The hot tourism button

March 11, 2010

At an age when taking a plane or going for a car or bus ride has become a chore, at a time when the security industry has taken every traveler hostage, at a period when climate changes are wreaking havoc with travel plans, the tourism industry is reinventing itself.

Finding the hot button to initiate a new wave of customers is certainly not easy. Quebec City mayor, Labaume, has hired Dr. Clotaire Rapaille, a well-known marketing guru, to carry out a sort of makeover exercise to rediscover the essential “code” of the city. (Dr. Rapaille claims marketing success with his unorthodox methods applied to other large cities, such as Singapore and Hong Kong, as well as to the auto industry and several fortune 500 companies that he names at every turn – thus marketing himself via traditional, repetitive, branding techniques.)

An old obsession resurfaces to the delight of the press
In the Canadian press, we see mixed reviews: some comment on the $300,000 contract with Rapaille, while others are happy to refuel the French-English saga that has always been an easy subject for the press. Rapaille points out that Quebec City’s obsession with French-English relations is a love/hate relationship and, according to him, makes for a very long-lasting “couple”. (He says: “There is pleasure in sadomasochism,” but, as we well know, he also likes to spice up his own image and play to the press.) All that is lots of fun to observe, but the reality is quite desperate. This destination needs reinventing.

The game
Quebec’s population is quickly aging (something that tourism is facing worldwide) and, as a result, the city is in danger of losing its market share as a desirable destination. It is tempting to say that this poking at the French-English, emotional button in the Quebec affair is possibly Rapaille’s way of creating a media buzz, polarizing attention on his notoriously theatrical ways of proceeding (the marketer selling the marketer). But it works. Everyone, or at least the Canadian press, is thrilled with it: “the cost”, “the controversy”, “the flamboyance of Rapaille”, etc., are all superficial snippets, with little to no analysis, reflection, or much attention paid to the fundamentals or to the urgency of the exercise. Nevertheless, the need to reinvent, reaffirm and keep marketing alive is certainly part of the game, and this on all levels, including journalism – a game, I must add, Rapaille plays like no other.

Marketing with a “code”
When we look at the tourism industry across America, it is by and large facing an urgent need to reinvent, to re-launch itself into a quest for the hot tourism button. To re-discover the “code” that would literally move people to travel to a destination. So, I applaud the initiative and the boldness of Quebec’s mayor, and what I find particularly positive is that the exercise is not a superficial undertaking, but, rather, that the intent is really to gain a better understanding of the product’s culture, before launching into yet another marketing campaign. It is a look into the core of this destination. Looking into what it is in contemporary terms, what is its very make-up, its actual product culture. The point is not that this specific exercise or the use of Dr. Rapaille may not be the right way to go, but, rather, that it positions knowledge of product culture squarely as the priority over doing advertising as usual with the risk of a focus that is no longer relevant.


Pitch it

February 3, 2010

Making a Media PITCH has its rules. 1) Go for the sizzle, 2) Be brief and 3) Pitch the right person are likely the forerunner rules to insure success. Amongst other proven guidelines there are: keep the story fresh and do not be afraid to be out-there. The latter proves to be often the most difficult to conquer. “Is my story too boring? Do I really have to let the media know? It seems such an effort and I am afraid it’s a lot of work and may not pay?” are often the main deterrents or excuses to stall and do nothing.

To get free press coverage you have to PITCH. Others do and the media is starving to hear your take, it is a symbiotic necessity. So let’s get going — it does not have to be a nightmare to undertake. At CleanPix, with the introduction of Pressuite.com, we make the process a breeze, and we offer coaching to the clients who want it. YES, we sometimes help hold the creative pen for a brief moment, but it does not take long before they are well on their way. Those who succeed are consistent and keep at it relentlessly.

To make the task even more productive, we recently added a whole new life to our clients’ sizzling stories published on Pressuite.com by joining Lou Taverna’s Hospitality 1ST Client Network. So now, when a brief is posted on Pressuite by our clients to our 4300+ qualified journalist members, the exposure will take a further leap and be distributed though Lou’s Newsmaker Alert email campaigns (70,000 registered members). We are looking forward to seeing increased success in key media news, as the stories of our clients are picked up by an expanding pool of journalists, travel writers of both print publishing and news blogs.


Spark of an idea

January 6, 2010

“CleanPix is so good…” a January 4th 2010 feedback comment from a German journalist user prompted me to write the following:

The spark of an idea.

It seems that every day new gadgets are showing up, new computer tablets, new smartphones, new apps, new toys of trade. They all add up to give us the impression that with these tools come more ease and instant ways to connect with others. But is it so? Some would argue that this connectivity frenzy is setting us back, while others see it as an ever expanding land of opportunities.

Lionel Tiger postulates that Social Media cause users to become conformist, and as I understand it, we are somewhat eroding the path of creativity. He Says: “We have reprimated ourselves“.
Lionel Tiger, Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University

Clearly we have the gear, the messengers and the audience, but what appears to elude us is the content. Content often seems like a cluster of darts thrown out there at random, unsure and insecure in direction, intent, target and substance. Opponents of social media tools (Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc) call it White Noise. As a result, they are often knocked back by the typical argument: “You don’t get it.” In fact, it is true, and I am one of these that likely do not get it. I suppose I am one of those who do not starve for constant entertainment, nor do I fear to lose contact when I do not look at commercials in the breaks, nor for that matter, if the cell is no longer in “roaming” mode. The need to feed silence with substance is a disease that social media practices exacerbate to no end. I sincerely believe that the SPARK of an Idea, can only happen within a moment of silence, and not allowing space for it is a bad idea.

A fragile thing, “the spark of an idea”, comes with observation and lots of it, a kind of self-reflection, like a mirror one could use to tap in for one’s own creative juices. What does it mean? Can we teach that at school? Unfortunately, we do not teach creativity at school, and ever so rarely in the course of the highest University learning. Nevertheless, creativity is what we especially applaud in the best scientists, politicians, farmers, social workers, doctors and in just plain, ordinary folks. Let’s be clear, in art school we teach mostly about art, not creativity; in advanced marketing and design schools we often talk about “creative” as if it was an ingredient one adds to porridge (I know, I have been a student in some of the top Universities). What we too often teach is how to makes things provoking, how to annoy, how to disturb. We teach, promote and validate through our media broadcasts a culture of shock, we promote the peculiar, the extreme, the terrifying, the disgusting and the disturbing, as opposed to the wise. We all realize that very little of our news is about sparking imagination. This may account for the fact that many of our young adults are becoming bored and disinterested with this output. Perhaps the 101 course on “idea education” could be based in validating an idea’s newsworthiness through its potential to spark imagination as opposed to its entertainment shock value.

I’ve got an idea. If what you have to offer is blue sky, say it, if it is powder snow, say it, and if it is white sand and a beach ball, say it. Say it simply with real emotion as if you were offering it, fresh out of the box yet again… that will always work. Do this TODAY… and tomorrow repeat it anew, with the same vigor and freshness— that is what branding is all about.


Proof is In The PressBrief

December 14, 2009

It is holiday time and I was thinking of pudding. You know figgy pudding. I have never had any but some how I started to think of the term the proof is in the pudding. I have no pudding today but I  have had some recent conversations with some of our clients about their PressBriefs. I thought I would share them with you and their recipe for PressBrief success. (for the Post Hotel Chrismas Pudding … see below.)

Here are the main ingredients they use in their PressBriefs:

1. Be Brief  (Pinch of This) I mean just a sentence or two.

2. Sell the Media to be interested in the story. (Use Sizzle) The media will write the story not you.

3. Variety in your PressBriefs Culture, Environment, Events. And, it is ok to have a few that are longer in length. That said a PressBrief, is a media PITCH,  it is not a press-release that you have to labor over for hours and let steam over several pages.  ( Think of your Brief as a deligthfull and appetizing Hors-D’oeuvres.)

4. Taste test what you are doing. Look at the reporting and see what is getting the views. Taylor your Pressbriefs to their taste.

5. Link your PressBriefs to the story Ideas page on your website.

6. Refrain from using PressBriefs for postings of a full or partial year events calendar. If you have 10 calendar events, make 10 individual “PITCH” puddings, I mean PressBriefs. Yes, follow the best practice of  a media PITCH, one story with its few sizzle points, fresh hot from the stove. If you make 10 PressBriefs you are launching 10 search leads on Google and feeding multiple RSS feeds … So you see…brief is most effective.

7. Make the PressBriefs fun!!!!!!!!!!!
Example: “It is cold here but fishing is hot
This one liner was responded to in 5 minutes after being posted on Pressuite.com

8. Try to add in your weblink an image selection or key picture that is consistant with the PITCH. This way the images are immediatly available to the media professional to construct a story for their publications or blogs.

9. Don’t limit yourself to just images. How about adding video to make it more delectable.

10. Weather you cook it at -10 or + 34 degrees Fahrenheit, a few minutes is all it needs from start to finish and you will smell the success.

Pressuite has over 3500 media specialists, journalists and travel-writers from all over the world and 3-5 new members are added every day awaiting to hear from you. They all need fresh pudding to feed their own news networks and blogs…Get cooking… Publish a new brief today.

Enjoy the results and happy holidays. Here is the delicious Figgy Pudding Recipe provided from one family member The Relais and Château Post Hotel.

“Après -Ski” Christmas Pudding
from the Post Hotel, Lake Louise.

(serves 8)
110gr. (3 ½ oz)        Beef Suet
110gr. (3 ½ oz)        Breadcrumbs
280gr. (10 oz)        Dried Mission Figs, cut in cubes
180gr. (6 oz)            Sultan Raisins
120gr. (4 oz)            Brown Sugar
50gr. (1 ½ oz)        Sliced Bleached Almonds
50gr. (1 ½ oz)        Candied Lemon
2                Lemon Zest
3                Whole Eggs
3cl.                Whisky

Mix all above ingredients together and place in buttered Christmas pudding mould. Poach for 3 hours just before serving at 275 F.


40-year birthday of the Internet

October 29, 2009

Today Internet is on cloud nine. Bravo! It has changed the way we live. 40 years ago, spam was something I put on my toast. Like many of us, I was not wired, 8 to 10 hours a day, in front of a computer screen, did not wear reading glasses, nor did I drive home from work with my GPS and my iPhone in one hand and the proverbial cup of coffee in the other, watching simultaneously the weather forecast projection on the windshield of my hybrid, while the energy consumption indicator pulsed in a 3-D rendering on the LCD dashboard. Let’s celebrate!

My zen guru texts me that multi-tasking does NOT exist. I obstinately pretend it does as I am oohmmmm…ing along. Surely she was right when she said, with great wisdom, that “suffering is optional!” Perhaps the Internet suffers from too much attention from us all.

Just now, I clicked via Google on the link to the UCLA engineering site, where the birth of the Internet took place 40 years earlier. The link showcased, the ephemeral nature of the Internet with — a site error message! … I guess they are busy celebrating!


The bats are turning green

October 5, 2009

Coincidence or not: Bats are migrating during the month Halloween is taking place. As a result, Enmax, one of our local energy magnum’s, has mandated a slow down to stand-still of it’s windturbine farm during the bat migratory season. The reason: The turbulent trail of the 3 winged eolian energivores has been found to be deadly to the little bats or at best making them “sickly” green, gasping for air. As a results, the poor things are found by the thousands with their lungs collapsed, lying dead at the feet of the towering white giants.

Contrary to their colleague the birds, bats seams unable to deal with sudden air de-pressurisations flowing in the trailing path of the turbine blades. In the course to design highly efficient wind turbines, who would have thought that bats would get in the way. The cause of their sudden and large mortality rates was but recently discovered thanks to a small team of researchers.

A marvelously simple insight: “the tiny bats don’t like to fly in high winds”, said U of C biology professor Robert Barclay.

…. On the up side, its likely that new university classes on bats are about to be integral curriculum to the equations of aero-dynamic windturbine design? Course: Bat-turbo-eolian dynamics 101.

At the CleanPix head office, we use 100% “green” windturbine generated power, so we are concerned. But do not be scared, we will still be pixing along during the Halloween night. Right now, I have to contact our “green” energy provider friends at Bullfrogpower to find out if they are, like Enmax, scheduling a powering down of their windturbines and leaving the bats migrate though and happily without a further breath of convincing.

—————–
What is nice and to shout the obvious:

First: Green power has admirably more nuances, scruples, self-examination, and instant democratic reactiveness at being eco-friendly in a way never concerted or previously observed over other type of energy generation.

Second (green or not): Clearly using less energy all together is far more palatable and beneficial in real time if one compares it to the efforts it takes for any power generation solutions.


Happy media

June 18, 2009

SmartviewcamImprovements in photo taking with smart phones are fueling the newsworld. Uncontrolled, uncensored, irreverent and totally suited for Web and TV publications, these fast growing devices, now often with 3 megapixels, are giving an all new perspective to the notion of free press.

Their success comes from the immediacy and the ease of basic photo manipulation and editing. But the primary key is in their ability to connect seamlessly online, as remote controls, image/sound capture and transmission devices.

Connect, interface, exchange, these are the rules of the game. We do not expect anymore to be served a fancy lunch onboard a plane, nor to carry extra baggage in the belly of it. But one thing is sure, we are demanding to be connected online all the time, all the way. Removing the right to use a smart phone, even for a brief airborne moment, is viewed with great resistance (the adult equivalent of what amounts to a teenage hissy fit).

Perhaps it is altogether only pointing out that anything that works must work with the Internet. Simply put, that is why smart phones are smart. As professional photo capture devices they are, without a doubt, a compromise, but whoever uses them to get the news out is definitely reaching a happy media.


A photo gadget that is real head-turner!

April 22, 2009

digispinNot that I am in the habit of drooling over photo gadgets, but I must say, when my partner Inese Birstins give me the BBC link below, I was truly dazzled. Our previous entry was all about archiving and the issue of storing/archiving files, ever-increasing in number and size. This new panoramic photo system is breaking all records in this regard: it is about to deliver a gargantuan appetite for storage but, nevertheless, an amazing visual and affordable way to create such files. This is all too dangerous. It works, it costs around $350-$500 (including a low-end digital camera), and it’s fun. The truth is there have been less than practical attempts to replace the legendary Swiss-made Alpa ROTO 360 panoramic camera that cost, in the eighties, a mere $25K. This just does it…  I need one.

Imagine being able to zoom into any part of a panoramic photograph that catches your eye. Plus, even seeing people miles away when the picture was taken.

Richard Taylor Editor, BBC Click

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/8004657.stm


Is there a definitative digital archive solution?

April 20, 2009

From time to time at CleanPix we get this question, or perhaps it takes the form of: Are the SD flash memory disks that are used with my digital camera a reliable way to keep my photo collection forever? Is there, in fact, a true way to preserve a digital file? The more we dig for a definite answer, the more we get: NO, there is not. Are my files at risk of evaporation… Remember the Alexandria library where the plans of the pyramids were kept? Or do we just assume they were there? YES, digital evaporation or, for that matter, failed retrieval, taking the form of the unfriendly “unreadable data”, is quite possible.

Here are some of the factors at play: File formats change constantly, the software versions that read these formats as well as the hardware and their operating systems seem to thrive on obsolescence. The sheer amount of digital bits, the cataloguing/indexing methods, the need for redundancies of storage and location are all part of the archival equation. And most important is ease of retrieval. (We already know: “Your call is important to us, we are busy serving your competition, please stay in the queue… then push the pound key to listen to this message again.”) Talking about pounds, it comes to mind (not to discourage anyone), that that the human body has more retentive ability to preserve fat than any digital system has for the files it so gluttonously ingests!

Here are some interesting notes:
Although this article was published in 2002, (this article was first published on guardian.co.uk at 10.51 GMT on Sunday 3 March 2002 ) it appears that at least the concept in this article and its relevancy remain preserved to this date.

“Digital Domesday Book lasts 15 years not 1000″
In a bid to rescue the project, Paul Wheatley has begun work on Camileon, a program aimed at recovering the data on the Domesday discs. ‘We have got a couple of rather scratchy pairs of discs, and we are confident we will eventually be able to read all their images, maps and text,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately, we don’t know what we will do after that. We could store the data on desktop computers – but they are likely to become redundant in a few years.’ Source

In further digging on the subject and the science of digital preservation, I retrieved this “touché” webpage that should, if nothing else, poke a serious dent in the illusive notion of digital archiving. (Note, in this case I took a picture of the webpage for fear of imminent evaporation.) Perhaps we should not just yet add “digital archive” (an oxymoron?) to Wikipedia.

There are, in fact, serious efforts and new conceptual approaches to solve the dilemma, but first, I think, we have to really look beyond IT and it’s terabyte devices to the professional librarians who, from Alexandria to now, have been in the business of dealing with archives. One thing that particularly struck me conceptually is that it appears that digital is better at being live than archived. So why not give it life? Here is one librarian, Brewster Kahle, revealing that the secret to the organization’s success is in keeping it simple in a vision opting to give access to the world of knowledge freely to the world. In his words: “We are allergic to secret sauce.”

Thinking about it, I have written on this WordPress blog platform now for several months. Did anyone at CleanPix make a copy of all this stuff, anywhere but on WordPress? … oops!

The latest digital archiving solution has a problem of its very age
Making alternate copies is likely core to any 101 classes on digital archiving. I must say that when I did my graduate studies at R.I.T. in photography, the museum practice course did not include “digital” anything in the subjects…yet. In the mid 1980s, the Encyclopedia Britannica was in its heyday in its printed voluminous form. Now it exists in its entirety in a complex configuration of zeros and ones. But the core archiving methodology learned then remains still valid: to date, not enough time has elapsed to definitely validate any digital archiving practices. This simply means that the latest digital archiving solution has a problem of its very age. This is the nature of new evolving digital technologies.

At CleanPix we are prone to say, in the context of a “green environment’”, that “dealing with digital files digitally is the only way to go” (using the internet as opposed to flash drives and CD burning etc.). This slogan may turn up to be more true on more levels than we first thought. For the shear pleasure of it, if we interpolate from the famous E=mc2 equation where mass contains all its energy, we could derive a parallel where digital is energy, and when stored as mass (mechanical) it becomes “heavier” to deal with.  I knew that sooner-than-later I will find a twist to insert Einstein in this blog and perhaps share with you this awesome NOVA video that put relativity, relatively understandable and certainly entertaining. Here is an abstract of the video: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/preview/q_3213.html


Living at light speed for 60 minutes

March 27, 2009

We are getting our telescope ready and are hoping for a clear view of the sky. The CleanPix team is happily switching off all lights on the inside and outside of our headquarters building for Earth Hour. In addition we will be unplugging all non-essential computers during this time. We’ll be enjoying the calm in concert with the millions of others who are joining in on this notable gesture. We are aware that living on Earth is a privilege.

You can learn more about Earth Hour and take your own personal steps in this global movement. We will be doing this on March 28th for an hour from 8:30 pm – 9:30 pm.