Tuesday, December 1, 2009

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Posted by Steve at 2:24 AM 0 comments

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Independent Filmmakers Distribute on Their Own

August 13, 2009

Independent Filmmakers Distribute on Their Own

By MICHAEL CIEPLY

LOS ANGELES — Quentin Tarantino never had to go through this.

When “The Age of Stupid,” a climate change movie, “opens” across the United States in September, it will play on some 400 screens in a one-night event, with a video performance by Thom Yorke of Radiohead, all paid for by the filmmakers themselves and their backers. In Britain, meanwhile, the film has been showing via an Internet service that lets anyone pay to license a copy, set up a screening and keep the profit.

The glory days of independent film, when hot young directors like Steven Soderbergh and Mr. Tarantino had studio executives tangled in fierce bidding wars at Sundance and other celebrity-studded festivals, are now barely a speck in the rearview mirror. And something new, something much odder, has taken their place.

Here is how it used to work: aspiring filmmakers playing the cool auteur in hopes of attracting the eye of a Hollywood power broker.

Here is the new way: filmmakers doing it themselves — paying for their own distribution, marketing films through social networking sites and Twitter blasts, putting their work up free on the Web to build a reputation, cozying up to concierges at luxury hotels in film festival cities to get them to whisper into the right ears.

The economic slowdown and tight credit have squeezed the entertainment industry along with everybody else, resulting in significantly fewer big-studio films in the pipeline and an even tougher road for smaller-budget independent projects. Independent distribution companies are much less likely to pull out the checkbook while many of the big studios have all but gotten out of the indie film business.

“It’s not like the audience for these movies has completely disappeared,” said Cynthia Swartz, a partner in the publicity company 42 West, which has been supplementing its mainstream business by helping filmmakers find ways to connect with an audience. “It’s just a matter of finding them.”

Sometimes, the odd approach actually works.

“Anvil! The Story of Anvil,” a documentary about a Canadian metal band, turned into the do-it-yourself equivalent of a smash hit when it stretched a three-screen opening in April into a four-month run, still under way, on more than 150 screens around the country.

“I paid for everything, I took a second mortgage on my house,” said Sacha Gervasi, the film’s director.

Mr. Gervasi, whose studio writing credits include “The Terminal,” directed by Steven Spielberg, nearly three years ago, began filming “Anvil!” with his own money in hopes of attracting a conventional distributor. The movie played well at Sundance in 2008, but offers were low.

So Mr. Gervasi put up more money — his total cost was in “the upper hundred thousands,” he said — to distribute the film through a company called Abramorama, while selling the DVD and television rights to VH1.

The aging rockers of Anvil have shown up at theaters to play for audiences. Famous fans like Courtney Love were soon chattering online about the film. And an army of “virtual street teamers” — Internet advocates who flood social networks with admiring comments, sometimes for a fee, sometimes not — were recruited by a Web consultant, Sarah Lewitinn, who usually works the music scene.

The idea behind this sort of guerrilla release is to accumulate just enough at the box office to prime the pump for DVD sales and return the filmmaker’s investment, maybe even with a little profit. “Anvil!” has earned roughly $1 million worldwide at the box office so far, its producer, Rebecca Yeldham, said.

Finding even relatively small amounts of money to make and market a film is, of course, no small trick. “The Age of Stupid” raised a production budget of about £450,000 (about $748,000) from 228 shareholders, and is soliciting a bit more to continue its release, Franny Armstrong, its director, said.

“Money has simply vanished,” said Mark Urman, an independent-film veteran, speaking of the financial drought that has pushed producers and directors into shouldering risks that only a few years ago were carried by a more robust field of distributors.

Many of those distributors have either disappeared or severely tightened their operations, including Warner Independent Pictures, Picturehouse, New Line Cinema, Miramax, the Weinstein Company, Paramount Classics and its successor, Paramount Vantage.

Typically, the distributors have paid money upfront for rights to release films. That helped the producers recover what they had already spent on production, but it often left the distributor with most or all of the profit.

Mr. Urman’s own position as president for distribution at Senator Entertainment evaporated this year when financing fell through for a slate of films. So he started a new company, Paladin, to support filmmakers willing to finance their own releases.

In September, Paladin is expected to help the filmmaker Steve Jacobs and his fellow producers release “Disgrace,” a drama with John Malkovich that is based on a novel by the Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee.

The film won a critics prize at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, but no attractive distribution offers. One key to releasing it without a Miramax, said Mr. Urman, is to minimize expensive advertising in newspapers or on television and play directly to a friendly audience — in this case through extensive promotional tie-ins with Mr. Coetzee’s publishers.

“Everyone still dreams there’s going to be a conventional sale to a major studio,” said Kevin Iwashina, once an independent-film specialist with the Creative Artists Agency and now a partner at IP Advisors, a film sales and finance consulting company. But, he said, smart producers and directors are figuring out how to tap the value in projects on their own.

Some big companies will still be on the hunt in Toronto this year, where the annual festival is scheduled to begin Sept. 10.

“We’ll be there in full force,” said Nancy Utley, a president of Fox Searchlight Pictures, which last year acquired rights to “Slumdog Millionaire” and “The Wrestler,” both screened in Toronto.

“It’s a great opportunity for us,” said Robert G. Friedman, a chairman of Summit Entertainment, which acquired “The Hurt Locker,” directed by Kathryn Bigelow. The film was offered in Toronto last year and has already been mentioned widely as an Oscar contender.

But some filmmakers and producers pointed toward the festival have already started working for themselves, rather than waiting for the few remaining, and ever fussier, buyers to swoop in.

In fact, the next-wave Tarantinos are in Canada already — coddling not prospective buyers, but concierges, who just might steer people to promotional parties and screenings.

“These guys have figured it out,” Barry Avrich, a member of the festival’s governing board, said of the do-it-yourself crowd. “They’re into all the cool hotels, to get the concierges thinking about them.”
Posted by Steve at 8:30 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

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Posted by Steve at 5:24 PM 0 comments

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Is the Amazon Kindle 1 Still Worth Buying?

Is the Amazon Kindle 1 Still Worth Buying?
By Tracey A Edwards Platinum Quality Author

Article Word Count: 319 [View Summary] Comments (0)

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If you have yet to jump on the ebook reader craze then you may be wondering whether you should buy the ebook reader that started it all - the original Kindle 1. Or choose the updated Kindle 2, or even perhaps if you should by a Sony Reader instead. With so many to choose from, which one is right for you?

In this article I'll go over some of the features of the original Amazon Kindle 1 so you can decide if it's still worth buying, or you should upgrade instead.

Back in late 2007 when the Kindle 1 first appeared, the ebook reader market was relatively small in the U.S. and while there were some readers already on the market (such as the Sony Reader), it was mainly being bought by high tech gadget lovers. It wasn't until Amazon bought the Kindle to the everyday book reader that people started to get excited about it.

When it launched it sold out within 5 hours. I think everybody, not least Amazon, were taken completely by surprise and just how much demand the everyday reader would embrace the technology.

It was sleek, could hold up to 200 books, was wireless (which means you could use it all over the country) and was relatively light and small to carry around.

But it wasn't without its faults. Many people complained that some of the buttons where not in a logical place and images didn't display very well on screen.

So Amazon went back and has bought out its latest version, the Kindle 2. An updated version that is smaller and more compact, can hold nearly double the amount of books and addresses many of the problems that customers wanted in the original machine.

Essentially the Amazon Kindle 2 it is a much improved version and probably worth your while paying that bit extra for the special features, rather than worrying about the original reader (which Amazon doesn't even sell anymore).

The Amazon Kindle 1 Review has hopefully helped you decide whether it is right for you or not. You can reader more Amazon Kindle Review's here.

Posted by Steve at 11:50 AM 0 comments

Saturday, July 25, 2009

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All Marketers Are Liars Blog




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Member since 08/2003

Am I the only one distracted by apostrophes and weird "quoting"?

When I get a manuscript or see a sign that misuses its and it's and quotes, I immediately assume that the person who created it is stupid.

I understand that this is a mistake on my part. They're not necessarily totally stupid, they're just stupid about apostrophes.

It's a moral failing on my part to conflate the two, but I bet I'm not the only one. What else are your customers judging you on?

It's not just about being a grammar stickler. The fact is, we're constantly looking for clues and telling ourselves stories based on limited information. It shouldn't matter, but it does.

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Posted by Seth Godin on July 25, 2009 | | TrackBack (0)

Social norms

The math for handshakes is difficult. You have to stand, look, squeeze, time and end in just the right way or it's weird. Skip the handshake or do a six-second version and people look at you funny.

Interpersonal relations have had thousands of years to develop. Online, there's been no time.

There are people who tweet in a way that rubs you the wrong way. Marketers who build businesses that seem scammy to you, or build websites that feel wrong. I get plenty of email from people that just doesn't feel right, whether it's in ALL CAPS or just difficult in tone or approach.

How do norms get formed? I think it's simpler than it looks: we interact with people who use the norm we use. We follow or read or hang out with people who use the same social constructs we do.

There might be people at the party down the street who are quite comfortable with each other and the things they're doing with or to each other... but you'd hate it. So you don't go.

Cliques form, which become communities and then, eventually a norm arrives. People like us like people like us.

If you're not attracting the people you want to be attracting online, perhaps you're not acting the way they do.

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Posted by Seth Godin on July 24, 2009 | | TrackBack (0)

Welcome to island marketing

If you run a business on a small island, every interaction matters and every customer is precious.

There's a finite number of people you're going to be able to sell to, and every person you interact with knows everyone else, so you always have to be on your best behavior. You can't say, "tough" and then go on to the next person. You can't run ads that churn and burn through an endless supply of naive prospects. You only get one chance to make a first impression, and on the island, that impression matters.

Consider an airline in Chicago that can bully and bluster and greedify its way through an endless supply of business travelers, and compare them to a short hop carrier on Martha's Vineyard. The Vineyard airline knows that people can always switch to the other short hop airline or the ferry, and they also know that the folks they serve have power, because there aren't an endless supply.

As you've probably guessed, like most things in our ever shrinking world, all marketers are now on an island.

The island perspective is the Zappos model. Every interaction is both precious and an opportunity to delight. Marketers no longer have the money or the platform to harass and promote their way to success by burning through the market. Instead, we have to act like we're on an island earning and then nurturing a permission asset.

Through this lens, banner ads and various pop ups make even less sense than they used to. So does the insane act of outsourcing the random dialing of businesses to do telemarketing spam. We used up those resources a long time ago.

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Posted by Seth Godin on July 23, 2009 | | TrackBack (1)

When you buy Zappos, what do you buy?

Amazon just announced that they're spending $800,000,000.00 (looks better that way) to buy Zappos.com.

But wait.

Amazon already has plenty of shoes.

Amazon already has great technology.

Amazon already has relationships with Fedex and UPS.

What you buy when you spend that kind of money is what matters now. And what matters is:

  • A corporate culture that's not the same (and where great people choose to work)
  • A tight relationship with customers that give you permission to talk with them
  • A business model that's remarkable and worth talking about
  • A story that spreads
  • Leadership

These things are available to organizations of every size. If you want them and choose to work for them.

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Posted by Seth Godin on July 22, 2009 | | TrackBack (1)

Ishita's here

ISHITA1 Please welcome Ishita Gupta, who now doubles the size of the team here at my tiny version of a company.

Ishita is our newly appointed Head of Hoopla. She's working with me on strategy, new projects, digital detailing, publishing and coordination. She's one of the most generous, most connected people I've ever had the chance to meet, and I'm lucky to be able to work with her.

If my name is on it, it's still from me... every word is still mine, every email too. Ishita is going to agitate, cajole and coordinate new projects and help me market, focus and be in the right places at the right time. And just in time, too.

A few other housekeeping notes:

This blog doesn't accept ads and I don't do paid endorsements. I get a new box of socks every year from Little Miss Match, but that doesn't really count. If you send me a book or a chocolate bar, it's unlikely that I'll blog it, but it never hurts to try, especially if the chocolate is dark chocolate. Books and other goods mentioned on this blog often carry affiliate links, and the money earned from these is donated to Room to Read or the Acumen Fund. I don't actively invest in the stock market or in startups, so if I mention a company, it's because I want to, not because I have an investment. I'm the founder of Squidoo.com, and if I mention them, it's because I believe in what we're building. This blog doesn't have comments but I read all non-anonymous email--and if I write back, it's me.

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Posted by Seth Godin on July 22, 2009 | | TrackBack (0)

Death spiral!

You've probably seen it. The fish monger sees a decline in business, so they have less money to spend on upkeep and inventory, so they keep the fish a bit longer and don't clean up as often, so of course, business declines and then they have even less money... Eventually, you have an empty, smelly fish store that's out of business.

The doctor has fewer patients so he doesn't invest as much in training or staff and so some other patients choose to leave which means that there are even fewer patients...

The newspaper has fewer advertisers, so they can't invest as much in running stories, so people stop reading it, which means advertisers have less reason to advertise which leaves less money for stories...

As Tom Peters says, "You can't shrink your way to greatness," and yet that's what so many dying businesses try to do. They hunker down and wait for things to get better, but they don't. This isn't a dip, it's a cul de sac. It's over.

Right this minute, you still have some cash, some customers, some momentum... Instead of squandering it in a long, slow, death spiral, do something else. Buy a new platform. Move. Find new products for the customers that still trust you.

Change is a bear, but it's better than death.

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Posted by Seth Godin on July 22, 2009 | | TrackBack (0)

Winning on the uphills

Interesting business lesson learned on a bicycle: it's very difficult to improve your performance on the downhills.

I used to dread the uphill parts of my ride. On a recumbent bike, they're particularly difficult. So I'd slog through, barely surviving, looking forward to the superspeedy downhill parts.

Unfortunately, I had a serious accident a few years ago (saving the life of a clueless pedestrian by throwing myself onto the pavement). Downhill might be fast, but it's crazy.

Lesson learned. Now, I look forward to the uphill parts, because that's where the work is, the fun is, the improvement is. On the uphills, I have a reasonable shot at a gain over last time. The downhills are already maxed out by the laws of physics and safety.

The best time to do great customer service is when a customer is upset. The moment you earn your keep as a public speaker is when the room isn't just right or the plane is late or the projector doesn't work or the audience is tired or distracted. The best time to engage with an employee is when everything falls apart, not when you're hitting every milestone. And everyone now knows that the best time to start a project is when the economy is lousy.

Most of your competition spend their days looking forward to those rare moments when everything goes right. Imagine how much leverage you have if you spend your time maximizing those common moments when it doesn't.

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Posted by Seth Godin on July 21, 2009 | | TrackBack (2)

He's doing his best

In fact, everyone is always doing their best under the circumstances. As my friend Al says, there's no such thing as irrational behavior. That's because in this moment, given the perceptions someone is holding, the way they behave is in fact the only way they can behave.

Consumers don't make choices as much as they react and respond to the inputs and assumptions they have about the marketplace, their life and your brand.

If you don't like the way someone is acting, understand you can't change his behavior, you can only change his circumstances.

This makes it really difficult to vilify the recalcitrant consumer. It's not that they're stupid, it's that you didn't explain it very well. As Zig has said, "I can understand why you're not interested. Other people who believed [insert belief here] weren't interested either. But once they discovered [insert new fact here] they were eager to try it."

Sure, people are willing to lie, break promises, willfully misunderstand, avoid responsibility and blame others. But why? They're doing it because under the circumstances, it seems like the right thing to do. As marketers, we can often change the circumstances.

There's an infamous scene in the Godfather where a movie producer turns down a 'reasonable' request from the Don. The Godfather is stunned. How could someone turn him down?

After the family kills the producer's prize racehorse (and puts it in his bed), the producer changes his mind.

What changed? Before the intervention, the producer didn't understand, didn't believe, didn't fear the Godfather. So he made what he believed was the best possible decision. Afterward, his worldview was forcibly changed and he made a different decision based on different facts.

Probably not a good idea to run around beheading horses, but it's a useful lesson in changing perception.

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Posted by Seth Godin on July 20, 2009 | | TrackBack (1)

Dashboards

Your users, employees, consumers and donors are obsessed with data now. Are you helping them solve their knowledge problem?

Years ago, I had an automatic transmission car with a tachometer. Why I needed to know my RPMs when I couldn't do a thing about it is beyond me.

Pulse Yet useless data and hidden data continue to plague users. I have a Garmin 305 watch to track my bike workouts. It's just fine, except I hate it. I hate it because there are only two pieces of data I care about while I'm working out: how fast I'm going and what my heart rate is. My theory is that I can't do anything about time, but I can control effort, right?

Garmin puts my heartrate in 3 point type in the top right corner. It's unreadable by anyone old enough to be crazy to use one of these devices. And my speed? They convert miles per hour into some sort of runner's fraction that I still haven't figured out. Broken.

[I was wrong! It's not broken, the instructions are. My faithful readers have alerted me that I can fix the display, which I'm going to spend the next hour figuring out how to do. Sorry to offend the 305].

Acumen, on the other hand, has built a charity dashboard that lets them evaluate projects on cost-effectiveness across sectors. It's a marvel, and it completely changes the way you think about philanthropy.

Or consider the ambient dashboards that have been built in surprising ways. One company put pinwheels on a VPs desk. When sales went up, the pinwheels spun faster.

Just curious: what do you think would happen to energy consumption if every car registered in the US was required to have a digital mileage readout installed?

Building good dashboards isn't difficult, but it's an excellent marketing strategy. A few brainstorms:

  1. If you can add a digital dashboard to your service, do it.
  2. If you can make the dashboard public, it gets more powerful.
  3. Highlight data that changes behavior.
  4. Allow the user to highlight the information that matters to them.

I'm not focused on digital companies here. If you can add a dashboard to a payroll company or a sleep measurement device, you can add one just about anywhere.

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Posted by Steve at 7:16 AM 0 comments

Teaching the Entitled Young the Financial Facts of Life NYT

July 25, 2009
Wealth Matters

Teaching the Entitled Young the Financial Facts of Life

By PAUL SULLIVAN

This is the summer of reviling the rich. The financiers at Goldman Sachs got a populist drubbing after the bank reported record quarterly earnings and analysts began predicting average bonuses of $700,000 an employee at the firm this year. Now, Congress is debating whether high earners should be hit with a surtax to pay for health care reform. In states like New York and California, that could mean that top earners are paying more than 50 percent of their income in taxes.

But the rich and the not-so-rich do have something in common this summer: worrying about their children’s financial future. This may come as a shock to those middle-class Americans who imagine wealthy parents sunning themselves by their infinity pools, confident that their children, having been given every opportunity, are on their way to productive lives.

In truth, the image is fairly rare at this point. What is more common among the wealthy is their fear that the lives their children have known, and the futures they expected, may be gone.

“The notion that you’re entitled to goodies has to be dispelled,” said Fredda Herz Brown, a partner at Relative Solutions, a consultant who works with family businesses. “They really do think life is going to continue as it has. But most of them are not getting jobs, no matter what their parents do.”

While the wealthy are in a better position to help their children financially, having money doesn’t guarantee that their child will be responsible and productive.

So that leads to the question: How can parents help children with a healthy sense of entitlement adjust to the new economic reality?

EMOTIONAL REASSURANCE The first thought that pops into many parents’ heads when they worry about their children is bailing them out. But the best thing many parents can do, particularly those with children who are not asking for money, is to set the right example.

While children may be idle this summer, many parents are out of work, too, and casting about for ways to pay the bills. If they mope around, their children are going to pick that up. If, on the other hand, they discussed what has happened over the last year, their children will be better equipped to make their own financial decisions.

“The patriarch can say, ‘This is the risk I took, this is how I felt, these are the lessons here,’ ” said Evan Roth, founding partner of BBR Partners, an adviser to ultra-high-net-worth clients. “It’s, ‘Look at how I’m handling this; I’m teaching you a valuable a lesson here.’ ”

That lesson is often the need to work hard. Ms. Herz Brown tells the story of a financial services client who traveled a lot on business. When his role at work was reduced, he started spending less time on jets and more time at home with his teenagers.

“He had a sense that too much came to them,” she said. “It came from a basic belief that what he had created for his kids was this sense that everything comes to you.”

So he made them look for summer jobs. And when they couldn’t find any, he made them take odd jobs to earn money. He also gave them a budget for school clothes and other incidentals and made it clear that if they budgeted poorly, they were not getting more money.

The point was that he recognized he was enabling his children’s sense of entitlement, she said. While his children will probably never want for money, he realized his actions had been just as indulgent as a parent who gives in to his child’s every request for fast food.

FINANCIAL PLANNING There are, of course, many reasons to give money to your children. A popular one during the bull market was estate planning — the more you could pass on while you were alive, the less subject to estate tax later.

One of the most popular structures during the bull market was a grantor retained annuity trust. This arcane-sounding trust was predicated on assets going up. The idea was that parents could put an asset they thought would appreciate into the trust for a set period of time, usually two to 10 years. At the end of that period, their child would get the appreciated value tax-free, less a small interest payment paid to their parents.

Now that most asset values have gone down, these trusts look as if they have failed. But there is a chance to salvage them. The grantor can swap out the original asset for one of equal value without penalty and start another trust with the original asset, if he believes it unfairly lost value.

Rich Kohan, partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers Private Company Services practice, said people who set up the trusts should take advantage of the opportunity. “If the asset has dropped in value, it’s likely not to leave anything for the benefit of children,” he said.

Then there are trusts set up for reasons other than tax savings. Joan Crain, senior director of wealth management strategies at Bank of New York Mellon, said she had seen an increase in clients setting up trusts for their adult children.

“Their children are in their late 30s to 50s, and they’re not good stewards with money,” she said. “Parents want to protect them from creditors but also ex-spouses, even if the children are happily married or not married.”

Money in trust is doled out to the beneficiaries and kept from creditors, but it is not shielded from estate taxes. That people are employing this strategy, though, should be a stark lesson to parents: teach money management skills to your children when they are young.

PRACTICAL SUPPORT In tough times, parents may need to set aside their estate plan and bail out their child.

One way parents or grandparents can help without seeming intrusive is to cover all medical and education costs for their children and grandchildren. If they pay the hospital or school directly, they will not incur gift tax.

Separately, if a husband and wife pool their annual gift exclusions, they can give up to $52,000 a year to a child and his spouse to help make up for a lost job.

“Parents worry it’s humiliating,” Mr. Roth said. “But paying their mortgage is not a direct handout. It’s the same thing, but if you don’t see it, it doesn’t affect them as much.”

On the positive side, this may be the right time to finance a child’s entrepreneurial idea.

“The consensus is the fortunes of tomorrow are going to be made today in this downturn,” said Mary Duke, head of private wealth solutions for the Americas at HSBC Private Bank.

The key is not to give your child a handout. Ms. Duke suggests setting up a board of advisers to look over the plan and provide assistance with framing and carrying out the idea. This takes the child’s request out of the realm of asking Mom and Dad for money and into the arena of an actual business plan.

“It’s important kids understand budgeting,” she said. “Everyone is more focused on living within their reduced means.”

If a parent can instill that discipline in a child, the rest may just fall into place.
Posted by Steve at 6:59 AM 0 comments

Friday, July 24, 2009

Social norms

Social norms

The math for handshakes is difficult. You have to stand, look, squeeze, time and end in just the right way or it's weird. Skip the handshake or do a six-second version and people look at you funny.

Interpersonal relations have had thousands of years to develop. Online, there's been no time.

There are people who tweet in a way that rubs you the wrong way. Marketers who build businesses that seem scammy to you, or build websites that feel wrong. I get plenty of email from people that just doesn't feel right, whether it's in ALL CAPS or just difficult in tone or approach.

How do norms get formed? I think it's simpler than it looks: we interact with people who use the norm we use. We follow or read or hang out with people who use the same social constructs we do.

There might be people at the party down the street who are quite comfortable with each other and the things they're doing with or to each other... but you'd hate it. So you don't go.

Cliques form, which become communities and then, eventually a norm arrives. People like us like people like us.

If you're not attracting the people you want to be attracting online, perhaps you're not acting the way they do.
Posted by Steve at 6:57 AM 0 comments
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