[Edit: If you’re looking for a less academic and more impassioned view on advertising, check out my more recent post, Advertising, the Fallacy of Perfectibility, and the Best Minds of My Generation.] Josh’s curmudgeonly comment on yesterday’s post reminded me of my grandfather saying that advertising is just “a way to convince people to buy things […]

I’ve always believed that you can’t pay people money to watch ads. I also believe you can’t pay them to pitch products to their friends, either directly, by endorsing things on social networks or by creating UGC tied to a product-pitch. (I mean, obviously, you can pay them to do these things, but it’s not […]

Every couple of months I hear a startup pitch how they are going to put the ad agencies out of business. My usual response is along the lines of “have fun with that.” The agency business is not especially big or profitable, as businesses go. By definition, the business is a small fraction the size […]

Valleywag has an post implying ad agencies don’t practice what they preach: that they don’t spend on search ads for themselves like they do for their clients. I have no doubt this is true. I just searched for “advertising agency” on Google. The paid results are almost all very small agencies. Ad agencies spend very […]

ReveNews links to Jack Myers’ 2006-2009 media spend estimates. Jack’s got a great breakdown of media spend by category. Nothing surprising, but it’s always nice to look at numbers. The big growers in 2009? Mobile ads (120% growth from 2008), videogame ads (60%), satellite radio ads (35%), and branded entertainment/product placement (30%) are the top […]

Louise Story had a decent article in the NY Times on Monday about internet ad targeting. But the article, like every article on ad targeting ever written in a publication dependent on placating their obviously non-objective sources, said this: …executives from the largest Web companies say … the data is a boon to consumers, because […]

The common wisdom, the man on the street, the wiseacre in the crowd and their various ilk at the major media outlets say: in a recession, advertising spend goes down. I’ve been arguing for six months that certain sectors of the advertising market won’t, even though their industries are troubled: mortgages and cars have been […]

AdAge has a roundup of what various marketing professionals think will happen to advertising spend in 2008. Of the ten people they quote, only one is a relatively impartial observer: TNS’ Jon Swallen. What does he say? “The lesson to be learned from the past few recessions is that it obviously impacts different categories differently. […]

I’ve been puzzling over where behavioral targeting takes advertising for the past few months (i.e. here.) It crystallized for me this morning when I started reading IBM’s “The End of Advertising as we know It“. (I only read the first page, though, so this post isn’t an endorsement of whatever IBM went on to say.) […]

Reading the press and opinion on Facebook’s new targeted advertising system. I think Facebook is overreaching, they’re asking too much. They’ve given us a container for widgets and a few of their own substandard built-ins (email, pictures, feed.) While free they accumulated the real value: a ton of users’ social graphs. Now that they have […]