Radio Flyer's little red wagon rolls on

Posted At : December 29, 2008 3:46 PM | Posted By : Steve McGrath
Related Categories: Strategy,Marketing,Commentary

Re-branding implies a colossal amount of time, effort and risk for uncertain results, but look how easy Radio Flyer is making it look:

Love it or pretend to hate it, the Cloud 9, a brand new “concept” version of the time-honored little red wagon, plants the 90-year-old company at the vanguard of the 21^st century.

Like the original, it has four wheels and a tow handle for mom or dad. Add a sleek plastic chassis, an MP3 player dock, speakers, bucket seats, belts, cup holders and digital temperature/time/speed/distance readouts, and it’s enough, as CNN says, “to make the minivan jealous.”

From a branding perspective, it’s important that the company is staying true to its roots. Still a little red wagon, the Cloud 9 embodies and advances the company’s narrative in a way that a new, divergent set of cutting-edge toys wouldn’t (a first-person shooter, for example, might have missed the mark). Radio Flyer is fearless both in its loyalty to a product that was bound for obsolescence, and in its wholesale embrace of what’s now.

And they knew when enough updating was enough: there is no engine to be found.

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Pulitzer Prize plugs in

Posted At : December 24, 2008 8:38 AM | Posted By : Mike McGrail
Related Categories: Commentary,Writing

As a journalist, you know you’ve arrived when the Pulitzer Committee comes knocking. Online journalism has arrived. The Pulitzer Committee is now accepting submissions from online-only publications, ending print’s decades-old monopoly on America’s most prestigious journalism award. Welcome to the big leagues, Salon.com, et al. This puts you on the same level as the New York Times and Washington Post.

But does that mean anything to readers? Awards are mainly an industry’s way of patting itself on the back. They often have little bearing on how well or poorly a publication serves its readers. Still, I’m going to say yes, the Pulitzer decision does make a difference for readers. It’s a sign that the center of gravity in the newspaper and magazine journalism is shifting to a more balanced spot between print and online. Print journalism, as I wrote in an earlier post, is coughing up blood like a gaffed marlin. Nevertheless, society needs the content that print journalism produces to keep business and government honest. The Pulitzer Committee’s decision means that the lords and ladies of the newsprint are thinking of the content first – not whether people read it on a screen or on a dead tree. Check in here to read Editor & Publisher’s coverage of the decision, and here for New York Times coverage.

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Hollywood, technology & innovation

Posted At : December 11, 2008 9:42 AM | Posted By : Andy Beaupre
Related Categories: Technology,Commentary

Scott Kirsner, the popular columnist and contributing writer to Variety, Business Week, The Boston Globe, New York Times and Wired, was in town last night talking up his new book “Inventing the Movies: Hollywood's Epic Battle Between Innovation and the Status Quo, from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs” The packed event held at the Portsmouth Public Library was sponsored by Borealis Ventures and the NH High Technology Council.

Kirsner wove a fascinating tale, connecting Hollywood, technology, chance and persistence.

Leave it to Kirsner – a master storyteller – to find a compelling link between two seemingly disparate worlds. It turns out there are three kinds of people common to both Hollywood and technology: innovators, preservationists (trying desperately to hang onto the status quo) and sideline-sitters. They’ve existed for a century in the movie business and for 50 plus years in high technology.

Did you know, for example, that it took 24 years for Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation (given birth by MIT alums, btw) to gain acceptance and widespread use in Hollywood? 24 years! It wasn’t until “Gone With the Wind” in 1939 that color movies were finally accepted.

That’s a lesson for technology entrepreneurs who impatiently believe their new product should be met with instant, wide-eyed acclaim and adoption.

Sometimes it takes persistence to succeed.

Did you know people couldn’t envision a day when movies with sound would be preferred over silent motion pictures? Amazing. Irving Thalberg, an MGM executive said “Sound is a passing fancy, it won’t last.” It wasn’t until popular vaudevillian Al Jolsen starred in “The Jazz Singer” in 1927 that people could finally envision a different reality. There was no looking back.

The same thing happened in the minicomputer era when the PC was born. And it’s happening now in Hollywood – 95 percent of major motion pictures shot in 2008 were shot with film, despite the availability of superior digital technology.

Sometimes it just takes the right actor.

Did you know one of the first standards battles occurred in Hollywood? Vitaphone and Movietone –two different sound standards - battled each other, the latter eventually winning out because of its ability to print audio optically on movie film. VHS nixing Betamax was another example. Standards technology battles continue today, the latest being HDDVD vs. Blue Ray. High tech has had hundreds of standards battles; everything from operating systems to networking protocols to disk formats.

The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson Movie Poster

Sometimes it takes a major battle to win the war.

Did you know it took 26 years for the VCR to win acceptance? Bing Crosby, the father of the VCR, wanted to record his voice, perfect things and play recordings on his NBC show. They didn’t like this idea; in the early days of radio everything was performed live. So Bing created “Crosby Video” and had to journey to ABC to use it. Crosby eventually sold the technology to 3M. That was in 1956.

In 1982, the evil threat of recording was still alive. Jack Valenti told Congress “I say to you the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.”

It took Andre Blay, an AV dealer from Michigan who envisioned a big payday, to make the studios see the light of day. It worked. Ten years later, movie studios earned more from home video sales than ticket sales. Are you listening RIAA?

Sometimes you have to forge the right kind of alliances.

Did you know the first movies were individual, not group, experiences? People watched 30-second movies in individual booths in a few major cities. Thomas Edison, who invented the movie camera (which he called the “peep show machine”) said, “We will only need about 10 of these in the whole United States.”

The first movies were ridiculous. For example, a man on a tightrope bouncing up and down, in black and white. Kirsner said the same thing is happening today with You Tube. The highest viewed video is a silly little piece produced by one performer with zero budget. Called “The evolution of dance,” it’s been viewed by over 100 million people. Like the first peep show movies, we’re still trying to figure out what really lurks in YouTube. Someday, its raw potential will unleash a different world.

Sometimes big ideas lie beneath seemingly ridiculous content.

Innovators, preservationists and sideline-sitters are all around us, shaping, delaying and eventually adopting inventions that capture our imagination and reshape life experiences.

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Big Three? Try three ring circus, with extra clowns

Posted At : December 5, 2008 10:37 AM | Posted By : Mike McGrail
Related Categories: PR,Media Relations,Public Relations,Commentary

Big Three? Clowns, bailout, congressional appearance, Mike McGrail, Beaupre & Co.

The Big Three automakers’ first congressional appearance was the Sistine Chapel ceiling of public “gotchas,” a magnum opus in nose tweaking and point scoring. There sat the GM, Ford and Chrysler bigfeet, asking the congressional panel for a multi-billion dollar bailout while they fumbled question after question about their travel fetishes and salaries. The longer I watched, the more the hearing turned into a Warner Brothers cartoon in my mind. The congressmen, in the Bugs Bunny role, kept handing sticks of Acme dynamite to Messrs Waggoner, Mulally and Nardelli. The execs accepted them, fuses sizzling, and looked just as crestfallen as the Tasmanian Devil and Wile E. Coyote when the TNT actually exploded in their faces.

Take Richard Waggoner and Alan Mulally, for example. They completely muffed a zinger from Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., when he asked if they’d work for $1 a year as a symbolic gesture. (Nardelli is doing so at Chrysler.) Given a chance to poke fun at themselves, or at least show their eagerness to share the pain, they replied with microwaved corporate boilerplate. Waggoner, GM’s $15 million dollar man, said he “doesn’t have a position on that today.” Mulally, at $21.7 million from Ford, said he is “okay where I am.”

Okay? At $21 million, and attempting to dip the public till, he says he’s “okay” with a $21.7 million salary. Alan, rewind: you earn more than my town’s annual budget, but you are asking for several billion dollars in taxpayer money. Dick, baby, you “don’t have a position” on your $15 million pay envelope? Here’s a position for you both: take the bait. Guys holding out their hands to the feds need to show humility and some sense of symbolism’s importance. Symbolism was the whole hearing’s point. It was the American auto industry’s chance to demonstrate that it had found religion about fuel-efficient cars and more sensible cost structures. It was their chance to talk about new technology and its role in securing our energy future. It was a chance to restore faith in the industry’s ability to save itself if it gets the breather it is asking for.

Instead, the execs showed a tin – if not titanium – ear for public perception. Their failure to answer the “gotcha” lines betrayed a lack of preparation that further betrayed an underlying arrogance. “Even if we’re clowns, you have to give us the money,” they seemed to think. “We’re too big to fail.” Waggoner, Mulally and Nardelli wised up a little after their public chain whipping. They’re driving hybrids to the next Congressional hearing instead of flying, and Waggoner and Mulally are warming to the idea of working for a symbolic salary. But it’s too late. The first stop on the Big Three Bailout Tour 2008 should join the Exxon Valdez in case studies of lousy corporate PR. In the final analysis, no bailout is going to work unless more people are willing to buy American-made cars. The cars have to be worth buying, which means the public has to believe in the companies making them. After watching the Big Three’s performance, I wouldn’t buy sunglasses from them in the Sahara, and I bet I’m not alone.

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