Maria, If You're Reading, Don't Sleep...

From Springwise.

Earlier this year, we wrote about a sympathetic initiative by Paris airports, giving weary travellers a chance to recharge with a dose of full-spectrum light therapy.

Last week, IKEA offered fatigued Stockholm shoppers a similar form of respite by installing a Sovhotell (sleep hotel) in one of the city's downtown shopping centres. After checking in at Sovhotell's front desk, guests were asked whether they normally sleep on their stomach, side or back, and were given a pillow to suit their personal sleeping style. In addition to single and double beds, the Sovhotell also featured a bridal suite.

Guests were welcome to snooze for 15 minutes, and were given eye masks and headphones with soothing soundscapes to help them benefit from their sponsored power naps. According to IKEA, inspiration for the Sovhotell came from Japanese capsule hotels and from the fact that the shoppers in its own stores are occasionally found napping in the bedroom section.

No word yet on whether IKEA is planning to bring this shopper-friendly campaign to malls in other parts of the world, but we think it's a great example of the tryvertising trend: marketing a product by letting customers try it out in a relevant setting, without pressuring them to buy.

Moishe likes angles, "Free" Business Model = Good Angle

From Wired

At the age of 40, King Gillette was a frustrated inventor, a bitter anticapitalist, and a salesman of cork-lined bottle caps. It was 1895, and despite ideas, energy, and wealthy parents, he had little to show for his work. He blamed the evils of market competition. Indeed, the previous year he had published a book, The Human Drift, which argued that all industry should be taken over by a single corporation owned by the public and that millions of Americans should live in a giant city called Metropolis powered by Niagara Falls. His boss at the bottle cap company, meanwhile, had just one piece of advice: Invent something people use and throw away....

Read entire article

Smart Thinking

From the NY Times.

In an attempt to increase book sales, HarperCollins Publishers will begin offering free electronic editions of some of its books on its Web site, including a novel by Paulo Coelho and a cookbook by the Food Network star Robert Irvine.

The idea is to give readers the opportunity to sample the books online in the same way that prospective buyers can flip through books in a bookstore.

“It’s like taking the shrink wrap off a book,” said Jane Friedman, chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide. “The best way to sell books is to have the consumer be able to read some of that content.”
Starting Monday, readers who log on to www.harpercollins.com will be able to see the entire contents of “The Witch of Portobello” by Mr. Coelho; “Mission: Cook! My Life, My Recipes and Making the Impossible Easy” by Mr. Irvine; “I Dream in Blue: Life, Death and the New York Giants” by Roger Director; “The Undecided Voter’s Guide to the Next President: Who the Candidates Are, Where They Come from and How You Can Choose” by Mark Halperin; and “Warriors: Into the Wild” the first volume in a children’s series by Erin Hunter...

Dear Record Companies, It's Not Rocket Science

From 60 Second Science. And here is another great music biz post that Morty and Moishe Recommend...

Blog Chatter Can Triple Future Sales of Music Albums According to New Study from NYU Stern
Thursday February 7, 9:42 am ET

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--In his new research paper entitled, “Does Chatter Matter,” co-authored with former student Elaine Chang, NYU Stern Professor Vasant Dhar, an expert in the strategic implications of information technology, finds that the volume of blog posts featured on the Internet before an album’s release can significantly affect future album sales, and in turn predict sales for record labels. This is the first study to quantify the economic impact of user-generated content for the music industry.

Based on a sample of 108 albums released during the first two months of 2007, Professor Dhar found:

* When legitimate blog posts exceeded a threshold of 40 before an album’s release, sales were three times the average
* If the albums blogged about were associated with a major record label, sales increased five-fold
* When blog activity reached more than 250 posts, sales were six times the average regardless of an association with a major or independent label
* The number of an artist’s MySpace friends also contributed to higher future sales, but had a weaker correlation as compared to blog chatter

Professor Dhar tracked changes in the volume of online chatter—blog posts and the number of friends an artist has on MySpace—four weeks before and after an album’s release date.

The full working paper is available at: https://archive.nyu.edu/handle/2451/23783

Interesting piece on future web ad models from Micro Persuasion - Good Stuff

During a recent exchange with one of my colleagues he posed a thought-provoking question that I hadn't quite pondered. "What new digital business models might take hold over the next four to five years," he asked.

This question should be on every marketing and media executive's mind. As we've seen, the Net is so disruptive that big ideas can come out of nowhere and reinvent advertising overnight - even in a recessionary climate. Google, for example, commercialized pay-per-click ads just after the dot-com crash in 2000.

Here are three models that might evolve over the next few years.

Advertiser-Supported Advertising: Brands are increasingly launching their own content platforms. Some, like Budweiser's BudTV, go it alone. Others partner with online media properties. P&G, for example, embedded Capessa inside Yahoo Health.

In the future some of the more successful marketer-sponsored content sites will accept advertising. The retail space is especially ripe here. Barnes & Noble's media site, in theory, could partially support itself by allowing publishers who they already co-market with to buy ads. Under such a scenario, transparency is critical.

Advertiser-Subsidized Devices: Content is a commodity. The barriers to entry are obliterated. Still, this means we all need to make choices - human attention doesn't scale. So how do you get consumers to choose your stuff? Simple. Use incentives.

Marketers will partner with consumer electronic companies to co-brand white-label gadgets. For example, a Gap-branded set-top box could come with exclusive video podcast subscriptions. Upstart device manufacturers that are looking to enter markets with entrenched players will be the first to dabble with this approach.

Just-in-Time Advertising: Digital advertising creative and planning, like any marketing discipline, follows an arc. It's planned, placed, measured and eventually evaluated, tweaked or tossed. However, in the digital world, brands need to be more nimble.

With the help of new technology, marketers will rely on "just-in-time" campaigns that adapt to conditions. Basically, this takes the Dell manufacturing model and applies it to advertising. Ad creative will morph based on certain triggers. This will include sales/ERP data, blog chatter/consumer feedback, weather/external conditions and more.