Magazines on-demand

If you have been following this blog, I had been stressing about the importance of content on demand.

The first example, is at Heathrow Airport in London, where HSBC is promoting their Premier Card.  Travelers go to a kiosk, where they are able to customize their own magazines for free by selecting their own content.  These custom magazines will be branded by HSBC.  The Premier card’s target demographic group are travelers.  Based on the success of this campaign, this program could be a perk for HSBC Premier members.

Second example, is with Time Magazine  in conjunction with Lexus are pursuing a made to order magazine. Lexus will have editorial content and exclusive ad space, while the readers get aggregated content from Time and its subsidiaries all for free.  This campaign ties the customizable nature of this new aggregated magazine to the new Lexus RX sport utility vehicle and its customizable features.   The magazine will be available as a hard copy to the first 31,000 respondents, and then it will be available online as well as on mobile.

I think this is definitely how content will be viewed in the future.  The internet as a disruptive technology, changed how people view media.  Offering customized content that appeals to what, when, where and how the customer wants to look at the media is imperative.  Online advertising has not generated enough revenue to offset the decline in print.  Offering this customizable content is probably the best alternative.  What do you all think?

The economy of free. How come I can now get almost anything for free?

 

 

Have you noticed there are an increasing number of goods and services are free? This is especially true if the goods/services are from the ever-increasing number of companies that act in the digital environment.  According to this article, one of the reasons is because of declining marginal costs.  As more users utilize the service, the cost per user decreases.  For the internet, storage (Gmail, Yahoo mail), bandwidth (YouTube, Daily Motion, etc.) and processing speed (Google) are all free for the user.

 

 

Other examples included are: what may appear to be free to the user, is subsidized by a third party.  For example, some free services on the internet are subsidized by licensing fees, fees for “exclusive” content, advertising revenue and information about subscribers.  Digital technologies will only continue to operate in the free economy. 

 

More examples include: Promoting products/services using cross subsidies, that occurs when a product/service is free, but the complementing product/service is not; Open Sourcing occurs when completely free product/services are developed and continuously improved by a community of users; and finally, web sites and services using a labor exchange are free because using and contributing to the web site creates value.

 

More examples of the free economy click here.