posts i’ve written / what consumes me, bud caddell

fan strategies

12 Jan, 2012 • posts i've written • 4 comments

As a passionate fan of numerous media titles, I’m fascinated by how digital technologies have enabled fans to work collectively to express their passions and, when called on, to attempt rescuing those titles from oblivion.

It’s led me to write extensively on this blog about fandom and modern fan movements – and to dabble in fanon works myself. I’m also proud to be a Futures of Entertainment Fellow, as well.

For this year’s conference I pitched the idea of building an online community dedicated to collecting past fan attempts to save or resurrect their favorite shows, and to host interviews with major network executives to discuss these movements from the perspective of someone attempting to balance a complex portfolio of titles and advertisers. Unfortunately (and fortunately) there was an embarrassment of riches when it came to other panel ideas and diverse speakers. So this idea was never realized.

Today, io9 published a short list of such successful fan movements.

I still think future fans could use a centralized resource to advise or inform their decentralized movements. I think having execs from major networks take part in a site like this would help humanize the often contentious movements. Someone like Craig Engler from SyFy Networks is a perfect example of one such exec. Sabrina Caluori at HBO is another.

I know a handful of brilliant media scholars that could help moderate interviews and discussions, people like Flourish Klink, Sam Ford, Nancy Baym, or Josh Green.

Additionally, in my past consulting for a trio of media companies, I explored listening strategies that could help these organizations vet scripts and pilots of new titles based on fandom behavior. This sort of predictive analysis would make such a site a valuable place for media companies to participate as well.

For now, I’m just releasing this idea into the wild for anyone to potentially run away with. To me, an idea shared and realized always beats an idea hoarded. I’d love to hear your feedback if you have any.

By the by, SaveMyShow.tv is currently available. Just a thought.

roundup: 2012 predictions, adaptive businesses, and candy corn

11 Jan, 2012 • posts i've written • No comments

I write these roundups as emails for my company from time to time, and I thought I’d share one with you. Let me know if you’d want to see these on a more regular basis.

Welcome to 2012. We now have jet-packs, augmented reality contact lenses, and time cloaking, though sadly still no hoverboards. Still, the future is pretty awesome. And you might as well be hopeful, only neutrinos (maybe) get to move backward in time, the rest of us are stuck moving forward.

First off, I thought I’d wrangle together the usual suspects of 2012 predictions and 2011 best-of’s for your perusal.

Seems appropriately meta to start the list with a list of lists of expert predictions
JWT’s 100 Things to Watch in 2012
Frog’s 2012 Tech Trend Predictions
AdAge guesses what social media will look like in 2012
30 Social Media Predictions
Time’s 50 Best Websites of 2011
The Top 21 Albums of 2011, culled from 120 top 10 lists

In other news, if you want to get a whiff of what happens when you combine business intelligence with real-time adaptation (where all businesses are headed), Wired’s exploration of Zynga and its competitor, Wooga, is a must read.

College Humor used to say that one of the easiest ways to make content that people share is to put candy corn in it. Not the actual treat – something mildly nostalgic and curious. The Restart Page is a great example of nerd candy corn.

A 20-hour work week could save the global economy. It would be extremely difficult, but I think I could sacrifice some of my time in the office for the good of the world. Just sayin’.

Go forth, and be awesome.

what’s my book about again?

05 Jan, 2012 • posts i've written • 2 comments

Strategy as we know it should become an emergent phenomenon of a lean organization co-evolving with its environment, seeking to map its internal and external networks, gain nodes, create shared value, and cope with unintended consequences.

Yep. In a nutshell. It’s ok if that just sparked more questions than it answered. That’s why it’s a book.

For a world that’s more connected, and inherently more complex, I think we need to question our old assumptions about strategy and organizational management.

Sign-up here to get updates as it progresses.

With a new year comes a strong re-commitment to this project. I appreciate everyone’s patience. My life has been a bit more chaotic than I would have liked and progress hasn’t come as quickly as I want, either.

Writing has been an adventure – one I’m incredibly fortunate to be afforded by very kind, supportive, folks.

how big is it?

19 Dec, 2011 • posts i've written • 1 comment

I feel like something becomes blog post worthy fodder when I’ve heard or thought about it for the 100th time.

In a meeting last week I was talking about an opportunity with a new start-up to a CPG client and they asked, “Well, how big is it?” and some bell went off in my head signaling that sentiment’s 100th utterance.

Brands like to buy big audiences. Buying big audiences is just easier to manage than courting lots of small groups, especially for a brand team member that’s probably juggling more responsibilities than they reasonably should. It’s also easier to expand the top of the funnel (by buying mass awareness) than it is to make the product better.

Louder advertising is easier to buy than better marketing. We have to change that.

Clients should be courting smaller communities, crowds, and audiences on the web. With smaller groups you get exponentially greater intimacy. You can negotiate truly bespoke partnerships. And you can even garner some free PR just for doing something novel. Creatively, you get to experiment with the brand in a new way. And you gain access to influential early adopters (the kind of people that glom on to new start-ups) who are about a thousand times more likely to talk about your brand’s partnership than the light web user who just ignored your banner ad on espn.com.

The opportunities most often outweigh any risks – but they rarely outweigh the cognitive and administrative costs.

That’s why agencies have to step up and become the connective tissue between the brand and the emerging tech scene. Some are definitely already doing this and pretty soon it will just be a parity product for any digital team worth a damn.

Moreover, we have to become masters of small. Bets, projects, audiences, and communities. We have to become better at tracking small before it becomes big, better at getting to small (projects) faster, and better at spinning smaller plates concurrently. We have to because our clients won’t or don’t have the authority to refocus.

Clients can call up a media department and ask for 5 million eyeballs like it’s a Happy Meal. Most of the time the buy is produced a bit like the meat in a Happy Meal, too.

We have to make small that easy.

Bonus points: work for clients that actually spend time checking out new stuff on the web, educate your clients about emerging tools, create a measurement system that rewards more than box filling, take partnerships out of media’s realm and make it a creative assignment, be good enough, and persistent enough, to influence product not just ads.

what is a digital strategy?

01 Dec, 2011 • posts i've written • 15 comments

I was flipping through Ana’s new deck on digital strategy, re-stumbled onto Mike’s Tenets of Digital Strategy and decided to take a crack at defining digital strategy, as pithily as possible, for myself.

Here goes …