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Apr
7
The five stages of customer relationships
Filed Under VRM, Social web, Advertising | Leave a Comment
How’s that for ‘user generated content’?! Eat your heart out, creative agencies. 
It is hard to maintain ‘it’s not us v. them‘ attitude when it is so easy to recognise and identify with the symptoms in the video…
Bonus link: Article by Knowledge Wharton Getting Engaged: Advertisers Search for Their Voices on YouTube
Mar
18
Christvertising
Filed Under Advertising, Funny | 1 Comment
Found it just in time for Easter, Christvertising:
Whether yours is a small, big or internationally renowned brand, God’s is infinitely larger.
Christvertising is a network of communications specialists and advertising professionals, which helps you navigate through the maze that is the world of competitive brands. If you like your product, so do we, but more importantly so does God. We believe that nothing is possible without the Lord’s blessing and consent. Your product is no exception. May God bless your Brand.
How quaintly medieval! And yet, has more rationale than the current advertising practices.
And as commenters here point out:
I think “God doesn’t love your brand” would be a good t-shirt… With a little graph depicting a decline in sales.
Feb
8
Truth in advertising…
Filed Under Social web, Advertising, Funny | Leave a Comment
A collection of brilliant adverts. One slight glitch - they are truthful. Here are my favourites:
by inyarear
by Sanchez
Feb
7
There’s something wrong in the trends business…
Filed Under Advertising, Business, Marketing, Trends | Leave a Comment
A brilliant and taking-no-prisoners analysis of the trend peddling agencies by Piers Fawkes.
He talks about arrogance and control, the long time favourite pastime of the media and ‘creative’ business, death of creativity (ouch), lack of critical judgement and of organisational change. All heartening observations for a devout disruptor like me, all the more noteworthy as they come from an insider. Anyone working or dealing with agencies could identify those, but it takes some courage and time to spell them out. I share those views, of course, but they do not keep me awake at night in the slightest. My focus are companies and more importantly the people inside those companies.
One of the frustrations I have with the ‘creative’ industry is the appropriation of what’s freely available and accessible and passing it for their own expertise or judgement. And very badly at that. So bloggers become ‘influentials’ to be showered with press releases, gimmicks and offers of participation for trinkets. Teenagers are superficially described and pigeon-holed faster than you can say ‘demographic’. Or ‘youf culture’ if you are one of the new trendy agencies. Geeks get conveniently ignored, definitely to their benefit. Sayz Piers:
We’re in a digital world where conversations are free - but trends services aren’t willing to be honest about where they got their judgments from. Too many companies and their ad agencies are cut and pasting their unchecked judgments into their powerpoint documents to make significant strategic decisions.
Another of my gripes is the number of agency pitches and presentations to clients promising social media nirvana, without anyone in the room having actually seen a blog/feed reader/bookmarking tool/widget etc etc. Alright, it’s 2008 so by now they have probably seen them. And signed up for Facebook/MySpace/LinkedIn/SocNet-de-jour. Or went to a workshop, a training session or asked the in-house geek to show them - but hardly used them, let alone immersed themselves in the ‘userland’ on a daily basis. Why, of course? These are consumers, demographics, markets and ultimately trends to package and sell. So it’s work, not a way of life or, god forbid, fun! The upshot is that if you don’t know what you are talking about but have to sell it, this is what happens:
In Summary, the trends business is a walled business that uses smoke and mirrors to protect it. It preaches from on high what the trends are without much transparency about what their recommendations were based on. In an era of Google inspired freedom of information, these businesses surely can’t continue to hide data that is already in the public domain.
via Mark Earls
update: How clients like it…
Jan
22
French school commercial
Filed Under Advertising, Funny | Leave a Comment
Advertising at its best! I take it all back!
Jan
3
The curse of the platform or advertising is not a business model
Filed Under Social web, New models, Advertising, Business, Tools and applications, Media | 4 Comments
I must agree with Alec’s post Twitter Business Models / Calacanis is Bonkers? where he calls Calacanis barking mad crazy for talking about in feed advertising and SMS advertising for Twitter. I am surprised that in this day and age anyone would consider advertising a long term, or even medium term, way of making money online. I can only hope that Hugh was being deeply sarcastic.
At best they may maintain some control over their half-life - how long it will take to lose half of their users, and then half of what remains - but decay is inevitable and will be rapid. Maybe they could milk some cash out of it on the way down, whilst they are pissing-off their userbase? Not a good plan for growth…
Indeed, especially as Calacanis believes in scale and this underscores his recommendations to Twitter.
It’s about scale. When you’re playing in the big leagues with unlimited access to capital you shouldn’t worry about revenue BEFORE you have critical mass.
Here is industrial age thinking translated into online environment. And true enough, to the extent that the mindset still rules our behaviour online. But there may be another way, in the ‘channel world’ scale is in aggregation. In the networked world, scale is in distribution. That is why people from the former build platforms, people from the latter build applications that help distribution. It is not platforms that are bringing the media industry to its business model knees but P2P-eed teenagers, networked bloggers and applications that increase the individual’s ability to produce, share and distribute.
The curse of the platform is that although it may initially bring users value, as time goes on it is hard to sustain, let alone make money as the cognitive dissonance about who your real customers are increases with time. At the start, when building a platform, the platform owners consider themselves, or at least behave as if, serving the users. But the moment they decide to start placing adverts or otherwise ‘monetise the eyeballs’, their real customers are the advertisers. There’s not many of them wot gets it:
Craigslist had been approached about placing text ads on the site. “We’ve had the numbers crunched for us,” he said. “The numbers are quite staggering.” But, no, the site wasn’t interested. “No users have been requesting that we run text ads, so for us, that’s the end of the story,” he said to the befuddlement of the crowd. “If users start calling out for text ads, we’ll listen.”
Another unspoken question presents itself - Is making x gazillion $$$ within a finite amount of time a business model? Or is an exit strategy with $$$ in the bank a business model? Both are certainly a way of making money but a business model is something more fundamental. It is about creating a way to create value, to maintain and grow it. The aims is to make enough money to keep doing just that. I don’t see much of that in Web 1.0/2.0. But I may be old-fashioned like that.
One of the statements that made my heart leap last year is: Advertising is a form of censorship. The Web of 2007 is a house built upon sand. But more about that later…
Nov
19
Quote to remember
Filed Under New models, Social web, Advertising, Quotes | Leave a Comment
…we too easily default to framing our understanding of advertising in its own terms. We regard advertising as an independent variable: something ya gotta have. But in fact advertising is a dependent variable. The independent variable is the individual human being. As Chris Locke put it so perfectly nine years ago, we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it.
What we need is to equip demand with better ways of engaging supply. Not just better ways for supply to create and manipulate demand.
- Doc Searls in Facebook doesn’t need to be Adbook
Oct
16
We write ads…!
Filed Under Advertising, Funny | Leave a Comment
Priceless:
Thanks, Philippe!
Oct
1
Think different. Not Apple.
Filed Under Autonomy, Social web, Advertising, Web/Tech, Marketing | Leave a Comment
Message to the iPhone “crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the trouble-makers”.
Sep
4
Quote to remember
Filed Under Advertising, Quotes | Leave a Comment
Corporate logos are blemishes on cultural artifacts.
- Groundhog Day
taking this shamelessly from Doc’s quote du jour. Too good to miss.
Aug
25
Metrics schmetrics
Filed Under Advertising, Business, Web/Tech | 1 Comment
Morgan Stanley Internet analyst Mary Meeker has been caught in an embarrassingly basic math mistake… Meeker’s estimate of the impact of YouTube’s new “overlay” ads? She says they could boost Google’s gross revenues by $4.8 billion next year. But her math, Blodget discovered, was off by a factor of a thousand. The error apparently stemmed from forgetting the meaning of CPM, or “cost per thousand,” a commonly used term in advertising rate cards.
Perhaps she subconsciously rebelled against the idea of counting eyeballs by thousands. Or maybe not.
New estimates via Henry Blodget.
Yesterday: $720 million. ($720 thousand using same assumptions and correct math)
Today: $75 - $189 million (using new assumptions).
The backstory: Mary Meeker’s YouTube Math
Well, anyone can make a mistake. These days such mistakes are less likely to serve as a foundation for the entire industry governed by a herd instinct. Provided that they put information online and accessible to everyone.
The real question is how to measure how annoyed YouTube fans get at the ads.
Aug
24
Get a new business model
Filed Under Autonomy, Advertising, Weblogs | 4 Comments
The sense of entitlement of payment for your efforts is palpable here. Danny Carlton has blocked Firefox users from accessing his site in protest of a popular browser extension that blocks text and display ads.
Accessing the content while blocking the ads therefore would be no less than stealing. Millions of hard working people are being robbed of their time and effort by this type of software.
Nobody owes Mr Carlton for his time and effort. The fact that he has or wants a deal with advertisers to pimp his readers’ attention is not exactly a fair arrangement either. Welcome to the world where users can and take control. And about time. Companies and advertisers have abused everyone’s attention for decades assuming that their ‘content’ is a fair exchange for idiotic ‘messages’ spewing from every medium available. In the world where you can get much more than content (interaction, conversation, relationships, self-expression), that kind of devil’s bargain has a snowball-in-hell’s chance of survival.
There is a different bargain to be struck and it is one directly with your readers. They are your audience but also your distributors as they can pass your ideas and creations along. Distribution off-line is one of the most expensive things, so the deal is pretty good. That is why Carlton’s attitude is nonsensical as he is cutting himself off from those who can make him more visible online, and bring him more readers. It is the old grab’em & lock’em in attitude that looks stone-age and unviable online.
It is worth noting that Carlton complains that he can’t block only those Firefox users that have the extension installed, so he’s blocking all Firefox users since it’s “the only alternative.”
The real problem is Adblock Plus’s unwillingness to allow individual site owners the freedom to block people using their plug-in.
This is a misplaced need to control people, namely his readers and visitors to his site. He seems to consider the ability to do that his birthright. This is the same attitude that’s burying the media industry.
Online you’d better control what you can, not what you wish you could. Controlling others has always been a delusion, controlling your identity and your own expression is where it is at. Otherwise… :
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