Your World Today

In a brilliant attempt at differentiation, American ad agency Boone Oakley (BooneOakley.com) scrapped its traditional website and is instead using a YouTube video as its homepage.

Utilizing YouTube tags and annotations, the company did not only succeed in engaging its website visitors in a very unique way, but it was also able to gain tremendous viral reach as the new site/video propelled it to being one of the top five viral videos on the internet for the week of June 12-19 (Viral Blog rankings).

Check out the video below, or go to BooneOakley.com to see it.

For those of you who do business internationally and who wonder if using the Maple Leaf alone is sufficient to associate their brand with Canada (and all the assumed ‘good vibes’ from that association), here is an ad that appeared in a middle east news paper that might give you an idea of what many common people in various countries think of when they see this Canadian emblem:

[via AdblogArbia]

Daniel McCann (Photo Credit: Saskatchewan Business Journal)

Daniel McCann wants to revolutionize the current online payment process used by millions of online shoppers when conducting online credit card transactions. During a telephone interview from his office in Regina, Saskatchewan, the 29 years-old inventor and entrepreneur told Your World Today that his new device has the potential of making the role of third-party security verification (Payment Gateways) obsolete.

And he should know what he is talking about. He was 26 when he first came up with the idea of a personal credit card reader; a fresh graduate of the University of Regina with a Bachelor degree in Computer Science. He entered his idea in a business plan competition sponsored by the Regina municipal government (called Progress2Capital) and placed in the top 10. He tried again the following year and won the first place prize of $10,000 in cash plus $5,000 in legal services. This was all the start-up capital he had to convert his idea from dream to reality.

A short three years later, and at age 29, Daniel is the President of a new technology company that employs 15 full-time employees. His invention is a patented reality, and is being sold online and through retail stores in Regina. He plans to offer the device in stores across Canada by mid to late summer of 2009.

I ask Daniel about his ‘big idea’, hoping that he would share his long-term vision of re-inventing the processing of online credit card transactions, and how the new process will cut the middleman out of the equation (Payment Gateways). He obliges.

‘Payment Gateways’ are companies that are used by online shops to process online purchases made by credit cards. The extra encryption and transaction verification (that Payment Gateways provide) is required by banks and credit card companies to accept transactions from online shops because the credit card information is entered by consumers on a website by hand, which makes the transaction less secure than if the credit card was ’swiped’ at a point of sale (POS) terminal (e.g. : a retail store or restaurant transaction). When you pay for your bill with a credit card at a restaurant, the conventional store’s credit card reader retrieves the card’s information directly from the magnetic strip on the card and transmits it electronically to the merchant’s bank.

If Payment Gateways can be avoided, merchants and customers can save on transaction costs for shopping online by eliminating the percentage that the middlemen (gateways) charge on each sale to allow the use of credit cards on a website. This can translate into lower product prices for consumers, or higher margins for online merchants.

That vision will have to wait until enough people adopt the new portable device that he has invented in order to justify to merchants why they should go through the trouble of offering it as a payment option. If the technology becomes main stream, that will also convince banks and credit card processors to accept transaction info coming directly from a SmartSwipe device.

If that vision becomes reality, the impact on personal online shopping will be monumental. With the savings on transaction fees that online merchants can achieve by skipping the Payment Gateways, SmartSwipe can position itself as the next PayPal of the world.

For now, however, using the device allows online shoppers to automatically and securely fill the credit card fields in any existing online shopping transaction page. It is marketed as a safer alternative to entering credit card information manually on websites while shopping online.

The SmartSwipe website  gives a good list of potential risks to watch for when shopping online. This personal/portable credit card reader allows the online shopper to avoid entering credit card information manually by swiping the card using the USB-connected SmartSwipe device. The information is then encrypted using the same encryption technology required by banks, and transferred directly into the appropriate credit card fields on the website where the shopper is conducting the transaction.

Daniel was kind enough to send Your World Today a demo unit. I tested the SmartSwipe with a couple of online credit card purchases and  everything worked as advertised. The software didn’t activate automatically when testing a credit card transaction on Firefox (version 3.0.8), but worked without glitches in Internet Explorer (version 7.0.6).

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this article, where Daniel McCann shares with YWT readers the journey of his invention from idea to reality, and provides valuable advice to similar entrepreneurs about patenting, raising capital, product design, and how online social networking played a crucial part in the invention process.

The Downtown Halifax Business Commission (DHBC), together with Extreme Group, are embarking on a unique new initiative to encourage Halifax residents to visit the downtown area to shop, dine, and play (or remain after work, if they work in the area).

Paul MacKinnon, Executive Director of the DHBC, unveils new campaign at Extreme's head office in downtown Halifax

I say the initiative is unique because, unlike previous initiatives, this one seems to target a demographic that had previously been largely ignored by city and provincial initiatives. It is also unique in its abandonment of cliche imagery that is normally associated with such campaigns (lobsters, waterfront, Citadel Hill, etc.).

The poster below is one of four executions revealed at the campaign launch, along with a new website at www.downtownhalifax.ca. Unfortunately, I only took a picture of this one. I’ll post the rest as soon as I am able to get my hands on them (hear that, Extreme?)

Account Director: Geoff Wills
Creative Director: Cliff Thompson
Account Planner: Martin Delaney
Account Supervisor: Allison Garber
Designer: Amy Boehmer
Art Director: Tyson Hynes
Copywriter: Trevor Millett
Project Manager: Karen Bell

During the campaign launch event at Extreme’s downtown headquarters, I asked the Account Director of the campaign and he confirmed that the departure from using common imagery was deliberate. The DHBC and Extreme group seemed to be on the same page in regards to what attracts the demographic they are targeting, and what imagery is seen as ineffective.

The campaign direction is interesting to me, as it reflects several conversations I have had recently with friends and colleagues that loathed the lack of an ‘after-work’ dynamic in the downtown. In other cities, the after-work crowd is a key soruce of business to shops, restaurants, and bars, resulting in an active downtown core throughout the business week.

Extreme Group is a local ad agency with offices in Halifax and Toronto. The agency received 13 awards in the 2008 ICE Awards, a prestegious annual advertising awards gala to recognize the Atlantic region’s best advertising and design.

The recent wave of closures and layoffs at Newspaper establishments like the Chronicle Herald is prompting observers to ponder the potential collapse of the Fourth Estate.

Internet enthusiasts believe that the solution is for traditional print media to simply “get with the times” and “go online”. Some even go as far as suggesting that with the proliferation of social media and citizen journalism (blogs, podcasts, vlogs, twitter, etc.), the market demand for traditional news reporting is diminishing and will soon disappear.

I disagree with this view, and I believe that market demand will always be present for traditional news reporting, specially investigative reporting. Unpaid bloggers simply don’t have the resources or access to chase around a story for an investigative report, so they can never provide a viable substitute.

Saying that “the only way traditional print media can save itself is by going online and embracing the way of social media” oversimplifies (or fails to address) the various elements involved in making such decisions. This view simply suggests that the only saving measure is to change the medium of delivery.

To raise profit, any business must do one (or both) of the following:

A. Increase Revenue (Sell more units | sell to more people | raise unit price)

B. Decrease Costs

With advertisers holding back on spending, and a general demographic migration of audience from paid, subscription-based, print-news consumption, to free, on-demand, online news consumption, it appears that maintaining profitability by increasing revenue would be difficult at the very least.

This leaves the print industry with the option to pursue strategies aimed at decreasing costs to remain profitable. These cost cutting strategies can be applied to:

A. Content Delivery, and/or

B. Content Creation

Content Delivery:

I.e. increasing profit (or cutting costs) by modifying the methods used to deliver the content. This is the solution suggested by many internet and social media advocates.

Modifying the medium of content delivery can also fall under the “increase revenue” category because it opens opportunities to access online revenue models. However, various current examples have proven that newspaper revenues from online advertising/subscriptions are a fraction of what the traditional paper copy yields.

This solution at its surface does not address the various demographic, geographical, and socioeconomic factors at play.

For example, in Nova Scotia, the demographical makeup of the population makes it difficult for Newspapers to simply decide to ‘go digital’.

According to the latest statistics (2007) of population estimates from the NS Finance department, a significant percentage of the population is in an age category that remains quite attached to paper formats. If we don’t count population aged 0 to 14 years as “news readers”, almost one-third of the remaining population is in the 55+ age category. This is the age category that largely contributes to the subscription revenue stream.

With the decline in advertising revenues, subscription revenues are now a growing contributor to the profit margin, and must be given its due consideration.

The 55+ age category remains attached to paper formats. It can be argued that it is much harder to ‘re-train’ this demographic to change their news consumption habits, or increase their existing adoption of internet media. A quick look at news media research studies and surveys easily confirms the age distribution of paper vs. online news readers.

So, while newspapers in regions with a larger percentage of a ‘younger’ population may conceive a viable switch to an online business model, papers like the Chronicle Herald are bound to cost-cutting options and innovations that are less flexible given the comparatively older demographic of their audience in the paper’s main distribution area (high percentage of people over 55 residing in Nova Scotia).

However, as previously mentioned, there are two aspects to the ‘News business’: Content Delivery, and Content Creation. The above limitations of demographics and technology adoption are shortcomings for cost-cutting strategies that target Content Delivery because they involve changing consumer habits that are outside the locus of control of a newspaper like the Chronicle Herald.

→ Locus of Control refers to the extent to which individuals believe that they can control events that affect them. Individuals with a high internal locus of control believe that events result primarily from their own behavior and actions. Those with a high external locus of control believe that powerful others, fate, or chance primarily determine events. (Wikipedia)

Content Creation:

On the Content Creation side, a number of strategic options are available for consideration. Any strategic changes to the business model of “content creation” are internal to the newspaper, and therefore are much easier to control and modify without negatively affecting the audience of the paper or asking them to change their consumption habits.

The increased control over the outcome alone makes cost-cutting strategies targeted towards content creation a better alternative to strategies targeted at changing the content delivery medium. Still, we must remember that content-creation and content-delivery strategies are not mutually exclusive.

So how can costs be reduced by tackling  ‘Content Creation’? The answer is in good ole’ fashioned Business Process Re-engineering (BPR).

First, the various elements of content creation should be identified and analysed:

What the content is?

• which content is syndicated, which content is local
• which content is based on press releases from 3^rd parties (companies, government departments, etc.)
• which content is regular reporting, and which is investigative reporting

How the content is created?<

• What are the existing processes of writing, submitting, and printing content
• Are there alternative methods or technologies that can be adopted to better (and more cost-effectively) manage how the content is written, submitted, edited, proofed, and printed

Who creates the content?

• What kind of qualifications must be present in a reporter/writer/journalist to create each type of content identified in the previous analysis of “what the content is”
• Is staff distributed adequately to match the qualifications required to create each content type, or does the paper have $100 reporters writing content that can be equally created by a $50 reporter
• Can existing staff work with new technologies that the organization might introduce to cut costs and/or improve productivity?
• Can existing staff be retrained? Will they adopt the change or will they resist it?
• If existing staff can not be retrained or resist the change, does the paper have access to new staff candidates who possess the qualifications required for the content, AND have the know-how to use the new technology platform, AND are willing to work at an equivalent (or cheaper) rate to the old staff.

Where the content is created?

• Does creating the content require a central physical space to house the creators (an office) or can the creators work off-site (e.g. telecommute)
• Which staff must have a physical presence at an office
• What operations/resources are required to create the content? Are they accessible only at a central physical location? Can they be digitized and provided online? Can they be outsourced?
• What is the cost-benefit analysis of changing the business model from creating content on-site to content creation off-site (savings on office space vs. cost of deploying new technology and processes to support off-site content creation and retraining staff)

The point of the above exercise is to create a new business model that:

A. Keeps providing quality news reporting

B. Removes non-vital expenses through achievable technology adoption (telecommuting, online authoring and collaboration tools, video conferencing, etc.)

C. Realigns human resources to maximize productivity by matching experience to the content that requires it, and trimming staff that is unable or unwilling to adapt to the new business model (deadwood).

By doing the above, traditional print newspapers can emerge as a leaner and more responsive business machine. They can cut costs, remain positioned for online delivery, and continue to cater to their traditional paper market.