Everyone's an owner
Move over Abramovich, it’s our turn to own a soccer team. Much like the publicly-held Green Bay Packers, My Football Club.com offers the chance to own and operate a real English soccer club, Ebbsfleet United. The idea behind the site and the service is that this brings fantasy sports play, a huge trend in recent years, into the real world. Co-owners vote on player acquisition, coaching staff and business ventures all through the website. It’s $70 to get a seat at the table so if your lifelong dream has been to own a sports franchise, pony up.
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Unilever straddles fence when it comes to women
Picture the two most varied images of women you can come up with and chances are they might coincide with two ad campaigns from Dutch multinational Unilever. Over the past few years Unilever-owned Dove has marketed themselves as a brand for “real women.” Their TV ads feature everyday women giving testimonials in favor of the soap company and its products. Off-screen Dove lives up to its image with the Dove Self-Esteem Fund, a non-profit subsidiary dedicated to being “an agent of change to educate and inspire girls on a wider definition of beauty and to make them feel more confident about themselves.” In short, Dove seems to be the perfect personal care company.
On the other side of Unilever’s gender coin is a different brand with a very different message. Axe sells sex. They also sell body spray, deodorant and shower gels, but the biggest thing they sell is sex. Axe commercials set a whole new standard for female objectification by portraying women as nothing but walking playgrounds for men who get all randy at the very sniff of a boy wearing Axe, often stooping to animal stupidity to get there.
By pushing both campaigns, Unilever makes it very clear that they don’t really care about the issues. Good business is simply good marketing and as long as it sells, principle doesn’t seem to matter. Does this mean that feminists should stop buying Dove, or misogynists stop buying Axe? I don’t know, but it’s worth noting the hypocrisy in pushing both images.
In case you haven’t seen either ad campaign, I’ve embedded samples from YouTube below.
Dove:
Axe:
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Interactive advertisements
I was walking through a not so busy area in Paris yesterday when I noticed the above plaque next to a billboard advertisement for coffee. Here’s a translation:
You are in front of an interactive advertisement.
To get a free multimedia offer from the brand shown on the poster
1. Activate your Bluetooth connection
2. Accept the mobile request
3. Get your media
I’ve included below the “gift” below and it was depressingly lame. Just a small digital version of the billboard ad itself. The whole experience does make me wonder about all the fun ways this technology could be used to better advertise other things. Just one idea: What if the advertisement had been for a concert or an album being released? The “multimedia offer” could have been a free mp3 track or something equivalent. Of course, that wouldn’t help for coffee, but there’s always smell-o-vision.
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Facebook launches Marketplace
Could craigslist be in trouble? Social giant facebook’s new marketplace feature will combine the social function of its site with an internet-based community marketing forum in which individual users can buy and sell anything from each other. Of course, this function is perfect for facebook users who are already self-organized into local city, company, or university networks. By combining the business functions with the social network, facebook could bring even more people into internet bartering/trade, assuring everyone on both ends of the transaction accountability. If you’re a facebook user, check out your local marketplace here and see what’s for sale.
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Time your child's birth right and you could win a Sebring
Perennially for sale car company Chrysler has come up with one of the weirder marketing gimicks I’ve seen in a while. In most ways, this is a normal win-a-car auction except for one catch, the only way to qualify to enter the contest is if you have a baby born at 2:03:04 on 05/06/07. I’m not sure whether they’re trying to say that their cars are good for new families, or that they just they like a good number joke, but this is something to keep in mind if you are due to deliver sometime in the next week. Stall.
(Via Winding Road)
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Budgeting for Your New Job
If you’re nearing graduation and about to step into the work force, changing your job, or just plain curious of the available salaries out there, then try Salary.com. This site gives you the median salaries of the jobs you’re interested from the place (zip code) you specify. If that’s still not enough for your budgeting purposes, use this calculator to enter in information like your salary, deductions, and some other (clearly defined) stuff to get a rough estimate of your take home pay. For my whopping salary, the after tax estimator was only $50 off. Still not enough? With some quick info entered into turbotax (here) you can generate an estimated tax return. If it works out that you’re just not making enough, learn the best ways to get promoted, how to switch fields or, contrarily, how to get fired.
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Save Money - Don't Sell Your Books to the Bookstore
Though many seasoned college students may know already this, the campus book store rips you off while both buying and selling your books. Half.com and Amazon are the two most popular book sites. However, these sites can be limited and typically more expensive than sites like campus books, where you’ll save an average of 61% when purchasing books. When it comes to selling, I’ve personally got 10-15% more than what the book store offers. With the cost of college being as high as it is (and rising), every little bit helps. By cutting out the middle man, students get more for less during your purchase and sale. Everybody wins, except of course the bandits at the bookstore.
Whlie you’re at it, here are 118 other ways to save money at college,
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Zopa.com. It's lending without the banks
Zopa is social lending brought to the masses. The principle is no different from a 12 year-old kid asking her parents for 10 bucks to go to the movies, but the implications are much wider-ranging. Through the very pretty Zopa website, individuals can borrow from other individuals, much like the earlier profiled micro-lender Kiva.org. Unlike, Kiva, Zopa facilitates big loans in the same way that banks do, only with much lower interest rates. Spreading the risk over dozens of lenders, a £5,000 loan over 3 years would brook 6.38% interest as compared with high-street banks rates of 8.7%-14.9%. It’s also a good deal for lenders who can dictate the rates and risk they’re willing to take, making an average of 6.75%. Rather than feed the bloated banking industry, paying a 0.5% fee to Zopa seems like a good idea. Unfortunately Zopa is only working in the UK at the moment, although they do have plans to open in the US soon.
*Redjoe says: “For a comparable US based site that aims to democratize the banking industry try www.prosper.com"
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Virgin Earth Challenge
Along the lines of my post a couple of days ago about the X Prize for auto efficiency, I bring you the Virgin Earth Challenge. Launched in February, 2007 Challenge prize of $25m will go to “whoever can demonstrate to the judges’ satisfaction a commercially viable design which results in the removal of anthropogenic, atmospheric greenhouse gases so as to contribute materially to the stability of Earth’s climate.”
Just like the X Prize, I hope this will provide the necessary impetus to get innovators and entrepreneurs to take the task of dealing with global warming seriously. For more about the competition, check out the website.
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IKEA to move beyond decorating homes, builds them
It wasn’t long ago that do-it-yourself Swedish furniture maker IKEA didn’t dominate the world of yuppy interior design. Okay, that’s not true, IKEA has had that market cornered for a long time but it was only recently that they moved into home manufacture itself. BoKlok Homes (a partnership between IKEA and Swedish construction firm Skanska) have been building homes in Sweden for a little over ten years and are now moving to the UK. A BoKlok (Swedish for smart living) development in Gateshead has already been approved and their British partners, Smart @ Home are very optimistic about becoming “a major provider of housing in Britain.” Pictured here is the original architect’s mock-up used to get planning permission for the development.
These houses actually seem pretty cool, they are all prefabricated pieces that can be assembled in a day cutting down in a big way on the waste associated with on-site construction. In addition to being less polluting on-site, BoKlok houses are also made of sustainable and durable materials. Perhaps most importantly, these houses are going to be filling a sorely-missed niche in the British housing market as property prices all over the country have soared astronomically in the past decade leaving most low-income families with very few options.
Here is a link to a Guardian article about BoKlok. Photo credit to e-architect.co.uk
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A Custom Network for Everyone
What do the Long Island Ducks, the National Parks Conservation Association, and Country Day Little School all have in common? They are all mobile network operators. Sonopia wireless, founded by former Microsoft executive, Juha Christensen, matches organizations of all sorts with all that it takes to provide mobile phone service. Just how the company makes money is unclear, but the network service is provided by Verizon Wireless and the organization (the Ducks, NPCA, and Country Day) take 5% of the revenue. In addition to the prospect of revenue sharing, Sonopia would appeal to potential clients by providing the opportunity to sell custom handsets and yet another way for non-profit groups to contact donors.
The Sonopia website . A Business Week article on the company.
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Go South Young Man
Global warming isn’t happening quite fast enough for sun-seeking Americans who have been moving to sunny Southern California and Florida at such rates that the property prices haven’t had time to catch up. Business Week recently put out a special report about the 274 most appreciative zip codes in America. Quite why they’re appreciative is unclear, and there’s certainly no real understanding as to why they chose 274, but in an equally random number choice, here are the top 11 and here is a link to the report.
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Death sentence given for ant scam
A Chinese court has just handed down a death sentence to businessman Wang Zhendong for illegally raising $390m in investor funds for a fictitious giant ant breeding program. A Reuters article with very little more information.
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Who the hell is pro-whaling?
The BBC ran an article four days ago about an upcoming conference to be held in Japan aimed at overturning the global ban on commercial whaling. Since the ban, which went into effect in 1982, Japan and other countries have continued whaling under the auspices of scientific research. Environmental groups have been trying to close this loop hole of “scientific” whaling, pointing to the fact that whales captured for scientific purposes are sold on the same markets that used to sell commercially hunted whale. The practice of whaling was one of the first successful bans in the ecological movement and it’s hardly a wonder to anyone with a brain why it should be banned. These creatures tend to not have more than 1 calf every 2-3 years and it takes 15 years for a single humpback to reach maturity. Clearly this is one link in the food chain we can’t afford to lose.
Since that article ran a Japanese whaling ship in the Ross Sea, the Nisshin Maru, caught fire and has refused the help of nearby Green Peace ships in towing it to port. More on that
- Posted later on Duenos: Harpooner, a Japanese Cetacean Research Simulator.
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The easiest way to win a war is to say you've won
In a move straight out of George Bush’‘s playbook, Sony has declared the format war between HD-DVD and Sony’‘s BluRay. Apparently BluRay outsold HD-DVD 2 to 1 in January and are using the numbers to declare their platform to be the victor of this quick, Sumo-like clash of the titans. I didn’‘t actually think of this story, or the analogy, both come from the irreverent technology news site the Inquirer .
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Liverpool FC bought by American sports moguls
Liverpool soccer club has just been sold to American businessmen George Gillett and Tom Hicks. The pair already own a number of sports franchises with Hicks owning the NHL’‘s Dallas Stars and Major League Baseball’‘s Texas Rangers and Gillett owning the Montreal Canadiens. This whole affair begs the question: who the hell becomes a sports franchise tycoon? They don’‘t make a video game for that.
BBC Sports article on the buyout
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English league dominates richest clubs
Deloitte‘‘s Football Money League is an annual report of the highest grossing soccer clubs. Here are this year’‘s rankings for the top 10:
Interesting things to note about this year’‘s rankings are that Spain’‘s La Liga has the two top spots but no other presence at all. It’‘s also hard to ignore the over-representation of English Premiership teams with Manchester Utd, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool.
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More Jordan than Jordan?
From a marketing perspective and on the court, Miami Heat superstar Dwayne Wade is on track to be the ONE to take on Jordan’s throne. I’ve said it before about other promising up and comers, so don’t take my word for it, but watching Wade play you have to feel it.
Winning the NBA Finals MVP in 2006, this 3-time All Star’s basketball credentials are perfect, but what really makes you sit back and take note though is the rapidity with which he is moving far beyond Wade the basketball star to a marketing icon. In addition to gracing the cover of GQ last November, Wade is leading the Converse comeback under new Nike ownership as well as cross-branding with T-Mobile and Lincoln. Maybe he’s not making as much as Jordan did in sponsorships, but remember, he’s still 25.
Maybe it’s just my wanting to see a new king crowned in the NBA, but I think Dwayne Wade has what it takes. Check out all of Wade’s commercials
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