Andrew Goodman did not like my post Eliminate Advertising. He says “in an attention economy, can you logically even conceive of no advertising? Not even remotely.” He doesn’t say why not. But, to be fair, I also don’t believe there will be a time when there is no advertising. In fact, I fear quite the […]
Posts for November 2009
Not yet Enough
I was reading Skidelsky’s critique of Keynes’ “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren“. In Economic Possibilities, written in 1930, Keynes asked What can we reasonably expect the level of our economic life to be a hundred years hence? What are the economic possibilities for our grandchildren? He concluded that by the year 2030, Assuming no important […]
The FCB Grid and its flipside
A while ago I talked about different views on how advertising works. Personally, I’ve never believed in a single theory, people evaluate different products differently. They also evaluate products differently depending on where in their product evaluation cycle they are. So, for instance, household cleaners are advertised informatively, while facial soap is sold with brand […]
Being allowed to make your own decisions, right or wrong
There was a fairly banal column over at the New York Times last Friday, complaining about being condescended to by a bank “customer service” rep.“Did you want to add him to the account, or open a separate joint account?” she asked. “We’ve talked about the options,” I said, giving my husband, James, my secret “not […]
Pennywise
I was with my friend Josh today as he pitched a really smart investor on his new company. The investor, as per the script, started picking holes in this and that. Mostly silent to that point, I interjected something to the effect: “this is a pretty cheap option on changing the world.” What is it […]
Eliminate Advertising
I was rereading one of my favorite books last weekend, Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets, and came upon this: Entire sectors of a modern economy are devoted to organizing transactions. The retail and wholesale trades and the advertising, insurance and finance industries exist not to manufacture things but to facilitate transacting… Innovating […]
Away from witnesses
My favorite thing about this blog is that many of the readers are practitioners. People actually out making money by using marketing to sell products or generate leads. I spend a lot of time daydreaming about the future, and one of my primary heuristics is a belief in progress, that things will become better, faster, […]
AdMob, Google, Apple
Along with everyone else, I’ve been pondering the Google acquisition of AdMob. Some thoughts: Google needs to be in mobile hosted media; Apple’s early move towards owning that space had the potential to sideline Google. Apple owned the customer. Thus Android and now AdMob. The mobile platform that is successful long-term will depend on the […]
VC Investment Amounts
When I can’t sleep, I play with data. It’s like meditating. The National Venture Capital Association recently released their latest venture investment numbers for the US. On their web site, they use the annoying iChart gadget. Annoying because as you scroll backwards and forwards in time, it adjusts the x axis, so I can’t really […]
Data consistency sidebar
I mentioned here that I would compare my post on online spending trends to Rob Leathern’s and see why we came to different conclusions. The answer, unsurprisingly to anyone who’s done any work with this type of industry data, is that we use different numbers. I used TNS for ad spend data. Rob used both […]