Hey everyone, here we go. . . . . .
IN OUR WORLD
Coming to you from across the pond in Jolly Olde England. Laura and I are in London for 10 days. A little tourist stuff and some work for me with a brand new client. I am jazzed about the opportunity to work with my new friends in England and hope my very American ideas translate well. I’m about as American as you can get being an ex-surfer who now lives in Texas!
The weather is cold but clear (pretty sure we are lucky).
On our arrival date after about 24 straight hours awake, we still managed to drag ourselves to the British Museum. It’s about a 5 minute walk from our hotel. There, we saw the ORIGINAL Rosetta Stone! We also got a history lesson on it. It inspired me to outline my next article, on the power of recognizing patterns.
We have a few days before I start to work on Monday and Laura has the whole few days planned out. I plan to follow along. The iPhone has an unbelievable app that shows the London Tube (subway) and all you do is enter a starting and ending point and it will figure out your entire journey. Way cool!
If you want to follow my London adventures, check my Twitter and Facebook postings.
HEY, YOU CAN FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER –CREATIVEVENTURE
AND ON FACEBOOK – STEPHEN HARVILL!
THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW
Are you looking for some of the legitimate trends that you might see become real players in 2010? Here are a couple to pay attention to:
- URBANY: Urban culture IS the culture. The key here is buyers are becoming more and more sophisticated, using virtually unlimited resources to make buying decisions. Make sure your bases are covered so a buyer can not only find you, but get to know you.
- LIVING IN REAL TIME: Everything happens NOW. If you have a success, make sure everyone knows RIGHT NOW. If you have a failure, yep, MAKE SURE EVERYONE KNOWS RIGHT NOW. By the way, be sure to add how you recovered!
- TRACKING AND ALERTING: The infolust that has grabbed consumers will launch countless new services to help manage all that stuff as well as connect searchers to what they are looking for. So what does this mean? How are you found and what do you look like will continue to gain momentum.
- PROFILE MYNING: Close to Tracking and Alerting is the knowledge that hundreds of millions of consumers are now nurturing some sort of on line profile and 2010 will be a great year to leverage the strategy around this.
There you go, just a couple of ideas to get your head going.
ENTERTAINMENT
MOVIES: Up In The Air: Still not in line for this one, but with both Dylan and Colin on my side, how can Laura say no???
NetFlix Fans: A Strategy Idea: During a recent client dinner I threw out the discussion topic of – “What movies do you stop on, every time, you are surfing around, no matter where the movie is in its running time?” Try this and keep a pen with you to jot down some of the movies that stop your friends dead in their surfing tracks. Reminded me to watch The Boondock Saints again before the sequel comes out. This is a FANTASTIC and weird little movie.
TV: OK, stop whatever you are doing and go the guide on your humungous HD TV and search for HBO – The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concert. This is four hours of non stop music. Everyone from CSN to Metallica, from Stevie Wonder to U2, from Paul Simon to The Boss, from Jeff Beck to BB King. I was mesmerized.
BOOKS: You Are What You Choose – By De Marchi & Hamilton. Backed by 30,000 test results the authors show six traits that impact the way we make decisions; Time, Risk, Altruism, Information, Me and Stickiness. Good stuff, but sometimes a little too academic.
MUSIC: I usually post a song here, but I was so taken with the HBO Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concert that I wanted to give you just a glimpse incase you missed it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPMwILVUWyA
WEB SITES: One you will want to bookmark.
SOUTH OF NORMAL
Yes, it’s true, Las Vegas is the home of South of Normal, but even by their terms the City Place project is weird. Huge is scale and in the works for years it is getting ready to finally open. Located right on the Strip it is a sight to behold, but really, in these times opening something like this seems insane:
- Adding 5,900 rooms to a city that already had 141,000 rooms already?
- It covers 67 acres and has a cost of +/- $8.5 billion (give or take a couple of hundred million).
- Room prices in Las Vegas have dropped 25% since last year and visitors are down from an all time high in 07 of 39.2 million to 37.5 million in 08.
- State unemployment is 13.3% (ouch).
- To top it all off there are three more mega hotel projects on hold that will add another 9,390 rooms to the Vegas inventory.
I wish I could figure out what they know that I don’t, but here is one thing I do know. Las Vegas is one of the BEST bargains in the world!
Drop me a note with your comments at steve@creativeventures.com
Thanks for stopping by and until next time, Adios and Aloha.
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