Today we talk about: East Coast vs. West Coast (sorry, but the sound isn’t as great as Studio D, but we’ll be back there next week), Learning from the Porn Industry, Porn kills Beta and Blue-Ray, Communitelligence and How to Pitch Bloggers, Mr. Penn still dealing with bad press, Buying Patterns in Second Life, Matthew Ebel Bootlegs, CDs without the CD,ISO as a better way to get music.
John is at: PR Online Convergence
Chris will be at Podcamp Europe
Our theme song is called Mellow G by Fonkmasters from the Podsafe Music Network
Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.
Unknown Speaker 0:08
This is marketing over coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.
John Wall 0:19
John Wall. This is marketing over coffee. I’m Christopher Penn. And we’re doing today we’ve got East Coast West Coast edition. We’re going gangsta marketing.
Christopher Penn 0:29
That’s right in the only coffee I’ve got as decaf because it’s almost 9pm.
John Wall 0:33
That’s it is almost six here in beautiful Los Angeles. I am right outside of Universal Studios and overlooking the vivid entertainment office building is a whole different kind of marketing.
Unknown Speaker 0:46
Yes, it is, but surprisingly effective.
Unknown Speaker 0:50
And extremely.
Christopher Penn 0:52
You have to admit, though, also, it’s probably one of the most competitive industries in terms of online marketing.
John Wall 0:57
Yeah, that’s true, too. It’s just insane on the online side. How much how many battles are going on? They really they’re pretty much king of the DVD. But on the online market, there’s a whole bunch of things there. It’s so funny. They’re really classic like 1930s or 40s movie production house, you know, the talent signs with them exclusively, and stays with them. But yeah, the online side, it’s just a bloody war of, you know, marketing and then tastes everything from mainstream to as extreme as you can imagine. Yeah,
Christopher Penn 1:28
exactly. gluing foreign imports and things. It’s really interesting to look at how they do like a lot of search stuff, because they’re banned from AdWords programs, things like that. So they have to really go kind of on the fringes of extreme marketing.
John Wall 1:43
Yeah. And I know, you know, tons of them are using, I mean, you wouldn’t call them link farms. They’re more like micro sites, you know, they have thousands of sites with thousands of URLs. So when you search for stuff, you go there and then it all funnels you to the main page is where you would start paying for content, but like Have these this outer ring of, you know, you kind of have all these sites orbiting and they’re all legitimate sites. It’s not like, Well, probably a huge ton of them are automated, and you know, generate automatically but it’s still it’s like it’s real content. It’s not just like, you know, click here to see this. Exactly,
Christopher Penn 2:16
exactly. And I’ve seen some of them they were one of the ones that came out with widgets before the mainstream ever caught on to them the ability to share out in very small portions of your content to get people back to your site.
John Wall 2:30
Yeah, that’s right. And are you having like interactive banners that can then lead right into the content play Do
Christopher Penn 2:37
you have free galleries that that you can distribute in terms of content they will get some of the ones fresh wants to license out content to affiliates in order to bring bring it so I guess in terms of you know, marketing for the future, we probably should be hanging out with them to see what they’re doing now that we’ll be doing in you know, two or three years.
John Wall 2:54
Oh, yeah, no, that’s that’s your gambling and in the porn industry, all that’s always where it hits first. You know the motion pictures VHS god you know there’s there’s some who will maintain that Sony yeah exactly the reason beta crashed was because they didn’t do the adult industry whenever else did and unbelievably history just completely repeating itself
Christopher Penn 3:17
I know blu ray and HD DVD
John Wall 3:19
yeah they refuse to take it for blu ray and so I don’t know why I can’t come up with a reason why the same thing is not going to happen all over again.
Christopher Penn 3:28
I think this time though I’m with with bandwidth being as powerful as it is. The disk itself is almost a souvenir
John Wall 3:35
Yeah, I would agree with you completely. I in fact, I I’ve got an Xbox 360 at home and I’ve been I’ve downloaded HD stuff. Why should I bother buying the drive when for the same price price of what I would rent I can get the HD you know, pipe right to my house. Exactly.
Christopher Penn 3:49
Exactly. So what’s on your plate this week besides the adult video world?
John Wall 3:54
Yeah, actually very little on Adult video on my plate. Thankfully. I’m at this conference. Community diligence. It’s called, it’s what PR online? You know, I always do this, I think I’m gonna make such a bonehead, you think as a marketing guy would have this right on top, your online convergence oh seven. And so we’ve got a lot of PR folks here. And it’s really funny. It’s been interesting. One of the biggest things they just want to know is how do I pitch bloggers you know, these are people that are used to going to, especially here in Hollywood, you know, they go to The Hollywood Reporter, or to, you know, Billboard magazine, and they know how to pitch these people on their story and tell them about what they have going on. But they have no idea of how to get to bloggers and they do realize that, you know, a lot of stuff now hits the blogosphere first and then goes to the mainstream press after that.
Unknown Speaker 4:41
Yeah, after gaining some critical mass, what are they advising?
John Wall 4:44
You know, it’s, it’s been kind of a mixed bag, but the the majority of the advice folks have given is just, you know, you have to treat them as an individual. And that kind of given the angle that I’ve put on is you have to treat them like they’re just some person you’ve met on the street. You have no idea If they’re, you know, somebody that’s trying to become a professional journalist and try and make their living doing this, or if they’re just some crazy angry person in their basement that has an axe to grind and some weird opinion or some mainstream opinion. Yeah. But yeah, the best advice was definitely people are saying, you know, go out there and figure out who these influential bloggers are, read their blogs, comment and follow them for, you know, at least two or three weeks before you before you do anything, right. So you can get a feel for what these people are liking, you know, what kind of comments are acceptable on their blog and things like that. And then Oh, the big one. And this, this applies to everybody, too, is the key is treat them as if you were dealing with, let’s say you had, you know, there were a ton of publications you deal with, but maybe there’s one that you advertise a lot with, it’s a little bit more on focus, and you would treat those reporters a little differently. You’d probably give them access a week ahead of time to things right. And they’re saying this is the same thing with bloggers You know, when if you’re going to go to the mainstream press on you Know the 15th on the 12th, you want to go to your top 10 bloggers and say, Hey, here’s something that I’m going to be, you know, that’s going to hit the press next week, you know, would you be interested in taking a look at this ahead of time? And, you know, we’d be happy to let you. In fact, they’re saying that that’s a great way to seed the mainstream press. You give it to the bloggers a week early, and it will, it may gain enough momentum in the in the blogosphere on its own, to push itself into the mainstream press without you doing anything,
Unknown Speaker 6:25
right, in which case, you don’t have to do the massive PR spend.
John Wall 6:29
Right, exactly, exactly. You did, you know, get things to the front page of, you know, the journal or the times without having to even work through that. And it’s funny to a lot of people are talking about how so much of mass media has been picked up in acquisitions that, you know, when you used to have a team of 20 reporters across 20 different pubs. Now you may be pitching for people that are still covering, you know, for those same 20 bucks. So the competition has just gotten even worse for the spaces.
Christopher Penn 7:00
Has there been any talk about what to do from the new media side? I mean, I know on my show, I’m one of the few. I’m the only daily financial aid show, I actually have been getting press releases and things now looking at them going, I guess they think I’m a news Atlas.
John Wall 7:17
No kidding. They’re pinging you and thinking that you’re just doing this as a hobby or something. Exactly. That that’s interesting that one of the things was, you know, pretty much stay away from the press release, you know, until you have a relationship, if you have relationships, and you know, that they don’t mind getting them, you know, avoid it. And they did talk about, you know, there’s some sites out there that even, you know, pick fun at the PR industry, and, you know, they’ll post the press releases they get and they’ll put in their snarky comments or they’ll complain about, you know, the email that they got, it’s obviously spam. The general consensus among the PR folks is like, that’s damage like that’s a bad thing. But you know, I don’t know having you know, at once you’re more familiar with the, the world of the blog, you know, even somebody saying Something bad about you is not really terrible as long as they get the URL. Right, exactly. Any
Christopher Penn 8:04
press is good press these days.
John Wall 8:05
Yeah, yeah, it’s it’s the same thing with content too. It’s like the only thing worse than your content getting, you know, stolen or scraped is people ignoring your content? Exactly.
Unknown Speaker 8:15
So, that’s been big.
John Wall 8:17
I don’t know, what’s happened with you this week. What have you had going on?
Christopher Penn 8:20
There’s a couple of things in the mainstream on the on the day job front, it’s, you know, more slogging through just, you know, bad story, bad press after bad press for the industry as a whole. So, right now, kind of really keeping the head down and, you know, trying to make sure things are running smoothly internally. So that if we ever do get called on the carpet, I don’t know, imagine. I don’t know why we wouldn’t be but if we ever did, even for spurious reasons, we’d have something to work with. But there’s a couple of side projects I’ve been involved in right now, that are very, very interesting. One is trying to look at, you know, buying patterns and interest patterns of people in Second Life, whether you treat it as a retail environment we have, you know, foot traffic and things like that we treat it as a searching a browsing environment like on the web. And it’s, it’s, it’s, you know, anecdotally a bit of both so far where you have a world is so large people do have to search for it. But then when they get to their destination, it’s more of a browsing thing rather than you’ll drop you right into the exact coordinates. You pick up your item you want to purchase and then you leave. Word of mouth is turning out to be extremely powerful in Second Life because there isn’t an effective search system yet. I mean, the one that’s built into some not wonderful. So that’s Thing number one thing number two, on my scope is doing a production and independent production from Matthew evil, the musician. He’s done a series of Second Life concerts, about six of them that I was able to get to and so digital bootlegging, where you plug an audio hijack pro you jack into the streaming and you literally record the concert As it’s happening, and you don’t get no club noise audience noise or the you know, the close ruffling sound having a microphone close. And I talked to him about it and we’re creating a digital bootleg album that we’re going to be releasing as as an actual album for sale. I mean, the sound quality is good enough that it’s it’s better than most bootlegs and better than some studio productions. But it’s there’s not going to be a physical disk it’s going to be a virtual CD released in the virtual world for sale, in coordination with them crayon and the virtual thirst campaign.
John Wall 10:37
So actually then what’s the will it be like available through iTunes or through through a unique site you’ll download mp3 so how will that work?
Christopher Penn 10:46
It will actually be a an ISO CD image, which contains 13 audio tracks to bring tones. A couple of the concert script in heavy mp3 the actual tracks themselves pre ripped into mp3 below below. disk image that you’ll download and you pop a physical disk into your computer to burn it. And print out the cover art print out the the disk label if you’re so inclined. But it really will be a fully featured CD exactly the same thing you’d buy on the shelf but without the physical part.
John Wall 11:17
That’s very cool. That’s a that’s an interesting idea. We’ll be really interesting to see how that runs. And how that works. Are you concerned at all about you know, ISO is a little bit on the geeky side would you still make it available via mp3 at all or anything like that?
Christopher Penn 11:31
We certainly would and you know, the distribution costs of an actual physical disk. I mean kunafa comm charges a buck 60 for for color print plus a disk you know, and a $3 shipping charge so you know for one or 1000 so it’s not exactly a higher production cost. We could always add you know, two or three bucks to the price if someone wanted the round piece of plastic. The mp3 is already exists and stuff but you know, things like ring tones cover art, the all the all the things extra goodies on enhanced CD. And we’ll see if I can just fly or not. You know, see what happens.
John Wall 12:06
No, that sounds like a great campaign that’ll be a lot of fun to see how that that goes just kind of cracked me up to the whole idea of a bootleg without you know, the drunken guy next to us and along is fantastic.
Christopher Penn 12:18
Exactly, exactly. And it’s something for a lot of people who are doing independent music to think about is you know what, what’s the distribution system the future going to look like if if the digital ISO image or whatever format we choose works, then you really don’t need the record store anymore.
John Wall 12:37
Yeah, no, exactly. It’s still it’s just, you know, this I just feel that it’s a cultural thing that you know, we’ve gotten used to the CD store the records, I mean literally think about the way I called the record store and you know, the music store that you would go to is the only store out of all the other stores you go to where you do not really get to touch or have any interaction with the product you know, I mean, you look at the cover the image JOHN it, and maybe you’ve heard it somewhere else. But you actually don’t know what’s on there and you’re expected to buy it, you know, and it but we’ve just, that’s a cultural thing. We’ve accepted that that’s the way it’s always been. And they do have, you know, Barnes and Noble that has those systems where you scan the desk and you can listen to
Christopher Penn 13:15
listening stations and things,
John Wall 13:17
but it doesn’t matter. I mean, the web is just so much better for that. Why would I bother to drive over to Barnes and Noble when I can just do that at my house?
Christopher Penn 13:23
Yeah, exactly. There’s also a piece from the ri a was talking more about, you know, digital piracy and things like that. But it turns out, I forget whose study was it might have been Nielsen saying about 3% of all music that’s pirated as pirated online. The other 97% of pirated music are stolen music by their measure. People just swapping CDs with each other.
John Wall 13:47
No kidding. Yep. Passing CDs around and ripping. Well, yeah. What’s that? Lala is a service where you can trade CDs and I know that that’s interesting. I’m trying to
Unknown Speaker 13:59
try to thank you for that. I believe that you know, the other thing too I get assessed with public library too, you know, you go to your public library, you can rip everything there if
Unknown Speaker 14:06
you can make a perfect digital copy,
John Wall 14:08
right, right. And so you could pass I think, again, it’s, it’s just a for musical acts. It’s a change in mind frame. It’s like okay, you can’t just crank out a song now you you know, you may have to do some live shows or do some other value add stuff. That’s where you’re going to make your cash the actual files themselves or are just not going to pass.
Christopher Penn 14:25
Yeah, exactly. A lot of folks in independent music have been saying, you know, really the, the song is the promo to get out Tom, the live show to buy the merch, that’s you have the T shirt and the in by money on the cover charge and things like that. Whereas it used to be you’d have a live show to promote the disc.
John Wall 14:44
Yeah, that’s true. That is true, isn’t it? Yeah. And even thought of that, you know, free concerts in Central Park. You don’t see that anymore, you
Unknown Speaker 14:50
know, but you should just see an awful lot of free mp3 to download.
John Wall 14:54
Right, right. Exactly. Everybody’s got tracks to pass around. Very cool. Yeah. you’d mentioned Second Life to Second Life was was hot today. We had during the lunch one of the sessions, we had Linda Zimmer, who was kind of showing off some stuff. And yes, she was very hot on Second Life. There were a lot of people here that were, you know, have had no experience with social media and are just learning about newsreaders for the first time. And I thought it was a little bit much to really throw a second life at him hard as like, you really have to do this, because I think there’s a ton of hype around it. But nonetheless, it is, you know, this is something you have to think about because it is definitely the next wave of, of, you know, interaction and user interface.
Christopher Penn 15:34
Exactly. It’s, and we were talking about that the at the coffee or crayon event this morning. There’s a I mean, I would not refer most of my audience to second life because, you know, the poor college student or the you know, the poor high school student, the poor family and they’re not even going to have the computer hardware to run Second Life much less, you know, spend a lot of time in it’s a marketing there would not be it that’s not certainly not why I go I go there to connect with other people in the marketing profession.
John Wall 16:00
Yeah to get out there No, that’s that’s sound advice. Oh well that I think I will wrap hopefully off some more good stuff for next week and we will be back face to face over the our dearest Dunkin Donuts
Christopher Penn 16:12
absolutely with the bad music and I actually stopped by Wednesday morning. The they had one pot of coffee where clearly the filter was not installed right. It was watery Brown. Well, liquid was not at all coffee. So I’m very glad we’re doing it virtually this week.
John Wall 16:26
missing out on the coffee was the the guy from the post office there used to be there for a week.
Christopher Penn 16:30
No, no, no, just the disgruntled coffee lady.
John Wall 16:33
Just the angry staff. Exactly. All right. Well, good deal. Thank you very much, sir. And we will see you at the next coffee. See the next coffee.
Unknown Speaker 16:43
You’ve been listening to a marketing over coffee. You can hear Mr. Penn daily at the financial aid podcast and read more Christopher s pen.com. Mr. Wolf blogs daily at Ronan marketeer.com and podcast the show every Monday.
John Wall 17:02
The marketing over coffee theme song is called mellow g by funk masters. And you can find it at the pod safe music network pod safe music network.com or follow the link in our show notes.