Posts for March 2009
What they Want, What they Need
Reading the comments on Saul Hansel’s NYT piece, An Icon that Says They’re Watching You. The two knee-jerk responses to advertising appear in the first few: #3: “Make a great product and people will seek you out and buy it. The market research dollars should be for learning what people truly want – not what […]
Supply of What?
Why are online CPMs so low? Why is the reader of an article on NYTimes.com worth a third of the exact same person reading the exact same article on paper? Dumb question. Everyone know that CPMs are low because there is an excess of advertising inventory: supply and demand. This can’t be true. Let’s say […]
50,000,000,000 $20 Bills
Geithner thinks he’s busy now? Wait until a 4,000 mile high stack of twenties lands on his desk, awaiting his signature. The Fed’s decision to print up a trillion dollars of crisp new greenbacks just a few days after we assured China that their investments in US debt were sound is kind of funny. Slapstick, […]
Echoing Green: Funding Social Entrepreneurs
I volunteer some of my time to Echoing Green, who provide seed funding and support to social entrepreneurs. EG’s approach is to find social entrepreneurs who take a businesslike approach to building sustainable organizations aimed at creating social change. I met them a few years ago and they asked me to be a reader: to […]
Bigger Ads Roundup
A lot of disagreement on the new OPA initiative. Only Jonathan Mendez seems as enthusiastic as I am. Some other views below (I should note, if my comments seem snarky, that these are the views of people whose opinions I follow and respect.) Why Super Banners are Lame, Noah Mallin on SearchViews. Let’s face it, […]
You Can’t Brand in a Banner
Members of the Online Publishers Association have decided that bigger is better in their quest for brand-advertising dollars, and 26 members of the group are adopting a new set of three interactive ad units to get agency minds on better creative and off low-CPM ad networks. The publishers, including Martha Stewart Living, Conde Nast Digital, […]
More Capping
Another voice in my crusade (such as it is) to stop paying exorbitant salaries to everyone on the government dole. In the hubbub surrounding President Obama’s decision to cap salaries of commercial-bank CEOs at $500,000 (if they receive future federal funds), the salaries of college and university presidents have been flying under the radar. Some […]
Money to Grow
The quote from Shane’s book yesterday could be taken to imply that somehow it is the venture capitalists that create jobs. Correlation, not causation. As the title tried to convey, it is growth companies that create jobs, and since venture capitalists try to invest in growth companies, their investments are a good proxy for growth […]
To Encourage Growth We Need to Invest in Growth Businesses
My friend John K. and I disagree about how to create jobs by encouraging more startup formation. I think the disagreement comes from John wondering how to create more startups and me wondering how to create more jobs. There’s a difference, as explained pretty well in Scott Shane‘s article in The American, The Startups We […]