Live Internet Television

A muse has been invented to guide the designers at Ford in better envisioning who their target customer is and what this person will respond to positively. Mother Jones reports based on a Business Week story:

The challenge was to come up with a design that could suit the tastes of consumers around the globe, thus cutting the cost of selling different small cars in every market. So, it made a Fiesta hatchback that has with a rear end that looks like that of a small SUV, a dashboard inspired by a cell-phone keyboard, and oversized headlights that belong on a bigger vehicle.

Ford’s target Fiesta buyer: Her name is Isabella, a name that consistently ranks among the Top 5 baby names for American girls. Isabella isn’t American, though. She is stylishly Italian, a recent college grad living near Milan. She’s a modest earner, hip, urban, creative, and way into social media.

She’s also considering journalism as a career.

In other words, she’s nuts. And entirely fictitious.

Back in May we were talking about ever-blurring lines between advertising and TV shows. This direction is accelerating as people try to find new ways to make revenue and connect with TV audiences. The latest:

AMC and Banana Republic are offering shoppers a chance for a walk-on role on the network’s Emmy Award winning drama Mad Men.

As part of marketing partnership, the parties are co-sponsoring a contest where customers can enter to win a walk-on role for an upcoming episode, plus a $1,000 gift card from the retailer.

Beginning July 21 and leading up to Mad Men’s third-season premiere on Aug. 16 at 10 p.m. (ET/CT), Banana Republic’s 400 U.S. and Canadian outlets will showcase mannequins dressed in modern takes on classic, iconic 1960s style, along with series imagery and tune-in details.

Banana Republic is also creating a style guide profiling the Mad Men character profiles and images alongside quintessential work looks from Banana Republic. The Guide will also be available in stores, while supplies last and offer U.S. customers a free gift-with-purchase — a free iTunes download of the show’s pilot, as well as an exclusive look at Mad Men style. Read the rest of this entry »

Joost is effectively withdrawing from the online video fray (Thanks, ClickZ).

Joost, a service that features ad-supported movies and other video content, has shifted gears — and its CEO. The company will now focus on selling its online video platform to cable, satellite, broadcast, and other media companies as a white-label service [...]

Joost will apparently continue to offer ad-supported online video programming. [...] But yesterday’s changes are a sign the company is being marginalized by Hulu.com, an ad-supported online video site launched in 2007 by News Corp. and NBC Universal.

It’s great being ivi, doing something completely different from the pack.

“In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay,” Chris Anderson writes, “but eventually the force of economic gravity will win."

Don’t miss the New Yorker article about why the free-to-consumer model for content seems inevitable. In the tradition of the New Yorker, it’s long but a very worthwhile read.

Some excerpts:

The cost of the building blocks of all electronic activity—storage, processing, and bandwidth—has fallen so far that it is now approaching zero. In 1961, Anderson says, a single transistor was ten dollars. In 1963, it was five dollars. By 1968, it was one dollar. Today, Intel will sell you two billion transistors for eleven hundred dollars—meaning that the cost of a single transistor is now about .000055 cents.

…

[An experiment conducted by an M.I.T. behavioral economist] offered a group of subjects a choice between two kinds of chocolate—Hershey’s Kisses, for one cent, and Lindt truffles, for fifteen cents. Three-quarters of the subjects chose the truffles. Then he redid the experiment, reducing the price of both chocolates by one cent. The Kisses were now free. What happened? The order of preference was reversed. Sixty-nine per cent of the subjects chose the Kisses. The price difference between the two chocolates was exactly the same, but that magic word “free” has the power to create a consumer stampede.

Like I said, read the whole article, it’s full of  interesting points.

The Times over the weekend reported that online video continues to mature, with the average length now at 3 and a half minutes.

The two things in the article, though, that struck me were:

1.) The historic parallels with movies:

More than anything else, the longer viewing spans may speak to the maturation of the medium itself. Mr. Konkle said that the first kinetoscopes, in the 1890s, were about 30 seconds long, because the format required outrageously long strips of film.

“It was also accepted as fact that 30 seconds made for a good kinetoscope. This is what filmmakers thought the audience could handle,” Mr. Konkle said, drawing a parallel to the early days of online video. “It probably felt like a giant dangerous leap to short films of three minutes.”

2. The concept of online delivery of video freeing the storytelling from standard length formats. Some stories take 2 seconds to tell, some take hours.