Category: Marketing
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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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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…
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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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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…
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How Forbes Monetizes The Frauds They Create
Sam Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, and Charlie Javice share a few things in common. They all seem to have committed fraud; though a court of law convicted only Homes at the time of writing. The three are also Forbes ’30 Under 30′ Alumni. Forbes is the best in the business at monetizing frauds on the way…
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AI Will Break Online Search
AI is going to give super powers to Blackhat SEO, breaking online search as we know it. RIP magic box at the top of the browser where we all reflexively type “how to [blank]”, “[blank] near me”, “best [blank] Reddit”, and anything else we seek a semi-reliable answer to at any given moment. Online search…
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Advertising Scams With MrBeast and Cory Doctorow
Every digital advertising platform wants more revenue and less expense. Policing ad quality is an expense, whereas advertising, whether the purpose is legitimate or not, generates revenue. Only when the economic incentives shift due to public outrage, demands from large advertisers or investor pressure will the companies in a position to stop advertisements of scams…
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Add Value, Not Noise: An Orwellian Social Media Post
Seeing engagement bait posts in social media groups is common. “Add value not noise” posted in a startup group on Facebook, however, is noteworthy due to the Orwellian level of using the behavior you’re cautioning not to use, to condemn the behavior you’re using. To the person who wrote this single sentence a few days…
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Apocalyptic Myths And The Horrible Reality Of AI
A mythology of artificial super intelligence has dominated the conversation about AI since the 80s. Constant media coverage of AI as if it’s a dark and threatening abyss likely to usher in an apocalypse is impacting how AI is developed, clouding the discourse when people bring up real flaws in the current generation of AIs.
