So I managed to finish off both Delivering Happiness (Hsieh), the book on Zappos, and Let My People Go Surfing (Chouniard), that on Patagonia. Don’t I just love corporate autobiographies? I also made a sizeable dent in The Checklist Manifesto (Gawande) and Walden (Thoreau) (just to read something different).

Anyway, they’re both great books, and I feel like I should put forth some take home points that I enjoyed from them. Firstly, from Delivering Happiness:

• There’s a point in the book where Hsieh is talking about how he goes about giving talks and presentations and that after giving up the strategy of writing a script and reciting it, he essentially freestyles, and reaches what he envisions as a state of Flow as Csikszentmihalyi describes in the book of the same name. I’ve read a little of Csikszentmihalyi’s work, I’m halfway through Creativity, after seeing it recommended somewhere (the New Yorker?) and it’s fantastic. So this is a new book for my list.
• There’s a great list of ‘Top 10 Questions to Ask When Looking for Investors and Board Members’ that Hsieh goes into when looking for new people or new companies to get involved it. I’d check that out.
• Finally, after toasting ‘Infinity and Beyond!’ to the takeover/marriage of Zappos and Amazon, there’s a lovely little quote, not attributed to anyone which reads:

No matter what your past has been, you have a spotless future.

What a great way to end.

And then from Let My People Go Surfing I noted this particular points:

• Look into a book called The One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka, about the careful ecological use of land.
• I also really like the definition of wilderness as “a place that is more than a day’s walk from civilisation”. This however leads on to the fact that there are few such places left. It almost explains going into the wild.
• I also made a note to look into the book Confessions of an Eco-Warrior. And that reminded me also to check out Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. Two more books I guess…
• I really rather enjoyed reading about the section where they looked into where the chemicals that were used in their dyes came from. Entirely reminded me of Cradle to Cradle (a book that I wholeheartedly adore). I was later then unsurprised in the book to come across mention of William McDonough. Fantastic work on the behalf of Patagonia though, looking into the origin of chemicals in their products.

I guess I now just have to read some more. I might even re-read C2C.

Related posts:

1. Businessy (sic) Books…
2. Onward – reflections…

Fittingly I sit here writing this in Starbucks, but nonetheless there are some wonderful take home points from this book that should be brought up. Firstly, I did not realise how bad a state Starbucks was in back in 2007. Literally had no idea it was that bad. This book explains them wonderfully, and Schultz’s writing style is fantastic, super accessible, but more importantly ultra informative. The lay-off and cuts sound terrible, real shitty, but at the end of the day they’re necessary for the business to survive and prosper in the long term. Which gets me to my (or at least the one that I discovered from Onward) first take home point:

…growth for growth’s sake is a losing proposition.

This book (and the company) is a wonderful example of why. Expanding on that point, and very much related, is the second take home point that I perceived:

From day one, I knew we could not transform the company if we did not excel and lead in our core business, and so a goal that began with Espresso Excellence Training evolved into innovative products and practices that continue to improve the quality and delivery of our brewed and espresso beverages.

Understand and build on your core competencies is probably the best way to put that. It’s so true.

Finally, the brief mention to the concept of Lean, affectionally put as:

…a nontraditional way of managing and working that claims to reduce redundancies and waste while making conditions easier for employees and improving products and service quality for customers.

is a fantastic little section, spearheaded by a guy called Scott Heydon. It outlines beautifully what programmes like this can achieve, or at least how they can be worked into practice. I’ve started reading Ries’ The Lean Entrepreneur, and i hope it will be as interesting!

A few more books have appeared on my radar, and they’re being added to my Kindle ever so soon, so expect an update on the reading list. Meanwhile, Michael Lewis has a great new(ish) Vanity Fair article.

A talk I discovered a while back on design and freelance work, and the role of lawyers and contracts is also very worth watching. F*ck You, Pay Me is the title, Mike Monteiro is the speaker, and it’s available here.

Related posts:

1. Businessy (sic) Books…
2. Procrastination (Days 3 to 6)

• The Four Hour Work Week, Tim Ferriss – I discovered this through his profile in the New Yorker (which, by the way, is fascinating and can be found here). It’s great to read, as is his 2nd book, The Four Hour Body, and I’m totally looking forward to his new one, which will be the flagship of Amazon’s publishing venture.
• Losing My Virginity, Richard Branson – This was mentioned in the New Yorker profile on Ferriss, and is in my to read list, currently waiting on my Kindle for some attention.
• Let My People Go Surfing, Yvon Chouinard – Again, from the same New Yorker article, but I’ve pretty much finished this one. It’s a great read, exciting and insightful.
• Rework, Jason Fried – I’ve been recommending this book to friends after using some 37signals products and reading how great a company they are (and how great this book is), despite never reading it. Suffice to say it’s on my list and it’s a matter of time.
• The Lean Startup, Eric Ries – I read the intro to this in Inc. (which I would wholeheartedly suggest keeping up with), and then picked it up once again in the Harvard Coop book store, began reading it, and then wondered where I’d read it before. It’s a pretty great book, I’m about halfway, check it out.
• Delivering Happiness, Tony Hsieh – It’s all about Zappos, and the tales behind its founding and culture. Really fun stuff and particularly enjoyable.
• In The Plex, Steven Levy – Google. Enough said. I enjoyed his book on Hackers, and his pieces in Wired. This is on my to read.
• Pour Your Heart Into It and Onward, Howard Schultz – being a former Starbucks employee I should really have read these, I’ve read the first 1/3 or so of Pour… and I like it so far.
• The Rare Find, George Anders – It’s a pretty new book, I only really heard about it today, but as with others, it’s on the list.
• The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman – It’s really fun and appeals to my engineering mind. Not the newest book, but it’s still very relevant.
• The Big Short, Michael Lewis – He’s pretty much my favourite author (along with Gladwell), and this book is part of the reason (though not anywhere near as much as Moneyball or The Blind Side). His articles in Vanity Fair on the European Economic messes are spot on, and his new book will be on my Kindle soon.
• A Book Apart books, Various authors – These cover a range of topics, primarily web design and strategy, but they’re concise, useful and there’s always new ones appearing. Have a look.

Beyond this, which is only a limited selection so far (prepare for it to expand in the near future), then I read Inc. magazine, Wired and (if I have time) Harvard Business Review. There’s a lot of good ideas hidden in there.

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1. Extending Kindle…
2. Recent readings…

Related posts:

1. MacKeeper: Legit?
2. A Letter from MacKeeper

Hi guys,

I’m Zeobit LLC PR Manager and would like to give you a clearer understanding of what MacKeeper is.

First of all I would like to assure you it’s a legit app – you can visit our official website – go to the mediaroom tab and take a look at the numerous reviews from the trustful resources.

Besides, MacKeeper is in the list of utilities to download on Apple site, while its shorten version 911 bundle is in the Mac App Store. Do you really think Apple would ever work with unlegal company?

As for the ads you’ve posted, we don’t have them any more as we are on the way of making our advertising campaighn maximum ethical. While it’s always been legal – both these ads contain the part of our trademark -the icon of the app, the name of the developing company. I would also like to add that the banners should be approved by the administration of the site before they will be posted to the site – and all the resoures follow the rules of legal advertising too so the banners are double-checked indeed.

And the last poin – you’ve told that all the MacKeeper does can be done with free apss like Onyx. Do you now what MacKeeper offers indeed? It’s a bundle of 16 tools, not only cleaning ones like Onyx. It also offers Antitheft, Antivirus, Undelete and more. As for the price, it’s extremely hard if not impossible to find he Undelete tool for example that would cost less than 50$ while the whole bundle of MacKeeper costs less.

Best regards,
Sana Paul, Zeobit LLC PR Manager.

So first off, I Googled this Sana Paul person, and it turns out that they’re employed primarily to write good things about MacKeeper on forums. Basically counteract its trojan horse-esque advertising strategy with nice messages. However MacKeeper’s rep still seems to get ripped apart anyway. I wonder why.

So anyway, getting to this letter, the first paragraph mentions all these numerous reviews from trustful resources. Whatever. Some of them may be trustful and legit, but take a peak at the awards section. 8 awards from 8 sites that you’ve never really quite heard of before. How many of these sites are impartial aswell? Could they be getting advertising cuts from MacKeeper? Perhaps. Also, one of the sites is called wareseeker. Its legitimacy is in the name (if you google it, the first result is a Norton safe search report of the site). That always means well.

Secondly the letter further mentions that the application is listed in the Apple utility directory. Well not any more. The search result shows that its still there, but the actual page redirects to, guess what, the App Store, and there’s no MacKeeper to be seen there. As for this 911 (MacKeeper light) app, it’s only in the app store because MacKeeper with its ‘special’ features was too risky to be put there. Look at the reviews for 911, 1 star is always a good start… Also, looking at the screenshots, the blatant promotion to get known on Facebook and Twitter on the main screen of the app is pretty low.

Thirdly, the advertising shouldn’t be wrong in the first place and should obviously be checked before being posted anywhere. Clearly not the case. And what about the invasive advertising, legal? Furthermore, why does MacKeeper include an Uninstaller and Undeleter app when no-one can actually uninstall MacKeeper itself. Seems a touch hypocritical.

So anyway, I’ll let you make up your own mind about MacKeeper, but just have a little search around first, maybe even see if people have been able to uninstall it if they wanted to. You might (or might not) be surprised!

p.s. Cleaning the ‘t’ button on your keyboard and using spellcheck is always a good start before writing letters.

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1. MacKeeper: Legit?
2. MacKeeper: Legit? Part 2

New style MacKeeper image ad. Note, no mention of their app's name.

New style MacKeeper text ad. Again, no mention of their app's name.

But now they seem to have gone for a more “look at all this stuff that you get” approach with their advertising (see above), and most importantly, a lot of these new print and image ads that they’re running do not even mention their name. Maybe they believe that their product transcends brand names and that it seems superfluous to mention it, or perhaps they’ve cottoned on to the fact that they’re selling a huge scam and the less they mention their name in their ads, the more likely people are to click on them. Seems fishy. Bear in mind though that they still have the other ads running, especially the great one with the javascript popup, but they less frequently appear. Also, did I mention earlier that some of the ‘awards’ that they received are rather made up.

Now that as a company they’ve realised that people don’t like the sound of their app, maybe it’s for a good reason, and maybe you should stay away too. My advice: avoid, it has all the great makings of a scam, and exactly the same can be done for free – Onyx, TinkerTool etc.

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1. MacKeeper: Legit?
2. I love my 50mm

Ensure your Mac’s top performance with MacKeeper – an award-winning system utility for Mac that offers a completely new approach to system care.

Judging by their advertising, which if you haven’t seen it, is just overly invasive, and presented in such a way that a certain type of tinned meat¹ comes to mind as soon as you see it, you’d think they’re not legit. Then perhaps you might Google them, as I did, to see if there’s anything interesting about them; any fishy reviews, any haters etc. Then you’ll find about a million results advertising MacKeeper as spam/fake/not legit etc, and when you click on them, you find out that they are in fact all affiliate links, saying how great MacKeeper is, and how much of a scam it is not.

Can I please be the first to call bullshit here? If they’re paying people to advertise (with their 50% affiliate fee!) the fact that it is not spam, then there’s something wrong, and using javascript popups to stop you closing their ad window is just so… low. Stop being so ghetto. I bet a large percentage of their reviews aren’t unbiased either. It’s terrible, alienating Mac users and using scaremongering tactics. Get a better marketing strategy.

In fact I propose that they change their little spiel about their company to:

Be unsure of your Mac’s top performance with MacKeeper – a no award-winning system utility for Mac that offers a completely new approach to spamming the hell out of Mac users on the internet.

Disclaimer: I would normally link to the various sites in question, but in this case they don’t need any more traffic, nor do they deserve any, hence why the links are missing.

1. spam

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1. Musings…
2. Stuff…

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking up a few things to do when I finish, or even start preparing now. I’ve bought some Ilford HP5+ film for my Olympus, which I’m intending on developing and processing myself. We’ll see how that goes…

But, more importantly, I’ve been using my Kindle more and more, and found some great things to go with it. I guess if you have an eReader, you’ve probably come across Calibre. It’s like a library tool, you could attempt to call it the iTunes on eBooks, except that it’s coded with Java and as such is 1) slow, 2) buggy and 3) so ugly. However it does work and can convert most things under the moon to .mobi (the most standard (if you can call it that) format that Kindle’s accept). It also has this other cool feature where it parses websites of various publications at regular intervals, and essentially aims to get the newest issue and download it for you. It doesn’t necessarily work, but it gets a nice cross section of articles (sometimes many of the same article…) and as such is a great idea, especially considering it’s free.

That’s all well and good, except that you still have to connect your Kindle via USB to get it. However, ReadBeam solves this. It essentially uses the Calibre framework on a server somewhere to get a small selection of magazines (I’m interested most in Wired and The New Yorker) and then send them to your device’s email address. So you can get your subscriptions anywhere for free if you’re on WiFi, or a small fee if you’re on 3G. However. I think it’s possible to go further. Granted it costs to receive documents on 3G, but you can still go on the internet and download documents for free. So my rough aim at the moment is to create some kind of personal repository of recent subscriptions of magazines on the web (probably through an email address) so I can actually get them anywhere for free. Yay! Pretty simple to implement I’m sure, but I’m focussing on working now, so it’ll have to wait.

I’m also thinking about getting my Arduino working again (it didn’t break, I just haven’t used it in a while) so I can try out some of the cool projects recommended in the most recent Wired. Anyway, just some thoughts for now.

Related posts:

1. Kindle!
2. Kindle Ads

It hit me a few months back when I got my Kindle (it’s literally one of the best things that I have ever bought, such a great device) that you have all this screen time so to speak when the device is off, but is displaying information (all due to e-ink technology (it only drains battery life when the screen is changing)¹ . In the Kindle 3′s case, famous authors (~50%), random pictures of fish, maps and statues (~40%) and ‘Welcome to Kindle’ and feedback screens (10%) are displayed. I mean obviously at launch and potentially for a lot longer (even indefinitely with the premium Kindles) Amazon want to keep it classy (you don’t see advertisements in the adwords sense on Amazon do you?) and keep a good brand reputation. They’re currently doing this well, showing predominantly neutral things on the off screen.

But there is so much potential is using that screen for other uses. Perhaps advertising, perhaps not, but clearly they’ve just stumbled upon what they can do with it². There are not many devices out right now that have free global 3G wireless (though some Kindle’s just have Wi-Fi (let’s ignore that for the moment)). Ads could be displayed on the Kindle’s off screen, delivered automatically and seamlessly through Whispernet (their wireless data service), localised (dependant on where the Kindle connects from) and trackable (advertisers could know how many views etc.). There’s such amazing market potential for enabling the Kindle to be used in this fashion. But then customers may feel used. They bought their Kindles to read on and now they’re being used as mini billboards. While the product is still fit for purpose and usable, I’m not sure that the augmented product and people’s perceptions of it (and Amazon as a company) would stay the same. And I think this is one of the main reasons why the special offers Kindle is sold as a separate entity. Sure it draws people away from the other Kindle models, but I think that the more people they can get receiving the special offers, the more weight and confidence they can throw behind it to future potential advertisers. Additionally the lower price may draw entirely new customers.

Admittedly Amazon have gotten off to a great start. I think one of the main issues with advertising now (and maybe always) is its intrusiveness and the lack of cohesion that it tends to create with the content that it gets paired with. To succeed, one must overcome this. Changing perceptions is one way to do this. Look at the offers you suddenly become entitled to when you get a ‘Special Offers’ Kindle over a regular Wi-Fi one:

• $10 for $20 Amazon.com Gift Card
• $6 for 6 Audible Books (normally $68)
• $1 for an album in the Amazon MP3 Store (choose from over 1 million albums)
• $10 for $30 of products in the Amazon Denim Shop or Amazon Swim Shop
• Free $100 Amazon.com Gift Card when you get an Amazon Rewards Visa Card (normally $30)
• Buy one of 30 Kindle bestsellers with your Visa card and get $10 Amazon.com credit
• 50% off Roku Streaming Player (normally $99)

And they’re presented in such a classy fashion. Not too intrusive, and in a similar style the current off-screen images.

Kindle Off-screen Advertising

It’s almost like you’re saving money in addition to saving money. How great is that. Money may not be everyone’s biggest pull factor, but it sure is for a lot of people, and it’s up there for the rest of us, so why not tempt us with it?

But as if the monetary saving isn’t good enough, and just to relieve you from your worrying that your ad supported Kindle (because frankly that’s what it is) might not be that good after all (think how crippled half the iOS apps with ads are!) you get to choose the ads you see. Admash, the advertising comparison ‘app’ is almost too good to be true, an April Fools joke if you will. It sounds a lot like something straight out of The Social Network (Facemash). But if it conquers bad feelings about advertisement on your Kindle (while obviously showing more than just one advert (potentially even for the same product)) while making sure that you even perhaps concentrate on the advertisements (you do have to choose after all) then it totally kills like 3 birds with one stone³ and can only be a good thing. Sweet.

But where do they go from here? What’s the next step with advertising on the Kindle, and maybe more importantly what’s the next step with the Kindle in general. While there is mention (or maybe just predictions) that the Kindle may be free by the second half of this year (see this optimistic chart) I see that as being a little too soon. Perhaps it will go the way of the movie streaming on the US Amazon site⁴, and become part of the service model that Amazon is implementing with Prime, so you get a free Kindle if you sign up with Prime (I can actually see this happening by the end of the year). Perhaps it could go other routes, even the Gillette/Razor Blade/Printer ink (less so) model could work – buy an ebook, get the Kindle to read it with free⁵. Perhaps it’s already happening subtly with the price decreases of the Kindle and price increases of eBooks (it would be interesting to look at the metrics of this), but I think in this current stage (still fairly early in this market), Amazon is prepared to make less profit (or even a loss) to garner more market share from Nooks and Sony devices (one of the ways that it was doing this was through big pull factors with particular books, particularly Steig Larsson and the particularly low prices (and large sales volume) it had over the December holiday period). The advertising market with the Kindle is still young however, and Amazon’s just beginning to try things out now. I think aspects of it will fail, especially the bar of home screen ads that will most likely go the way of Twitter’s dickbar.

Kindle Home Screen Ads

However aspects of it will do well. Especially if they ‘keep it classy’ and maintain their brand reputation whilst implementing these ads. I think there will be a lot of swing and power to them over the next few years if they’re implemented well now. I’m interested to see what happens, and it’ll be coming right to a Kindle screen near you.

1. However there are other options for what could be displayed on the off-screen that Amazon doesn’t necessarily give you. It would be just as easy and maybe more practical to keep displaying the current page, or perhaps nothing. I think this choice *could* be given to the user, but it that happens, then implementing ads could be more tricky. It perhaps boils down to the ‘If you don’t ask, then you don’t get mentality’
2. or maybe they had it in mind for a while and just decided to implement it now
3. Bird 1 – The ‘People don’t pay attention to ads’ bird, Bird 2 – The ‘How many ads can you show as a whole (more opportunities = more potential revenue for Amazon) and where can you display them’ bird and Bird 3 – The ‘People don’t like ads’ bird (Though this is assuming that if you get to have your choice of ads then you’ll like them more).
4. Yes, I’m bitter that despite having prime, both for the US and the UK, I still don’t get any movie streaming
5. However there are many issues with this in that people could just buy one book and migrate to reading .mobi and .pdf’s (all obtained through other means) and thus depriving Amazon of business. Then again this may happen to Gillette all the time and they still keep to this strategy. An option would be to limit the Kindle to just reading .azw files until x number of books or an add on have been purchased. Seems too pernickety though.

Related posts:

1. Kindle!
2. Yo! Sushi: Marketing with Facebook

Just as a background to the promotion that they were running, all you had to do was go to a Yo! Sushi, use your smartphone and check in with Facebook places (while tagging a friend), letting all of your Facebook friends know that you’re at a Yo! Sushi and making them aware of the promotion (in addition to all your friend’s friends), then show the check in confirmation to a waiter/waitress and receive your 5 free plates of sushi and a drink of your choice for you and your friend (so 10 plates and 2 drinks). The number of plates and the free drink is no small thing, and this really shows Yo!’s commitment to this campaign. They’re putting a lot of money into it and backing it in a very non-traditional way, leading me to think that this idea must be very beneficial for business and work as very effective personal advertising.

The reach of this campaign is huge, and the benefits that Yo! seek to get are twofold. Not only is there the usual ‘give someone a free plate of food and hope that they’ll order more’ approach, but there is so much more. Consider that when you check in, all of your friends know that you’re there and will be informed thus from their (or your) newsfeed. This is excellent placement. Not only have they managed to move their advertising from the right sidebar on the Facebook page (where the rest of the ads lie) to the newsfeed (where people actually read), but they’ve given it an inherent personal touch—it’s like ‘yes, there is a Yo! Sushi nearby you, and yes it is popular, 6 of your friends are there’—how much more personal and targeted can you get without being invasive. If your Facebook friends have heard of Yo! before, then great, they’ll be happy to learn that they’re giving away free sushi, but if they haven’t, then they’ll pick up on it too, for a still niche food product in the UK (compared to the market penetration in the US, that is) this is a huge boost, what have people got to lose if the food’s free, they may aswell go along and try it. There’s also a certain cool associated with campaigns like this (the kind of cool that Google once had (and is now losing) and the cool status that Facebook is attaining), a hip new (or not that new, but that’s not the point) company giving away food and marketing themselves in a novel and seemingly un-intrusive fashion. That goes down a treat.

Looking at the numbers in more detail though, you can see the kind of reach and potentially the response that such a campaign is going to generate. First off though, the expenses. The offer gives you 5 plates and a free drink, plates come in between £2.30 and £5 retail, beers are £3.55 and water is £1.05. So on average, the spend of someone claiming the free plates and drink is:

(2.30 + 5)/2 x 5 + (1.05 + 3.55)/2 = £20.55

Let’s assume that they have a profit margin of 50%—this may be completely out, but it’s a ballpark and it gives us numbers to work with. Thus the cost to Yo! is £10.28 on average per person, but the deal is per pair of people, so that takes us back to a cost of £20.55 to Yo! per check in. There are 48 participating Yo! restaurants in the UK, each allowing 1000 people to check in. So the total cost to Yo! is around:

20.55/pair x 1000/location x 48 locations = £986,400

Essentially a million pounds! Wow. Quite a spend for a supposed ‘free’ and non traditional marketing campaign. Compare this with the estimated set up cost and installation for a US franchised Yo! of $727,000 to $1,390,000 = ~£500,000 to £858,000. Again, not insignificant.

Then again though, what potential reach does a campaign like this have. Going by Facebook’s statistic that on average a user has 130 friends and that the friend that you bring along with you and tag has another 129 friends (however these may not be unique friends (i.e. not mutual), then the total audience to a given check in is anywhere between 130 and 259. Again, let’s take the average with this and assume a solid 195 friends per check in at Yo!.

The next layer up is more tricky to estimate the number however. The uncertainty here stems from the fact that each pair of people (out of the 1000 per location) who go may all be mutually exclusive and have entirely different friend sets, or they may be all a lot closer friends they think (7 degrees of separation etc.) so that the total number of people made aware of the check in on Facebook could be quite different than 1000 x 195, which would occur if no one pair knew another pair and there were zero friend overlaps. The other end of the scale is the absolute minimum amount of people that would be made aware of the check in. This would occur if everyone going there was friends with everyone else going there (this is obviously an extreme condition that would never really occur, but it’s worth bearing in mind). In this case, 1000 people would be made aware in total.

The two figures here are hugely different, and so when working out an estimated average, it is worth bearing in mind a few things. Firstly, though the offer did run (and is still running) for a week, most of the locations would have had 1000 people on the first day (as Cambridge did), and so the distribution of people being able to go and check in would be a lot more first come first served than a slow permeation through friend groups on Facebook, pointing the number more towards the larger end of the spectrum. Secondly, the method in which people found out about the promotion initially could have been very different. For example, those going on to www.yosushi.com, their Yo! Love Club email subscriber list (100,000+ (reference)) etc. and these groups of people represent a different slice of the population than perhaps Facebook friends. Furthermore assuming that most of the people who received an email about the campaign (from Yo!’s email subscriber list) went and immediately checked in at a Yo! alerting on average 195 of their friends and that each one of the subscribers was not friends with any other one of the subscribers, then this will make the figure higher. I’m also assuming that everyone went once, failure to do this would result in a smaller audience reached.

Bearing in mind these two points, I’m going to assume a number 2/3 of the way towards the maximum. So about 130,000 people per location. Again making the bold assumption that noöne from one location knows anyone from another location (this may not quite be true in London…) then there’s going to be a total of about 130,000 x 48 = 6,240,000. On average, 6.24 million people. Again, an impressive ballpark figure.

On a £ per person reached sort of scale, this works out as:

£986,400 / 6,240,000 people = £0.158 or 15.8p per person (about $0.25/person)

Pretty impressive. Then again I’m not really sure what to compare it to. Taking for example Superbowl ads, thirty seconds of advertising on TV is roughly $2.6 million. Then again there may up to 90 million viewers, giving a per person cost of $0.029, about 5.5 times smaller than Yo!. However this is only a very ballpark figure. This gentleman seems to be of the opinion that it’s going to be more of a $1 per person kind of affair when all the costs and everything are brought into account, which is fair enough and makes a good deal of sense. It also puts into perspective how good Yo!’s campaign is though, and how vastly different.

Anyway, I just wanted to draw attention to this new and fairly novel way of marketing using social network media in the hope that it will spark some debate and thought. Let me know what you think.

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