Business
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The problem for people isn’t advertising, and the problem for advertising isn’t blocking. The problem for both is tracking.
In Google Has Quietly Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking, @JuliaAngwin and @ProPublica unpack what the subhead says well already: “Google is the latest tech company to drop the longstanding wall between anonymous online ad tracking and user’s names.” So here’s a message from humanity to Google and all the other spy organizations in… Continue reading
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@Staples, you can Un faster than that.
I just unsubscribed from Staples mailings, and got this: WTF? Is the request traveling by boat somewhere? Does it need to be aged before it works? We have computers now. We’re on the Internet. There is no reason why unsubscribing from anything should take longer than now. Staples is not alone at this, by the… Continue reading
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The cash model of “customer experience”
Here’s the handy thing about cash: it gives customers scale. It does that by working the same way for everybody, everywhere it’s accepted. It’s also anonymous by nature, meaning it carries no personal identifiers. Recording what happens with it is also optional, because using it doesn’t require an entry in a ledger (as happens with… Continue reading
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Is the online advertising bubble finally starting to pop?
I started calling online advertising a bubble in 2008. I made “The Advertising Bubble” a chapter in The Intention Economy in 2012. I’ve been unpacking what I figure ought to be obvious (but isn’t) in 52 posts and articles (so far) in the Adblock War Series. This will be the 53rd. And it ain’t happened yet. But, now… Continue reading
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Dear Adobe, Please buy Flickr
Flickr is far from perfect, but it is also by far the best online service for serious photographers. At a time when the center of photographic gravity is drifting form arts & archives to selfies & social, Flickr remains both retro and contemporary in the best possible ways: a museum-grade treasure it would hurt terribly… Continue reading
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Toward an ethics of influence
This event is now in the past and can be seen in its entirety here. Stop now and go to TimeWellSpent.io, where @TristanHarris, the guy on the left above, has produced and gathered much wisdom about a subject most of us think little about and all of us cannot value more: our time. Both of us… Continue reading
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TV Viewers to Madison Avenue: Please quit driving drunk on digital
Today AdAge gives us Clinton and Sanders Using Addressable Advertising in New York Market: Precision Targeting Is Especially Relevant in NYC, Say Political Media Observers, by @LowBrowKate. Here’s how it works: In order to aim addressable TV spots to those voters, the campaigns provide a list of the individual voters they want to target to… Continue reading
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Thought: mobile apps are just hors d’oeuvres
Yesterday morning, while I was making curtados in the kitchen, I was also trying to listen to the radio. The station was WNYC, New York’s main public radio station. The program at the time was This American Life. Since the espresso machine is noisy when extracting coffee or steaming milk, I kept looking for the… Continue reading
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Free Money!
I’d like to find a way to say “You may be owed money!” that doesn’t sound like spam. But I that’s the message, and it’s true, so here you go. A few days ago a cousin-in-law told the extended family’s mail list about the North Carolina State Treasurer’s Claim Your Cash! program for recovering unclaimed property people… Continue reading
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Speeding on the Subway
At the uptown end of the 59th Street/Columbus Circle subway platform there hangs from the ceiling a box with three disks on fat stalks, connected by thick black cables that run to something unseen in the downtown direction. Knowing a few things about radio and how it works, I saw that and thought, Hmm… That… Continue reading
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The slow sidelining of over-the-air radio
I’ve always loved AM radio. But it’s not a requited love. AM radios these days are harder to get, and tend to suck. The band is thick with electronic noise from things that compute (a sum of devices that rounds to everything). AM stations are falling like old trees all over the band, and all… Continue reading
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More thoughts on privacy
(Somebody on Quora asked, What is the social justification of privacy? adding, I am trying to ask about why individual privacy is important to society. Obviously it is preferable to individuals for a variety of reasons. But society seems to gain more from transparency. So, rather than leave my answer buried there, I decided to… Continue reading
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At last, Cluetrain’s time has come
While The Cluetrain Manifesto is best known for its 95 theses (especially its first, “Markets are conversations”), the clue that matters most is this one, which runs above the whole list: we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it. That was… Continue reading
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Talking customer power and VRM
I’ll be on a webinar this morning talking with folks about The Intention Economy and the Rise in Customer Power. That link goes to my recent post about it on the blog of Modria, the VRM company hosting the event. It’s at 9:30am Pacific time. Read more about it and register to attend here. There… Continue reading
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The iPad Pro is for business
The rap on Apple for years was that it made gear just for hipsters and schools. But that’s no longer the case. It’s kicking ass in business now too, and in a way that may end up being more dominant than IBM and Microsoft ever were. A refresher… From the mid-’80s to the mid-’00s, Microsoft… Continue reading
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WMAL/630am 2.0
A few months back I wrote a post with a headline in the form of a question: How will WMAL-AM survive losing its transmitter? Here was my best guess at the time: To stay on the air, WMAL will need to find replacement acreage, somewhere that allows the signals … to cross as much of the Metro area… Continue reading
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The Adblock War Series
Here is a list of pieces I’ve written on what has come to be known as the “adblock wars.” That term applies most to #22 (written August of ’15) those that follow. But the whole series works as a coherent whole that might make a good book if a publisher is interested. Why online advertising sucks,… Continue reading