Great marketing = great product?
This weekend Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull opened in theaters everywhere. I went to see it Saturday and was not as impressed as I expected to be. Why? Maybe because I’m (much) older than when the original came out, or maybe because it didn’t live up to the hype.
I mean, they marketed the hell out of this movie. Tie ins everywhere, viral ad campaigns, nice website, word of mouth like crazy. But does that make it great? No.
Undoubtedly it will be the biggest movie this weekend, maybe even this year, but overall, you can market the hell out of something, but if the product isn’t 100% what people expect (managing their expectations), then all you’ve got is a mediocre product with great marketing, and it will leave your audience wanting.
The same philosophy applies to all products, not just movies.
iPhones in Canada! Doh!
So it’s been announced that Rogers will be selling the ever popular Apple iPhone in Canada come this fall. DOH!
Why Doh!? Two reasons
1) Just bought and iPod Touch 2 weeks ago!
2) I have nearly 2 years on my current contract with Telus
Both of which make it highly unlikely I’ll be buying an iPhone any time soon. Not that I wouldn’t love to have one. Sigh. Where is that time machine I asked for…?
Now iPod Touch compatible
I haven’t seen this in too many places yet so I thought I’d mention it and plug the author’s at the same time.
I just added the WPTouch plugin to this blog which makes it “easier” to read on a iPod Touch or iPhone. This brilliant little plug in condenses a Word Press blog down to titles with expandable content for even easier reading on an iPod Touch or iPhone. It even has a link at the bottom of the content that allows readers to flip back to the full view, since both devices will render most blogs properly anyway.
Here’s the list of features from their site:
WPtouch comes with a host of built-in features. Some notable ones include:
- User-selected theme toggle (between WPtouch view and your site’s regular look)
- iPhone-like application appearance, functions
- AJAX, Prototype, Scriptaculous, & iPhone rotation effects in only 49kb
- Entire theme+plugin package is only 290kb zipped!
- Full WordPress search, login, pages, archives, categories, tags and links support
- Theme native social bookmarking support
- iPhone/iPod touch native post e-mailing support
- Ajax comments, posted in real time
- Ajaxed pagination (users can browse posts like YouTube videos)
- Admin selectable custom icons for pages, logo
- Easily add your own icons to customize your menu appearance
- Admin inclusion/exclusion of site pages shown in the theme’s menu
- Compatibility suite in the admin to inform of add-ons, WordPress version support
- Favicon fetch & conversion to .png for links displayed using the WP blogroll
- Support for FlickrRSS plugin, Blip.it video plugin
- Automatic Archives page layout (if you have or create a page called ‘Archives’)
After reading the comments on their site, I’ll be checking out some other people’s blogs really soon.
Nice work guys. The only improvement I’d like, is a (optional) badge on my site for non-iTouch users to see that the blog is compatible!
