Listened to the Kevin Kelly econtalk podcast the other day. Eh. One thing he said that struck my fancy was from his Edge.org answer to “What Are You Optimistic About?” Moving back into the past has never been easier. Citizens in developing countries can merely walk back to their villages, where they can live with […]
Google Shuts dMarc
I never understood Google buying dMarc, or the price they paid. $102 million up front, with an earnout estimated at more than another $1 billion. The company was a sort of automated rep firm for radio, with about 700 stations in their network and selling primarily remnant inventory for low prices. The idea was solid. […]
Why You Won’t be Able to Reach Me for the Next 150 Hours
Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias pointed to an interview he did for EconTalk. I love Hanson’s stuff, so I downloaded the podcast and listened to it. It was great. The host kept mentioning other big names he had interviewed, so I went back and looked at the archives. It’s a freakin gold mine, even the […]
Is Advertising Good or Bad?
[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 […]
You Don’t Arb Your Friends
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 […]
Self Limbing
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 […]
And then We Approach the Strategic Buyers…
Fortune updates my graph of stock market cap to GDP (they use GNP, but the two are pretty similar.) (Fortune link via Mankiw.) Warren Buffet said “buy at 75%”, about where we are now. What I’d like to know is, why 75%? Looking at the graph, 75% isn’t a great place to invest, historically, except […]
Cap ’em All
Geithner announces salary caps on executives at companies receiving government money. This is fair and good and, in fact, not an unusual demand when putting money into a company, especially a troubled company. No investor wants to fund a company just to see the money flow back out to executives. No taxpayer should want that […]
If the Neighbor’s Grass Always Looks Greener, Rip out Your Lawn and Plant Wildflowers
Everybody complains about the finance industry, but nobody does anything about it. Everybody complains about the advertising business, but nobody does anything about it. I spend a lot of my time talking to people, meeting them, listening to their ideas and what they need to achieve them, making introduction, sharing information and etc. This week’s […]
John Bell, In the Accelerator, With the Polarizer
Last night I had a dream I was playing a card game with my son. It was an interesting game: each card had a piece of Dirac notation on it. He was winning. It could be a real game, I thought, when I woke up. Perhaps there are a few cards on the table that […]