Love this quote courtesy of Bob Lefsetz:

“Before if you were making a product, the right business strategy was to put 70% of your attention, energy, and dollars into shouting about a product, and 30% into making a great product. So you could win with a mediocre product, if you were a good enough marketer. That is getting harder to do. The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies…the individual is empowered… The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it. If I build a great product or service, my customers will tell each other.” – Jeff Bezos

How many times have you been in a meeting where the sole purpose is for someone to deliver a presentation or pitch?  It could be your agency presenting a new creative idea.  Or perhaps its a start-up that is presenting why you should do business with them.

Or maybe you have even been the one giving the presentation?

The common fact with all of these is that in most cases, a presentation is a Hail Mary pass.  If you are just simply giving a one-way pitch, you are giving the audience two choices at the end….to say yes or to say no.  And the worst part about most presentations is that you have no idea which of those two choices the decision maker is going to make.

Some people love the thrill of the presentation, of trying to close the sale.  But business should not be a sport for thrill seekers.  Its not good business to have hold your breath and hope a decision goes your way.

To continue with the sports analogies, you should try to make your presentations a lay-up, instead of a Hail Mary pass.  Make the  presentation a formality where you know that the deal is closed before you even flip through your first slide.  Work with the decision makers in advance so they feel bought into the work.  Enroll your client in the process so they feel the same sense of ownership as you have.  Devote as much time to making the decision an easy one as you spend making the presentation look / sound good.

Delivering a great presentation is an important skill in business (Steve Jobs has shown us that).  But an even more important skill is being able to make the sale before the presentation even begins.

What if you asked folks like Tim Berners-Lee, Chris Dixon, David Weinberger, and Nova Spivack to explain the future of the Internet?  Or had them explain concepts such as the Semantic Web or Linked Data?   Or gave Clay Shirky the chance to talk about what he considers to be “one of the deepest questions in all of Western Philosophy?

Well Kate Ray, a student at NYU, did just that as she worked to produce a short documentary entitled Web 3.0.  Only 14 minutes in length, this is a must watch video for any marketer trying to wrap their mind around where things are headed in this digital world we are living.  Very cool stuff.

Credit to Mitch Joel for pointing me to this video.

One of the conversations that stood out from my visit to the VCU Brandcenter in March was a discussion with two Creative Strategists, Adam Wiese and Melissa Cabral. The two were working on a project where they were examining the impact of “ubiquitous connection” to the Internet.  The result of their work is an article, From 3rd Places to Blurred Spaces, that is featured in Cultural Standpoints, the annual magazine created by second year strategists at the VCU Brandcenter.

The piece is great read and has some interesting implications for a variety of stakeholders ranging from retail establishments city planners to technology providers.  I particularly loved this comment from the paper:

When Internet access is added to a location, it changes the structure and purpose of that physical location.  What happened with coffee shops is a microcosm of what will happen to cities with the proliferation of ubiquitous connectivity.  Ubiquitous connectivity and the resulting increase of blurred spaces would kill any of the last digital barriers between us.

You can download their entire paper through the below link:

From Third Places to Blurred Spaces

If you enjoy the piece as much as I did, be sure to contribute to the discussion on their blog.

In January, the Kaiser Family Foundation released a study on young people’s media use entitled Generation M²: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds. I came across the study thanks to a post by Chas Edwards at Digg who called out some really interesting stats such as:

• Young people are spending more time per day consuming media on a cell phone (49 minutes) than talking on a cell phone (33 minutes)
• Young people are “watching 38 more minutes per day of TV content in 2009 versus 2004, but 25 minutes less (per day) of it is live on an actual TV.”

In addition to these two stats, a few other things really jumped out to me including:

• Over the past decade, the total amount of media an 8-to-18 year-old consumes in a day has jumped 3 hours and 15 minutes to over 10 hours and 45 minutes a day.
• 3 out of 4 young people own an iPod/MP3 Player and 2 out of 3 own a cell phone
• More TV Content is consumed by DVD (12%), Mobile (12%) and Online (9%) than by DVR (8%).  All totaled, only 59% of TV Content is consumed live.
• Time spent playing video games is up 50% in the past 5 years to 1 hour and 13 minutes per day.
• 7 out of 10 young people have a TV in their bedroom.

I point these stats out because in 10 years, today’s young people will be tomorrow’s general market.    These are amazing shifts in the media landscape and something brands need to pay attention to today…whether or not you currently target younger consumers.

If you want to read the whole presentation, you can download the PDF here.