2006's Word of the Year - iFad!

Michael Hedges January 9, 2006

Trend spotting is a no luxury. Media makers mine this diamond of knowledge like caviar before the well-heeled gourmet, the stuff of life. What will the world be like tomorrow: the best to get there before somebody else hoards the spoils?

The young are spied upon for their rebellion against habit, fueled by higher, if slightly, disposable incomes. Not the old; stale, bad habits, reflective. The young are, bless them, the future. Watching what they do is such a joy, up until about age five.

Apple introduced its iPod™ with a delicious ad campaign reaping benefits in the millions, not the least of which served to the company a new slice of the multi-media pie. The internet facilitated downloading, inflated music rights lawyers hourly rates and raised “concerns” among radio broadcasters. Four very short years later downloading music is legitimate – Apple benefiting again with iTunes™ and jumping into e-commerce, music rights lawyers are retiring to their very large boats and broadcasters concerns look more like panic. Young people are deserting traditional media – broadcast and print – and, if the surveys are correct, taking up personal digital audio players.

In a PR coup as stunning as the original iPod™ ad campaign, Apple is taking full advantage of the announcement that “podcast” is the 2005 word of the year, chosen by the New Oxford American Dictionary (OAD) editors. Here’s the official definition that started the party: “a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program made available on the internet for downloading to a personal audio player.”

Also last month, substantially under-reported, came US broadcast researcher Fred Jacob’s conclusions about gizmo savvy 18 to 34 year old Americans; one being that “podcasting is barely on the radar screen.” Since he was speaking at an Arbitron seminar for US programming consultants, measuring iPod™ listening came up.”Why bother?” Jacobs said.

Why, indeed? Broadcasters around the planet offer podcasts. And speech-based broadcasters, particularly public and international, have every reason to reach into PoMo (post-modern) marketing for justification. For music broadcasters, this is a nightmare, particularly with the music police inside every PC. The internet, after all, facilitates disintermediation, the fancy academic term for cutting out the middle-man.  If the public views broadcast media as simply a distribution device – particularly a music distribution device – they prefer going directly to the source. Speech-based podcasts have far less fear of those copyright lawyers. So far.

Podcast follows blog, the OAD’s 2004 word of the year; a logical PoMo thought extension. Bloggers, at least those begging professional status, use the internet to evade stonewalling gate-keeper publishers and editors. Early in podcastings’ brief history was the notion of citizen-producers, circumventing traditional media, reaching the masses directly. Now podcasting is thought to facilitate another PoMo fantasy: time control via time-shifting.

But the cutting edge of technology rides rough on iPods and other MPG3 players. Their bet, and not without justification, is on the G3 mobile phone: get what you want, when and where you want it, paid on the phone bill.

Words are transformative: and the English language more so since it readily adapts everything. Take “globalization,” for example. It entered Websters Dictionary in 1961. Forty years later, “globaloney” was added. “Walkman,” a truly transformational technology – no “record” button, entered the Oxford Dictionary in 1986. Five years earlier it was added to Le Petit Larousse. The French wrote PoMo theory.

The annual Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is, as its promoters call it, a “Mecca” for trend watchers. Its only similarity with the real Mecca is an absence of non-believers. This show is like a pharmaceutical convention, filled with drugs for which there are no diseases. It finished last week leaving, no doubt, 130,000 flying on their flash drives.

Delphi Corporation, formerly known as General Motors automobile electronics supplier Delco, announced at CES its investment in European satellite radio company ONDAS Media. Trading cash and technology for board seats and “strategic input” Delphi will help ONDAS fire up 150 satellite distributed radio channels for Europeans anxious to pay for more radio even as they now, usually, pay radio and TV license fees to receive the roughly 10,000 stations already on the air in 30 European countries. 

Motorola unleashed iRadio™, 435 radio channels available by subscription through, surprise, your mobile handset, “the device formerly known as the cell phone,” said its press release. One of their newest “devices” can record 500 tunes. Or is it 5 million? Using Bluetooth technologies Motorola’s product line includes jackets for snowboarders, devices formerly known as sports wear. Is it fad or fashion?

Content distribution’s center of gravity continues to oscillate from nano (individuals) to macro (global) in search of a business model – a term first entering the lexicon in the 1930’s. With iPod being the most recent and, arguably, only “killer application” to actually move consumers the clamor among designers and marketers will focus for the foreseeable future (three minutes and 25 seconds) on derivatives, almost all of which will be pictured in the next OAD accompanying the 2006 Word of the Year – iFad.

IFad (noun)

any product or service offered or suggested born of or attached to the internet or other digital technology which is deemed by the market cycle as falling from the introduction stage to the disappearance stage before attracting one repeat customer or subscriber, not including Wall Street analysts, technology writers, marketing gurus and the terminally bored. See craze or crazy.

ftm Follow Up & Comments

Automakers Shuffle to iPods – August 7, 2006

Radio broadcasters face another assault on their traditional car dashboard space, this time from the fashion-friendly iPod. Apple Computers scored a major strategic victory over satellite radio as auto makers Ford, GM and Mazda announced a new addition to the dashboard: iPod docking stations.

Mazda will add the iPod docking station, complete with charger and storage, in all models beginning in 2007. Ford and GM will add the feature to about 70% of new cars later this year. The iPod features will be factory installed options costing buyers under $200 (€155).

Over the last two years Apple has signed similar deals with over a dozen automakers, including BMW, Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz and Honda.

In the US market satellite radio services have depended on the auto industry for dashboard space and subscription sales. BMW offers a variety of digital radio options for its top-level cars worldwide. The iPod caché, if it translates to auto sales, could cause music-format radio broadcasters yet another headache.

Walkman: 1979-20?? RIP - January 26, 2006

Sony’s Walkman, the test instrument for mobile thinking, is not quite dead but it has been sent to the home for wheezing brands: China.

Sony launched Walkman A, with a memory chip, to compete with iPod and other similar digital music players last year. The move failed to revive the brand. The Japanese Walkman factories will be closed and what’s left of manufacturing will be in China. Sir Howard Stringer, Sony CEO, shows little patience with history.

Under Stringer’s command Sony led a Tokyo stock market rally Friday (January 26) with a 14% jump in share price after better than expected quarterly net profit report. Profits at Sony’s electronics division, home to Walkman, rose more than 50%.

Software bugs plagued Walkman A and customers have been offered five fixes to download.

"The Walkman has long been a symbolic and strategic product for Sony, but it has now turned into just one item that should be produced overseas due to labor costs," said Okasan Research Institute analyst Masayuki Hoshina, quoted in TodayOnLine (Singapore).