How Old Pasadena scares up customers in hard times

FREE candy!

Well, that about covers it. G’night folks. I’ll be here all week.

O wait. Free candy isn’t enough. Not in this economy. Lemme ‘splain.

On Halloween night, our Old Pasadena merchants will continue their long-standing tradition of opening their doors to kids for the district’s Store-to-Store, Safe Trick-or-Treat Night. Every year, hundreds of handfuls of free candy are doled out to the costumed kids of Pasadena. However this year, the Old Pas marketing committee suggested that the merchants add a little twist. The scope of the Halloween festivities will be expanded to include a full month of specials leading up to Halloween, and on Halloween Day, our merchants will be adding special treats for the long-suffering, too-long ignored Trick-or-Treaters’ moms and dads.

This year, select Old Pasadena stores and restaurants will be treating Grown-ups to hundreds of dollars in savings. Plus, the streets and alleyways will be filled with wandering spooks, a free, haunted photo booth, and more. On October 31, participating merchants will beckon visitors with Trick-Or-Treat signs in store windows. A photographer will take free haunted pictures of the kids in costumes among hundreds of pumpkins in the One Colorado Courtyard. Throughout the celebration, guests will also enjoy a unique opportunity to meet and greet with various popular (and non-threatening) Halloween costumed characters.

Of course, this expansion of the traditional Old Pasadena Halloween festivities is a rather naked attempt to get the parents of those cute little characters to come back and shop here. Oddly, this is the first year that the Old Pas merchants have taken advantage of their Trick-or-Treat Night candy give-aways to promote themselves. Perhaps the abysmal economy has something to do with this epiphany, but ironically, today the MediaPost “Engage:Gen Y” blog advised marketers “Don't Be Afraid To Embrace The Potential Of Halloween.”

Blog author Jason Bakker, inspired by a memorable, late Halloween night “visit” of some unruly teen candy addicts, wrote, “The more I looked into it, the more I realized how much fun there is to be had out there. Youth marketers should know that Halloween for college students is always a bull market, and for a very small amount of time each year, they need look no further than the local haunts if they want to reach this demographic.”

Of course, his target audience is not the same one that the merchant’s of Old Pas are trying to attract. However, the fact remains that Halloween, along with being a high holy day of pre-teens and their dentists, has a substantial potential to bring returning traffic back to eager store owners and restaurateurs. If the spike in hits on the Old Pasadena web site is any indication, that potential is working its Halloween magic.

To the Old Pasadena Marketing District staff and my clever marketing committee members, allow me to say, BOO!

Now You’re Thinking Freely

This weekend “CBS Sunday Morning” examined the burgeoning “Free” economy that is developing on the Internet. On the web, of course, “free content” is the norm. It’s expected, even demanded. Free searches, free email, free bargain hunting, free classified ads, free dictionaries, free encyclopedias. Everything online is either free or marginalized, shunned, avoided and diminished in importance. Certainly there are sites that charge a fee, or share a fee, but much of that content is available elsewhere, either independently or from a pirated source.

And piracy is theft, right? You put time and money into your intellectual property and someone enjoys it for free like music on the radio… Wait. No. That’s a bad example. Radio was good. On the radio, recording artists gained an audience who would come out to their concerts or buy their records or both. It was just great advertising. Record companies paid DJ’s in money, drugs and scotch to play their artists on the radio. Recording artists made money. Recording studios made money. Everyone was happy, and no one was stealing the content, except for the vast majority of listeners who recorded and shared it on cassettes… Damn. My train of thought seems to be derailing.

Or I’m being facetious.

Sunday morning guest commentator, Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson showed how Google has mastered the art of profiting from the “Free” market. First of course is Google’s cash cow “free search,” which combines search results with highly targeted ads based on the user’s search term. As Anderson pointed out, searching for plants brings up ads for landscapers. Innovative, yet intuitive.

More interesting, the Monty Python gang, faced with a slew of “pirated” videos of favorite skits like the “Dead Parrot” and “Cheese Shop” on Youtube (owned by Google) chose not to sue or enjoin Youtube to cease, desist and remove their bits. No. Instead they started their own Monty Python channel which featured all these favorite skits. Then they used the channel to sell high quality DVD’s of the originals. As a result Monty Python DVD sales went up 23,000 percent. Free can be verrrrry profitable.

Another example of choosing to profit from “pirated” content appeared this morning in Media Post’s “Search Insider” blog. One of the most popular Youtube videos is the joyful explosion of wedding celebration, the “J K Wedding Entrance Dance.” That wild and raucous, devilish dance down the center isle to the alter is uplifting, moving and inspirational. But it could have subjected the happy couple to a devastating RIAA type lawsuit and cost them thousands of dollars in fines.

Sony's Jive label chose instead to link the video to Amazon and iTunes where users could download “Forever,” the song featured in the video which, oh by the way, “briefly climbed to the No. 3 and No. 4 most popular song on those two sites” and the official 'Forever' music video also had a spike in downloads. Now the video is being used to collect donations for violence prevention.

The choice, it seems, is make a profit or make a stink. The RIAA legal battles, which began with shutting down Napster, have resulted in horrible publicity and hundreds of thousands of dollars in uncollectible fines from students who can never pay them. Google’s “Free” market exploitation is resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits. Unless you’re a lawyer, the choice seems clear.

It’s a new world. It’s a new economic paradigm. The choice comes down to this: Get on board, or get left behind.