Merrian-Webster has coined “slop” as the word of the year. They define slop as … “Digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” Fair enough. Bad AI content comes in many varieties. On the content side we speak of the “tsunamic of bullshit.” On the image side,…
Summary: Digital advertising has made it harder for print magazines to simultaneously please advertisers and readers, which is crucial to the print magazine business model. You can’t please everybody, and it may be getting harder for print magazines to please the right people. Bo Sacks posted an article about the challenges facing print magazines, which…
Summary: GARM tried to provide a universally “safe” list of places for advertisers, but their selections seem to have had an ideological bent. Musk sued, and now GARM is gone. What comes next? The Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) is an advertising group dedicated to promoting something called “brand safety.” Brand safety means making…
Summary: Modern website design — especially mobile design — simultaneously bombards users with content and ads, creating a frustrating, lousy experience. There is another tried and true model that we should explore. Show the content, then the ads, then the content, as we do on TV, in movies, on podcasts, etc. Imagine you’re in a…
Summary: The article discusses how reading on paper often leads to better comprehension and retention than digital reading, citing fewer distractions and engagement of more senses as key factors. It suggests enhancing digital reading by reducing distractions, such as intrusive ads, and incorporating features like text-to-speech, note-taking, and providing contextual elements like unique typefaces and…
The image for this post — and the strange words — was created by Dall-E Summary: The article discusses Robbie Kellman Baxter’s “Customer Retention Metrics Kit,” focusing on the challenge of retaining customers in a fragmented media landscape. It explores the evolving definitions of ‘customer’ and ‘subscriber’ in the context of diverse media platforms, stressing…
Summary: The article emphasizes the challenges of measuring the impact of advertising, noting that while the internet provides vast data, relying solely on numbers can lead to errors and a skewed perspective. The author cautions against an overreliance on mathematical metrics, citing cases of advertising stats being inaccurately reported. The piece suggests that quantifying the…
Summary: The challenge publishers face in growing and engaging audiences due to platforms like Facebook no longer promoting their content. The article questions whether the focus on building audiences for advertisers is mismatched with the goal of finding paying customers for subscriptions. The article emphasizes the need to offer valuable content to the right audience…
On a plane ride this past weekend I read Bob Hoffman’s Advertising for Skeptics, which is worth your time. Bob’s books are nice and short, which I appreciate because almost all business books could easily be one fifth as long. He has a lot of interesting things to say about advertising, but I’m going to…
In the last issue, I mentioned why we should be skeptical of 3rd-party advertising claims. Along those lines, is attention measurement a real thing, or is it another way for the ad sales industry to snow people with BS metrics? Some “attention measurement” technologies require special apps and permission to track eye movements. Are people…
An interesting exercise in disaster planning is to imagine what you’d do if all your current sources of revenue disappeared. Bob Hoffman’s Adscam makes a persuasive case that programmatic advertising might as well have, because it’s mostly garbage. It may have stopped returning results and you didn’t notice. I often say that every business book…