Wagging the long tail to market your existence.

In the case of Saturn, exploiting transparency: have enough guts and faith in your product to show up, toss the keys to some high share-of-voice folks, and take your lumps good or bad.

In the case of Cambrian House, exploiting the flash-mob’s appetite for documenting and reposting geeky tomfoolery qua news by delivering 1,000 pizzas to Google. For those of you like me and thousands of others who didn’t know but now do, Cambrian House is a cleverly conceived crowdsourced idea incubator that has interesting potential (even if I’m a bit skeptical it can execute its full vision).

Nicely done.

This is fascinating – Mark Cuban has more than 900 responses to the following challenge, which he posted on his blog less than a week ago:

How do you get people out of the house to see your movie without spending a fortune. How can you convince 5 million people to give up their weekend and go to a theater to see a specific movie without spending 60mm dollars.

Interesting question, not a trivial one, and one that leads to some interesting discussions. But what amazes me most is the number and variety of thoughtful (and in some cases not-so-thoughtful) responses in the comments, many of which are replicated elsewhere in the blogosphere — producing yet more exposure for this question and its responses. Turns out you don’t need Digg to “crowdsource” a question like this, if you’ve got enough readers (and the promise of an interesting job to boot).

As for the actual question at hand, taking it at face value (i.e., trying to solve the problem of how to get people into movie theaters, as opposed to suggesting alternate distribution channels for media), the movie theater business is a fat pipe designed, much like bestseller-driven book publishing houses, to shove product of a certain size out with a certain frequency. The problem has become how to stuff the pipe full enough, and how to spend enough on marketing to ensure the attendence is there (even if the quality of the content is not), leading to a downward cycle of more and more marketing for ever-safer movies that need more and more sales to break even.

There are several very obvious approaches to solving this problem, many of which have parallels in other industries.

1. Make it like cable tv. Add more content to the pipe, and break up the business model so it’s not so monolithically focused on delivering such a small number of products. Break your multi-plexes into multiple channels – so there’s always an indy film on, and a new chick flick every week. A savvy operator realizes he can sell off this distribution, or at least rent it (like cable).

2. Make it like “appointment” TV. There’s always a foreign film on thurdays at 8, and a Hitchcock classic at midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. Cancel the channels and shows that don’t work after giving them a fair shot.

3. Make it like HBO. Go out and get the very best content, even if you have to bend the medium. Speaking of HBO, why not a weekly showing of the Sopranos, or Entourage, or NFL football?

4. Make it like a stadium / a ski resort / a cable company / a Dell computer. In combination with the above, experiment with the pricing model. Several good suggestions have been made in the comments already, but tying innovative pricing to something beyond “all you can eat” is more interesting. Think luxury boxes, half-share box seats, season passes not good on weekends. Sell channels a la carte or in packages that appeal to market segments. . . let people “build your own pass”.

5. Make it more social. Group discounts and family nights. Neighborhood discounts that rotate by what street you live on. Internet planning outing planning tools, comment publishing tools. Going to the movies is a great American institution. Take a cue from the Celebration, Florida, or the reinvention of classic ballparks, and reinvent this iconic experience around community.

6. Make it like a nightclub. Hire promoters with rolodexes. Encourage private bookings. Have exclusive VIP stuff. Have event-driven nights (think Oscars, Emmys, Superbowl).

7. Make it like Target. Have a celebrity programming host for certain slots and build identity around those personas. “Stephen King presents” has a promising ring to it.

8. Make it like Google’s IPO. Completely reinvent the distribution model — when you have a hot enough hand to do it — by giving the theater a huge incentive to make your film. If a typical model is to spend $10 per butt-in-seat opening weekend, of which the house keeps 50% and for which the average capacity ranges from 60-100%, pay the house $4 a seat (at 100% capacity) to run it free, for opening week only, for as many seats as you want. (You could probably pay even less for late shows given away on a “buy one get one free basis” that helps theater owners sell their other shows and popcorn.) Give the house a bigger (60%? 75%) cut of everything sold thereafter, and make the house commit to: a) significant coop advertising pushing the film for a month; and b) keeping the film open for as many weeks as the theater is at least 50% full (net on the week). If the movie’s any good, there will be word of mouth, and both sides win (less risk for the theater, less marketing cost for you). If it’s a stinker, you just saved half your marketing loss.

9. Mix and match!

Now that it’s Friday, I’m about recovered enough to post about last weekend, during which your narrator turned 36. I don’t normally do the whole “week of Greg’s birthday” thing, but this year it just sort of snowballed.

First, my friend Alex was in Las Vegas for work (or for “work”), prompting me to excuse myself from my normal friday cubicle activities and hop a flight out of Burbank thursday afternoon. After a bang-up meal at Thomas Keller’s Bouchon, an evening out and about, and a day lounging at the surprisingly enticing Hard Rock pool, I flew back to LA, drove directly to the Short Stop for drinks, and applied myself fully to some sweaty sweaty disco dancing with about 15 friends (powered by a late-breaking second wind inspired by the indefatigable dz and all-too-rare encounter with Tamale Guy).

Ater closing time, Amy steered me away from the proffered after-hours drinks — but little did I know what my super-amazing girlfriend had in store for me the next morning. After a ruse involving talk of a pool party and a suspicious stop at a diner in San Pedro, where a close fried turned up under ridiculously false pretenses, she drove me straight to Berth 75. “Snowbird”, a beautiful 30-foot Hunter sailboat, awaited our chartering pleasure. I was given a quick tour, handed the helm, and off we casted, spending the day under sunny skies and modest breezes, tacking up and down the coast and tooling around Long Beach harbor. It was perfect. (Stay tuned to Amy’s flickr blog for the visual works.)
At dinner after, the group of us were so mellow that my friend John (who had not sailed with us) said, “I feel like the guy at the party who didn’t take the drugs.” To that I raise a glass and say, “hear hear!”

Thanks to everyone who celebrated with me!

UPDATE: Now with Cookie Puss

Cross-posting my item on the Yahoo! Publisher Network blog regarding today’s launch of publisher quote & news badges.  Pretty nifty.

Two services I use — Feedburner to manage and track my RSS feeds, and Blogbeat to track readership on my blog — just merged. A very interesting development in the analytics space! Congrats to Dick, Rick, and the rest of the teams of both companies.  UPDATE:  Official blog post on Burning Questions.

In one of the most entertaining viral-video web memes I’ve seen in a while, the band OK Go has nailed the ironic indy-culture meets backyard DIY aesthetic in a video called “A Million Ways”. In it, the four band members dance a well-choreographed but hilariously low-quality set piece (watch it here) whose popularity has inspired imitation across the nation.

But the twist is, now a contest for user-uploaded imitations has videos pouring in from high-school talent-show entrants, college fraternities, and other american idol rejects far and wide. My favorite so far is a surprise black-tie wedding performance, with the father of the bride as the dance troupe leader.

What’s so interesting to me about this goes beyond the simple idea that web2.0 makes everyone an amateur publisher. People are forming social identies and new kinds of community relationships on the web. Watching the wedding video, I laughed along as if I were at an extended-family skit comedy contest – I am a voyeur/participant, in on the joke.

New applications like the dating site engage.com (which gets individuals to participate as matchmakers in the online dating process and is funded by half.com founder Josh Kopelman among others), mybloglog.com (which manages the “recent readers” badge off to the right), and swaptree (which i’m watching with great interest) are moving beyond myspace and spinner rims for your blog, and instead fashioning innovative experiences and fantastic new opportunities for user-to-user relationships.

A propos of my previous post. . . In a funny twist of timing, Jonathan Weber, my former employer at New West, just wrote a column in the Times of London in which he reflects on exactly the issue of Expression Engine vs. other publishing tools that I touched on in my welcome post.

I am somewhat amused by his wondering whether he made the right choice in building on EE — I sure hope he’s happy enough with it, since I was a primary driver of that call — but I think his results so far speak for themselves. And ultimately he comes to the right conclusions, which are that these things are still way too hard to use and “way” not good enough for non-developers to really customize.

Though he refers to Yahoo! and Google as wanting to own this space (and we certainly have pounded a few collective stakes in the ground there), I still see lots of room for innovation from the edges. Last weekend at Gnomedex, I got a demo and met the founder of a product called Wetpaint, which is a really easy-to-use, pretty, WYSIWYG version of Typepad, and its getting easier to blend 3rd-party developer tools with many platforms due to entries from PostApp (aka WidgetBox), Ning, and the like. Just a couple of examples among many; I look forward to seeing more emerge.

Hi – and thanks for stopping by. Please take a second to say hello via the comments.

As you can see, I’ve finally decided to launch a dedicated blog. Those who know me will be aware I’ve been experimenting with blogging long enough to have developed a taste for the habit, but I’ve found myself wanting to express more thoughts along the way than have been suitable to a blog about social cause marketing. I’ve also had a hankering to test-drive Wordpress. While I’ve been a happy user of pmachine/expression engine and have found it flexible enough to launch a successful business on, it is not always convenient for personal use. Plus I want to play around with some of the new tricked-out blog tools that are in the marketplace.

I’ll use this space primarily for thoughts that emerge via my work in the web/publishing 2.0 space, along with personal news and musings that I’d like to share with my community. (You can read my first cut at a charter here.)

Hopefully you’ll become part of my community if you aren’t already, but either way, welcome!