Category Archives: Business & Marketing

“How Google Dominates Us”

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James Gleick’s The Information was one of the more interestisng books I’ve read this year. And this piece in the New York Review of Books he talks about “How Google Dominates Us. A few of my favorites:

  • “The business of finding facts has been an important gear in the workings of human knowledge, and the technology has just been upgraded from rubber band to nuclear reactor.”
  • “When (we) say Google “possesses” all this information, that’s not the same as owning it. What it means to own information is very much in flux.”
  • “(Google has) been relentless in driving computer science forward. Google Translate has achieved more in machine translation than the rest of the world’s artificial intelligence experts combined.”
  • “The merchandise of the information economy is not information; it is attention. These commodities have an inverse relationship. When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive. Attention is what we, the users, give to Google, and our attention is what Google sells—concentrated, focused, and crystallized.”
  • “Google makes more from advertising than all the nation’s newspapers combined”
  • “The perfect search engine, as Sergey and Larry imagine it, reads your mind and produces the answer you want. The perfect advertising engine does the same: it shows you the ads you want. Anything else wastes your attention, the advertiser’s money, and the world’s bandwidth.”

Almost every article about Google worries about the potential danger of someone having so much information about us. And yet, few seem concerned about how much power, information and control governments have over us. I’ll trust Larry and Sergey over any politician that has come along in my lifetime.

Robert Reich: The Truth About the Economy

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Robert Reich describes what’s wrong with the economy in 2 minutes.

  • The economy doubles since 1980, but wages flat. Where did the money go…
  • All (or most) of the gains went to the super rich.
  • With money comes political power.
  • Taxes on super rich slashed, revenues evaporate.

You might disagree with his economics and/or his politics, but the guy can DRAW!

What did we do before computers?

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It’s a question I silently ask myself from time to time, so I thought I’d try to reconstruct how I (and others) did my job when I first came to Learfield in 1984. (This photo was taken in 1985 and I’m including it with this post as a memory aid. Annotated version.)

It might be easier to to start with what we didn’t have. I’m going to say no computers even though there was a Lisa II (?) running VisiCalc. No fax machine. No mobile phones.

The bulk of my job was dealing with affiliate radio stations and there was only three ways to do that:

1. Call them on the phone
2. Send them a letter in the mail
3. Get in the car and go see them in person

Each week we would send stations a “log” showing which commercials would be airing in each of the news or farm programs we sent them via satellite. One of the secretaries had drawn a table (6 columns for M-Sa and 13 rows for the number of shows) using a ruler. This was copied (we had a copier) each week and the blank table was rolled into an IMB Selectric typewriter and the names of the sponsors typed in.

This had to be completed by Wednesday of each week in order to get them mailed and to the stations in time for their “traffic” person to insert those commercials into THEIR log for the coming week. And delay and the system fell apart.

The photo above reminds me I used a manual typewriter often enough to keep it close. The computer in the photos is a Zenith and I was the only person in the company with his own personal computer.

We also had a big IBM Displaywriter that allowed us to do mail-merge documents. Amazing tech for the time.

Next to my phone is a Rolodex with all of my contacts, each typed on the big Royal but continuously updated with scratch-throughs and margin notes. If you got fired, you wanted to have a copy of your Rolodex.

If –god forbid– we needed to get information to every network affiliate “fast,” someone had to call each station, one at at time.

One of the tools I relied upon most was my big map. You can’t see them but there is a pin showing the location of each radio station on the network. It was a thrill to add a new pin and agony to remove one.

Long before Google Docs, there was the bulletin board for all the important lists. (this was not portable)

Years later we got our first fax machines, even though most of our stations didn’t have them. We knew they would. Someone stood at the machine and keyed in the name and phone number of every radio station (or advertiser). When you wanted to blast a fax out to a “list,” you fed the document in and it called each number, transmitted the facsimile; printed a “receipt” and then called the next number on the list. It was wonderful. We didn’t have to wait 3 or 4 days for the USPS.

And it got better. As we got more computers and modems, programs like WinFax could do the job of a fax machine but with far less effort and with much greater speed. We could keep a station’s fax machine humming all day and all night, burning up expensive rolls of thermal paper. The term “spam” was years in the future.

Now we post information to our websites and stations download at their leisure. We communicate with them on Facebook and Twitter and all the rest. Email is instantaneous.

Will it get faster/better/easier still? Hard to imagine how but I assume it will

The End of Demographics

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In small market radio we were thrilled to have research that told us how many men listened to our station compared to how many women. And, of course, the demos: 12+, 18-24, 35-54… I think I missed one but that’s not the point. From 8 or 10 “diaries” in a county we were supposed to extrapolate useful information for out programmers and advertisers. Uh huh.

This article illustrates how much things are changing.

“The rise of mass-produced consumer goods also brought the rise of mass-market advertising. In the 1950s and 1960s, the goal of television was to aggregate the most possible eyeballs for advertisers. In order to convince consumers that an advertising message was relevant to them, consumers had to buy the idea that they were just like everyone else. The year that someone was born will not tell you how likely he is to buy your product.”

 

“Threads of advertising-sponsored content”

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“Advertising is becoming content, not message. Or, more specifically, the message is knit into the content.  Under that scenario there is no 30-second spot per se, there are simply threads of advertising-sponsored content.

Creating “content that people choose to watch (and share)” (and listen to) is the job of every company that calls itself “media.”  This goes to the heart of radio’s revenue model because it is clearly out of step with the direction of clients and their agencies.

This is why the structure of so much of radio is outdated.  We have sellers who move spots and programmers who mix music. What we need amongst these are content creators who match consumers with clients in the presence of our brands by bringing compelling ideas to life.”

— Mark Ramsey Media

Your business card a billboard for your brand

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“In my universe a powerful brand should be able to explain their mission in a single paragraph–the fewer words, the better. But what most brands forget is that their business card is indeed their ‘napkin,’ a blank canvas enabling them to communicate the essence of their brand (or fail to do so).

We live in a super-cluttered world where no one has time for anything. We’re bombarded with text messages, TV commercials, billboards and online ads, and so companies need to know what they stand for. It’s a fact that you cannot remember more than three television commercials in a row, let alone recall the design of your average business card unless they manage to rise above the cacophony and stand out in a way that’s completely relevant.”

—Fast Company

nd.

Are you living “a meaningful well-lived life?”

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Eudaimonia is a term the Greeks used to describe “a meaningfully well-lived life.” In this essay, Umair Haque wonders if the economy we have is providing this:

“Instead of an “energy industry,” I see a resource addiction that saps money and preserves self-destructive expectations. I see, instead of food and education “industries,” an obesity epidemic and a debt-driven education crisis. Instead of a pharmaceutical industry, I see a new set of mental and physical discontents, like rates of suspiciously normally “abnormal” mental illnesses and drugs whose lists of “side effects” are longer than the Magna Carta. Instead of a “media industry,” I see news that actually misinforms instead of enlightening — rusting the beams of democracy — and entertainment that merely titillates.”

But Mr. Haque thinks things are changing (and I hope he’s right):

“I believe the quantum leap from opulence to eudaimonia is going to be the biggest, most significant economic shift of the next decade, and perhaps beyond: of our lifetimes. We’re not just on the cusp of, but smack in the middle of nothing less than a series of revolutions, aimed squarely at the trembling status quo (financial, political, social): new values, mindsets, and behaviors, fundamentally redesigned political, social, economic, and financial institutions; nothing less than reweaving the warp and weft of not just the way we live—but why we live, work, and play.”

We just don’t know which half

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“Every advertising should be measurable. You should be able to adjust it, right? Then you should be able to tune it, track it, track the right users, and target to the right people.” – Susan Wojcicki, Google Ad Chief (from In the Plex by Steven Levy)

Mel Karmazin calls this “fucking with the magic.” And sixty years ago, it was magic.

The Two Bobs

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The Missouri Department of Transportation recently announced the closure of a number of offices around the state and the elimination of a bunch of jobs. Difficult times call for difficult decisions.

A few days ago I got a whif of how this is coming down, at least for some employees.

In at least one section, managers at a certain level and above were notified they will have to “reapply” for their current jobs. They’ll log in to a website and justify why they should keep the job they have had for years.

They’ll also have to identify some other jobs within the department that they’d be qualified for, in the event they don’t keep their current job.

Anyone who has ever done a stint in management sees what’s going on here. Someone up the food chain doesn’t have the authority (or balls) to decide who stays and who goes, and to tell them that, eye-to-eye.

“Yes, I know you did your job for 15 years and got great evaluations every year, but someone more qualified got your job. Sorry.”

Now I ask you, after going through this demeaning process, even if you get to keep your job, how do you feel about the people you work for?

Direct Mail Spam

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It bothers me –more than it should– that I can filter out most email spam but not the spam that hits my USPS mail box.

The envelope above contained a not-very-interesting offer from a local car dealer (Capitol Chrysler Jeep Dodge). I’m guessing the dealer knew it wasn’t very interesting because he designed the envelope to look like something official from the state DMV. He knew that if the recipient knew is was fr0m a car dealer, she would just toss it.

So, if the dealer is this dishonest in his marketing, why should I expect him to be any more trust-worthy in selling me a car?