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.

La théorie selon laquelle l’information est commune et indivisible et tout un chacun peut y puiser à pleines mains, médias sociaux aidant, est fausse. Les  médias sociaux sont une mode, cette mode s’appuie sur deux apparences;  convivialité des rapports entre nous, et abondance de l’information qu’on nous sert. Rien n’est moins vrai. Le fait qu’une personne voit sa photo reprise par des centaines d’amis, qu’un politicien échange – mon Dieu quel mot! – avec ses commettants,  contribue à créer l’image de la convivialité en question. Mais il suffit de tomber malade, et les centaines d’amis oublieront de mettre votre photo de l’hosto, ils vont oublier que vous existez. Le politicien, lui, vous enverra balader dès que vous le confronterez – il est dans les média sociaux pour vous séduire, si ca ne marche pas, tant pis!

La surabondance de l’information est l’autre abject mensonge dont se nourrissent les médias sociaux. L’accès à l’information est restreint à ce qu’on appelle communément des décideurs et ils n’ont aucune, mais aucune intention de mettre de la vrai info dans leur profil Twitter par exemple. Ils, les décideurs, peuvent partager leur points de vue sur les meilleures boîtes en ville par exemple….

Ressaisissez-vous avant qu’il ne soit trop tard. Un journal, on le jette, un livre on l’oublie – s’ils n’ont rien à vous apprendre. La télé, on l’éteint, la radio on ne la met pas; un CD de choix, c’est mieux.

Mais que faire du besoin qui nous démange jusqu’aux tripes, d’informer nos amis-sociaux de notre nouvelle coupe de cheveux par exemple? Saisissant besoin.

Sur de besoins similaires repose le monumental succès de Google entre autres. Facebook, Twitter et compagnie ne peuvent pas le rattraper, ils diversifient simplement nos activités, relations, pensées, et les modulent pour que tout soit cool.

Rien ne reste de la distance que j’ai avec mon journal-papier, que je feuillette, par-ci quelque chose m’attire, ailleurs autre chose me fait sourire. Le papier a ce côté rassurant d’une technologie vieille de plusieurs siècles.

Oui mais, au Québec on détruit la Forêt Boréale pour faire des hebdos! Hélas, l’industrie forestière du Québec fait vivre 45 000 personnes, vous dirait Gilles Duceppe.

Entre la fluidité des médias sociaux et l’aspect anti-écolo du papier, il y a une solution.

Contactez donc Ethnique Media inc. et demandez.

Instead I want to tell you about a good friend of ours, who is an amazing photographer and is now offering baby, maternity and newborn photography services. Pepita Photography is the project of Mariana Dankova, a creative graphic-design artist and photographer, with which Ethnique Media Inc has been working for years.

Pepita Photography specializes in the photography of kids, newborns and babies as well as of expecting moms. You can see ample samples of her quality work online: just visit the link for her babies gallery or her children gallery.

With the advent of digital photography, parents all too often snap hundreds of pictures of their babies or kids, thinking that it is enough in order to immortalize this all-so important period in their children lives. What a mistake; because nothing can replace the services of a professional photographer. If you don’t believe me, just visit Pepita Photography’s galleries and you’ll be convinced.

You can also follow Mariana on her photography blog, where she regularly discusses and posts examples of her work.

These beautiful photos could be of you or your baby. Just contact Pepita Photography.

Malheureusement, hier, La Presse a publiée un article sur les medias ethniques. Il n’y a rien d’intéressant ou de nouveau dans cet article, mais ce qui me choque c’est qu’il a même des erreurs. D’âpres les deux “chercheurs” citées par le journaliste:

Mon intuition, c’est que cette diversité va prendre sa place dans les médias sociaux, qui deviendront le nouveau lieu d’échange communautaire.

Donc d’âpres ces “académiciens” des medias ethniques, les medias sociaux ne sont pas encore devenus le nouveau lieu d’échange communautaire. Doit-on comprendre que les media sociaux et le Web 2.0 est pour le moment le domaine exclusif des communautés “non-culturelles”, c’est à dire les communautés de “souche”, et que les communautés culturelles n’ont pas encore pris leur place dans le Web 2.0? Cette affirmation est complètement fausse, peut-être même insultante. Mais surtout cette conclusion me fait rire et démontre que les auteurs de ces “recherches” ne sont probablement pas présents sur le Web 2.0 eux-mêmes, et ne comprennent rien du tout a la consommation des medias fait par les membres des communautés culturelles au Québec.

The census will reveal the extent of several well-documented trends, such as the growth of America’s Hispanic population [...]. Cesar Conde, president of Univision Networks, a Spanish-language media company, says it will be a “wake-up to marketers”. Once the results are in, firms are likely to invest more in marketing to minorities, to develop more products to appeal specifically to them, to advertise in languages other than English and to hire more racially diverse models.

Basically, this new census will further cement the importance of ethnic-oriented marketing.

And hand-in-hand with this switch in marketing, comes the even bigger change: the move to hyper-targeting that marketing is experiencing, through ethnic and community media, to specialty media and content-targeted Internet advertisement:

Peter Francese, a demographer at Ogilvy & Mather, an advertising agency, thinks the 2010 census will permanently change marketing. When companies analyse the census data, they will see that cities, and even some neighbourhoods, are so diverse now that broad advertising campaigns are no longer suitable. Mass-market advertising, he says, will become “extinct”. Marketers will instead have to focus on reaching specific households—just as the Census Bureau is preparing to do.

The print-edition cover is a classic example of men’s-mag know-how: a gorgeous woman (singer Rihanna), pretty much naked, printed so vividly you can count the lashes on the big brown eyes that reach deep into your soul and beg you to buy. But on the iPhone, poor Rihanna stares dimly from a tiny screen like a little mouse.

and

Reading GQ on a phone is like browsing the Internet, following a succession of disembodied pages who knows where, with pop-up ads ambushing every path. The pages are not much more than snapshots of the print edition rather than proper Web pages.

Clearly making the jump to the digital world isn’t that straight forward. The print magazine is tightly coupled to its technology and platform (quality large print on quality paper) and when transfered to the digital world, if not done so properly, looses these main selling points and distinguishing characteristics. Because the reality is that people that purchase these 10$ glossy magazines do so for the glosiness and the quality of photos and easy of flip-through. The value of magazines isn’t only in their text stories and gossip. These are already available in large quantities and free on the Internet, and if this textual content was the sole value-added of magazines, they would have long ago disappeared in favor of free web-based blogs and sites like TMZ.

The key for magazine publishers is not to emulate the web and make small-rez and hardly-navigable textual versions of their magazines available online. The key is to identify the main differentiating points of glossy magazines, discover what makes them unique and sellable, and somehow replicate or add to this experience with digital tools.

I know, it’s easier said than done.

I don’t want to paraphrase the article, you should read it instead. Obviously, the main question that the article explores, and drives magazine publishers mad, is “how to make money online”. An interesting approach is to include the digital views in the base advertisement rates: that is count the eyes viewing the digital magazine and include these in the ad-viewership number, which eventually determines ad rates.

A complementary approach is to create what I would call “digitally augmented ads”, that is, ads that provide digital features and charge extra fees for these features. For example, embed in the digital version of the ad a video that users can click on and view or embed a website links such that users can be drawn to visit the site of the advertiser. It seems like this idea is actually already gained ground:

Advertisers can pay extra for digital features, such as a tag the user taps to go to the product website or to watch a video ad. Out of approximately 180 ad pages in the December GQ, more than three-quarters included one of these extras.

The big plus of the Internet is that all these new techniques can actually be precisely measured and monitored. It’s easy to measure the viewership numbers, and it’s easy to measure the number of viewers interacting with these digitally augmented ads. This is one of the biggest strengths of the Internet vs traditional print media, and it is one of the foundations of the business model of Internet advertisement giants, such as Google.

These digital augmented ads are nice and dandy for publishing giants such as Conde Nast, News Corp or our local Rogers, Transco and Quebecor, but what about small independent publishers that don’t have the technical or financial means to implement such online advertisement strategies?

It’s a tough question to answer, and I want to keep that for another post.

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.