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Sunday, December 17, 2006
Instead of throwing messages at them 
| | As traditional, Madison-Avenue-style advertising gets more expensive and less relevant by the day, as the traditional mainstream media advertising business model gets continues to nosedive, where is all the client's business going to move to, as it seeks out greener pastures? Google? Perhaps. Purple Cow? Sure. But where else? |
| | ...imagine what would happen to the TV business if mute buttons delivered "we don't want to hear this" feedback directly to advertisers. It would crash the whole industry's business model in a heartbeat. |
| | Let's face it: there are only two kinds of advertising demanded by their consumers: yellow pages and classifieds. It's not coincidental that they're both ugly. Beauty isn't a value when the only purpose is to answer the simple demand for useful information. |
| | The bulk of advertising -- all $160 billion of it (which buys a lot of art) -- is a conversation between advertisers, media and agents for both. That conversation has enormous flywheels that were forged in the Age of Industry, and carry assumptions that are totally obsolete in a new age when the human beings we've been calling "consumers" are no longer dumb targets in a position only to absorb messages and displace cash. |
| | Remember this essay's title? The main reason I got out of advertising and PR was this epiphany: |
| | THERE IS NO DEMAND FOR MESSAGES |
| | Let me see a show of hands: who here wants a message? Right: none. And who wants to shield themselves from messages they don't want? Exactly: everybody. |
| | TV advertising has negative demand. It subtracts value. |
| | The day will come, hopefully soon, when we will measure demand for advertising on a customer-by-customer basis, and not just by its indirect effects on large populations. When that happens, and direct vendor- customer conversations start adding serious value for both parties, that new conversation will disintermediate most media. Companies will drop advertising like a bad packet. |
| | You know how easy it is to kill an ad budget? It's just a line item. Cash savings, right off the bottom line. Almost nobody gets fired, other than some marcom types and their expensive ad agencies. No tax disincentives. No environmental impact statements. Bang: it's done. |
| | I wrote that in May, 1998. So my timing was a little off. But the prophesy wasn't. We overestimate in the short term and underestimate in the long. |
| | Wherever we stand, it's still clear as ever to me that the future of advertising isn't advertising at all. It's in relating to customers. |
Netflix accessory
| | Kevin Kelly: I present here the best general interest true films I've found. You can also buy the book in color or b&w. |
The longest tail
| | America loves its solitary geniuses—its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses—but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We're looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy. |
Ever becoming a "business model", for example
Woof
| | Hey, Cisco needs the carriers as customers. Further, Cisco sees the complexification of Net Discrimination as a selling point that keeps the commoditization monster at bay. Charlie G saw the hot water John Chambers got into by repeating that voice would be free until Verizon's execs lost patience, and he's not going to make the same mistake. OK. But . . . |
| | The battle is between those who would change the carriers so the Internet survives and those who would change the Internet so the carriers survive. Wouldn't it be better for Cisco to have dogs on both sides? |
Ranking it personally
| | Nice to see both this blog and IT Garage listed among These4Walls Disinformation's Top 150 Blogs. (Not to bite the feeding hand, but who is T4WD? Gotta say I never like it when it isn't clear who's writing a blog, even when I appreciate what they say.) Nice to see that a look through the list and the comments also brings up Stephen Davies' UK Top 100, and the inevitably named Technoranki Top 200. Meanwhile, this blog is down to #570 at Technorati. It peaked at #16, I think. I also think the ranking method was different then. I also notice that BoingBoing is no longer the #1 blog among Technorati's Top 100, but has been bucked down to #3 behind MySinaBlog and Engadget. |
| | Anyway, the only rankings that matter are personal, which is my point here. |
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