Captivating Connections.

is content bad for your budget?

There's something about seamlessly buying and downloading content like music, movies, and books that makes you forget you're actually spending (real) money on it. I used to be a major offender of, um, filesharing music, and now I can't stop buying random songs from iTunes. It all seems pretty harmless - a song here, a song there - until I get my bill and I realize just how much I racked up.

For some reason, until I get the bill, I forget I'm actually spending money on the content, and probably don't need all these songs I won't listen to after a week. Part of me thinks "meh, it's less than 1 or 2 dollars," while another part of me thinks "isn't that how people ruin their budgets? By minor purchases here and there?"

I'm not the only one concerned about this. According to AICPA, "more than 40% of Americans download and pay for digital content, and they’re spending more money on them than they ever have."

But do they have this money to spend? Jordin Amin, chair of the AICPA’s national CPA financial literacy, says it best when he says, “one of the concerns we have is that it’s very easy to make these purchases without a budget or an overall financial plan.”

It's true. Do people not 'count' content they download as a real purchase because it's not in tangible DVD, book, or CD form? One could argue that it's cheaper to buy a song vs. an album, or a digital version of a book than a physical paperback, but do we justify more purchases when they are only a tap or swpire away?

What do you think?

are music games sales down?

Apparently, yes.

"According to data from market analyst NPD Group, sales of these games haven't met expectations. The Beatles game, while selling a respectable 800,000 units of its various versions so far, missed the 1 million mark analysts expected in just the first month after its September 9 debut. 'Guitar Hero 5' sold 500,000 units in its first month, compared with the 1.4 million 'Guitar Hero III' moved two years ago in its first month.

'DJ Hero,' the game that was meant to expand the category into the hip-hop genre, moved 123,000 units in the first few days after its late-October release, and analysts at Cowen & Co. slashed their sales forecast for the game from 1.6 million this year to 600,000.

So what happened to this once-promising category, which so many in the music industry looked to for much-needed revenue? According to Pachter, the answer is: Too many games with too much music in too short a time."

roll the dice and take a chance.

Candy Land. Monopoly. Ouija.

Rockin' games, but do you think they will make good movies?

mash it up.

Check out the wrap up from the YPulse Teen Mash Up.

wasting time (in a good way).

As always, I’m constantly on the hunt to find interactive advertisements that do it RIGHT, engaging the audience in a space their open to, and in a way that makes sense.

Playing off of the idea that people love to play ‘timewaster’ games on their cellphones, like Tetris, Pac Man and Memory, Nokia brings the gaming element found on most mobile devices to another place that is often demands timewasters: bus stops. Nokia created an interactive touch screen game for the
href="http://www.nseries.com/products/n95/index.html#l=products,n95">Nokia N95, playing off of the idea that the N96 is so slim and so unobtrusive that it’s difficult to pick out. The game, placed in bus stops throughout London, requests that players flip pictures of pants pockets in order to find matches. It’s really just a branded game of Memory.

Why is this so great? It’s simple, targets a captive audience, provides something that is missing or wanted in the audience’s lives, and very quietly marries the message to the interaction.

A+ Nokia.