Archive for the 'Advertising' Category

Negative Campaigning During the Olympics

Published by Taylor on August 13, 2008 in Advertising and Politics. Comments

I go crazy for the Olympics.  Most of my close friends and family members know that if they need to reach me over the next three weeks, they’ll find me glued to a television.  I’m a complete sucker for all of the pomp and pageantry surrounding the Games, and I will admit that the Opening Ceremony blew me away despite my best efforts to treat China’s display with the scrutiny it deserves.

But the Summer Games aren’t the only major sensation that comes about every four years.  There’s an election on, if you haven’t heard, and the candidates are especially eager to target all of those patriotic viewers watching Michael Phelps et al bring home the gold.

A few weeks before the Olympics began, I came across this post (emphasis mine):

Conventional wisdom has held that neither candidate would pick his running mate during the Olympic Games, because once underway the Games would occupy the nation’s attention at the expense of political news. [...]

The vice presidential pick is big political news, but consider what the Obama campaign’s ideal scenario is: dozens and dozens of ads aimed at a national audience permitting the Democrats to define and frame the ticket on their own terms. Biographical spots, smiling running mates, optimistic, patriotic, flag-waving images, and no countering ads from the Republicans that define the ticket in negative terms. It’s a mass first impression of an optimistic, change ticket Obama would want to make, and almost a free field to make that impression (there are no reports of any McCain Olympic ad buy, and negative ads during the Olympics feel tonally off).

Of course, part of this scenario changed dramatically when McCain’s campaign upped the ante with $6 million (compared to Obama’s $5 million) in Olympics advertising.  But going into the Olympics I was convinced that this strategy could work and that no candidate would dare interrupt the free-flowing goodwill of the Olympics with attack ads.

Wrong.

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Distracted by Shoes

Published by a Guest on July 24, 2008 in Advertising, Consumer Behavior, Culture and Lifestyle. Comments

The following is a guest post from Daniel H.  Welcome back, Dan!

In a recent NY Times column, David Brooks describes a deterioration in American culture over the past century, noting that “America once had a culture of thrift…but over the past decades, that unspoken code has been silently eroded,” and now we exist in a “culture of debt.”

He partially blames the effects of a rapidly growing economy, noting how some luxury items which were once unaffordable for the middle class suddenly came within financial reach (especially within the reach of creditors if not within the reach of one’s own cash).  He also blames the deterioration of the norm of personal responsibility, and claims that those who fell victim to marketing schemes were also furthering the deterioration of a norm of thriftiness, in themselves and in those around them.

I thought it was a good opinion piece, really. But the whole time I was reading the article, I kept getting distracted by shoes.

Lots of shoes.

The whole top and side of the internet page on the New York Times website was full of shoe advertisements, which of course, exist because the Times wants to collect on extra revenue whenever possible and because advertisers are willing to pay prime dollar for space on a site viewed by perhaps millions of people per day.  And so as I was challenged by Brooks’ thoughts on how we, as Americans, should seek to be wiser consumers, I also felt that this change cannot and will not happen if I do not seek to monitor the ways in which I take in information, most especially on the web, but anywhere for that matter.  If Americans truly desire to become wiser spenders, we must question our acceptance of the commercial advertising industry and its self-imposition into our day-to-day lives.

While I don’t think internet advertising is wrong at all, it might be helpful, as technology and the internet becomes more and more central to our means of gathering information, to ask several questions:  First, what space is sacred?  What space or information should not be corrupted with advertisements?  At what point, if any, is the value of information corrupted or degraded by advertisements?  Would we put corporate sponsors on our holy scriptures or governmental documents?  What about on websites that contain this kind of information?  What about good literature?  The unspoken reality here is that corporate sponsors help keep quite a bit of the internet free and available to all, which I tend to find is a good thing.  I only wonder where we go from here?

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user bcjordan.

Web Frustration: Partial RSS Feeds

Published by Taylor on July 23, 2008 in Advertising, Blogging, Computing, Consumer Behavior and Web 2.0. Comments

I’m sure if I thought about it for a moment, I could come up with other blog and web quirks that drive me bonkers (please share your own web-peeves in the comments).  But there’s one in particular that has me rankled this morning: RSS feeds that provide only partial content.

Those of us who use feed readers are well accustomed to major newspapers limiting their feeds to article titles and a sentence or two of summary.  A typical NY Times feed item, instead of a full article, looks like this:

Sticking Together, Up to a Point

from NYT > NYTimes.com Home

The Americans preparing for the Olympic sabre team have come to New York City, always a hotbed of fencing, to train for Beijing with Yury Gelman at the Manhattan Fencing Club.

It drives me nuts that I have to click through to read an article instead of reading without breaking stride on the Google Reader page.  But I accept that advertising pressures–despite the fact that some feeds, even partial ones (*cough*washington post*cough*), have ads embedded in them–will prevent the major news institutions from sharing their content in a more open way.

When the Freakonomics blog moved from an independent site to the NY Times, they experienced a huge amount of legitimate outrage from readers for switching from a full to a partial feed.  In a post to readers, co-author/blogger Stephen Dubner wrote (emphasis mine):

Way back when we first started talking to the Times, they said that they, like most content providers of their sort, favor partial feeds. Why? As much as people like to say that “information wants to be free,” content does not like to be created for free. In order to pay all the writers, editors, photographers, graphic artists, technologists, and the few dozen other kinds of folks who create and curate the Times’s content, most of which is free on the web [...] the Times sells ads on its site. But can’t they sell ads on a full feed, so that feed readers can still get all the content they want delivered to their computers for free without having to visit a single web site? The short answer is yes, they can, and our friends at FeedBurner, who have been distributing our feed, created a great business by doing so. But the Times and its advertisers aren’t crazy about this option. (Nor are they alone, apparently.) Why? This is the fundamental point: many advertisers do not value feed readers as much as they value site readers, since they believe that feed readers are far harder to measure and track.

Enter the most recent source of my web-frustration: Mental Floss.  I’ve read the Mental Floss blog (which is absolutely terrific) for about a year and a half.  While catching up on their prolific feed after a week of travel, I discovered that in early July they switched from a glorious and full feed to a sloppy partial feed.  I’m pissed.

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iGoogle Goes Social: The Birth of Scaled Automation

Published by Jarred on April 24, 2008 in Advertising, Facebook, Google, Privacy, Social Networks and Web 2.0. Comments

The Heat Is On

The cold war between Google and Facebook just warmed up a whole lot, and this time it’s Google with its fingers on the dial.

Garrett Rogers reports that Google is releasing tools for developers to begin building social applications for the iGoogle homepage, built on the OpenSocial API.  For those who don’t speak geek, this basically means that individuals and companies are able to tap into the social graph you’ve created through Google — primarily through your Gmail contacts — to build useful gadgets for your homepage.  Users will be able to see “updates” from their friends (see right column of image), paralleling Facebook’s News Feed and Mini Feed features

Who cares, right?  Well, as Garrett points out, the potential for a coup is enormous:

I wonder if this will have a significant impact on Facebook since there are twice as many people who set Google as their default browser homepage than Facebook according to comScore? Who knows, Google might win by default if they get it just right.

With this move, Google is forging together two movements that it has been leading under much scrutiny and controversy: scaling and automation.  Together, they become what I’m going to call scaled automation.  Like Tom Friedman says, if you name an issue you own it… so if this term somehow becomes popular, well, remember you heard it here first.

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Monday Links: April 7, 2008

Published by Taylor on April 7, 2008 in Advertising, Business, Cooking, Design, Energy, Environment, Health, Monday Links, Philanthropy, Sociology and Sustainability. Comments

Sorry for the delay in posting these links, folks. I’ve been traveling, and I’m just now getting back to bloggin’. Unlike some people, I’m determined to make it through the 826 unread items in my Google Reader. How about a few links?

Although common tracking systems, known as cookies, have counted a consumer’s visits to a network of sites, the new monitoring, known as “deep-packet inspection,” enables a far wider view — every Web page visited, every e-mail sent and every search entered. Every bit of data is divided into packets — like electronic envelopes — that the system can access and analyze for content

  • This Nick Kristof column on racial and gender bias provides links to a number of interesting online psychological tests.
  • PhilanTopic highlights a Gates Foundation initiative aimed at involving scientists who might not normally focus on global health issues, particularly those in the developing world or in complimentary disciplines. From the Gates site:

The initiative is modeled after the grand challenges formulated more than 100 years ago by mathematician David Hilbert. His list of important unsolved problems has encouraged innovation in mathematics research ever since. Similarly, the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative aims to engage creative minds from across scientific disciplines — including those who have not traditionally taken part in global health research — to work on 14 major challenges.

  • Smitten Kitchen is my new favorite food/cooking blog. This lemon blueberry yogurt cake looks amazing (due in no small part to their expert photography…and baking).
  • If you’re looking to spice up an office memo, or maybe a senior thesis, try the beard font.

That should be enough for now. Sorry to fill the links with so much random stuff, but expect more *ahem* serious blogging to follow this week.