Finding what's forgotten.
Listen to me read the actual email I received from a kraft.com domain.
I question its authenticity, but then, its from the place that brought us cheese food.
UPDATE:
I just received confirmation that the message did come from a Kraft “Senior Associate Brand Manager”, and I’m not the only one in PodcastMN land to receive the message. More updates to follow.
While it’s not astroturfing or splogging, it still gets added to the “How not to engage bloggers for marketing” pile.
Via my WP-GotLucky plugin, I’ve been tracking the volume to a handful of real popular posts (really, there are some?) here at garrickvanburen.com just check out the ‘Most Popular Posts’ section to see the 10 mostest popularist.
Inspired by Ze Frank’s gimmesomecandy-ducky experiment, I’m now taking money for 50 character messages on each and every one of my posts.
You pick the post – any post.
One message per post.
Messages are a maximum of 50 characters – including HTML.
All posts start at $10 – the price doubles with each published message.
Messages are displayed until someone else pays the doubled price.
Message are also included in the feeds.
(emphasis mine.)
70 is a great number. It’s not a number that makes sense for advertisers – it’s statistically zero (credit to Dave Slusher for the quote titling this post). Well, until we can accurately measure influence and caring.
“But it is a number that can find your friends, like thinkers and make you feel that you are talking to more than 3 people.” – Kris Smith.
Exactly. Mass voicemail.
Related:
“”The average blog has exactly one reader: the blogger.” – Eric Schmidt, CEO Google, via Jeff Jarvis
Today, Aaron Abramson and I enjoyed a very heated lunch conversation on the strengths and weaknesses ad-subsidized wifi networks. No conversions, definitely an agree-to-disagree situation.
The work he’s doing with the wifi guys sounded so similar to the work I did years back (see paragraph 6) I had deja vu.
Thankfully, he didn’t mention anything like this.
NetNewsWire has been working overtime this week (just like me) and there’s less than 500mb empty space remaining on my 40gb 3G iPod. According to iTunes, that’s 35.1 days of audio entertainment. More than a month – without repeating.
Contrast that to the few minutes we had the radio on this morning, back-to-back commercials. As I turned it off and headed to the office, I heard them ask me not to, “Back to the music in 60 seconds’.
Ha. It doesn’t take me that long to hit ‘play’ in iTunes.
See you in 35.1 days. 😉
I suspect I’m not the only one that finds it ironic that calling undue attention to Google’s AdSense ad is a violation of their terms. Ironic, because ads that don’t call attention to themselves have an inherently lower click-through.
What a fine line.
“Pssst, hey, buddy, don’t click over there.”
I got a call the other day asking if I’d produce a podcast just for the ad dollars I could sell on top of it.
That’s doing two jobs (product development and ad sales) and getting paid for one (ad sales). Though Google and other have made advertising more efficient (how could they not), it’s still two jobs. A dollar spent on selling an ad is a dollar not spent on product development. Unless a startup just received millions in venture funding (one big advertiser) every dollar is precious.
Ads will detract, ads do detract, otherwise they wouldn’t work.
My advise to projects and companies aiming to skewer eyeballs with the sword of advertising: Either build something that doesn’t need advertising or something that is only advertising.
Related:
I’ve stopped tracking my web stats. I’ve only got one site left on the useless Google Analytics and haven’t visited the reporting page in forever.
Incoming links and comments are the useful measures to me. Those tools are nowhere as mature as they need to be. Then again, I’m not looking for investors, advertisers, or the press. I’m looking for a way to share my thoughts with you on your terms.
Ev has the same complaints about our current metrics as I mentioned in the above rant:
“But Ajax is only part of the reason pageviews are obsolete. Another one is RSS.”
Also, this beautiful dig on MySpace.
A little more eloquent than this:
A decade ago, I had this vision of a television channel – MTV for commercials. Above is the logo I drew up for it. Commercials would be presented in a structured way – by theme, brand history, actor, etc. In other words, the ads themselves would be the program.
Fast-forward to today, and I think we’re nearly there. Sure, there’s no Ad-J navigating us through the ads, but the volume of commercial advertisements on over-the-air TV, radio, even cable stations is there. The regularly scheduled program is arguably the theme tying the commercials together for 30 or 60 minute intervals.
Next step is to drop the program all together. All ads – continuously 24/7.
In fact, that’s where I see over-the-air broadcasts going in 5 years after today’s broadcasters deem their FCC licenses worthless and migrate distribution 100% online.
Flipping through the channels, you’ll see no big brands, all small, local businesses; used car dealers, family-owned restaurants, nail salons, etc. Just like those weird direct-mail coupon books.
LATER: 30 January 2007
It’s telling that the most stable, high-def segments picked up by our over-the-air HD TV antenna are the commercials.
ELSEWHERE:
16 April 2007