Wallstrip: Who's the Audience?

You take a good looking girl, a blue screen, and a prosumer video camera and you're in show business. Rocketboom wrote the formula, and now a hedge fund manager from Phoenix with "endless bad ideas" takes it to the streets of New York. Howard Lindzon of Lindzon Capital Partners calls himself 'the addicted entrepreneur." He rolled out WallStrip.com this week, a videoblog hosted by Lindsay Campbell.

Episodes highlight a company whose shares are at, or near, a new high "We try to figure out why. But not in the stock world, here in the free world," Campbell explained in the first episode. So for today's segment, featuring Chipotle Mexican Grill (CMG), that meant a visit to a company restaurant and a roll-off between the area manager and a counter person to see who was fastest to build a burrito, part of the effort to figure out what pop culture elements are helping fuel a company's success.

Entertaining, yes. Enlightening, not so much? The WallStrip concept seems to be that you have dessert first, then the meal. The funny video and cute girl set the agenda, then you're supposed to go to the Conversation to chime in along with "pro" investors who blog. One of them is Fred Wilson, managing partner of two VC firms in New York. In these early days (three episodes so far ... Apple (AAPL), Research in Motion (RIMM), and Chipotle (CMG), there's not much meat on the plate.

I'm not sure who the intended audience is. It's surely not traders and fund managers. Much too frothy. And as for "normal" investors, well there's not a lot of space for reason and research to buttress the blog comments. As Lindzon himself said, "The blogosphere - much like 'crowds' is a dangerous place to trust consensus."

The takeaway here is how simple it is to get into the business with a niche video product. Wall Street news and comment is, in marketer's language, a vertical, a category of information that self-selects an audience and, by extension, is attractive to, and very efficient for, certain advertisers. That's not happened yet with WallStrip - its shows include spots for video games and an episodic Weblog, but then maybe Lindzon's pitching the show as a way to grab the eyeballs of investment-minded 20-somethings.