Seeing Both Sides: The Soul of a New Company

Seeing Both Sides: The Soul of a New Company

Jeff Bussgang at IDG Ventures Boston blogs from CMO Perspectives about the importance of brand personification by entrepreneurs in startups. Nice post. 

"Keynote speaker Charlotte Beers (who had great stories about her experience in Washington when she was tapped by Colin Powell in October 2001 to run the US PR campaign in Arab countries after a long Madison Avenue career running Oglivy & Mather and J. Walter Thompson) talked about the importance of company executives, particularly CMOs, personifying the brands of their companies. Although the CMOs of Pepsi and WalMart, who were in the room, took her advice as very relevant to their global branding efforts, it struck me as even more critical to the little start-ups we VCs deal with every day in a very different way."

Digital Magazines: WSJ.com – Magazines Further Experiment With Print’s Digital Format

WSJ.com – Magazines Further Experiment With Print’s Digital Format

Sorry, but I’ve got to unload on this current revived infatuation with "digital" editions of magazines. For the past year and half I’ve been subscribing to the MIT Technology Review via Zinio — the technology that delivers a digital rendition of the print product into my PC via yet another content delivery system.

I get to "turn" pages, see the actual ads (my heart be still), search for text, and have fun playing with my very own "glass" copy of the dead-tree version.

It sucks. Let me repeat — it really sucks. It’s either a bone thrown to the Quark jockeys in the design department, a way to justify the big fee paid to the redesign firm, or some inter-generational stop-gap that makes the old farts who go around saying "I can’t read a magazine on the toilet" happy with their honest-to-god brave new world format. This is plain and simple a sop to advertisers and a stop-gap solution.

It’s wrong. It’s a kludge. If we must hang onto to our precious kerning and leading and big glossy ads, then let’s do it within the fricking browser.  PDF the damn things and be done with it. Digital editions are so yesterday. Up there with the wonderful CueCat: as yet another desperate life-ring for the 19th century world of print.

I won’t slag Zinio. They keep drumming along. Mike Edelhart — my old boss at PC Week in the 80s used to run it. Now Scott Kauffman,  ex-Time Warner and CompuServe is at the helm. I’m looking at Texterity for some custom publishing applications, and expect to get pestered yet again by some digital print stop-gap vendor.

Don’t bother. I’m looking over the hill at a post-pageview world and after a decade of butting my head against the print-online transition am too grumpy to care.

 

 

 

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