Miscellaneous 'Shoe

-- "Walt Disney Plans To Launch Cellphone Service In Japan" (Wall Street Journal). Disney will lease bandwidth from Softbank, the nation's third-largest mobile operator, and sell phones and services through Softbank. The WSJ notes that Disney is entering an "already tough market."  There's a good amount of hubris in large media companies when it comes to the mobile space (and not enough operators to work with). Look at the poor mobile showing by MTV and the disastrous showing by ESPN, plus MTV's tepid performance in digital music. Where there's money there's a will...but not necessarily a way. Disney has failed to get its U.S. mobile initiative (with Sprint) going and will drop it at the end of the year. Is there any way to keep these media giants out of mobile? Not a chance. Though the market is immature, everybody knows it's the future and knows grabbing market share is important. Just as it took companies years to figure out the Internet, it will take a while for them to figure out mobile.

-- An example of Facebook's new social advertising system. What's better, super-focused or broader Internet advertising? This kind of Facebook advertising holds promise for smaller advertisers who need to reach a specific niche. Most Internet advertising, in my experiences,  misses the mark. Ads at the New York Times occasionally interest me, but they're an exception to the rule. How many U.S. Army ads can I see online? Do those really speak to a grad student with no interest in the military? If I knew ads were better targeted, I might actually pay attention to them. The main question here is whether or not advertisers like the cost/results of targeting really small segments.

-- "How Marketing Hype Hurt Apple and Boeing" (HBS Working Knowledge). Boeing hyped its Dreamliner and then got behind in its production schedule. Apple hyped the iPhone and then dropped the price by $200 eight weeks after its launch. "The moral of the story: Do not risk marketing hype unless you are sure of both your supply curve and your demand curve. Hype can hurt stock prices and investor confidence when expectations are not met."