Making the Common Uncommon

The peeps over at Brand Autopsy have a very interesting story on their blog about Which Wich Superior Sandwiches.

Read the entry <== click there.

I thought the comments were interesting too.  It will be intriguing to see how this concept plays out.  I like the way they have taken the concept of allowing the customer to have more control (a definite cornerstone of today's consumer culture) but have done so in a very low tech way. 

It's hard to think of anything more common than a sandwich, but you would have to admit that many church services and ministry television programs have become somewhat "common".  How can we pull our "customers" into the experience of church or television/radio in more meaningful ways?

It's not just the sandwich.

Mobisodes - the future of cellular?

from addict3d.org -

THE Twentieth Century Fox studio, a veteran of the big screen and the TV screen, is about to break into an entirely new realm: the really little screen, the kind that comes on a mobile phone.

In what appeared to be the first arrangement of its kind, Twentieth Century Fox said it would create a unique series of one-minute dramas based on its hit show "24" exclusively for a new high-speed wireless service being offered by Vodafone, the world's biggest mobile phone company.

Vodafone will begin offering the one-minute episodes in January in the UK, coinciding with the start of the fourth season of the show on a satellite TV service.

The "mobisodes," as they're being called, will be introduced later in 2005 in up to 23 more countries where Vodafone operates, mainly in Europe, as well as in the United States through the company's Verizon Wireless joint venture.

The deal is part of a broader agreement between Fox Entertainment Group and London-based Vodafone under which Fox, the entertainment unit of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, publisher of AustralianIT, will develop other programming to be viewed on the phones.

In March, the new Vodafone service, to be called Vodafone live! with 3G, will also offer trailers and clips of movies under a "Movie of the Month" service, the first one being "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason."

Good blog entry at The Spark.

It will be an interesting experiment, but more and more the way consumers use media is changing.  Technology has tipped the scales of power to the viewer for the conceivable future, and those who don't realize that everything has changed will be frozen into the glaciers soon.  People want to hear and watch what they want, when they want.  And now, they can.

Google Scholar beta

In addition to Gmail, Google is beta-testing a new search site, Google Scholar. I’ve dinked around with it a bit, and I’m finding that it is distinctively different from Google or any other search engine I’ve used. GS gives you a large universe of scholarly articles and papers written on a given topic. Here’s what GScholar says about itself –

“Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.

Just as with Google Web Search, Google Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are to your query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article's author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online. This means your search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications.”

Could be of great help on research for a lot of us out here.

Give it a try  <==  click there.

Good blog on GS by Robin Good <== click there.

Yes, I am thankful

I could go into a long list this Thanksgiving. My wonderful wife, my awesome kids, a grandson on the way, great friends, . . .

But, here’s what I am most grateful for this year – time. Without time, I couldn’t enjoy all the rest of it. I couldn’t learn, grow, work . . .

Even health, without time, is moot.

Thank you, God for time. What I’ve had so far has been great.

For whatever’s left, thanks for that too.

Sign me up for some of that there anger management!

After reviewing the interview with Ron Artest on the Today Show this morning, I have a idea. Maybe the NBA should provide me with some anger management counseling. Because the more I see and hear, the madder I am getting not only about the stupidity and ignorance surrounding this riot, but even more in the way this behavior is being justified by some in the aftermath.

Here’s Artest, acting cool and detached wearing a T-shirt advertising his new record label, with a chance to say, “I was wrong,” to a national TV audience on the Today Show, but no-o-o-o-o-o. . . he simply says he wishes the whole thing had never happened. I wonder if he’s been taking PR pointers from Pete Rose? Then, he holds up his new rap CD three times to plug it during the interview. That’s real remorse there sports fans.

When asked about the effect on young boys, he muttered something about how they witnessed what happened when someone gets disrespected. And there’s more . . .

We Know More Than Our Pastors

Why Bloggers are the Vanguard of the Participatory Church

Tim Bednar over at e-church.com has written an interesting white paper entitled We Know More Than Our Pastors (PDF). It’s an interesting read on his premise that bloggers are the vanguard of the participatory church. Tim has done a lot of thinking about what he has written.

Here are but a few captions in Tim’s tome –

• We blog to participate
• We blog in the present
• We blog in the first person
• We blog as a discipline
• We use blogging to preach
• We blog to earn permission
• We blog to care
• We blog to build the kingdom

Marketing Without Media

November 22, 2004 Monday Morning Memo from Roy Williams.

Hear no Advertising. See no Advertising. Speak no Advertising.

I think we've had our fill of ads. And by "we," I mean the entire population of the twenty-first century. That's a dangerous and controversial statement coming from a man known as The Wizard of Ads, wouldn't you say?

My staff and I have been quietly studying this dilemma for the past 29 months because our clients depend on us to help them attract new business. That's how we make our living. You'll recall that I first mentioned this problem 6 months ago in a May 24 memo entitled The Future of Advertising and in a sequel the following week, Media's Missing Mass.

Billy Graham in Los Angeles

Billy Graham preached to estimated crowds totalling 230,500 at the Rose Bowl in what is believed to be his next to last crusade. 

Here's the story at Yahoo.

Christian News <== click there.

San Francisco Chronicle <== click there.

The Cost of Confusion

The guys over at ChurchMarketingSucks.com have an interesting post about a recent "Perplexity Poll" related to the wireless communications industry.

Read the CMS blog entry here.

Look over the Perplexity Poll (PDF) here.

Andy Havens at CMS looks at this from a church perspective with good insight.  I'd like to make a couple of comments from a media perspective:   
(1) Keep your message simple.  I prefer a one point sermon to the traditional three-point variety.
(2) Offers should be simple and straightforward.  Make the offer so  clear the viewer (or listener in radio) has a binary decision - yes or no.
(3) Whatever your proposition and whatever the medium, keep it clear, simple, and binary.

Pacers/Pistons Brawl

In a post on October 26, NBA Attempts to Fill NHL Void, I took a tongue-in-cheek poke at the increasing violence in the NBA and suggested (somewhat jokingly) that the NBA was trying to fill the void for violence left by the NHL lockout. 

Now we have what could be the worst "riot" in NBA history in the Friday night game between the Pacers and the Pistons at Detroit.  Here's the story at Fox Sports.  My sarcasm from October 26 should not mask the fact that I truly think that these types of outbreaks are very bad for the game of basketball, my favorite sport.  The NBA lost its hope for a successor to Michael Jordan in Kobe Bryant.  It seems now that Lebron James is the newly anointed role model, quite a burden for such a young man.

The NBA is in trouble.  There's more talent than ever before, but there seems to be a great deficit in character.  This latest crisis is going to cause weeks and months of soul-searching throughout the league from the commissioner's office to every locker in every locker room.  Let's hope they come up with some answers.  A great game is at stake.

Meanwhile there's college basketball, which is rapidly becoming my solid favorite to watch.