Media and Entertainment
Last night was the first meeting of the Media and Entertainment Club. It was a small crowd, but we were all thrilled to see that the dinner provided was NOT pizza! Thus far, the M&E club is the least structured of those I've attended. The reason given was because Media and Entertainment companies do not actively recruit on campus, thus the club executive must make all of the industry contacts on their own. The plan for the year has a lot of 'expect to see speakers from these places' but nothing firmly booked.
Clubs elections will be happening next week. Most clubs have 1 rep for each section, so a total of 4 first year reps. I've self-nominated myself for the REMA first year rep so VOTE FOR MEG :)
Constant Dissatisfaction
Jonathan Lister, Canada Country Manager, Google
As mentioned, Rotman has an impressive speaker series that students are invited to attend. Last night Jonathan Lister, Rotman Alum, spoke about Google's take on social media. While most of the talk centered around Google and Google's products (much like the presentations that Google present to media ad companies), there were a few gems that I took away:
Google is obsessed about search - while they have a bunch of other interesting products, they don't forget about their core product. For instance, recently they changed the size of the search box, (I personally didn't notice).
Launch Early and Launch Often - Google doesn't worry about perfection, they just worry about being FIRST. Launch now, and then refine based on the user feedback. This could be disasterous for a company with a physical product (imagine launching something dangerous), but it is a technique that has kept Google ahead of the curve.
Marketing is the New Finance - This was based on the fact that online advertising is measureable, you can tell the cost of the click and how many impressions were seen. I didn't like how he implied that an online only media campaign is as good as one with multiple media (because research shows it's not), but I did have a little bit of a chuckle at the slide title.
Doodle for Google - Marketing to kids is always a point of contention, but this seemed non-treatening, which is what makes it so clever. Google actually gets school children to redesign their logo which gets posted for 1 day. Not only do they get some good PR (winner from an orphanage in Egypt), but they get kids to prefer Google.
All in all an OK presentation. Where Mr. Lister really shone though was in answering the audience questions. A wide range of questions from personal "my son has to submit school assignments via Google docs, does this mean that the US government is spying on him?" to business "does Google feel guilty about lowering the standard of journalism since newspapers can't afford to keep publishing?" to the ridiculous "I'm holding a concert and I advertised on YouTube - there are still tickets by the way".
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