Toxic Buzzword of the Week: Customer Preference Advertising
By dave_pasternack | July 22, 2008
This week’s totally toxic buzzword comes from a letter sent by ISP Embarq in response to a formal inquiry from several members of congress asking whether it ever warned its customers before subjecting them to monitoring using technology supplied by NebuAd (it didn’t).
The term “Customer Preference Advertising” would make George Orwell proud, because it so completely inverts the meaning of what this technology actually does. Monitoring user traffic without opt in consent is anti-customer, non-preferential, and has less to do with advertising than with wiretapping.
Topics: Behavioral Targeting, I'm Mad as Hell and I'm Not Clicking on It Anymore, Spyware, Toxic Buzzword of the Week | No Comments »
Toxic Buzzword of the Week: DAO (Digital Asset Optimization)
By dave_pasternack | June 24, 2008
Prime Visibility’s Andrew Hazen gets our Toxic Buzzword of the week award for his coining of the spurious term “DAO” in the pages of MediaPost. According to Hazen, “DAO is all about moving the focus of optimization efforts from the page text to more relevant assets, such as images, audio and video.”
I won’t dwell at length on the obvious logical fallacy here, which assumes that because an asset isn’t text it’s automatically more relevant than a text element. What’s ridiculous here is that SEO already encompasses all on-page elements quite well through tagging, captioning, and other well-documented techniques. We sure as Hell don’t need another buzzword to describe this process, unless the real point of Mr. Hazen’s new acronym is to jumpstart a new (and completely useless) conference circuit called “DAO Strategies,” “DAO Insider,” ad nauseum.
Sorry, Andrew, your new buzzword DAO is DOA.
Topics: I'm Mad as Hell and I'm Not Clicking on It Anymore, Toxic Buzzword of the Week | No Comments »
Get Your Stinking Brand Out of My Social Network
By dave_pasternack | June 24, 2008
Great article today from Adweek’s Alan Wolk, who hammers decisively at the idiotic idea that people on social networks will respond positively to the big brands increasingly infesting these networks. As Wolk notes, “the last thing they want is some salesperson trying to have a “conversation” with them while they’re figuring out what movie they’re going to see. They don’t want to talk to you. They want to talk to their friends.”
This is bad news for all (including Microsoft) who’ve placed big bets on advertising being able to subsidize the cost of the all-you-can-friend social network.
Topics: I'm Mad as Hell and I'm Not Clicking on It Anymore, Online Ad Industry Foolishness | No Comments »
Am I The Only Person on the Planet Who Knows that In-House SEM Teams Are a Disaster?
By dave_pasternack | June 23, 2008
I’m used to getting flak from people in the online ad industry with certain vested interests. You should have heard the howls when I noted back in 2006 that “SEO Isn’t Rocket Science,” and that companies paying SEO spammers $500 an hour to fix their web sites were saps. Now it seems my latest article, The Great (And Completely Ridiculous) ‘In-house vs. Outsourced SEM’ Debate is garnering a fair share of sharp replies on the pages of Mediapost.
I don’t expect everybody to agree with my thesis and welcome people who disagree with it to submit reasoned rebuttals. In my view, the real danger to the online ad industry is homogeneous group think.
Topics: I'm Mad as Hell and I'm Not Clicking on It Anymore, SEO, Search Engine Marketing | No Comments »
Bob Garfield Gets it Right
By dave_pasternack | June 16, 2008
AdAge.com’s Bob Garfield nails Madison Avenue’s current woes precisely when he likens the industry’s annual Cannes outing to “Norma Desmond… preening for one last close-up, dwelling delusionally in its glamorous past.” Still, the Cannes Festival goes on, sure proof that you can never underestimate the degree to which institutional inertia can keep alive an industry already on life support.
Topics: And These People Still Have Jobs?, Giants of Advertising, Great Moments in Advertising, Old vs. New Media | No Comments »
Earth to Online Ad Industry: Prepare for a Planetary Crash
By dave_pasternack | May 27, 2008
Sometimes reality just creeps up on you and slams you with a 2 by 4, and this is exactly what seems to be happening with the online ad industry. Slowly, it’s dawning on people that you can’t run an industry on nothing more than hot air, whatever fancy names (”brand engagement, view-through conversions) you come up with to sugar-coat the fact that the vast majority of online advertising does not work. Users ruthlessly screen out irrelevant junk as they scour the info-ways for a few rare nuggets of useful information. Roadblock delays and pre-rolls deliver resentment, not engagement. The whole $300 billion advertising business is really only worth $50 billion, after you remove all the inefficiencies and tradition-bound price inflation.
I’ve been slamming at this issue for years, but now that, miracle of miracles, Jacob Nielsen has lent his considerable intellectual girth to the struggle, we might actually see some reality-based decisions made by the deep-walleted folks who pay the bills once they read the following articles all pointing out the scandalous truth about this industry: it’s broken and poised to take a classic Humpty Dumpty Fall:
(BBC News)
Why Do Traditional Advertising Formats Fail on the Web? (Seeking Alpha)
Why is so much money still being spent on banner, rich-media, pre-roll junk? Part of the reason is because it appears that many C-level executives with budgetary authority are stuck in a time warp where TV and newspapers are the “leading edge.” No wonder they can’t distinguish functional and dysfunctional digital advertising media!
See: Top Executives Exploring Digital Space (Center for Media Research - note: this article has a very poorly chosen title. It should have been “Top Executives FAIL to Explore Digital Space”)
Topics: I'm Mad as Hell and I'm Not Clicking on It Anymore, Old vs. New Media, Online Ad Industry Foolishness | No Comments »
Make No Mistake: Microsoft Called Carl Icahn
By dave_pasternack | May 15, 2008
So what do you do if you’re Steve Ballmer and you’ve had it up to here with the juvenile antics of your takeover target’s board? You call Carl Icahn and tell him to go to work. I’m completely convinced that Icahn (who will announce Yahoo’s alternate board today) has already gotten firm agreement from Microsoft that it will pay somewhere in the neighborhood of $33 for Yahoo. The media seems to think that Carl Icahn must somehow convince Steve Ballmer to close the deal. But guys like Icahn never buy 59 million shares of anything without having a guaranteed deal — a sure thing — already in place. I can only imagine the cackling that’s going on in Redmond right now: Microsoft gets to have it both ways now: it can pick up Yahoo for the money it was willing to pay for it, keep its hands from being bloodied in a proxy war, and wind up looking like the nice guys who just said no to an unreasonable deal. Now that’s a beautiful thing.
Topics: Online Ad Industry Foolishness | No Comments »
Social Networking Gets a Much-Needed Downgrade
By dave_pasternack | May 13, 2008
A blistering new report from EMarketer hammers a couple of much-needed nails into the coffin of social networks as ad media. The fact that advertising doesn’t work on social networks is obvious: users are too busy diddling around with some doo-dad to pay attention to marketing pitches. Here’s more bad news for social networking hype-meisters:
- Revenue projections fell 22.5 percent (from $1.6 to $1.4 billion) for all of $2.8. Why did EMarketer downgrade this medium this early in the year? Because expenditures for this junk are tanking badly!
- Growth figures have been cut in half (from 163 percent growth in 2007) to just 55 percent. This is more than a deceleration: it’s a downright crash.
- Myspace alone (a gaudy, obtrusive ad-laden nightmare) accounts for 55 percent of social network ad spend. And yet Fox Interactive’s revenue is DOWN 10 percent. This obviously means that whatever money its making is offset by huge costs.
Social networking is a dog as an ad medium. Expect to hear more about its doggyness as this fast-moving train wreck destroys the hopes of all the lunatics promoting it. This ridiculous waste of ad dollars must stop!
Topics: I'm Mad as Hell and I'm Not Clicking on It Anymore, Online Ad Industry Foolishness, Uncategorized | No Comments »
When Will We Finally Abolish the Banner Ad?
By dave_pasternack | May 6, 2008
Sean X Cummings, of Ask.com, writes a witty, well-reasoned article on how ad agencies consistently fall down when designing those horribly ubiquitous banner ads we see almost everywhere on the Web. According to Cummings, just about everything is wrong with ad banners, from their conception to final delivery. Unfortunately, he offers no real corrective remedy, in fact, some of his suggestions (especially that they always be animated) will simply add more visual clutter to a medium which feels more like a tawdry strip mall than the Library of Alexandria. Nobody notices them, nobody clicks them, and the reasons for this are quite obvious: human beings are very good at screening out irrelevant messaging — it’s a skill we’ve learned from millions of years of hunting and gathering — and this has been borne out by numerous eye-tracking studies proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that people almost never click on images. As a species we’re hard-wired to separate the wheat from the dross, banners are a throwback that deserve to be buried forthwith.
Topics: Online Ad Industry Foolishness | No Comments »
You Can’t Wake Up a Dead Man
By dave_pasternack | May 5, 2008
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting sick of hearing about conferences where the advertising industry is issued an urgent “wake up call” to become digitally competent and leave its glorious but completely irrelevant past behind. But this is exactly what happened this week at Dana Point, as reported in The New York Times and also in Advertising Age.
Talking “tough love” to an industry whose very DNA is based on opposing change (in order to preserve its fat margins on analog media) is great, and so is the call to “leave the past behind” and “stop your whining.” Substituting boring digital workshops with Eric Schmidt for free golf and tennis is a great way to torture the doomed, but even the toughest kind of tough love is too little and too late: if it happened ten years ago, or even five, Madison Avenue might have had a chance of surviving into the second decade of the 21st Century, but it’s far too late to save this archaic, ridiculously inefficient business, especially when the best advice given to agencies is to “hire young people and don’t tell them what to do: ask them what to do.” If this advice is followed, we’ll soon occupy a world of non-professionals with no competence at anything except playing the latest version of “Grand Theft Auto.”
Topics: And These People Still Have Jobs?, I'm Mad as Hell and I'm Not Clicking on It Anymore, Old vs. New Media | No Comments »
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