Category Archives: Marketing

The Root of Digital Advertising B.S.

Posted on Thursday, 25 January 2018 9:41 am by

For years, Bob Hoffman has been writing about the delusion held by advertisers that people want to interact with us or our ads. I was an early adopter of that now-disproven fantasy. I bought in back in ’89-’90 when I … Continue reading →

Posted in Analysis, Data, digital marketing, fraud, Marketing, Tactics | Tagged , , ,

No Real Marketer Wants Their Budget Increased…

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

Aside | Posted on Wednesday, 24 January 2018 7:10 am by | Tagged , ,

Publisher Advice From a Buyer

Posted on Friday, 12 January 2018 8:31 am by

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 →

Posted in Branding, Data, digital marketing, Marketing, Media, Strategy | Tagged , , , , , ,

Mad Men Was Better

Posted on Wednesday, 10 January 2018 9:15 am by

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 →

Posted in Branding, Communications, digital marketing, Marketing, Media | Tagged , , , , ,

Improve Ad Performance With Slow, Deep, Breathing

Posted on Tuesday, 9 January 2018 8:01 am by

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 →

Posted in digital marketing, fraud, Marketing, Media, Strategy | Tagged , , , ,

Happy 2018! AdTech Surveillance Edition

Posted on Thursday, 4 January 2018 8:53 am by

How would you like it if somebody was standing over your shoulder jotting down your user ID (and who knows what else) as you were logging into sites, and then sharing the information with–well, it could be anybody? Thought so. … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, digital marketing, Marketing, Media, Privacy, Security | Tagged , , , , , , ,

>$5 CPM for This? YouTube Head-Scratcher

Posted on Monday, 1 January 2018 11:06 am by

I’ve got a YouTube channel for experimentation purposes and “monetize” (I hate that MBA non-word) the videos to see what happens. Looking at it this morning, I noticed that  a fairly recent video of a guitar I purchased generated $6.19 … Continue reading →

Posted in Analysis, digital marketing, Guitar, Marketing, Media, Strategy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Humans Still Go To Malls

As long as we’re going to malls ourselves and not sending non-human traffic–like drones or social media strategists–there to get our stuff, programmatic OOH makes sense. See, I’m not totally against buying media programmatically!

Aside | Posted on Wednesday, 27 December 2017 8:42 am by | Tagged , , ,

Justifying the Weird

Posted on Thursday, 7 December 2017 8:30 am by

What’s the success rate for people trying to evade marketing surveillance on the web? I think it’s zero. Check out the story of Ross William Ulbricht AKA “Dread Pirate Roberts” of Silk Road infamy. He was alleged to be responsible … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, digital marketing, fraud, Marketing, Media, Security | Tagged , , , , ,

Dealing With Dump Money

I love the holidays, but as a buyer, I hate this time of year. Media sales people and vendors are calling constantly looking for that use it or lose it “dump money.” If you have dump money, only two things … Continue reading →

Aside | Posted on Friday, 1 December 2017 9:16 am by | Tagged , ,