Category: Ideas

A little known fact is that I have a private, full-sized theater. Actually five theaters. I don’t technically own them… Regal Entertainment does and is gracious enough to operate them exclusively for me and my family.

Or at least that’s the impression I get. In nearly all movies we go to, we seem to have the whole theater pretty much to ourselves. I might be missing something in Regal’s business plan, but it seems to me awfully hard to sustain that huge operation just for an occasional visit of the 4 of us (well, I admit – the price we pay for a single bucket of pop-corn does probably cover a month’s rent and then some).

There are 100 reasons why theaters are bleeding audience (DVD’s, TiVo’s, VOD, Netflix, etc, etc). But I think at the core it all boils down to the fact that the scheduling of movies in theaters totally sucks. The movies playing in theaters at any given day are determined by some anachronistic distribution structure that was conceived ~80 years ago, an era in which content (and film reel distribution) were in short supply, and audiences were abundant.

This is flipped by 180⁰ today: content (and distribution means) are abundant, and audience attention is extremely scarce. This requires flipping the distribution model by 180⁰ too.

Here’s an idea that I’m hereby contributing to the movie theater industry, free of charge:

• Launch a website where people can signup with their zip code.
• Hook up to IMDB (or the likes), and let people browse a catalog of movies.
• Let each registered user check the movies they’re interested in seeing in theater format.
• As soon as a movie reaches X number of interested viewers, the system will find an open screening slot for the next 1-2 weeks.
• An automated email would go out to all those that signed up for that movie.

There are probably about 50 movies I can think of which I missed when they were first playing in theaters and I’d love to see on the big screen. Probably about another 100 which I’d be happy to see again in theater format. And probably about 500 others that I can’t even remember right now.

Imagine being able to go out to the movies and see Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings or The Matrix or even Citizen Kane… Or taking my kids out to see ET or Charlie Chaplin or Disney’s Fantasia… How cool would that be?!….

(I know – there are probably a hundred technical and legal reasons why not to do this… whatever… I guess the Regal’s of the world will just have to die while babbling those excuses before someone like Mark Cuban does this…)

{Image CC MattBerggren – thanks!}

A couple of years ago I had an idea relating to the way we purchase groceries. I thought maybe someday I’ll get around to doing it, if no one does before me.

But this week I noticed that FreshDirect have launched a service that’s the beginning of what I had in mind. Now that this cat is out of the bag I thought I’d share my full idea with the world here. If this plays out, I think FreshDirect could be onto something big big big[1].

The idea in a nutshell is this:
Most groceries we buy are intended for cooking. Cooking is driven by recipes. The question is – Why is grocery shopping so detached from recipes then?

My idea was: Use recipes as the shopping lists of the future. Let the shoppers decide on a menu, and ship the exact ingredients needed to fulfill that menu. There’s so much inefficiency in the process today where the shopper/cooker has to translate the menu to recipes and then to shopping lists, and then to actual buying decisions. Surely a more streamlined and automated process for grocery shopping would be a winner in this space.

If you’re scratching your head un-impressed, keep reading… this is where this gets  really interesting:

I think that recipe-driven shopping might be one of the biggest potential cross-promotional opportunities in history.  

Think about this scenario:

• FreshDirect (or whoever may emerge) offers national recipe-driven shopping to shoppers.
• They open an interface for anyone to register recipes with them. Enter your recipe and you get a unique ‘Recipe ID’.
• Any time someone buys via your recipe, you get a small cut of the profits.
• FreshDirect also provides you with a unique ‘Recipe ID Badge’ that you can print next to each recipe. I made one up below (don’t try the URL…;-):

Now play this through. Did the light bulb go off??

Recipes has to be one of the most frequently published items in
print today. The cookbook shelf at B&N is one of the biggest, and
there are hundreds of magazines dedicated to cooking (whether entirely
or partially). Not to mention TV shows, websites, etc. However, with the print advertising market declining, this is a slow/no-growth market. 

But what cooking publishers have failed to see is that they own a
treasure trove of completely untapped ad media right under their noses – the recipes themselves. It’s one of those rare occasions where readers actively consume content with a clear intent of making a related purchase. It’s the level of user intent you get when people "read" the yellow pages or use Google. In other words – a perfect advertising media.

Once this is realized (and FreshDirect seem well on their way to do so), a perfect cross-promotion platform is created. Every recipe published in books, magazines, TV, the web, heck – even in restaurants[2], becomes a small revenue generator for its publisher. In return, the whole cooking publishing industry becomes one huge sales funnel into FreshDirect. And unlike some other cross-promotion marketing schemes, this is one where the user is actually benefiting because it perfectly aligns with his initial intent – to purchase the ingredients for the recipes he’s looking to cook.

Think about it – A magazine that cover-to-cover is 100% "ad" space, without alienating readers a single bit (on the contrary).

If I were an investor, I would not touch traditional publishing companies with a stick these days. But in the cooking niche there might be a very very bright future. And if publishers understand this, the future of FreshDirect (or whoever emerges as this platform[3]) will be even brighter.

[1] BTW – it’s pretty amusing to me that every stupid ‘social calendaring tagging video web 2.0 mashup’ developed by two college dropouts gets ridiculous amount of publicity in the blogosphere driven by TechCrunch & Co., while real businesses like this get totally ignored… 😉

[2] How cool would this be? – Restaurants have little incentive to
publish their recipes. That’s their livelihood, so why give the secrets
away? But this dynamic completely changes if a restaurant could make
25-50c each time someone prepares one of their recipes at home. It’s a
0 cost transaction and it gives the restaurant potential scale they
couldn’t have dreamed about achieving in their physical location.

[3] While FreshDirect is the first player to make an entry into this space, it is not necessarily the winner. The key to winning this space is offering grocery shipments nation-wide, and FreshDirect seems far from having the infrastructure to do so at this point.
The importance of the ‘national’ piece is extremely significant – Publishers of national magazines (ditto TV shows, books, etc) will not start referencing a recipe shopping destination that cannot ship to 95% of the readers, because doing that would alienate most of the readers. So this game is far from over, and I’m sure an arms race will soon start.