I'm Mad as Hell and I'm Not Clicking on It Anymore
« Previous EntriesToxic Buzzword of the Week: Customer Preference Advertising
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008This 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 […]
Toxic Buzzword of the Week: DAO (Digital Asset Optimization)
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008Prime 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 […]
Get Your Stinking Brand Out of My Social Network
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008Great 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 […]
Am I The Only Person on the Planet Who Knows that In-House SEM Teams Are a Disaster?
Monday, June 23rd, 2008I’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, […]
Earth to Online Ad Industry: Prepare for a Planetary Crash
Tuesday, May 27th, 2008Sometimes 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 […]
Social Networking Gets a Much-Needed Downgrade
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008A 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 […]
You Can’t Wake Up a Dead Man
Monday, May 5th, 2008I 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 […]
Online Ad Network Bubble Will Soon Burst
Monday, April 21st, 2008Remember, about a million years ago in Web time, when all the pundits were saying that the Net was going to “disintermediate” all of those obnoxious middlemen skimming pennies from every commercial transaction? Well, exactly the opposite’s happened, at least in the world of interactive advertising: today, we’ve got more than 200 ad networks, each […]
Loyalty is Dead; Long Live Marketplace Amorality
Thursday, April 17th, 2008Loyalty, it’s said, is dead. Already buried is the traditional loyalty which corporations used to display towards those working for them and the reciprocal loyalty of workers toward these organizations. Loyalty towards brands is an illusion, especially in a recession, when consumers figure out that they can get the same value from a non-branded good […]
American Express Slams SEO, SE Spammers React With More Whining
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008One of the most annoying things about the SEO crowd is how thin-skinned they are. They might come off all rough and tough on their Blogs, but this hard shell masks a quivering level of insecurity that’s clearly rooted in their own precarious and highly temporary status in the search economy.
All it took was […]