momorantings

A couple of years ago, I was speaking at a conference and someone from the audience asked me what I believed to be the biggest marketing challenge of the next five years. I answered with the death of the newspaper, which surprised many, who thought I would point to declining subscription bases or overall drops in arts participation.   We had just experienced the death of four major newspapers – the Seattle Post Intelligencer , the Rocky Mountain News , the Tucson Citizen and the Christian Science Monitor – at a time when most non-profit arts organizations had important symbiotic relationships with their hometown newspapers.    So let me pause to ask – if your newspaper were to go out of business today, how would that impact your organization?    And here’s why I am asking. According to the Newspaper Association of America (NAA): ·          Total print advertising has dropped from $47.4 billion in 2005 to $20.6 billion i...

Kickstarter launches in the UK at the end of the month and there will be lots of media coverage about this "funding platform for creative projects" and its new way of raising money. But, it occurs to me, it's not really about crowdsourced funding at all. After all, many of the successful projects could arguably have found traditional funding if the founders had been willing to give up some control to traditional third parties, and many of the projects find themselves funded far beyond the original goals. No, the money's secondary. Something else is going on. This isn't just crowdsourcing, it's momentum sourcing. Momentum that's derived from proof of concept; momentum that's derived from building a tribe of promoter-users who are incentivised via the range of prizes on offer; and momentum that's derived from being able to leverage critical mass with future investors, distributors and customers. Most people see it solely as a fund-raising exercise a...