Author Archives: markpilip

…properly-trained marketers focus on improving business performance. A bigger marketing budget might be a second order effect.

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Zirconium: The Holdco You’ve Never Heard Of

The slippery nature of online advertising gets better (or worse) all the time. The latest comes from Confiant’s CTO, Jerome Dangu. Turns out there’s a fake agency holdco of sorts, with 28 fake ad agencies under the Zirconium umbrella. They were … Continue reading

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Bet Your Ads Aren’t Loading

Back in the early aughts, I remember getting worked up about losing around 5% of the impressions I paid for. In other words, I paid for 100 ads and could only see 95 in the server logs. The usual explanation … Continue reading

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Immigrants and Education

“Як школа?”is something asked repeatedly of me by my grandparents growing up. The question–“how’s school?”–wasn’t just about whether I was getting A’s. Although the grade was important, the question really was “are you learning?” I found myself thinking about that … Continue reading

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The Verge’s Silicon Valley editor, Casey Newton, tweeted on Thursday: So many publishers think they have audiences, when what they really have is traffic. I think we’re about to find out who has an audience. To find out who has … Continue reading

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Publisher Advice From a Buyer

Dr. Augustine Fou wrote a brilliant article yesterday, Five Unintended Consequences, Counter-intuitive Outcomes that Publishers May Not Have Thought Of,  that got me thinking about the advice I’d give publishers as a buyer. Here they are: Remove all the tracking widgets … Continue reading

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The Finish Line in the Race to the Bottom

Last night, I was doing some analysis of a premium publisher’s site. I encountered RPM optimization in all its glory. And it made me sad and sick. The malvertising at left attempts to: Hijack browser settings Encourage installation of a … Continue reading

Posted in Data, digital marketing, Media, Privacy, Rants, Security, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Mad Men Was Better

You used to pay your ad agency a 15% commission back in the day. You groused about the high fees, the bad or non-existent data about campaign performance and wondered why you had to pay for those fancy Madison Ave … Continue reading

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Improve Ad Performance With Slow, Deep, Breathing

My mission for 2018 is to help marketers improve their digital marketing performance. It’s a mess out there. The latest example? News UK (publisher of The Sun and Times of London) finds that SSPs were still offering their inventory for … Continue reading

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Ad Blockers: Common Sense

With the recent news of the Spectre and Meltdown CPU flaws, it’s more important than ever that you do a few things: Install ad blockers (do your homework first* [update: see how-to below]!) Turn on DNT (for whatever that’s worth) … Continue reading

Posted in Data, digital marketing, fraud, Media, Privacy, Security | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments