Apple’s killjoy attorneys shatter Newsday’s fun

Newsday may be a bad newspaper with an even worse Website, but it had one funny commercial (although, as I pointed out on Sept 13, the ad’s message was anything but flattering to Newsday’s ailing print edition).

In any event, lawyers for Apple apparently forced Newsday to pull the commercial — whose punch line featured a shattering iPad.

This is “yet another classic example of lawyers needlessly sucking all the fun out of life,” observes NetworkWorld, which reports on the ad’s disappearance after it racked up several hundred thousand YouTube views in just a few days.

Write the future

If you haven’t yet seen this 3-minute Nike epic, watch it now.

Starring international soccer superstars Didier Drogba, Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo, the video has broken the record for attracting the biggest viral audience in the first week of a campaign, with 7.8 million views, according to Ad Age. Ten days from launch, its YouTube count alone is about 10 million.

This is great stuff, which, after all, is its point.

It’s all about relationships

You have 45 active clients, pretty close together geographically, and you want to stay in touch, get that two-way thing going.

A company with that goal approached midwest marketing maven Michael Libbie (pictured). Libbie demurred, suggesting to his potential client that he get off his tuchas and hit the street:

“Look“, I said, “we could create a survey for you and take your money and maybe even sell you more stuff.  But what you need to do, and you are not going to like my answer, is get in your vehicle and go see each one of these customers.  You, not a sales person, not somebody else from the office … you.”

It’s not always about technology.  It’s not always about a third-person visit.  It’s about relationships and going out and asking for the business.

Click here for Libbie’s full post at Insight Cubed.

It’s just very sad

I don’t have it in me as the sun sets this Friday for a fresh rant about the $4-million well-intentioned but wrong-headed newspapers-are-alive-and-kicking campaign engineered by the New York Press Association. I said my piece on Feb. 23 (Hey, Opie — in New York, the newspapers think it’s the 1950s. Let’s put our pop in a sack and ride the Chevy to the levy and gaze at the stars) and on Feb. 18 (Promoting the walking dead).

[UPDATE: Click the Feb. 23 link and scroll to the bottom to read fresh comments posted March 31 through April 2.]

Today, Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish on the Atlantic put this ad from the campaign under a “Creepy Ad Watch” headline.

Sullivan quoted Copyranter:

New York City residents, your local papers want you to know that, while, yes they may be mortally wounded by digital news sources and even stupid blogs that break the big stories before they can, they’re not going down without passive-aggressively making you feel guilty as hell about their demise. That “Told ya” is just so preciously fucking childish.

And Lindsay Beyerstein on BigThink said this:

Print is officially dead. I held out hope longer than most, but I knew it was all over yesterday when this ad appeared at my New York City subway stop. …

This ad perfectly distills the ineptness of the newspaper industry. An unidentified group of managers at community papers pooled their last remaining dollars to hire an advertising agency to build a campaign around the idea of “Nobody loves us, but we told you so.” The money they spent guilt-tripping their readership could have funded coverage said readers actually care about.

Click on Coney Media’s Feb. 23 post to see the other ads in this series.

3 quick reads: Excerpts

CHRIS SALMON ON TWITTER’S HIP LITTLE BROTHER:

From The Guardian

It isn’t easy for a web-based music company to come up with a great, original idea, realise it effectively and then convince people they need it in their lives. … Yet a new service called mflow thinks it might just have cracked it. And from the growing buzz ahead of its full launch on April 15, it seems quite a few people agree.

Download the free mflow software and you’re presented with a desktop application/player not dissimilar to iTunes. Users can then search a large (but by no means exhaustive) catalogue of music, hear 30 second previews and buy high quality MP3s for 79p-99p per track.

The big twist is that mflow also closely resembles Twitter: you can follow other mflow users and they can follow you. If someone wants to recommend a track to their followers, they “flow” it, along with a tweet-sized comment. The followers then get one chance to stream the song in full via their “inbox,” which is essentially a continuous playlist of all the tracks flowed to them. To add further spice, if a follower decides to purchase a track, whoever flowed it is credited with 20% of the price paid, to put towards downloading tracks.

Coney Media note: A preview of the mflow service is not available outside the UK.

MATT LAWSON ON MARKETING — HOW TO INTEGRATE PAID SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA:

From Mashable

Search and social each provide different benefits to your business, so you should leverage their strengths instead of trying to get them to deliver results that aren’t suited to the medium.

Marketers usually participate in social media to create an active dialogue with consumers around their products and services, with the main goal of building brand value, and a secondary goal of driving sales. On the other hand, marketers use paid search primarily to drive sales, leads, and conversion, and don’t expect the short text of their paid search ads to do much for branding.

JEFF JARVIS ON SERENDIPITY:

From the Buzz Machine

I constantly hear the fear that serendipity is among the many things we’re supposedly set to lose as news moves out of newsrooms and off print to online. … Serendipity, it is said, is something we get from that story we happen upon as we flip pages, the story we never would have searched for but find only or best in print. Serendipity, it is also said, is the province and value of editors, who pick the fluky and fortuitous for us. …

We can and do [get serendipity online] — mostly on Twitter and Facebook. Serendipity comes from friends who find that story and — like an editor — pass it on. If we share their judgment, we may like what they share and call that serendipity. But there’s plenty that passes me by on Twitter that I don’t like; it’s serendipitous by the usual definitions but it doesn’t work for me because it has no value; it’s not relevant.

Can an algorithm serve us serendipity? Maybe, if it has enough signals of what we and people we trust like, what interests us, what we need, our context. … Serendipity comes not from one-size-fits-all editing but from better targeting across a larger pool of possibilities. If Google can intuit intent, I think it can also serve surprise and serendipity.