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 […]
A Dollar’s Worth of Wine, and Three Dollars’ Worth of Bubbles
I had this New Yorker cartoon on my desk in 2002. I felt for that guy. Wait, I was that guy. I totally missed out on the real estate bubble. Well, I bought a house in 2003, so I guess I played a bit role. Eric Janszen has a great article in Harper’s about the […]
Shoemaker’s Child
I should be using this blog as a marketing vehicle, not for the money, but for the learning. This company, YouCast, is doing something pretty interesting around branding on the internet. Can’t say too much, but this Snapple widget is part of it.
The Sky is Falling! Onto the Moon!
Paul Kedrosky, whose blog I love to read, lends credence to a misleading MSNBC article “Mortgage Application Volume Plummets” by pointing to it. See below, a graph of the stat that “plummeted,” through 2/15/2008. I mean, there’s something wacky going on with that volatility, but it’s not a disappearance of mortgage applications. Looks to me […]
Advertising in a Downturn: Case Study
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 […]
The Google: Inflection Point
Google continued growing rapidly, albeit a tad less rapidly, and said they saw no weakness in the online advertising market from the oft-predicted recession. But they also said that they were going to focus more on display advertising to diversify away from their core CPC business. That’s exactly what I said to expect. This will […]
Customer Rotation
Paul Kedrosky takes a quick look at a graph of advertising growth and GDP growth since 1983 and says, essentially, “See, they’re correlated.” Well, yeah. But he’s not answering his own question: how does this affect Google/Yahoo? Ad spending growth is highly correlated to GDP growth. About 52% correlation since the end of World War […]
Another Opinion on Financial Services Advertising
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. […]
The New Universal Identifier
Josh commented on my last post that privacy requires control over both (a) personal data and (b) the platform on which the data is used. My gut instinct is that our expectation of privacy is only the former. Privacy is a moral issue but, as with most moral issues, the ideal compromises with practicality in […]
Drawing the Privacy Line
Greg is bothered by Plaxo scraping your friends’ email addresses from Facebook. But I think he’s less bothered about the automated downloading of them from Gmail and other services. Paul Buchheit points out that the latter is just as much a violation of Gmail’s TOS as the former is of Facebook’s. Why is doing it […]