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Toxic Buzzword of the Week

Toxic Buzzword of the Week: Customer Preference Advertising

Tuesday, July 22nd, 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 […]

Toxic Buzzword of the Week: DAO (Digital Asset Optimization)

Tuesday, June 24th, 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 […]

Toxic Buzzword of the Week: ORM (Online Reputation Management)

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008

I don’t have any real quarrel with the article that John Carcutt wrote for SearchEngineJournal.com this week, because he does us all a service by pointing out that most SEOs are, for a variety of reasons, completely unqualified to handle online reputation management. Not only do they not have the proper skillsets, but as he […]

Toxic Buzzword of the Week: “Alternative Media”

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

One of the great ironies of the number-driven online ad biz is that nobody can agree on the numbers. How much click fraud is there? Nobody can agree. How much must marketers spend to achieve a given goal? Well - it depends. Is Google being affected by a secular economic downturn? Who knows (even Google’s […]

Toxic Buzzword of the Week: “Socialommerce”

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

In a March 20th SearchEngineWatch.com column, a fellow named Eric Qualman has coined what has to be one of the worst industry buzzwords in many years. “Socialommerce.” I read Qualman’s article and he almost makes some sense, because recommendations do count for a lot when it comes to purchasing certain types of goods. But his […]