Wired. Ready to go iPad.

Februar 17th, 2010 • Comments Media
Tags: Apple, Brands, Cool, Creativity, Experimental, iPad, Media, Print, Strategy, Tech, Trends

Wired Magazine has just launched its video preview for its iPad application. And yes it looks yummy! In fact it is very logical for Wired to be among the first to take this step. I think the iPad will be a piece of hardware to make print publisher’s wet dreams come true and offer a digital platform to buy and consume print media.

As a commenter explained: This visual demo is very likely an Adobe Air demo…which does not work on the iPad yet.

Apple iPad. Endorsed by Print Publishers Worldwide.

Januar 28th, 2010 • Comments Allgemein
Tags: Apple, Burda, Industry, iPad, Media, Murdoch, Print, publishers, Strategy, Tablets, Tech, Tools, Touch, Trend, World

What a week for Hubert Burda! The Grandsigneur of German Publishers, ‘Chairman of the Board and Publisher of Hubert Burda Media, President of the Association of German Magazine Publishers, and co-founder of the European Publishers Council’  must have had a great night last night.

Why? Because it seems to me that he, as one of the most conservative protagonists of paid content on the web, has finally won.  Earlier this week he had opened Burda’s annual digital conference DLD in Munich. A digital conference which looks like all the industry meetings you know from around the world…except that it was hosted by a brand which publicly asked to disappropriate google because of their online media market share. Sounds ridiculous? Well, it is.

Burda described Google as a “killer application” which delivered almost half of all traffic to local journalism Web sites and yet managed to keep almost one-third of all Internet advertising revenues in Germany for itself. “All of that without making any investment of its own in the expensive business of journalism,” Burda noted.

Burda called for amendments to copyright and even suggested that Google should pay for the use of news it had not produced itself. Of course, the search engine wanted nothing to do with this suggestion. (‘Der Spiegel‘, Sept 09)

Actually your failed business model is not my problem

Earlier, in summer 2009, Burda and other publishers had managed to channel their whining about antiquated business model into the Hamburg Declaration of European Publishers. It demanded a ‘fair share’ by search engines like google. Google reacted with an offer to deny robots the access to the publisher’s pages. The conflict went hot. The web manned the battle stations when Silicon Valley started fighting against Munich. Well, and of course it could get even more bizarre when Rupert Mordoch started to ‘threaten’ google to block them from his newspapers and rumors about a Murdoch pact with Bing versus google made the headlines.

Burdoch’s ‘new business model’ was the old one…translated into digital: Making readers pay for stuff they read online.

In the new business model, we will be charging consumers for the news we provide on our Internet sites. The critics say people won’t pay. I believe they will, but only if we give them something of good and useful value. Our customers are smart enough to know that you don’t get something for nothing.

Similar to the music industry publishers never condescended to think about alternative business models. While print advertising revenues worldwide dropped like they were hot, no alternative business model was even explored. The direction was clear: Save mainstream print media at all cost. No matter wether there simply is no need for so many general interest magazines anymore, we do print…with a digital touch to make it look cooler.

The web’s response was unambiguous: Twitter founder Biz Stone commented the Burdoch’s closed payment model will ‘fail fast’ and it would be impossible to ‘put the genie back into the bottle’. Others compared the old men’s inflexibility to the disaster of the music industry etc. In autumn 2009 both, Burda and Murdoch, demasked themselves as dinosaurs – powerful but inflexible, free from creative power and about to make the same mistakes so many others had done before.

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Digital Magazines. Another future for print.

Dezember 18th, 2009 • Comments Ideas, Tech
Tags: Cool, Creativity, Experimental, Future, Ideas, Prediction, Presentation, Print, Tech, Trends, UX, visual, We like, World

Is print dead? If you read my own headlines you will find out that I am undecided as well. I am sure that the majority of mainstream print media nowadays is doomed. But, I think that some traditional print media products might reinvent themselves. Lately Outsider Magazine and Esquire came up with remarkable experiments in this sector.

Publishing thinktank Bonnier plus its partner Berg London have come up with this cool vision of how magazine UX might evolve. It’s a concept video and does not exist yet. But the concept convincingly uses digital media to create a rich and meaningful experience, while maintaining the relaxed and curated features of printed magazines. It illustrates one possible vision for digital magazines in the near future.

Absolut. 25 years in fantastic ads.

Dezember 7th, 2009 • Comments Ads, Brands, Classics
Tags: Absolut, Ads, Branding, Brands, Classics, Cool, Creativity, history, Lifestyle, Print, visual, We like, World

My friends at Creative Criminals have published this fantastic compilation quite a while ago. But it is still worth taking a look at: For over 25 years Absolut vodka has run a simply überinspiring advertising campaign. The well known bottle of Absolut is formed in the shape of a tradtional Swedish medicine flagon. It may be hard to use for bartenders but the shape was an inspiration for their print campaign which just does one thing: Position the product as hero.

Check out the ad compilation here.

Print Advertising. Yes, it is dead.

November 21st, 2009 • Comments Allgemein
Tags: Ads, Business, Diagram, Media, Print, Strategy, Trends, visual, World

One can argue that he slow death of traditional media is perfectly summarized in Rupert Murdoch’s bizarre war with google. The awl, instead, has just published this diagram which visualizes ad revenue vs newsstand and subscriber sales of major print media titles. It highlights the end of the print advertising era. While sales revenues rise or stay on the same level, ad revenues decline with rocket engines attached to it. I am not convinced, ignorance will restore the status quo (check out the Awl’s post here).

Esquire. Spicing up print with Augmented Reality.

November 17th, 2009 • Comments Experimental
Tags: Augmented Reality, Business, Cool, Experimental, Ideas, Lifestyle, Market, Print, Strategy, Tech, Tools, visual

Okay…Augmented Reality. About a year ago three words which simply had to be said by someone in a digital creative brainstorming was Flashmob, Social Media and QR code, with the latter being replaced in 2009 by Augmented Reality (“Creatives Bingo”).

To be honest…currently I only see few interesting use cases for it (the way it is used by brands nowadays). No, dear brands. I am not interested in an animated version of my cereals box. And no I won’t hold print ads into my webcam in order to see ads.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe, it’s a great technology. Augmented Reality can work – in the moment it delivers added value. Something which is more than just a moveable 3D-version of ads, ads, ads. Take Layar for example, a mobile browser which intertwines AR, mobile and knowledge. Or Invizimals, a pretty cool looking toy for the PSP. And maybe….just maybe….magazines and newspapers might create new, cool experiences intertwined with their print content as well through AR… One year after their 2008 E-Ink issue Esquire has published its first AR issue together with the Barbarian Group.

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Hirngespinster. Giving life to a story.

Oktober 12th, 2009 • Comments Experimental, Ideas, Surface, Tech
Tags: Art, Cool, Creativity, Experimental, Hirngespinster, Media, Motion, Print, Surface, Tech, Tools, visual, We like, World

Hirngespinster is the final project of Tristan Hohne to graduate from University of Applied Sciences Dortmund in Germany. Tristan describes it as a tangible user interface which combines the analogue book with the digital world. Hirngespinst is one of those German words which might make it into an English dictionary one day. I would roughly translate it as phantasy-driven fixation.

And as Tristan’s Hirngespinste find their way into your head, he shows a nice way to make print and digital interact – whenever Hirngespinster are seen on a book page, the viewer can interact by catching them. Once caught, an animation lets you get an inside look from the affected point of view.

Nice one, Tristan (thx Helge for the link).

Hirngespinster from Tristan Hohne on Vimeo.

Print. Far from being dead.

Oktober 7th, 2009 • Comments Media
Tags: Cool, Creativity, Experimental, Future, Ideas, Media, Print, Strategy, Trends, visual, We like, World

Thanks to Creativecriminals for proving once again: Print is far from being dead. Watch this amazing concept video of Photographer Alexx Henry and his team show you how a magazine might look in the not-so-distant future with the October cover and spread for Outside Magazine.