The Devil You Know

Posts Tagged ‘advertising’

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The (currently) lost opportunity with iAds

In Bidness, Free idea, Gadgets, Media on June 14, 2010 at 9:51 pm
150 Million

150 Million (Source: Engadget)

So I imagine, like me, many of you are buying your new iPhones today or at least waiting with bated breath for the New World of the iOS 4.0.

Last week, I followed the WWDC keynote, and despite all the gadget and gizmo talk, there was one thing that stuck in my head. In fact, it haunted me as nothing has since I first wrote the business plan for Pegasus News in 2004:

150 million credit cards on file from people using iTunes and/or the App Store (and now the iBooks Store). 150 Million.

As Steve Jobs said, “We have 150 million accounts — we think it’s the biggest on the web. We’re number one.”

Interestingly, he then segued into a discussion of iAds, but there was no connection.

As someone who has been obsessed with transactional ad models for the better part of this decade, this presented both a tragedy and an opportunity. That night, after mulling the problem while floating in the pool with the pups, I toddled inside and fired off an email to sjobs@apple.com: Read the rest of this entry »

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The measurement mess

In Bidness, Media on January 24, 2010 at 10:54 am

It keeps getting smaller.

There’s a pissing match today among several InterWebs iconoclasts about Comscore‘s traffic counting methods and business models. Actually, to be more accurate, it’s a bunch of bitch-slapping about unrelated issues, but web traffic is the jumping-off point.

You can read it for yourself — be sure to follow the comment thread too, in which all the principals rebut. (Or, as one commenter deems it, “three poodles fighting over a piece of raw meat”).

But for me, the whole thing is sad because it reminds me of another “scandal” almost six years ago now. Several newspaper chains had been caught overstating their circulation. There was all sorts of hand-wringing over it, but in the midst of the mea culpas, I read one simple line in a column by Ed Wasserman that changed my way of thinking and in large part led me to create The Daily You as a major feature of Pegasus News:

“Still, there is an absurdity to the whole scam. Counting copies is a dopey way to gauge impact. The explosion of information channels necessarily means erosion of audience share held by dominant media. There is still nothing that can rivet the attention of a community the way its daily paper does.”

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The PR / advertising disconnect

In Media on June 3, 2009 at 3:56 pm

I know I tend to spend all my rant power on broken media models, but I’ve had reason lately to ponder the relationship between PR and advertising.

PR people wonder why there’s sometimes resentment towards them from media folk — I don’t think it is actually because of anything PR professionals do per se, but rather because of the utter disconnect between most businesses public relations and advertising. And I don’t think it is generally front-of-mind for most media companies because of the church-state separation. But as someone who lives in both worlds, I’ve found myself seething lately over repeated scenarios like this: Read the rest of this entry »

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Stuff Journalists (apparently don’t) Like: The Chinese Wall

In Media on January 28, 2009 at 1:12 pm

Note: I’ve recently become a fan of the blog Stuff Journalists Like, a different twist on the style of blog started by Stuff White People Like. I submitted the following piece to them, and after more than a week of complete radio silence (during which they posted several other items), I inquired and got a polite response that they didn’t think it fit their vibe. So, I inflict it on you here:

#66: The Chinese Wall

519px-greatwall_large

“The Chinese Wall” is a construct by which journalists have long convinced themselves (and only themselves) that they are immune to the vagaries of advertising and corporate management. Referring to the Great Wall of China, it gives a sense of complete separation with the added bonus of sounding vaguely culturally insensitive when uttered in the patois of a crusty Lou Grant figure. It also avoids the even more problematic and provincial “church and state” analogy also used to describe the same phenomenon. Read the rest of this entry »

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Required reading: The Wizard of Ads

In Media on December 16, 2008 at 6:02 pm
The Wiz

The Wiz

I’m usually leery when sales managers recommend reading — it’s typically brainless, feel-good plucky crap designed to motivate the unmotivated. So when our last sales manager pointed me at the Monday Morning Memo by Roy H. Williams, a self-styled “Wizard of Ads,” my eyes almost rolled out of my head.

But week in and week out, Williams’ missives are the most consistently insightful thing I read. He’s a master of human psychology and counter-intuitive wisdom. I generally find myself agreeing with him on some concept or other that hadn’t ocurred to me before: Take for example this week’s study of how most marketing is geared towards extraverts while alienating introverts.

If you become a regular reader, don’t miss the “rabbit hole,” which is an Easter Egg hidden in every issue. Click on the lead photo (and each subsequent one that appears) and you’ll be taken down some other, unrelated road. This week’s, for instance, is a series of thoughts, photos and videos on Audrey Hepburn.

I never thought I’d find a truly literate writer focused on sales, but Roy’s the real deal. You’re cheating yourself if your don’t sign up for his weekly email or subscribe to his podcast.

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Was Simpsons’ genius skewering of Apple an advertising D’oh?

In Media, PopCult on December 1, 2008 at 3:24 pm
"Look! It's so sterile!"

"Look! It's so sterile!"

Whether you’re an Apple fanboy (like me) or a hater, you had to enjoy the skewering delivered by The Simpsons last night. It was some of the sharper satire we’ve seen out of the show in a while. (See video clips after the jump).

But for all the merriment rampant in Apple’s Mac/PC ad campaigns, Steve Jobs isn’t known for his sense of humor on such matters. Especially when the first ad of the first commercial break was for the Macbook… Read the rest of this entry »