Brilliant Ideas

Some great ideas that I shall share...

Richard once pointed out that graffiti vandals aren't creative enough. Why does everyone just randomly spray paint some unreadable version of their name everywhere? Why not be clever about it? His suggestion was to go to the Canal Street subway station and paint over all the "C"s in "Canal". I'll let you do the math on that one.

I've had this idea for a long time - a radio station that played top 40 hits from like 4 years ago. I don't mean 2003 hits permanently, I just mean it would always play mostly hits 4-5 years before the current time period. When you're listening to the radio, and a hit song that you sort of forgot about comes on (maybe you got sick of it because it was overplayed in its day), don't you get excited and listen? Well, why not expand on that experience? Plus, it would probably be easy to set up promotional concerts and interviews and such, since a lot of the artists whose careers will have presumably declined will be eager for any publicity. I think the station would have a good listener demographic too - young enough that they're flexible with consumption spending, but old enough to be making legitimate money. Tweens, for example, would be unlikely to listen to my station.

Shawn mentioned a very solid idea to me the other day - expanded dining options at movie theaters. Let's say you put drop-down tables on the seats, like an airplane, or side tables come up, like in a classroom or auditorium. Then you pair your movie theater with some American chain, like TGI Fridays, and you sell people jalapeno poppers and fiesta lime chicken to eat with their movie. I think this is a great idea for a variety of reasons. First off, it makes it a lot more reasonable to watch a 2.5 hour movie at 6:30. Let's say you wanted to do that - either you'd eat a really early dinner like a 70-year old, or you'd wait until the movie was over (with previews, this might be 9:20), at which point you'd drive somewhere to eat (9:30, and ultimately not eat until 9:45 or 10:00 pm) or go home and cook, and also not eat until 10:00 pm. Your other alternative would be to try to eat the theater hot dogs and popcorn as your dinner, which is a little disgusting and not very fulfilling. Plus, we've already seen the dinner-show concept work, like at Medieval Times, or Benihana (where dinner IS the show!). I'd probably stop short of selling stuff like Electric Lemonade, but it feels like there's a significant revenue opportunity here.