Children’s Educational Network

A few days ago, I got to see Greg Writer, the CEO, of the Children’s Educational Workshop present his business opportunity to a group of Angels at a Keiretsu Forum meeting in San Diego. As Greg mentioned, there are about 53M American youths (4-16 years) that access the Internet from their homes. Few of these use systems that protect them from accessing pornographic materials or chatting with the numerous pedophiles that surf the net and look for opportunities to interact with these children. Well Greg got tired of it especially since he had children of his own to protect.

Greg didn’t sit on the side lines and complain. Instead he created the Children’s Educational Network and its safe browser, TUKI(tm). Additionally, he offers TUKI as a free download for end users and is developing relationships with major brands who are targeting this demographic and creating “Private Label” browsers.

Kudos to Greg and I hope he is successful at building this business. We need more entrepreneurs who are willing to take on issues like protecting our children from sites with inappropriate materials and the sick people who try to communicate with them. If you have children, download TUKI and give it a try. It won’t cost you anything to try out. If your kids like TUKI, you can get access to more rich content for a low  monthly fee.

Other Examples of CGM in the Mainstream

The vast majority of people who watched the Superbowl yesterday watched the commercials. For the last 20+ years, the commercials shown during the game are highly anticipated and much media coverage and hoopla is generated before and after the game. Additionally, there is a high cost for advertising during the game. Yesterday, the commercial time ran $2.5M for 30 seconds, a considerable amount of money.

This year, for the first time, two companies and one organization used material not created by a big ad agency but by consumers. Chevrolet and Frito Lay were the companies and the National Football League was the organization.

I found it interesting that Frito Lay’s one big hit, Live the Flavor, came from a small team of twenty-somethings for a cost of about $12.78. That’s right, twelve not twelve thousand or million, just twelve dollars and seventy-eight cents.

In an interview on this morning’s Today Show, the team said they took about 21 takes and the $12.78 was the cost of 4 bags or Doritos, although they did admit that they ate one of the bags for lunch but  still included the cost in the total.

Along with the winner, Frito Lay had 4 runners up and are going to run all five through the end of March.

The Chevrolet ad was created by a college freshman, Katie Crabb, although a real ad agency took her concept and produced it. As part of her prize she gets an internship this summer at the ad agency that does Chevrolet’s ads.

My point here is that some consumers, not slick ad agencies, got to produce ads that showed during the Superbowl at rates of a couple of million dollars for half a minute. I wonder how the Chevrolet and Frito Lay ads costs stacked up against the nine ads that Budweiser ran? Let’s calculate these ROI’s and see if CGM might make sense?

Interesting Post on Small Company Big Image

One of the key things about blogging is that you are always trying out new things. My partner, Cynthia Trevino, has a blog titled Small Company Big Image that she recently moved over to Typepad and is trying out some new features. For one, she needed someone to talk about one of he posts from another site and see if a reference to it appears in her comments section. So I agreed to post something about her most recent post, How Not to Market to Businesses.

So I just did, now I need to see what happens. Sorry if I inconvenienced anyone following my blog.