Odd, but that’s exactly what I am telling you to do: go read my guest blog spot on FabriceCalando.ca about how the CBC Radio 1 in Montreal uses Facebook in a smart way. Why am I doing this? Because of the hyperlink: it takes no energy or time to click on some text on a web page and follow the hyperlink to the original article. This obviously cannot be done on physical paper.

Yet, some experienced minds here at Ethnique Media would argue that this physical limitation of paper has its value and importance. All this to say that this world is made of shades and diverging opinions and ideas. Without this diversity, the world would be a dull and ineffective place; and Ethnique Media wouldn’t be here.

The LP album cover is a great recent example of this. You make an LP containing the recorded art of musicians and then you insert the LP in a carton sleeve. Now you have a huge paper surface which you can use as a platform for displaying another piece of art.

What more, this piece of art is now central to the whole music experience recorded on the LP. This piece of art must capture the listeners visual attention and hopefully encourage a purchase. This piece of art must be memorable and imprint itself in the listener’s mind. Finally and magically, this piece of art must distill the essence of sound into a printed image.

Media in general follows this growing and evolving characteristic even quicker. Out of print came virtual, out of virtual came interactive, social. Paper now mixes with computer screen through scan-able advertisement, smart phone apps interact with your magazine. Your virtual can become your printed. You can mash-up text, images, video and sound to create other media.

For example, Wired’s article on Best Album Art of All Time, the article that inspired me to write this post. Wired is a print magazine, but it also has a web facet. The web allows for such rich mixes between image gallery and written article, such as the article above.

Actually, “article” is not the right word here, “piece” would be more correct. This piece can be viewed in any order, just by clicking on different images. Finally, all readers can augment the piece by leaving comments. This piece is an accomplishment of media art, best suited for the internet media.

As the article points out, many different marketing tools are bundled together under the umbrella of “online advertisement”. That makes the comparison between online and TV ads a bit unfair, as online ads include direct advertisement by email, contextual search ads and display ads, whereas TV ads are usually only display (unless you have an interactive TV from the future, but I am not sure they are producing those yet).

What’s more, the reality is that the distinction between “online” and other medias such as TV is getting blurrier by the minute. For example, more and more people actually consume TV on the Web, radio is also being massively consumed online and everyone reads their news on the Web.

Still, the reality is that this milestone is important, and is clearly showing that the Internet has now become an advertisements juggernaut.

And this trend is only set to accelerate, especially as “online” and other medias converge further into one massive soup of professional, interactive and user submitted content super-media.

But the layout of the landing page is great, the color scheme is simple but beautiful, and the video ad is amazingly well shot, with a refreshing analog feel to the recording. And the concept of humans holding of the search text-bar throughout the video is a great idea.

Here it is, enjoy some fresh web marketing directly from the land of the rising sun.

“Coke, however, thinks it can do just that [assessing a campaign’s value]. Its new model guarantees to cover advertising agencies’ costs, plus a bonus of up to 30%. The bonus depends on a number of metrics, including the agency’s overall performance, and the sales and market share of the products being advertised. Coke insists that its aim is not to cut costs but to inspire creativity and efficiency.”

Now, I am no expert, and the article is fairly basic and is not delving much into the details of this “by performance” payment model. But to me this sounds like a bad offering, that is, seen from an advertisement agency point of view obviously.

First, a traditional brand-marketing campaign is not like an online contextual advertisement campaign: it is hard to obtain complete viewership information and there is no direct consumer action that can be recorded (there is no URL link to click on in a newspaper or on the TV).

Second, this scheme that Coke (and others are pushing) is simply an attempt to spread out the risk involved in product development, such that the advertisement agencies involved also bear some of this risk. This practice is unfair in my opinion. Would a subcontractor building car parts accept to share the risk in making the car, by getting paid only cost for producing the parts and hoping for a return if car sales are successful? I highly doubt it: large corporations can not expect the double whammy benefit of outsourcing (and saving on costs) and spreading the risk to those they outsource (and thus saving on product development cost too).

Thirdly, there is already a mechanism in the advertisement world that ensures that risk is somewhat spread to advertisement agencies: it is called bidding for a contract. Bidding can involve hours of work that are not billed by a large number of agencies, and the client is given the opportunity to pick the best campaign. I do not see why, once the client has made a decision, the selected advertisement agency has to further pick-up the tab for clients; and all the loosing agencies are left with nothing but a financial loss.

Fourthly, a client builds and sells a product, whereas the advertisement agency simply promotes and pushes this product. If the client fails at making a great product, which is then unsuccessful in its sales, there is absolutely no reason to punish the advertisement agency that created the product’s campaign. Again, I repeat that this is nothing but a spread of the risk and losses away from the client and towards the agency.

Finally, a trial involving lawyers not billing by the hour but instead billing according to the outcome of the case is a completely different situation than a marketing campaign. In a trial, the service (the product) is entirely provided (produced) by the lawyers, it’s not the defendant that argues their cases. In other words, in a trial it is the lawyer who produces the product being sold. In an advertisement campaign, the product is made by the client and not by the marketing agency, so the analogy to layers can not hold in any way.

I could go on and on about why this is a bad idea.

It could also be a good idea, but only if this risk taking by advertisement agencies is also accompanied by a higher rewards. Unfortunately, a 30 % bonus does not qualify as a higher reward.

Books, magazines and newspapers are all different incarnations of the same medium, and I re-iterate my view that newspaper design can be treated more like magazine design, especially when it comes to the front page (and actually other key pages too).

This is where newspaper designers can take cue from book covers; very often, book covers are the only heavily design oriented portion of a book. And they are a central part of its sales-appeal, they are often the last message publishers can throw at potential customers in order to close a sale. The same could be said of newspapers.

Today, the CEO of Google gave the closing keynote speech at the Newspaper Association of America’s annual conference, attempting to address the issues that newspapers execs have.

Read the story, but I believe that newspaper execs are barking at the wrong dog, and are miserably failing to understand that the issue lies with their content and their online pricing strategy, not with Google or other news aggregators.

Newspapers need to reinvent themselves and their pricing strategy on the Internet. Apple’s iTunes has showed that people are ready to pay for a good service on the Web, now it is time for newspapers to follow suit. Newspapers need to concentrate on creating creative and original content, not just reprint AP and other wire stories.

Once the creative content is there, you can charge customers to access this original material online. If no one else can provide for free the same quality and content of coverage on a certain topic, then customers will pay to read online. Opinion stories, rich editorials, investigative journalism, local coverage, community (or ethnic) coverage: all these could be original and unique content that readers would pay for.

And it doesn’t need to cost a lot, because a million readers at a certain price, the money adds up very quickly.

The article clearly mentions the fact around which Ethnique Media is built:

“At Kang & Lee, more than 20 years of consumer research for our clients has consistently illustrated that our target, Asian-immigrant consumers, do, in fact, gravitate to their native-language media for the comfort of the language, as well as for the daily editorial content that contains richer news and information from Asia, (and from within their own ethnic communities in the U.S.) than would otherwise be featured regularly in any mainstream media outlet.”

As it is clearly stated above, Ethnic press has an undeniable advantage over tradition press: this advantage is its content, and the fact that is geared towards the communities themselves.