Posts tagged advertising
“ Advertising comprises a full 85 percent of Facebook’s revenues, down from 98 percent in 2009. Zynga alone accounts for 12 percent of Facebook’s total revenues, as the social gaming company must pay Facebook a cut of purchases made in Zynga’s Facebook games.”
What happens when real money is invested in a stock driven by the sale of fake money?
The Media Agency Behind the Chome Pay-Per-Link Mess Just Received $25 Million in Funding
I’m not sure whom to laugh at here… This paragraph from their blog post announcement details their “assets”:
Unruly’s proprietary technology, RAMP (Real-time Amplification and Measurement Platform), powers the entire social video campaign lifecycle and their Viral Video Chart is widely recognized as the Billboard Hot 100 of the Internet generation. Unruly is a whitelisted Facebook partner and its video ad charts are syndicated to major outlets, including Mashable, The Guardian, Adweek, Die Welt and the IAB.
Amazing. Whitelisting is free, RAMP is probably just a social media CMS, and getting Mashable and Adweek to syndicate your widget is not quite an achievement.
In two years or so businesses are going to find their footing in social media, experiment less, and separate the real tools from the processes hawked as tools. Afterwards, the easy money in this sphere is going to dry up very quickly.
Modern dilemma: trying to deduce what email made Gmail think you’d be in the market for piano movers.
And if that works, we can make the ads to see the ads for free, but people will have to look at an ad to see the ads to see the ads.
My God, this is brilliant.
I’d like to start a social network for ads. Each ad has a profile with their name, age, and list of favorite products and services. Each ad has a bio section where the ad talks about the things they’re into. Then the ads can friend each other and invite other ads to join.
It’s cool because the ads pay to keep the site running. Also no humans allowed. Just ads.
Too late, Peter. They’re called Award Shows. It’s a crowded market
“ The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”
Jeff Hammerbacher
I had the pleasure of meeting Jeff a few weeks ago. He is ridiculously sharp and clearly spots simple truths the rest of us never notice. (Via The Atlantic Wire)
Google’s raising our babies now? These ads cross the uncanny valley of what you should and shouldn’t be turning to Google for advice. There’s something very sad about someone turing to a search algorithm for every question they have about a child. Do we talk to people anymore? Or are we being raised by robots-by-proxy? (Via Agency Spy)
Business Insider points to comments section of Sheryl Sandberg’s blog post addressing the role of advertising on Facebook. Advertisers take note: these are the people you’re paying to reach.
* It took a lot of effort not to pick apart Sandberg’s piece and the Facebook/Google party line that advertising improves user experience. A screed for another time…
“ I am not saying that it is a bad or dishonest thing to try to sell your work. It is not. What I am saying is that I am tired of the rush to commodify everything, to turn everything into products, including people. I don’t want a brand, because a brand limits me. A brand says I will churn out the same thing over and over. Which I won’t, because I am weird.”
Maureen Johnson has written a manifest against personal branding. It is lovely and refreshing. Go read it.
I’ve written it in countless presentations: a brand is a stand-in for real, human connection when real, human connection is impossible. You don’t know the people who make Coca-Cola. But you can be ‘friends’ with the brand. Coke, Ikea, Apple, etc need brands because their products are sold a scale that is too large for them to individually address. So their brand, their watered down human connection, acts as a proxy. (In a way, it’s kind of like a robot.)
Why someone would want to reduce their real, human connections and become a brand is beyond me. Sure, it makes you easier to scale throughout media, but it threatens to make all future interactions flat, defined by the light, portable version of yourself.
