch doesn’t necessarily mean the food is being given away or that you’ll pay for it later — it could just mean someone else is picking up the tab”.

I’m a big believer of heavy users should offset costs for lighter users, in society as well as in business. Making things free for basic service and asking the market to pay for premium services works. 37signals.com is a great example of this, I’ve used their basecamp and tadalist services and worked on projects where we had the premium version.

One thought, London could give free tube rides from 10 – 4 during the week, this would increase tourist spend in London and the commuters could offset this. You’d also be less likely to get tourists holding commuters up on a daily basis. From a market and supply side this concept makes a lot of sense. Why more business and societies don’t use free or the freemium business model more is beyond me. Free can be a great business model, just ask MySQL.

Where’s the money for people with a dream and a plan? I had an interesting conversation with a couple of people last night about starting up in London. Then this morning I was reminded that 3i is pulling out of early stage and a bunch of angel networks that actually operate more like venture capital funds. So where do people with a dream and a plan go for start up (seed) capital? I know you should start out with friends, family members and fools, but what if you don’t have access to capital through this channel?

Sure there are things in Europe like Seedcamp and other hubs as well a friend of A friend of mine is trying to address this through matching private individuals and other angels to entrepreneurs through his site lift-finance.net/. Is this enough capital for tech and logistic ventures that have heavy capital costs to start up? Personally I don’t think so.

Is this a common problem in places not called Silicon Valley?

Congrats Sony, looks like you’ve won the HD battle with Toshiba. You sure learned a lot from the beta max – VHS war 20 years ago. Too bad you were so focused on a 1:1 strategic battle that you might have forgot that innovation is happening at a crazy speed. So while Blu-ray might have won the partnership battle and managed to avoid a replay of the VHS situation, I’m not sure about whether Blu-ray will be the choice for consumers.

Scott Anthony has a post over on his innovation insights blog about this and when I came across this coke ad in HD on daily vision I think he’s right. The industry is being disrupted already and HD online may shake things up, I can’t see Blu-ray having nearly as much penetration as VHS did in the 80s, 90s and even the first few years of this decade.

Sure the costs of hosting high bandwidth stuff like films in HD online might be pretty high but surely the cost savings of production and distribution would off set this. I don’t have a huge TV or watch a lot of films at home so I don’t really know how it will play out from a personal point of view. But I do think that this HD commercial on DailyMotion looks pretty good. Can’t see why a movie online wouldn’t be the same.

Good luck Sony, don’t let the door hit Blu-ray on it’s way out.

More new years shenanigans

Originally uploaded by farhanlalji

I finally managed to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress and along with the upgrade decided to give the blog a new look and feel. As a consequence my layout no longer breaks when I embed videos, phew. I think it was long overdue. Let me know what you think. Facebook readers, check it out!

In a nutshell interaction is becoming cheaper so the investment in the brand promise doesn’t have to be high, as people can just interact with the brand. Simply genius in my opinion. UPDATE - now embedded.

More from Umair on his blog post.

I heart Lawrence Lessig. If you want to know what I think about the American election this year check out his blog and the video clips he’s put on his site.

I especially liked this blog post - 20 minutes of excellence in my opinion.

I found it really interesting to see that Union Square Ventures was recruiting their new analyst through their blog. Fred and his crew really get it. I really like the evaluation methodology - candidates were asked to send a link showing their web profile.

Personally, I think the best way to tell if someone gets the internet is to see their web footprint. Which is why I’m always surprised if someone in the space doesn’t have a solid blog, delicious, facebook or Linkedin profile, even worse is when I search for someone who claims to know the internet industry and I find little or no results.   I call this a web footprint and someone who get’s the web should have a sizeable web footprint. If not do they really know what they speak of?