Tag Archives: advertising

Don’t let your drive for adver­tis­ing dol­lars under­cut your purpose:

I made the mis­take of going to a web­site today. It’s under­stand­able, of course — every­body does it, from time to time — and I’m sure I’ll for­give myself, eventually.

I don’t mean just any web­site, of course, I mean a pub­li­ca­tion. A place where a busi­ness pub­lishes inter­est­ing things that I like to read.

I couldn’t hit the Reader but­ton in Safari fast enough. In fact, I couldn’t hit it at all, so stunned was I by the flick­er­ing col­or­ful cir­cus the page pre­sented. It was like angry fruit salad on meth.

Brent Simmons — The Pummeling Pages.

Maybe these dif­fer­ent stan­dards are because the con­texts are so dif­fer­ent: mag­a­zines, news­pa­pers, and TV all feel cheap, since they’ve shat on con­sumers to make a few more cents for decades, but the iPad or a well-designed web­site are clean, high qual­ity, and customer-centric.

Or maybe it’s just me. I just don’t feel com­fort­able pay­ing for an iPad or web pub­li­ca­tion, no mat­ter how good it is, and then hav­ing ads shoved down my throat. It makes me feel ripped off: what did I pay for?

Marco Arment — Double-dipping.

The key word, I think, is spir­i­tual. Mythological brands make a spir­i­tual con­nec­tion with the user, deliv­er­ing some­thing that we can’t find on our own… or, at the very least, giv­ing us a slate we can use to write our own spir­i­tu­al­ity on.

People use a Dell. They are an Apple.

Seth Godin — Just a myth.

There’s a very sim­ple busi­ness rea­son why Google cares if they have your real name. It means it’s pos­si­ble to cross-relate your account with your buy­ing behav­ior with their part­ners, who might be banks, retail­ers, super­mar­kets, hos­pi­tals, air­lines. To con­nect with your use of cell phones that might be run­ning their mobile oper­at­ing sys­tem. To pro­vide iden­tity in a commerce-ready way. And to give them infor­ma­tion about what you do on the Internet, with­out obfus­ca­tion of pseudonyms.

Simply put, a real name is worth more than a fake one.

Dave Winer — Why Google cares if you use your real name.

MTV and video ad formats

Just got around to watch­ing this. It’s a good dis­cus­sion of try­ing to build an online video expe­ri­ence that is best for both the user and the adver­tiser. For a lit­tle more infor­ma­tion on the study check out the full article.