Crowdsourcing is around us as a concept for the last 10 years. It is a combination of crowd and outsourcing which means getting a task done by engaging a crowd of people. It is a participative and democratic approach to get something done — be it a creative, a script, start up ideas or funding. Mostly crowd is the audience of online media. Apple crowdsourced photos taken with its phone by regular people around the world. P & G commercialized ideas sourced from individual creators. Coca Cola ran ‘ Share a Coke’ campaign with loved ones. Advertising agencies can crowdsource creative ideas. Publishers can crowdsource books, stories, novels. Crowdsourcing output commands a lot of respect as it is non-partisan and non-agenda oriented. It gets quick acceptance. Crowdsourcing done by an advertising agency augments its creative efforts. When an organization excessively depends on crowdsourcing, some may think it is devoid of ideas. Besides, some ideas thus sourced can be jaded or copied. Crowdsourcing is economical. It saves costs. But that is not the objective. The objective is to engage the people. Sony crowdsourced some ideas for its popular CID serial by asking people to conclude an incomplete story. Balaji Motion Pictures proposes to use the platform to get scripts. Crowdsourcing can raise funds for films and can be used to source scripts.
Month: August 2015
Lauterborn’s Four Cs of Marketing
Much water has flown through the Ganga since McCarthy proposed the famous Four Ps thirty years ago — Product, Price, Place and Promotion. It was alright for an advertiser to develop a product, price it to make a profit, place it on the retail shelf and promote it to an eager consumer. The formula does not work well these days. There is product explosion. Retailers are independent. Consumers are not pliable. It is time to think of a new model.
Lauterborn suggests a Four Cs model.
Consumer wants and needs
We have to make what someone specifically wants to buy. We can no longer sell what we make.
Consumer cost to satisfy
Price is irrelevant. We have to consider the cost of time, the cost of conscience and the cost of guilt — so many other aspects apart from price.
Convenience to buy
It is an era of e-commerce and direct marketing. It is not necessary to go physically to a place to buy. We have to consider how each segment in the market prefers to buy.
Communication
Promotion is out, communication is in . It is co-operative. Promotion was manipulative.
Prabuddha Dasgupta — A Photographer
Prabuddha Dasgupta, a photographer who celebrated nudity, passed away on 12th Aug 2012. He was 56. He was self-taught. His collection of photographs titled Women was published in 1996. It had portraits and nudes of urban Indian women. He did both the commissioned and artistic work. His photographic series Longing too is very famous. He worked with Lara Dutta and Lakshmi Menon. Lakshmi was his muse. Then he entered into a relationship with her.
Newsjacking
This coinage combines ‘hijacking’ and ‘ news’. It is the exploitation of news for marketing mileage. According to David Scott, it is the process by which you inject your ideas, or angles into breaking news in real time so as to generate media coverage for yourself or your business. In these days of social media, newsjacking has become possible in real time. Prior to this, when India won freedom in 1947, many companies attempted to appropriate a piece of independence day either subtly or brazenly. Strictly speaking it was not newsjacking as it was not in real time, but it came closest to it.
Google’s Restructuring
Google has formed a new parent company called Alphabet which will now oversee the other businesses such as:
- Calico which does research on longevity of life and biotech.
- Nest which proposes to introduce smart home products such as the Nest Thermostat.
- Fiber to provide high speed internet service.
- X — Labs which incubates projects such as self-driving cars and delivery drones.
- Ventures and Capital for investing in start ups and long-term tech trends.
Google will retain under its umbrella the search function, the advertising activity, Google maps, apps, YouTube and Android-operating system.
Alphabet ultimately will become the holding or parent company and will eventually report the earnings separately. It will replace Google as the publicly traded company. All shares of Google will be converted to Alphabet shares eventually.
All futuristic business and innovations sometimes disturbed employee focus and gave concern to investors. Google can now concentrate on areas under its umbrella, and the parent company Alphabet can chase opportunities in other promising areas.
The founders liked Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity’s most important innovations.
Firoz Rangoonwalla
Firoz Rangoonwalla passed away on Aug 4, 2015 at the age of 82. He is the first Indian cinema historian, and a film scholar. He played an important role in setting up the National Film Archive of India ( NFAI ) in Pune. He has to his credit an array of 15 well-researched books an cinema, and a huge body of reviews of films. He created the Indian Film Index ( 1970 ) which traces the journey of Indian cinema from 1913 to 1967. He wrote Indian Filmography ( 1972 ) and Bhartiya Chalchitraka Itihas in Hindi which chronicles the history of Indian cinema. He wrote two monographs — one on Guru Dutt and the other on Bimal Roy — for the NFAI. He was passionate about both Indian and foreign cinema. He loved every aspect of film making.
Samsung’s Tizen Operating System
Samsung has supported an open source operating system called Tizen which works across the devices — mobile phones to wearables to TVs. Almost a thousand developers are working on creating new uses for this platform. Nearly fifty per cent applications in the Tizen store are being created in India in a Bangalore-based TDS2015. Tizen is being promoted as the ‘ OS of Everything’. Samsung has announced two new SDKs. This will enable the developers to write native apps apart from the existing web-apps. There will be graphics driven user interface and content from the cloud-based systems. A new 3D engine will enable developers to bring 3D applications to the platform. Tizen functions can be contextualized according to the user behavior. A third of Tizen developers are from India. And a third of top apps are games. The new SDKs will bring support from HTML, Javas cript and Cascading Style Sheets. All this will enable development of intuitive UIs for the platform. Samsung proposes to create an open system for Internet of things ( IoT ) based on Tizen. Using Android compatability library, developers can bring Android apps to Tizen.
Soap Operas
A soap opera is a radio or television serial drama chiefly characterized by stock domestic situation or often melodramatic or sentimental treatment.
It is so called probably for the fact that it was formerly often sponsored by soap manufacturers. TV’s first soap in India was the 156-episode Hum Log which went on air on July 15, 1984.
Characteristics of a Soap Opera
The continuous serial has to work with a punishing schedule, normally appearing on TV once a week or more than once a week or daily. In order to do this, it establishes a base which becomes increasingly familiar to its audience, while maintaining sufficient flexibility to be able to present apparently different situations.
It provides us with the feeling of an unwritten future while giving us necessary access to the past . We are constantly wondering what will happen next — occasionally with a real cliff-hanger.
It presents us with new events which are endless variations on regular patterns and provides a range of characters which is both varied and limited. This balance of change and repetition is achieved through the organization of narrative and character.
Television calls for a lot of discipline, unlike films. It is one step ahead of theatre.
TV is such a medium that dialogues become all important factor since shots are mostly close-ups of people. When combined with the right kind of performance, good casting and good direction, we get the formula of a sure winner.
In any soap, the characters keep developing with the story. If it clicks with the audience, it can prove to be a turning point in the story.
TV serials largely depend upon certain combination of factors like good writing, good artists and good coordination.
Image Banks
Indian advertising professionals have started relying heavily on image banks. Image banks are a collection of stock photographs and videos which are on offer, after research and study of the society and its changing patterns. Image banks act as barometers to the society’s changing attitudes and predict trends and needs. All this is captured on film. Image banks encourage photographers by throwing open a global gateway to them to showcase their work and receive royalty.
The Hutch Pink puppy, the floating dias in the Deusche Bank ad are stock photographs taken from Getty Images, an international photography image bank. Getty has set up office in India, and is represented by Visage Media Services. Dell, Vipro, SBI have all used Getty images for their campaigns. Image banks are more than just still photos. The shot in Hindi film Rang De Basanti of the three MIGs flying over-head as the actors jump is a stock photograph altered for the film by adding the actors into the frame.
Imagine you wanted Albert Einstein in your ad film or ad commercial. Where would you go shoot him? Go back in time? There is a simpler solution — visage image.com. They have clips of Eiffel Tower, the Buckingham Palace, the San Francisco Bridge, historical events, planets. One can take one’s pick. Another organization that supplies creative images with Indian faces is www.imagesbazar.com. It is set up by Sandeep Maheshwari. It has seven lac plus images in stock. The web-site is fully e-searchable and e-commerce website. The search takes less than two seconds. Another web-site ShotIndia.com has been launched by Sandeep in 2009. Here anybody can upload pictures, and when it is sold, the person receives 50 per cent of the amount. It has more than 3000 registered members who load thousands of images everyday. At present over 6,000 customers in more than 42 countries are using images from Images Bazaar.com and ShotIndia.com for advertising, marketing and publishing. Their all-India toll free number is 1800-11-6869.
Haute Couture
Who in the world will wear clothes like that? Nobody does wear them anyway; because they are not clothes. These are a designer’s fantasy which expresses his vision of the world artistically. In other words, haute couture. We hear this word many a time to communicate high fashion. Its other connotations include the houses of fashion which are authorized to call them couturiers. These houses form the ‘Chambre Syndicate De La Haute Couture Pariesienne.’ A coutre line is an opportunity to show off the designer’s genius rather than an attempt to sell too many clothes. For all fashion houses, the big money lies in accessories and fragrances.
How clothes of normal wear emerge from all this? Twice a year, each House of Fashion presents Haute Courure collection for spring/summer and Autmn/Winter at the Louvre. With Haute Couture line, the designer has already done a lot of ground work. He has developed the concept, the mood, the feel, the fabrics and so on. Now all he has to do is to turn fantasies into realities — give them a practical form.
Boutique and Pret-A-Preter come into the picture to offer these controlled fantasies, which one can wear. At exclusive boutiques, we might be fitted by the designer himself/herself. The Pret-A-Preter, the ready-to-wear ones are available all over the world. Ready-to-wear lines draw inspiration from the couture. They, however, have their own identity.