"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" – Mark Twain
As anyone who has spent any time in the UK will know, the BBC is a safe haven from that most grubby of industries, advertising. It’s enshrined in the BBC’s charter. But the BBC’s ban on advertising only applies to the UK (where anyone who owns a TV has to pay a $300 licence fee … Read more
There’s a very interesting post by Robin Goad over on the Hitwise blog about the change in distribution of search terms on search engines. As more and more people are searching online, two things are happening to the range of search terms, one intuitively obvious, the other somewhat counter-intuitive. The obvious change is that the … Read more
I’ve just received my invite into the Hulu private beta. For those of you who don’t know what Hulu is, it’s the joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp to provide streaming episodes from the NBC and FOX networks (including the likes of The Office, Heroes, The Simpsons and so on) as well as clips … Read more
So, last Monday was a big day for me, and for a few thousand of my colleagues at Microsoft and aQuantive – we closed the aQuantive acquisition that we originally announced in May. Those of you who like to track every iteration of Microsoft’s ever-changing organizational structure may already have read that we’ve created a new … Read more
Yahoo has put a funky name to their targeted ads service – SmartAds, and has added some extra juice. Yahoo’s been strong in demographic and behavioral targeting for some time – they have a significant team working on it – but SmartAds is new for a couple of reasons: It allows targeted ad delivery based … Read more
I’m a sucker for a nice little TV short, and this amused me at the same time as giving me that glow you get when the behemoth of a company you work for does something cool: The Break UpUploaded by geertdesager My favorite line from this is when the guy says, “Know you? Sweetheart, I know everything … Read more
Do you know how online ad serving works? Are you familiar with the difference between a publisher-side ad server and an advertiser (or third-party) ad server? No? Then read this excellent article on the topic by my colleague and ad industry veteran Eric Picard. The article’s actually an updated version of one that he wrote … Read more
I came across a very interesting article in last week’s Economist Technology Quarterly the other day (which I was reading a week late, thanks to the efficiencies of the US Postal Service). The article mentioned a couple of sites such as AttentionTrust and Agloco which have sprung up to help users take ownership of their own online behavior … Read more
Have just finished watching a very short Channel 4 programme about Second Life – featuring a woman who not only makes a healthy living selling jewellery, flowers and all sorts of other stuff inside the ‘game’, but also met her husband (rendered on-line as a rather trendy-looking blue metallic robot, rendered in real-life as a … Read more
Interesting study by "art-technology-philosophy group of basket weaving enthusiasts and theory do-it-yourselfers" (their words) monochrom into brand recall – they asked 25 people to draw various well-known brand logos from memory. The results are interesting, particularly for brands (such as BP, Adidas, Philips & Eskimo/Algida/Walls) who have changed their logos of late. How well would … Read more