Are The Olympics Cuttings Edge For Marketing Or Cutting Marketers Out?
Every Monday morning at 7:10 am, I am a guest contributor on CHOM 97.7 FM radio broadcasting out of Montreal (home base). It’s not a long segment – about 5 to 10 minutes every week – about everything that is happening in the world of technology and digital media. The good folks at CHOM 97.7 FM are posting these segments weekly to SoundCloud, if you’re interested in hearing more of me blathering away. I’m really excited about this opportunity, because this is the radio station that I grew up on listening to, and it really is a fun treat to be invited to the Mornings Rock with Terry and Heather B. morning show. The segment is called, CTRL ALT Delete with Mitch Joel.
We’re in Olympics mode. And, in typical Olympics mode, the IOC has created a whole batch of Draconian laws that prohibit short videos that may misrepresent how the Rio Games are represented. News organizations are banned from taking Olympic Material and turning it into GIFs, Vines, etc… The ICO also banned any businesses from using the terms “summer”, “gold”, “games”, “effort”, “victory”, “Rio” and “2016” in relation to the games. They don’t want any brands (who aren’t paid sponsors or advertisers) to “benefit” from the Games, without their permission. In a world like ours, how do they expect this to play out?
Amazon made a surprising announcement last week. They are shipping enough packages across the US that it is starting to build their own airline fleet. Amazon One?… the first Amazon Prime Air airplane was unveiled in Seattle. According to Amazon: “You can almost think about the difference between commercial flight and private flight… We have the ability, with our own planes, to create connections between one point and another point that are exactly tailored to our needs, and exactly tailored to the timing of when we want to put packages on those routes — versus other peoples’ networks which are optimized to run their entire network. We add capacity, we add flexibility, and it gives us cost-control capability as well.” Think about the logistics, data and information that Amazon knows about you, me and every consumer.
Facebook is making a huge play toward making Snapchat useless. Instagram (which is owned by Facebook) just added a new feature that lets people share photos and videos that disappear, the key feature of Snapchat. “Users can write over the photos and add annotations — just like in Snapchat. The product lets people post photos or videos taken throughout their day in a slideshow form, just like Snapchat Stories. They vanish in 24 hours — just like Snapchat Stories. To make it totally clear, Instagram is calling its product Stories too.” Will it work?