Agency Nil Works For What It’s Worth

A recent graduate from an advertising program found zero paying jobs for offer at the established firms so he has started his own, Agency Nil.

The question is, what does a recent college grad do to find clients willing to give him a chance?

Agency Nil will work without a set price, with the understanding that agencies or clients pay what they think it’s worth upon completion—no strings attached. For clients, that takes the risk out of the equation, theoretically, allowing Agency Nil to operate somewhere between intern and full-fledged freelancer.  LINK

While this might sound insanely risky, it’s not like the guy was passing up some wonderfully secure opportunity elsewhere.  Not only that, but if he is any good at all he will probably be able to make a living.  Not only that, but he won’t have to fight with others for promotions, favors or raises, not to mention battle creative differences.

It is a simple, put your money where your mouth is, situation and it’s hard to see how he can lose.

If he actually succeeds in any significant way the model could become a real threat to established agencies.  Why should a company fork over hundreds of thousands of dollars and hope an agency does a good job when it could wait and see what one driven individual can come up with and pay whatever they think that is worth.

RickRoll and Micropayments Used to Fight “The Man”

There were two stories this week about plans to get revenge on corporate entities by doing some version of what is known as a DDo$ or “denial-of-service” attack.

Basically, this means a plan to overwhelm a system and thus to shut it down.

First, there was Michael Silveira’s response to a constant barrage of calls from a single telemarketer.

Mr. Silveira began calling back an auto-warranty company that has become the focus of an Internet crusade. He left it voice-mail messages that contained nothing but a recording of Rick Astley’s 1987 hit song “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

Using phone numbers for Auto One Warranty Specialists Inc. that users posted to a Web site called Reddit.com, Mr. Silveira joined dozens of activists who have peppered the warranty company with messages including elevator music, threats and offers of rude services.

“I thought, if you get a bunch of people together, you could blow up their voice-mail boxes,” says Mr. Silveira. (LINK)

Next, there was a plan by one of the Pirate Bay founders, Gottfrid Svarholm, to bring down the law office that had prosecuted him.  Facing a fine of 30 million SEK, Svarholm:

encourages all Internet users to pay extremely small sums around 1 SEK (0.13 USD) to Danowsky’s law firm, which represented the music companies at the Pirate Bay trial. The music companies will not benefit from this, instead it will cost them money to handle and process all the money.

Any internet-fee payments made after the first 1000, which includes the law firm’s ordinary transfers, will instead of giving 1 SEK, cost 1 SEK to the law firm. Since Danowsky & Partners Advokatbyrå is a small firm, all the transactions are handled by hand. Handling all payments will be time consuming, costing the law firm in productivity. (LINK)

In some ways, this is a lot like trying to pay a parking ticket you didn’t deserve with a sack full of pennies.

Both of these acts show the power of the internet to rally people to cause and should be a real concern for corporations who no longer hold a monopoly on our attention or our support.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Pirate Bay Seeks Interesting Route To “Pay” Fine (entertainment.slashdot.org)
• Nerds ‘Rickroll’ Spammy Auto-Warranty Telemarketers (financegeek.com)

Time Warner Cable Forced to Abandon Caps (for now…)

It turns out that if enough people express enough outrage than even a company as stubborn and unresponsive as Time Warner Cable is forced to respond.

Such is the case with TWC’s misguided plans to do a test rollout of metered bandwidth pricing.  Once everyone from top bloggers to major politicians weighed in on the myriad problems with the plan, TWC has be forced to reconsider and will not proceed with their current test programs in Texas and upstate New York.

Still, it isn’t all good news:

Not that the company believes anything about the plan was fundamentally misguided; as CEO Glenn Britt put it today, “There is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans to roll out additional tests on consumption based billing.”

Sadly, Britt did not go into detail on just what we all misunderstood about a plan that could force users to pay up $20 just to download and view TWILIGHT in HD.

LINK

Related articles by Zemanta

• Metering the Internet not catching on (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• The Twilight Problem: Why Metered Broadband Could Suck (gigaom.com)
• Time Warner Cable Says It Singled Out Austin’s Geeks (gigaom.com)

Equifax FAIL – Owl Tossing?!

Ya know what says “Get Your Credit Report From Us?”  A casual videogame in which one attempts to throw owls into a raised hottub.

Or…not.  Why they hell do seemingly smart companies think that this sort of stunt is going to help build their core business?  There are some many ways a company like Equifax could leverage the power of alternative online marketing but offering some completely unrelated Flash game is not one of them.

Please, Equifax, I’m begging you, if you read this post give us a call. We’ve got plenty of ways to spend your ad dollars online that might actually relate what you do as a company.

Tipping Point continues to tip…

Yet more evidence that Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point might not be quite so valid.  The anti-Tipping buzz began with this article in Fast Company that takes a good hard look at the work of Duncan Watts, who set out to scientifically test the theories set forth by Gladwell.  What he found largely contradicts much of Gladwell’s thinking.

Now comes this piece in ArsTechnica:

“The amount of online “chatter” about an upcoming album release directly correlates to higher physical album sales, according to two researchers with New York University’s Stern Business School. Professor Vasant Dhar and former student Elaine Chang observed the trends of 108 albums released during the first two months of 2007 to see how different outside elements affected (or predicted) sales once the albums became available, and found that all of them had some effect or another. But certain elements of online chatter—namely blogs and social networks—seemed to be fairly accurate predictors of future success.”

While “influentials” will always have a certain amount of influence, the internet changes the dynamics so that many more people can be influential without ever being singled out in any significant way as “influentials.”  The more small-world influencers out there, the more power they have when they agree on sometime – whether that be an album, a designer or just an idea.