Papa John's and Mobile

I am bullish on retail brands utilizing the mobile channel to drive commerce. This Papa John's article is just the tip of the iceberg. It will be a combination of brands creating applications and WAP specific sites in order to interact with their customers and enable purchases directly from their mobile devices. 

These retailers will need to utilize advertising/partnerships with media and social media companies to drive traffic to their sites with a percentage resulting in a purchase. Why not just develop the App/WAP site and let the customers come to you? Many of us needing a little nudge to help us decide what we want to eat/wear/attend/etc. 

Just like you need to make it easy for your customers/fans/potential customers to have a relationship or conversation with you via community, you will need to make it easy for them to purchase from you in the channel most convenient for them.  I am a big fan of where the mobile space is heading!

By the way, I love the ESPN Iphone mobile site as it is extremely fast and easy to navigate...bye bye SportsTap.

YouTube Live

YouTube held a live event this past Saturday featuring 50 performers from San Francisco. Reports indicate that 700K streamed the event live and an additional 2.5M have since downloaded parts of the event. Akamai was called upon to provide the streaming and according to sources did a very good job.

The live streaming space has come a long way from the first few Broadcast.com events. YouTube did very little if any paid promotion for the event and the 700K number is a very respectable as it would be a .5 national rating if measured via traditional television ratings. I am assuming most of this audience was comprised of the 18-34 audience which is highly coveted by advertisers. The 700K number in the 18-34 audience would be equal to approximately 40-50% of NBC, CBS and Fox's audience on any given weekday evening.

It will be interesting to see if YouTube looks to start doing live events or if this was a one time experiment...based on the results I wouldn't be surprised if this becomes a once a week/month type of advertising supported programming.

Here is one of the performers from the event:

Google Search Hazard...

I Want This App...

for my Iphone!

Mark Cuban & The SEC

He can't comment, but here is the post from Mark Cuban in response to the SEC looking into his selling of 600,000 shares of mamma.com:

Mark Cuban