Martha Stewart Living publishes first multimedia magazine

  

On November 10, Martha Stewart Living magazine launched its premier digital edition created especially for iPad. Like most things Martha Stewart does, jumping into digital publishing is bound to be a very “good thing.”  In this video Martha explains her decision to add a digital edition of MSL, which just celebrated its 20th anniversary. 

There is plenty to like about MSL's digital format, with its dynamic how-to's, rich photo panoramas and slide shows, and documentary-quality video features. It's an extraordinary example of what can be done editorially thanks to advances in electronic publishing and camera technology. 

For example, digital MSL has two video features: one on artisanal cheese making and another about fishing in Alaska, each shot using one camera (i.e. RED camera) that captures still and moving images. Now, a subject can be covered for an array of media platforms, working quickly, economically, and to very high editorial standards. 

According to Eric Pike, MSLO's creative director, Adobe’s digital publishing suite makes it easy to incorporate moving images and interactive elements into a digital edition that's based on the print edition's layout. 

The challenge for print-trained editors, says Gael Towey, MSLO’s editorial director and creative chief, is conceiving stories for multimedia by anticipating how and where digital readers will view them. Publishing MSL on an iPad makes it a mobile magazine and toolbox that can move from armchair to the kitchen counter, into to the garden and out to the local supermarket. 

Ralph Lauren's amazing 4D augmented reality light show in New York and London

Ralph Lauren's flagship store in New York

This week Ralph Lauren boldly pushed the publicity and merchandising envelope with an extraordinary 4D light show, billed as “The Ultimate Collision Of Fashion, Art, & Technology,”  that superimposed lush cinematic effects on the company's storefronts in New York and London.

The roughly seven-minute light show celebrating Ralph Lauren's 10-year old online business was an eye-popping, multi-sensory happening powered by the latest in augmented reality and "architectural mapping." 

In one sequence the illusion of a grand staircase unfolding from inside the building's belly set the stage for 3D models who descended catwalk-style while towering chandeliers lowered from the night sky. Fade to black and seconds later a row of silk ties appeared, almost Dali-like, flapping gently in the virtual breeze. 

Next, a lizard skin belt stretched the building's width and cinched its glamorous waist. Again, momentary darkness until a giant crocodile handbag popped up and revolved 360-degrees. Fade once more and ... boom! Like a wild band of ghosts the brand’s signature polo players thundered across the store's facade, dashing in and out of sight.  

The big 4D moment arrived when four Big Pony fragrance bottles appeared and on cue one bottle spritzed the crowd below.

 RL's old-line image belies the fact that it is one of only a few luxury brands with a significant digital footprint. In addition to cross-channel advertising and an array of online catalogs, the company maintains a video-centric lifestyle website called RLTV, offers iPhone apps, and boasts more than one million friends on Facebook. Indeed, video of the 4D light show, now posted all over the social landscape, is neatly integrated across the Ralph Lauren's own digital network. 

What brand storytellers can learn from John Barleycorn

In medieval Europe some ballads were composed, then cheaply printed and sold as broadsheets.  

This post is devoted to the artful use of words and verse to convey, powerful, imaginative, cohesive, and memorable narratives. Ballads, for example, a narrative form often set to music, trace back to medieval times when many were composed, then cheaply printed and sold across Europe as single sheet broadsheets.

The ballad has evolved over the years, though it remains characteristically narrative - a concise story using vivid imagery rather than description. The central theme is often anchored in repetition, sometimes in the fourth lines in succeeding stanzas. 

Today we talk about the value of word-of-mouth marketing and brand narratives. How might a great balladeer tell a brand story?

An especially old and wonderful ballad is the English folksong "John Barleycorn," in which the character of John Barleycorn personifies the cultivation of barley for making beverages like whisky and beer. The song is set at harvest time, and it chronicles John Barleycorn's demise during the process of reaping and malting. It's a grizzly story, true, but it is told provocatively and beautifully. 

It's hardly surprising that some versions of "John Barleycorn," date back 500 years; many of us may know it as the song John Barleycorn Must Die, recorded in 1970 by the English rock band Traffic. Theirs is a fantastic rendition, and it is best enjoyed by listening and reading (or singing) along.

- Ballad-Lyrics - 

There were three men came out of the west, their fortunes for to try

And these three men made a solemn vow
John Barleycorn must die
They've plowed, they've sown, they've harrowed him in
Threw clods upon his head
And these three men made a solemn vow
John Barleycorn was dead

They've let him lie for a very long time, 'til the rains from heaven did fall
And little Sir John sprung up his head and so amazed them all
They've let him stand 'til Midsummer's Day 'til he looked both pale and wan
And little Sir John's grown a long long beard and so become a man
They've hired men with their scythes so sharp to cut him off at the knee
They've rolled him and tied him by the way, serving him most barbarously
They've hired men with their sharp pitchforks who've pricked him to the heart
And the loader he has served him worse than that
For he's bound him to the cart

They've wheeled him around and around a field 'til they came onto a pond
And there they made a solemn oath on poor John Barleycorn
They've hired men with their crabtree sticks to cut him skin from bone
And the miller he has served him worse than that
For he's ground him between two stones

And little Sir John and the nut brown bowl and his brandy in the glass
And little Sir John and the nut brown bowl proved the strongest man at last
The huntsman he can't hunt the fox nor so loudly to blow his horn
And the tinker he can't mend kettle or pots without a little barleycorn

New "curatorial" tools help brand story creators harness authority content on social networks

The abundance of authoritative tweets, video, blog posts, white papers, graphics, etc., make it easy to source elements for a dynamic multimedia story.Then what? Assembling choice bits into a cohesive narrative takes time and some editorial skill.

Publishing platforms like Posterous and Tumblr make it fairly simple to plug social content into multimedia blogposts. Now, new “curatorial” tools such as Storify go a step further, enabling story creators to search the likes of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Photobucket, and then drag and drop selected content into a linear flow wrapped in their own commentary. 

Storify co-founder Burt Herman, a former reporter for the Associated Press, says his service enables working journalists to weave original sources from the social web into their news stories. For example, The Washington Post used Storify to aggregate tweets from candidates after last week’s midterm elections. Storify's simplicity makes it suitable for non-journalists, too, like educators, marketers and publicists. 

A number of curatorial tools are currently in alpha or beta testing, notably Curatedby and Keepstream. Another platform called Qwiki is quite unique in the way it sources and assembles social content into amazing visual presentations. The company’s website has a slick demo portfolio featuring glossy, pithy profiles about Madrid, the Eiffel Tower, Vincent van Gogh, and more. 

Facebook Deals: Mobile promo may catch on slowly given geo-social's privacy issues

Facebook now makes local marketing even more socially dynamic with Facebook Deals, a new geo-location app that connects users of Facebook Places to hot deals offered by local businesses. Deals can take many forms: coupon savings, group deals, loyalty rewards or even charitable deals where a portion of sales go to a charity.

Some 23 major merchants and up to 20,000 small and midsize businesses in the U.S. are part of the initial program. Big players include American Eagle Outfitters, Chipotle, H&M, Macy's, McDonald's and Starbucks. The Gap says it plans to give away 10,000 pairs of jeans via Facebook Deals.  

Initially, Deals is only available through Facebook's iPhone app or via touch.facebook.com.

As this video post by Cnet demonstrates, users simply click to claim their discount and then redeem it by showing the deal on their phone at checkout.  The Deals service is an extension of Facebook Places, which lets smartphone owners with Facebook accounts share their exact location and find the whereabouts of friends. This latest feature notifies users of discounts and deals at selected merchants nearby.

"Coupons have become one of the most desirable forms of mobile advertising from a consumer perspective," says Greg Sterling, an independent analyst who closely follows Facebook. “Facebook Deals not only 'accelerates' the company's big presence on mobile devices, it is 'very significant' for marketers, retailers and local businesses.  

Forrester Research's social media analyst Augie Ray calls this move “a game changer,” predicting that Facebook Places could single-handedly change the way people shop by “encouraging the adoption of check-in activities among people who previously saw no reason to do so.”     

Facebook doesn’t charge businesses to promote an offer on Facebook Deals. Instead, local businesses with deals have incentive to buy display ads on Facebook. 

Researcher eMarketerer projects Facebook will earn $1.28 billion in worldwide advertising revenue this year, up from $665 million in 2009. Market researcher BIA/Kelsey sees revenue from mobile advertising in the U.S. exploding to $3.1 billion in 2013, up from $320 million in 2009.   

To make things even more interesting, Facebook Deals combines geo-location with other geo-social features like Yelp, Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, which many now use to shop, communicate, socialize and play games. Foursquare is said to be planning personal brand discovery features that leverage user recommendations and buying history.

Privacy concerns are hindering mainstream adoption of geosocial tech, however, and Facebook members may be turned off by the fact that when they activate a deal news of it gets posted to their wall. 

Pew Research found that only 4 percent of adults now use location-based services like Foursquare, Gowalla, or Facebook Places, and only 1 percent of these actually use these services on any given day.  Pew also found that only 8 percent of adults 18-29 use them – significant because this segment is the largest in terms of geosocial tools acceptance.

For more on Facebook's privacy issues mega PR firm MS&L offers a white paper,  FacebookPrivacy: Implications for Marketers. 


This story from InformationWeekcom provides good insight, too. 

  

Lost in translation? Why global brands need a local story.

Everyone aspires to luxury, right? Not according to Tyler Brûlé, the Canadian-born journalist, entrepreneur, and magazine publisher, who argues that consumers around the world think and behave differently, shaped by their local culture, history and values. Luxury brand Gucci for example, which is hot in Japan and the US, holds little appeal in Sweden where people prize social equality.(It’s little wonder that the massively democratic retailers H&M and IKEA are Swedish.)   

Several years ago Britain’s BBC4 ran a series presented by Brule called Counter Culture, which examined the consumer mindset in Japan, Libya, Sweden, Italy and the US.  He found that marketing, like politics, always has a  local dynamic. The Telegraph newspaper ran an article about Brule's show that’s still worth reading. Only the episode on Libya can be viewed on the web and it is fascinating. The other episodes are sold online. 

Recently the Financial Times ran a story about Russia's growing preference for home-grown fashion designers. According to Igor Chapurin, a noted Russian designer, after the end of the drab Soviet years Russian consumers gravitated to flashy western designers such as Versace and Valentino. Now they favor monochrome, low-key looks created by domestic talent who have a better grasp of Russian tastes and attitudes.

Mashable has an excellent post on international marketing with insights (and tips) on tailoring digital programs to vastly different audiences. 

Victoria's Secret? Short (commercials) work great. But shift to 15-second spots pushes larger brand story to the web

 USA Today reports that TV advertisers are shifting to shorter commercials.  The number of 15-second television commercials has jumped more than 70% in five years to nearly 5.5 million last year, according to Nielsen.  

The trend isn’t all that surprising. Today, people are pretty adept at tuning out tiresome commercials and research now shows that longer spots aren't necessarily better. With the right creative marketers can get a bigger bang running a heavier schedule of concise blips. 

Case in point: Victoria Secret’s new “Bombshell Bra” commercial  packs a heck of lot of sell into 15-seconds, though I wonder why this spot doesn't work harder by driving traffic to the VS website. Short format commercials airing on Hulu do this seamlessly because they are clickable. The fusion of broadcasting and web browsing should evolve quickly as new interactive television platforms such as Google TV become mainstream.