The Ten Spot: Nov 30, 2009

via The Media Equation – For Media, a Sunset Is Followed Quickly by a Sunrise – NYT

For those of us who work in Manhattan media, it means that a life of occasional excess and prerogative has been replaced by a drum beat of goodbye speeches with sheet cakes and cheap sparkling wine. It’s a wan reminder that all reigns are temporary, that the court of self-appointed media royalty was serving at the pleasure of an advertising economy that itself was built on inefficiency and excess. Google fixed that.

via The $20m Actor…Who Needs ‘Em? | ZDONK

I like to think of it like this: Every time a studio green lights a movie for production, it’s like they’re investing in a company. Some companies are run by charismatic leaders who are proven winners ($20 million actors), but if that company’s agenda and business model (script) are weak, then it doesn’t matter who the CEO is. I have to imagine that every Fortune 500 company started out with a great concept, not some name brand face.

via Spotify CEO Confident For 2010 U.S. Launch

“Subscription doesn’t work on its own because that’s been proven for 10 years as well,” Ek continued. “But the combination of an ad pricing model and a subscription model does. So far, in terms of Spotify, we haven’t actually spent any money at all on marketing. But what we have done is that we have taken a lot of people in using the free service, they start using the free service and they find attractive options such as becoming a paid user because they wanted to have [the service] on their mobile phone or they wanted to have higher volume quality… and they’ve done so now at the scale where we can say that we’re the biggest subscription service in Europe.”

via For Dreamworks, Partners Will Bolster 2010 3-D Push – Advertising Age – CMO Strategy

Ad Age: What kind of metrics are you putting in place as a studio to help you gauge that these brand extensions are working?

Ms. Globe [Dreamworks Animation CMO]: You have to start with a successful film product. And then that gives you the opportunity to really look at the stories, which are typically 80 to 85 minutes in feature form, so there’s often more story to tell beyond the feature story that’s been conceived. There might be some additional questions we ask beyond that, like, “are there characters like the ‘Penguins of Madagascar’ on Nickelodeon?” or “might there be some environment like a TV special?” We’re mapping out how we want the story to continue visually; the business is the continuation of that story.

via Hollywood Entertainment Breaking News – Nikki Finke on Deadline.com/hollywood.

[Neck and neck - a good vampire metaphor for "New Moon" versus "The Blind Side" at the box office this past Thanksgiving holiday weekend - big drop for Summit, but with such a huge opening weekend, it was inevitable.]

1. NEW MOON Summit Entertainment Week 2 [4,042 Theaters]

Wed $14.3M, Thurs $9.2M, Fri $17.7M, Sat $16.5M

3-Day Total: $42.5M includes Sunday estimate -70% over last weekend

5-Day Total: $66M includes Sunday estimate

Domestic Cume: $230.7M includes Sunday estimate

International Cume: $243M

Worldwide Cume: $473.7M

2. THE BLIND SIDE Alcon/Warner Bros Week 2 [3,140 Theaters]

Wed $7.9M, Thurs $9.4M, Fri $16.2M, Sat $15.9M +18% over last weekend

3-Day Total: $40.1M

5-Day Total: $57.5M

Domestic Cume: $100.2M

via AOL’s Armstrong Orders Up News That’s Automated And Advertorial | paidContent

AOL will using the forthcoming site Seed.com to coordinate article assignments among its 3,000 freelancers. The new system will also help determine how much freelancers get paid, as it predicts how much marketers might pay to advertise on a particular article. To make the articles more palatable to marketers, AOL’s system will also screen pieces for grammar, spelling, even plagiarism, before going through a human editor.

via How ‘Modern Warfare 2′ Vanquished ‘Harry Potter’ – Advertising Age – Digital

“Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2″ might be a traditional, hardcore shooter game, but its marketing didn’t treat it as such. The result was the biggest entertainment launch ever, according to publisher Activison Blizzard. It claims “MW2″ brought in $550 million in software sales worldwide, enough to best the previous five-day global sales record holders from both the movie and gaming industries: “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” grossed $394 million in global box-office sales and “Grand Theft Auto IV” snared $500 million

via Another One Bites The Dust: BitTorrent Giant Mininova Forced To Go Legal | paidContent

It calls itself “the ultimate BitTorrent source”, but P2P tracker Mininova has now removed almost all links to copyrighted content after complying with a cease-and-desist court ruling in August from Dutch entertainment rightsholder group Brein. As in the Pirate Bay case in April, the ruling (Google translation here) said that, while Mininova had no control over what its users downloaded, it was encouraging them to upload and share copyrighted material and making copyright abuse possible.

via Product design debt versus Technical debt | Andrew Chen

[Great article on refactoring web design via iterating your product] The first kind of technical debt is the kind that is incurred unintentionally. For example, a design approach just turns out to be error-prone or a junior programmer just writes bad code. This technical debt is the non-strategic result of doing a poor job. In some cases, this kind of debt can be incurred unknowingly, for example, your company might acquire a company that has accumulated significant technical debt that you don’t identify until after the acquisition. Sometimes, ironically, this debt can be created when a team stumbles in its efforts to rewrite a debt-laden platform and inadvertently creates more debt.