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The AI Anti-Utopia, And Other Stories
Software is replacing artists and writers who enjoy their work while warehouse staffers pee in bottles to make quota. AI is turning into a shitty anti-utopia. As I write this, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) has been on strike for 28 days. In a negotiation with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers […]
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AI Enabled Greed And Stupidity
The content units mindset makes AI replacing human writers inevitable. This AI future won’t just replace writers, when the goal is churning out more content units, ever cheaper, every creative is on the chopping block. The sword that will cut their jobs is being forged with their work.
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The Advertising Pyramid Scheme
The advertising economy is starting to resemble a collection of interconnected multi-level marketing schemes. Some kind of intermediary firm sits atop each pyramid brokering the serving of ads to eyeballs. Under that are ad agencies, and tech firms that work on sales and bid management. The bottom are ad buyers, perhaps too few to sustain […]
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The Business of Helping Build Businesses
This goes out to freelancers and those who run professional service companies. Are you building a business or helping others build theirs? It can be both. But that requires awareness, caution, and focus.
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Ad Fed Brains, And Other Stories
People absorb information passively. Humans can, of course, intently study; but few can fully switch off passive learning. This gives advertising incredible power over people they do not recognize. I vividly remember a multi-month period in my childhood when headlines about Tylenol overdoses dominated the nightly news. I also remember Aleve’s commercial saying, “Just two […]
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BuzzFeed News And Twitter Blues
To greatly paraphrase Tolstoy, you can explain anything to a complete ding dong if they know nothing about the topic, but you’ll fail to explain it to the greatest minds if they start with any preconceptions. Cognitive bias is powerful. People will pay more for a worse product if they think the brand is better. […]
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Advertising Demon, And Other Stories
People like getting services at no direct cost, advertisers like selling to those people. While most want services at no cost to them, they don’t like being tracked. Modern ad tech puts people into a kind of human terrarium. Large tech platforms from Alphabet (once Google) and Meta (once Facebook) down the line gather and […]
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Brands As People, People As Brands
People strive to be brands creating a loss of self, and often a loss of any potential brand. Brands try to be people, in programmatic and contrived ways. Both are organic as a Twinkie asking how the fellow kids are doing.
On a call for a long-dead startup building its empire on Google+, someone, a person, objected to being paid to appear in a commercial promoting a class they sold because of how it would impact their brand. They were a chef, not a famous one. But in July of 2011, they had quickly amassed a following of about 6,000 in under a month on the hot emerging social network that was Google+, and they believed fame was on the horizon. -
Get Woke, Gain Earned Media Coverage
Get woke go broke, rhymes. It is, however, a stupid criticism nearly every time I’ve heard it applied to a company’s advertising. The exceptions are when the criticism of wokeness is a criticism of the messaging and placement. Or when a company is truly ideologically motivated, but the latter is rare. In almost every example […]
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A Blue Check On A Pike Warns Us Not To Give Up The Web
Today is my seventh day of Twitter limbo. On March 31st, I became Elon Musk’s mother for several hours. But the account was put into a type of quarantine. My username replaced by a dot, my photo removed, I cannot log in. But my profile, with the years-old blue check still stands like a head on a pike warning others that Elon Musk has mommy issues.
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Stephen King’s Happiness Is A Twitter Success Metric
As a writer, Stephen King is famous, prolific, and respected. He’s published over 70 novels, novellas, and non-fiction books. Whatever brain chemicals Stephen King gets from using Twitter is all he receives from his free work to add value to the platform. Since King has perhaps the fewest reasons to use Twitter of any famous person on earth, his happiness should literally be a Twitter success metric.
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TikTok, Drugs, Congress, and Monopoly
Very few accusations are unique to TikTok. But, to the extent that members of congress know about data brokers, I assume they feel the U.S. data brokers’ selling lists of all the closeted gay people, with cancer, taking anti depressants in Kentucky are good and clean. But first party data collection by the Chinese Communist Party is bad, and dirty. The drug harm-comparison analogy here is alcohol you distilled yourself versus GHB you made in your bathtub; both being less than ideal.
