When we think of the movies that defined the latter part of the 20th century — the movies that mattered, that stories that hit pop culture like a hammer and left a dent — more often than not they came from Miramax

Sharon Waxman blogging in The Wrap about Miramax’s closing

For me, there wasn’t another movie studio teaser that gave me more joy to see in trailers than the one of Miramax. It stand always for quality, entertaining and transcending movie-making. Sad to see a big company like Disney getting rid of its arthouse studio.

I’ve strongly criticized Mexican newspaper Reforma for maintaining a paid content model for their online presence. I thought it unimaginable that in 2010 a newspaper still charged for content. It is, however, the first Mexican newspaper I check online and the one I read the most. I do it only because my parents being paper subscribers, I get to use their online account. Reforma offers high-quality content but its site design hasn’t changed in a long time. Still, it’s my first choice.

The recent announcement of the NY Times, in which they introduce their new long-term strategy to increase online revenue by setting up a “pay wall” for frequent visitors to nytimes.com (incidental readers will have a set amount of articles they can pull up for free) turns out to be very similar to what I think Reforma has had in mind all this time. I’ve seen Reforma.com giving out “free access” to content more and more in the last year and that is exactly what the new model at the NYT will look like (they are postponing the launch of this new model until January 2011). Browse superficially, don’t pay. Want more and more pages, subscribe. People like me are loyal to a news source and therefore more willing to pay for it content.

I’m not suggesting that the way Reforma.com has operated in the last 10 years has been the ideal one. They come across as slow, old-fashioned and not forward thinking. However, I’m sure that with this announcement, more and more newspapers and news outlets will adopt this type of model. I think Reforma will start giving out more free content to attract incidental and superficial readers and will also enhance their monetization efforts for loyal visitors. At the end of the day, both newspapers will meet in the same place after going through very different paths.

I’m comfortable with the NYT’s new model. Whenever my browser ends up in one of their pages or articles and I want to read it, I just make a small note on my Kindle and then look up that article in my Kindle subscription to the Times. I won’t have to become a paying “frequent reader” because I already pay Amazon Digital Services $14 a month.  Did you notice the last words in bold? That’s the reason digital readers/tablets/Kindles are a whole different story. A story in which, I think, the true secret to sustainable revenue lies within.

So, what is a decade anyway? Well, here are a few facts I’ve come across these last days since I’ve been thinking about this (just the numerological, round aspect of a decade amazes me):

• A decade is half of the time the Simpsons and Achtung Baby have been around. It’s the time it took the Beatles to reach the peak of their career since they first started playing.
• As Gladwell describes in Outliers, a decade is roughly what it takes to accumulate 10,000 hours practicing a given discipline, which in turn will make you an expert or erudite in it.
• A decade is what it took me to complete all the studies that I was destined to do in my life (my first semester in college started exactly 10 years ago and I finished grad school only a few months ago).
• I can also imagine that a decade is a fair estimate of the time it takes to actually accomplish something significant when working for a single organization. I keep asking myself whether I will be of the “decade type” and in which company will it be. What will be that substantial change that I will steer inside that company? In any case, I hope to find hints of this soon.
• A decade is a lot of time but it’s also merely one tenth (roughly) of the time we’ll all live.

Today it’s the beginning, which is the end, which is the beginning of a decade. What do you think of it? Of the one past and the one starting? Any decade-ish thoughts?

And FYI, the decade commonly referred to as the “two thousands” ended on December 31st, 2009.

Before this year ends and we embark on our long drive tomorrow from the Rhine-Main area to the Austrian Alps, I want to wrap up this post I had in the oven for some time.

It’s merely a recollection of my favorite stuff in this very significant year in my life. I hope you can start something with it.

1. YouTube video that I enjoyed watching the most: SOUR ‘日々の音色 (Hibi no neiro)’ is the most creative, complex and entertaining piece of musical footage that I’ve seen. And it’s a crowdsourced video, which made me very happy.
2. YouTube video that made me laugh the most: We must have watched this poor drunk Mexican (aka “El Canaca”) over a million times and cracked every time we did. Probably overrated in Mexico but we had one helluva time with it.
3. My favorite song was definitely Lizstomania by Phoenix. Not a lot to say here, just that I absolutely love Phoenix.
4. On the same note, my favorite album in 2009 was Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix.
5. My favorite movie in 2009 is “Inglourious Basterds” (and I say “is” instead of “was” because it was not only my favorite movie in 2009 but became my favorite movie of all times; Tarantino just keeps raising the bar for me). Here’s a piece I wrote after I saw it. In second place is “Up in the Air”, which I thought it was exquisite and I seriously predict that it will win the Oscar for Best Picture in February.
6. My favorite tweet in 2009: http://twitter.com/BernardoSosa/status/1473678178
7. The most important tweet in 2009 (and probably the most important one I’ll write in my life): http://twitter.com/BernardoSosa/status/1444888501
8. Favorite picture (taken by myself) this year is this one or this other one. Both were taken during a trip to Cartagena, Colombia. The conference I attended there and the trip in general are also two of the highlights of my year.

Now, on to work on my new year’s resolutions. Post to follow.

I hope I’m not boring my four readers with more aviation content here. The fact is, my Reader is now full of aviation-related feeds and the research I’ve been doing at work in the last 3 months is merely about the airline industry in North- and Latin America. I’ve also been spending a lot of time tracking the Social Media activities of companies in this space, both airlines and airline suppliers, and I’ve learned a lot about the intersection of aviation and new media.

The good news is, it’s really interesting stuff and I want to record it somehow, using this everlasting resource (aka my rarely updated blog). Here are some of the take-aways:

1. Unlike North American airlines, Latin American airlines are strong, privately owned and professionally managed companies that show figures of growth and profitability (look at Gol, Avianca, TACA and Azul). The roles have switched and these airlines now represent strong competition to the legacy North American players. While Latin America is home to some of the most profitable airlines in the world, North American airlines struggle to survive and find a path towards profitability. On the other hand, North American carriers still account for 57% of the world’s domestic passenger traffic and 17% of the international passenger traffic, making it the biggest airline market in the world.
2. Both markets show signs of consolidation; Colombia-based Avianca and El Salvador-based TACA formed a new Latin American airline powerhouse with annual revenues of over $3 billion pushing it into the top 50 airline groups in the world.  Continental’s entry to Star Alliance marked the first step of a strategic partnership with United that many believe will lead to an eventual merger.
3. 2009 was the year Social Media became important for airlines. Although carriers like JetBlue and Southwest have been active in Social Media since years, we were amazed by the strategies airlines like Lufthansa, Virgin, Continental and Volaris implemented this year. It is all an interesting preamble of the center stage position that Social Media will have in 2010 for airlines’ marketing and communications.
4. B2B companies in this space are struggling to find context for Social Media activities. The key here will be to clearly connect Social Media to business objectives and gain a better understanding of how to measure the direct and indirect ROI of social media. Also, I always insist on the fact that Social Media can have a direct and traceable impact on the bottom line, serving purposes like lead generation or more cost-effective communications.

I hope you will find this useful in any way possible, dear reader. Comments or additional take-aways are highly welcome.

The United States has emerged from the longest economic contraction since Wolrd War II.

Happy news and definitely a good way to start the day. Next, my iPhone with the amazing new CNN app pushes the following notification to my home screen, immediately after turning the device on:

The largest stimulus program in the nation’s history has created or saved just over 640,000 jobs, the Obama administration said.

Another good indication that this country is apparently pulling out of the “great recession”, a terminology we’ll possibly use when we tell our kids stories about 2009. The way these notifications are pushed to me every morning make me think of the digital aspect of our lifestyle and how these technologies contribute to widespread innovation and in turn, in a tiny way, to this recovery. I guess the point I’m trying to make here is that crisis and recessions make us think about new, more efficient ways to do everything we do and that unleashes innovation. Then, the achieved innovations fuel the economy and generate growth again. All part of a virtuous cycle that we tend to ignore when we concentrate only on the down times.

These innovations and the digitalization of our interactions with media never cease to amaze me and keep me ticking…even during recessions.

Volaris.com.mx

I could write a long paper just describing the wide set of innovative channels the airline uses to communicate with its customers, achieving intimacy and focusing on them rather than on their products (which also happen to be disruptive and innovative); but in this post I’ll try to concentrate on the emerging digital channels they have chosen to formally incorporate to their mix. And this takes me exactly to the first step of their strategy: As Beltranena explained showing a slide with a big amount of emerging media categories and social networks, they had to first choose which ones they’d use according to their usefulness and relevance to their overall marketing strategy. They ended up choosing the fastest growing channels in Mexico after their assessment: YouTube, Facebook, Twitterand a Volaris-branded blog (coming early 2010). The message here is that these channels won’t necessarily be the ones everybody should pick for their Social Media strategy. In each case, resourcefulness, relevance and fit should be analyzed before picking a given tool. For a different company maybe MySpace of Flickr could prove to be more efficient and adequate channels.

Then Beltranena showed this video, which, in a nutshell, answers the question of why Social Media is not a fad. The best part of the afternoon was watching the faces of important CEOs and airline leaders while they saw the video with awe and realized that they had to do something about this quickly. Hopefully, they will take the matter seriously and, like our friends at Volaris, assign (human and budgetary) resources to it and instruct their CMO to make Social Media a cornerstone of their marketing and communications strategy.

To get a feel of what Volaris is doing, go to their Twitter, Facebook and YouTube channels and see how they are first listening, then connecting and at the end communicating with their customers. Please note the customization of the content according to the channel and the continuity they exercise in each one of them. Also try to see how they seek a healthy amount of activity that will demonstrate engagement without bother the user with excessive tweets, posts, videos or content.

I’m proud to say that Volaris is the first Latin American airline to successfully deploy Social Media as part of an innovative and disruptive marketing strategy, setting a precedent and putting Mexico’s name and digital literacy high above. Congratulations from this humble blog to everybody making it happen.

Originally, this post was a sort of review of a book I had just finished reading: Ahead of the Curve by Philip Delves Broughton, the 2-year-long story of a journalist-turned-MBA-student during his time in the “world’s best business school”, HBS. I’m glad that the exciting news gave me the opportunity to talk about Babson instead of HBS in this post, using only the title of the book to illustrate how Babson thrives as the top-of-mind entrepreneurship school in the world. I could have written about the excellency, particularity or exclusivity that, according to the author, HBS represents in the business school world. Instead, I can say that Babson not only shares a common space with HBS as top business schools, but also stands out as a community that values an entrepreneurial and open mindset and welcomes hands-on innovation. Exactly as HBS plays a role in the elite of the business and corporate worlds, I think of Babson as a contributing force in the entrepreneurial elite in the entire world.

To conclude this celebratory text, I want to recognize the achievements of some of the Babson entrepreneurs that keep our school ahead of the entrepreneurship curve and that I had the great opportunity to sit next to in class. Kudos to Canditto, Lazybones, Incentive Targeting, PeopleAhead, Finroo, RetireLife and VergheseVentures, whose CEO is one of the most inspiring individuals I’ve had the opportunity to meet in my life.

Oh, the places we’ll go as Babson alumni!

I decided to write you a “letter” (or its fictional equivalent) after watching Inglourious Basterds. Fact is, it became automatically my favorite film of all times. I recently read a convoluted article (like all film critics like to write them) in which you stated that your only goal as a filmmaker was to inspire that feeling in members of your audience; make them feel that the film they just saw is the best one they will ever see. Well, I felt that and that’s why I’m writing this: to leave a written proof of it, at least in cyberspace.

But enough justification, let’s move on to the details. I’ve been trying to explain to myself why IB had such an impact in me and I’ve come to the conclusion that it mixes everything I love about movies, films and everything that floats around. WWII and German history are two of my favorite subjects in films, the music is spectacular, the script feels like an opera, the characters have that deep and long-time relationship with the audience and well, you’re one hell of a director (disclosure: I’m a long-time fan of yours since that ’94 work of art left a mark in me for ever).

I want to praise the exhausting due diligence you performed to be in a position to make IB. Not only the decision to be true to the spoken languages in the film, but the fact that the historical susceptibilities of the plot are treated with respect and cultural conscience. The process itself of scouting and recruiting the cast and the overall talent feel like a masterpiece. Although the film doesn’t intend to be historically accurate, all your cinematic obsessions were taken to the time of the plot with care and thoughtful deliberation.

I must admit that the entire film feels a little chopped. It’s no secret that it was intended to be way longer but the commercial connotations we all know made you edit fast and take out complete scenes. At this point I can only hope you’ll let us see them sometime in a special edition blue ray or, better yet, at the movies, like it should be.

Kudos to that visionary individual who put Christoph Waltz in front of your eyes and obviously all my respect and admiration to him because his multilingual, delicate and mind-blowing performance has given birth to one of the most transcendental villains in the history of filmmaking.

Finally, congratulations to you because, at least in me you have always (and most definitely with IB) left that feeling when watching the credits roll: “this is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen inside a movie theater”

Inglouriously yours,

A long-time fan