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…
If I steal your car, you don’t have a car anymore. It’s a physical object. We can’t both have it at the same time. Everybody realizes that’s wrong. But if I make a copy of some digital music you’ve purchased, you still have it. So have I wronged you? I may or may not have…
I’m assuming you’ve used ChatGPT. If so, you’ve probably run into its very annoying super ego. For example, you’re doing some research on nuclear power and it hectors you with grade school morality about the dangers of this and that. It’s quite annoying. But there’s a value in that. It shows it’s possible to layer…
I’m a big advocate of practical tools: checklists, forms, and that sort of thing. When I was a VP of operations at a large association, I learned a lot about frameworks. This post is about one very simple kind of framework: Quadrant analysis. You’ve seen these before. It’s a 2×2 matrix where some value on…
Bo Sacks distributed an article the other day about the need to refresh your design if it hasn’t been updated in a while. The article is mostly about print, but the same can apply to a website. Designers amaze me. They can tweak one little thing — a color here, a font there — and…
Micropayments are the idea that won’t catch fire but also the idea that won’t die. Publishers are starting to take another look at micropayments because ad revenues are declining, and subscription revenues aren’t always making up the difference. Are micropayments a desperation move, or do micropayments belong as part of the paid content ecosystem? Advocates…
Have you heard of “intent-based marketing”? According to an article by Sara Fischer, It’s Dotdash Meredith’s response to the alleged death of the 3rd party cookie. To understand how this works, let’s start with how things used to work. You visit a website, say 123.com, and 123.com participates in an ad network, called ads4everybody.com. If…
The “People vs. Algorithms” podcast has an episode called “The Deterioration of Webpages.” It raises some very interesting questions about the future of media companies. If you’re in the media space, you should listen to it. Here are my comments and opinions on their analysis. Some of it follows what those guys say, and some…
I was getting ready to send the latest issue of The Krehbiel Report, and when I’m getting ready to send a message I like to send it to different accounts to make sure it displays properly. I sent a test message to my protonmail address, and I got this message. “This email has failed its…
Yesterday I had the privilege of watching Brian Morrissey and Sean Griffey record the latest Rebooting Show at a MACMA event in Washington. Relevant links below. Brian mentioned that publishers don’t want to depend on other tech platforms. If you live by the algorithm, you die by the algorithm. And Brian is exactly right about…
When advertising revenue gets disappointing, publishers often wonder if they can charge for access to their content, and the most common way they do that is with a paywall. Paywalls raise a lot of interesting questions, and as a consequence, there are a lot of different strategies. One strategy is to show a little of…
Bo Sacks distributed an interesting article by Peter Houston yesterday called “How to build a future-proof editorial operation: Insights from IFJ 2023.” IFJ being the International Journalism Festival in Italy. I’ll review his five points and give my take below. 1. Serve your audience This should be obvious, right? If you make a product, you…
Google has unveiled precisely the doomsday scenario that I’ve been warning publishers about. Put simply, Google will do what ChatGPT can do, but it will also have access to the current web. When someone enters a query, they won’t get a list of websites to visit. They’ll get the answer to their question. There will…
It’s not all the job losses. Although I do think that’s a big problem we’re not ready for. It’s the fact that one or maybe just a few organizations will control everyone’s access to information. Right now, just about anybody who wants can get their ideas out into the public square – as I’m doing…
I met Ken Kraetzer at the MACMA Days event in NYC a couple of weeks ago. He invited me to do a short interview on his podcast, which is available here. Ken hosts a series of interviews with leaders in digital marketing, banking, insurance, customer service and business education for Harrison, NY-based CBSIservices.com.