#advertising (184 links)
- SKF advert review – let’s hope this dull AI Greta Garbo is not the future | The Guardian theguardian.com
The AI Greta Garbo is a bizarre soignée figure, a Stepford robo-star, a Hallmark-greeting-card parody of the icy hauteur, distraite sensuality and deadpan comedy that Garbo projected in life. The AI Garbo is like the classiest ever presenter of a TV shopping channel, purring her way through a dull and humourless script that seeks to create a brand synergy between the frictionless ball-bearings manufactured by SKF and what the company imagines to be Garbo’s own all-important smoothness.
- ‘A crisis of authenticity’: the truth about food influencers theguardian.com
- Daring Fireball: ‘Your Frustration Is the Product’ daringfireball.net
People are spending less and less time on the web because websites are becoming worse and worse experiences, but the publishers of websites are almost literally trying to dig their way out of that hole by adding more and more of the reader-hostile shit that is driving people away.
Nobody's asking the harder question: what would a commercial model look like that rewards measurable plumbing and creative risk? That captures the incremental certainty of optimisation and the asymmetric upside of fame?
- Let It Burn - by Zoe Scaman - Musings Of A Wandering Mind zoescaman.substack.com
And the stuff that does go out? It’s going to look less and less like big bureaucratic holding companies and more like ragtag groups of brilliant minds. Strategists and creatives and makers who can be assembled for a project, who can move fast, who aren’t carrying the overhead of a Soho office and seventeen layers of account management.
- LinkedIn ads: Everything you need to know in 2024 blog.hootsuite.com
- The AI flight attendants of Facebook garbageday.email
The fact that, in the span of less than year, Facebook effectively removed anything resembling news from the platform, even conservative news, and allowed AI-generated spam to take its place, and both investors and advertisers don’t care, should tell you all you need to know about what social networks are in 2024. They’re a data holding pen for advertisers to harvest and it seems like Meta has finally given up pretending they’re anything else.
- Pluralistic: Sympathy for the spammer (15 Jan 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow pluralistic.net
This is absolutely classic passive-income brainworms thinking. "I have a bot that can turn out plausible sentences. I will locate places where sentences can be exchanged for money, aim my bot at it, sit back, and count my winnings." It's MBA logic on meth: find a thing people pay for, then, without bothering to understand why they pay for that thing, find a way to generate something like it at scale and bombard them with it.
- The Twitter Advertiser Exodus – Caterina.net caterina.net
A lot of the posts I’ve read about companies leaving Twitter talk about trust and safety issues, and some about ideology, some ideological leavers fleeing after the reinstatement of Trump. But from a purely practical standpoint, this post is a pretty damning[...]
- The crass, ad-laden reinvention of central London theguardian.com
Outernet boasts of being “the world’s foremost bridge between the real world and the digital world”, a place where the metaverse meets meatspace, where virtual luxury trainers can be sold as NFTs alongside the real thing. There are plans for it to grow into a worldwide network of 10 connected hubs, with New York and Los Angeles next on the list. But it shows what happens when urban development is conceived in the same way as making a website or running a TV channel – “curating a brand neighbourhood,” as O’Ferrall puts it. Pings, clicks and content trump human experience, until advertising swallows the city whole.
How to opt-out of FLoC as a web user: Don’t use Google Chrome
- Debranding Is the New Branding bloomberg.com
The difficulty of ensuring that any logo (let alone an intricate, dimensional logo) stands out from the kaleidoscopic eye-candy of ads, apps and open tabs is one driver behind “mobile first” design. Here identity and functionality are conceived from the outset inside the tightest constraints — for what works on a cellphone will surely work on a water-tower.
Such pixel-fixation is table-stakes for modern startups, but legacy brands must be canny when reverse-engineering decades of brand equity into today’s digital Lilliput.
It's very pleasing to have a name and a creditable stab at a rationale for this trend.
Via 💥BLAST!
- London Pirate Radio Adverts 1984-1993, Vol. 1 deathisnot.bandcamp.com
The first volume in a two-part collection of pirate radio adverts & idents, taken from recordings of London stations between 1984 & 1993.
Via Thom Yorke's Guest Mix.
- The Reality of Missing Out | Hacker News news.ycombinator.com
AdTech companies are completely fucked. Just totally and utterly fucked. Google and Facebook are kicking their asses left and right.
- Adactio: Journal—On The Verge adactio.com
<blockquote>For such a young, supposedly-innovative industry, I’m often amazed at what people choose to treat as immovable, unchangeable, carved-in-stone issues. Bloated, invasive ad tracking isn’t a law of nature. It’s a choice. We can choose to change.</blockquote>
- The Verge's web sucks blog.lmorchard.com
<blockquote>TL;DR: Did you know that The Verge delivers you to around 20 companies for advertising & tracking purposes? I didn't. That might foul up your web experience a little bit. Maybe we should try something different.</blockquote>
- Ad tech is killing the online experience theguardian.com
<blockquote>The “surveillance business model” of building up detailed electronic dossiers on internet users in order to predict what they want to buy and how to sell it to them produced some genuinely impressive results in its early years. The serendipity of seeing an ad for something you had been thinking about proved very powerful in the early days of Facebook and the first generation of “retargeting” services.
But a look at Facebook’s ad-card rates shows that the novelty of this technique wears off fast. Facebook was founded on the premise that it could use its mounting dossier on your behavior to figure out how to sell you things faster than your natural defenses would repel its pitches. If that ideology was borne out, you’d expect to see the company’s cost-per-thousand ad rates climbing into the stratosphere. Instead, they’re damned close to the rate you’ll pay for regular, minimally targeted display advertising elsewhere.</blockquote>
<blockquote>Finally, our analysis might provide a reality check on some of the gigantic brand values now published by leading brand valuation companies as it reveals that often the lion’s share of value lies in customer relationships. Although closely intertwined, brand equity and customer equity are different concepts that need to be measured and reported separately. The real art of brand management will be to integrate the two concepts without being stymied by friction between the camps that typically manage brands and customer relationships. As Peter Drucker said, well before the advent of the information age, the sole purpose of a business is to create a customer. It’s clear that brand building will only go so far.</blockquote>
- Ad blockers gain ground as consumers say 'Enough' campaignlive.com
- The Economist’s Tom Standage on digital strategy and the limits of a model based on advertising » Nieman Journalism Lab niemanlab.org
The Economist has taken the view that advertising is nice, and we’ll certainly take money where we can get it, but we’re pretty much expecting it to go away.
- Russell Davies: Consumers, users, people, mammals russelldavies.typepad.com
<blockquote>Public servants can't pivot to a new problem or a new set of users. They have to solve the problem that's in front of them, and, probably, they'll have to keep solving it for years. That's something that the 'civic tech' community is going to have to face.</blockquote>
- Why Talented Creatives Are Leaving Your Shitty Agency mobileinc.co.uk
<blockquote>The people who generate all the ideas and work are evolving and realising that they themselves could be reaping the rewards rather than the agency.
Agencies on the other hand are happy to keep trying to live in a world which is ceasing to exist. Clinging onto the same ideas, tools, and ways of working with CEOs who are either oblivious to the current mindset or too frightened to instigate change. It’s the perfect storm of increasing entrepreneurialism, decreasing loyalty and an industry reveling in mediocrity.</blockquote>
- This Recycling Bin Is Stalking You - Siraj Datoo - The Atlantic Cities theatlanticcities.com
Nasty.
- The declining profitability of Google Adwords | Hacker News news.ycombinator.com
<blockquote>The service line is the part that scares advertising agencies. It’s associated with building products, which potentially puts them in competition with their clients who, after all, are the ones who actually make things. Those services can create deeper, more meaningful experiences that solve different needs and produce a different kind of brand relationship. It’s also, because of that organisational drag, horrendously difficult.
[...]
Product people know this. Startup people know this. Most advertising people do not, as yet, know this.</blockquote>
<blockquote>Disconnect, like similar software from Abine and Ghostery, aims to give consumers more control over the data they share. After the extension is installed, an icon in the browser lets users adjust which advertisers and tracking companies can access their data. Disconnect sorts the requests into categories like advertising, analytics, and social.</blockquote>
<blockquote>"Mr. Lam’s revenue is low, about $50,000 a month, but it’s doubling every quarter, enough to pay his freelancers, invest in the site and keep him in surfboards. And now he actually has time to ride them. In that sense, Mr. Lam is living out that initial dream of the Web: working from home, working with friends, making something that saves others time and money."</blockquote>
We don't pitch often, but when we do the question of pitching creative work usually crops up. We never do it, even when - as happened when we pitched for ITV - other people we're pitching against do, and we want it, and there is pressure to conform. But it would be utterly wrong to talk about how important it is to discover and validate the customer need and problem space if the very first thing we produce for a client presents completely the opposite approach. Doing creative work at the pitch stage is a dangerous fiction
- Adactio: Journal—Getting ahead in advertising adactio.com
I realise that in pointing out that advertising is fundamentally shit, I’m not being very helpful and I’m not exactly offering much in the way of solutions or alternatives. But I rail against the idea that we need to accept intrusive online advertising just because “that’s the way things have always been.” There are many constructs—advertising, copyright—that we treat as if they are immutable laws of nature when in fact they may be outmoded business concepts more suited to the last century (if they ever really worked at all).
- Responsive Advertising| Mark Boulton markboulton.co.uk
Responsive + advertising sounds like it'll be a horrible car crash.
- img class from nowhere | CodeIgniter Forums codeigniter.com
A reminder to myself to avoid the string "ad" in classes if your development browser runs AdBlock or a variant. Doh.
- Creative Review - Advertising, design and morality creativereview.co.uk
"Can you work in advertising and be a moral person? Philosopher AC Grayling answers the big questions". Swill.
- New Music Strategies: Myspace – now with glitter newmusicstrategies.com
That message again, just so we’re clear – now every frickin’ band on the planet is making money for the major record labels. [...] The fact remains that in order to be fixed, the whole Myspace architecture has to be rebuilt from scratch, and they’re not going to do that. [...] My expectations were very low, and they have not been raised but confirmed. My account is closed. Tom is not my friend.
- Redefining talent within the advertising agency « Mike Parsons mikeparsons.net
"The future stars of advertising will be the consultants, craftsmen and traders." Pronouncement.
- words to strategize by / what consumes me, bud caddell whatconsumesme.com
Basically, if your idea ends with “and then we drive traffic to it,” you’ve failed.
- Sell! Sell! - Hello there! sellsell.co.uk
- Leagas Delaney - London leagasdelaney.co.uk
- YouTube - Re: @Starbucks | Old Spice youtube.com
Still laughing at the @oldspice videos from last night, best way to keep warm
- Tinkering in London » Blog Archive » Into the Marketing Maelstrom tinkerlondon.com
It seems in Marketing, the world of Digital still consists largely of people who’ve not yet twigged that ‘Digital’ means more than “…on the web” or “…on your mobile”. Conceptually, there’s still a divide separating the Digital from the Physical. Forward-looking brands and agencies are onto this.
- Facebook | Advertising facebook.com
- 6 Tips for Running Promotions Within Facebook’s Guidelines insidefacebook.com
The big one is basically spend at least $10,000 on Facebook advertising in order to get an account manager in order to get approval.