Seminar Materials
From CreativeBusiness
Here are the CBDE seminar materials, as used on the full day seminar. They are all available under Creative Commons Licence (see bottom of page for the licence we're using), so please feel free to reuse, remix and recycle! We'll try to get the source files (InDesign) up too, as soon as we can.
Contents |
Downloads
- CBDE Workbook: Contains the executive summaries for the three case studies, space to note down your 'Five Next Steps', and room for notes.
- Radiohead exercise: Cards with a list of music industry roles to allow discussion of the impact of giving away an album for free.
- Products and markets exercise: Cards with a product and matching market, to allow people to discuss how they would market a specific product to a market, using 'free' as a core part of their strategy.
Notes on running the exercises
Five Next Steps
At the end of the seminar, we encourage people to think about their own specific situation, and to think about what next steps they were going to take. It's very important to think in terms of real, doable, actions, such as:
- "talk to my boss about opening up some of our ip"
- "release a someong as a free download under Creative Commons"
You should avoid projects, i.e. tasks that are big enough to be broken down into smaller component actions, e.g.
- "write book" is a project
- "email my publisher to suggest using Creative Commons" is an action
Radiohead
On the 10 October 2007, Radiohead released their latest album, In Rainbows, online for free. They announced its release just 10 days before the site went live. They refused to put individual tracks on iTunes, instead offering the album as a whole unit, thus preserving its artistic integrity. Fans could pay whatever they wanted, with no upper or lower limits, although a processing fee of 45p applied. Users could also pre-order deluxe CD version for £40.
Record of the Day carried out a poll of 3000 purchasers and reported an average price of between $4 and $8. CommScore reported that 62% of downloaders paid nothing and that the average payment was $6. Radiohead rubbished CommScore's report, but have so far refused to release official figures, and it will be very difficult to assess their experiment until they do.
However it is clear that, at the very least, Radiohead triggered a huge conversation and undoubtedly benefited from the additional promotion garnered by that discussion. BlogPlus recorded a 1300% increase in blog posts mentioning the band between September 29 and October 1.
Users experience of the website was not uniformly good. There were difficulties with downloading, the files provided were only 160 kbps, which is quite poor quality even for non-audiophiles, and the usability of the site design was poor.
In this exercise, we are going to examine the hypothetical case of a band who have decided to give away some aspects of their intellectual property. We will look at the different stakeholders involved, and try to imagine how they may react and how they could use 'free' to enhance their own offering. Exactly what is given away free and the strategies to deal with that, such as marketing campaigns are up to you.
For each role, discuss what 'free' means, what your goals might be, what you would consider to be a success, the risks to your business from going the free route and the actions you might take to mitigate those risks.
The roles:
- the band
- the fan
- the record label
- the publisher
- the distributor
- the promoter
- the manager
- the merchandiser
Business Models and Target Markets
It's all very well to decide to give your intellectual property away for free, but it's important to identify which business model and marketing strategies are most suitable for you and your product. Where the money is coming from? And how are you going to grab people's attention? These essential questions do not have simple answers and each case must be examined on its own merits.
In this exercise each group will be given a card detailing a product and the market to which it is being sold. Discuss and decide upon a business model and marketing plan that makes the most of both the intellectual property you can give away and the individual characteristics of the market you are serving. You should consider:
- What exactly are you going to give away? Downloads? Rights? If so, which ones?
- Where will the money come from?
- How does what you're giving away help you build a business?
- What are your criteria for success?
- What are your goals?
- What are the risks of having a free strategy?
- What actions would you take to enact your strategy?
Cards:
- Product - Market
- Free digital music downloads - Radio 1 Listeners
- Free digital music downloads - Radio 2 Listeners
- 'Chick lit' novels - Yummies mummies
- SF novels - Geeks
- Blockbuster feature film - Mass audience
- Photographs - First time art buyers
- TV Series - Pre-teen CBBC viewers
