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When your brand is in trouble, you can always count on a certain degree of openness to licensing deals and brand extensions.

While the concept of a Vogue cafe might have been far from the mind of the brand owners 10 years ago, it's now very much on the agenda.

With consultants running though the halls of Conde-Nast with ways to trim costs and drive extra revenue, this type of thinking is back on the table with Conde looking to develop new lines of revenue from by extending their titles in restaurants, bars and cafes.

Given the troubles the newspaper and magazine business is in- we will see deals of a similar type for some of the strongest brands in the business.

Just imagine the possibilities:

The New York Post bar

The Sun (UK) holiday resort

McSweeney's literary cafes

Brides bridal centers

Wired gadget centers in airports (probably a vending machine)

Spin concert venues

Guns and Ammo indoor shooting ranges in Las Vegas

Paris Match paparazzi school


 


Posted by Ed Cotton Although newspapers have no trouble producing a physical object containing news almost every single day of the year, magazines have a tougher time, some are weekly, but most are monthly and take weeks to produce.

As an interesting experiment, some writers, designers and artists got together to see what could be produced in a mere 48 hours. The result is pretty impressive with a ton of interesting articles and some great design and art.

Not sure the team has the stamina to produce a magazine every two days and if the idea is sustainable on many levels, but it's certainly an interesting experiment that explodes conventional norms.

The 60 page issue can be previewed and purchased on MagCloud. 

Posted by Ed Cotton While Apple's iPad has been the subject of a lot of attention ranging, from ridicule and mixed reviews. The spin suggested the iPad would usher in a new era for those in the publishing business by creating another medium for consumers to experience print.

However, the promise suggested by Apple's demos and a number of flashy publisher initiatives is that this new experience is going to be better than a web site, and more satisfying than reading a newspaper or a magazine.

The dream being sold is how our magazines are going to be turned into immersive multimedia experiences (see the Sports Illustrated demo below) where the user takes a joyride through a stream of beautifully designed content and can dig deeper on topics and experience multimedia to their hearts content. While all these seems technically feasible, the big question is who are the publishers who can afford to develop this content on a daily, weekly or even a monthly basis?



It's easy to imagine a scenario where excitement drives the creation of great first iPad editions that succeed in seducing new subscribers into magazine franchises at significant premiums to current subscription rates. However this will not be sustainable because the economics won't map out and the result will be falling quality standards and subscriber discontent. 

The other way of looking at this is through the application lens, where new entrants will come into the publishing space from a completely different direction.These new entrants might find better and more interesting ways of serving up content than the publishing incumbents.

It's likely magazines will never be able to afford to realize the "Sports Ilustrated" dream and instead be forced to fight it out in the App Store with hundreds of thousands of competitors.

The future for traditional publications on tablets has to be more "application like", than "issue like".

I hate to burst anyone's bubble, but I don't believe we are going to get the sizzle of the Sports Ilustrated demo, it's much more likely we will be looking at something like the latest GQ iPhone application.



Posted by Ed Cotton AAN is on a fast track to break out of the web and into mainstream stardom, the guys have just signed a six-figure book deal with Random House and there are rumors of a TV deal just around the corner.

Kent Nichols of AAN will be a speaker at the Influx Ideas 07 conference in October.
Miranda July is true renaissance women; an actress, musician filmmaker, artist and storyteller.

Miranda is best known for an independent film she wrote and directed, released in 2005, called “Me and You and Everyone I Know.”

She has now written a book of stories and is promoting it on a website she clearly designed herself in Flash. It looks as if she has never designed a website before and that’s the beauty of it.








Human, honest, funny, real and lacking any of the predictable conventions or rules, it makes for a refreshingly different experience.

Expect to see this style everywhere by December.
Yesterday, Gizmodo broke the news of a fireplace manufacturer installing iPod functionality into their latest line of luxury of fireplaces and at the same time, Harry Potter’s publishing house, Bloomsbury, announced that it would be looking to make acquisitions following a 74% drop in pre-tax profits.

Both these stories suggest that it’s easy to get fat and lazy; either you borrow someone else’s innovation, take it into a new category call it your own, hoping people will respond or you continue to milk the same franchise until time runs out.

The problem with both these initiatives is that they lack fundamental foresight.

Surely, execs at Bloomsbury must have been aware that not having any Harry Potter books to publish would result in profit and revenue declines.

Influx would have loved to be in the meeting with the fireplace manufacturer where the embedded iPod was given the go ahead.

Did anyone question it?

How did they justify it- everyone’s doing it- so we should?

In the end, this is all about timing.

Had the fireplace manufacturer come up with the idea two years back; there’s a slight possibility it would not have been ridiculed.

Had Bloomsbury started thinking about acquisitions and finding the next Harry Potter, three years ago, things might have been different.

The time to look for the next new thing is right after you had your first success.

You shouldn’t wait till problems strike to innovate.

Innovation is not just a way out of a problem; it’s a continuous process to ensure that you don’t get into trouble in the first place.

The secret is to never to stop and you don't get so drunk on success that you press “pause” on the innovation engine.