Andy Boyer

Author: Andy Boyer

  • Site to Avoid

    It makes me sick when companies are so successful at being sleezy, that they can afford to advertise in Google Mail, and have a high enough conversion rate that the venture is profitable.

    I hesitate to give the url, of my latest nnoyance, because they are probably good enough marketers that they’ll receive a ping and then launch some kid of attack on me.  So, here it is, but you can’t cllick on it.  http://your fortune revealed [dot].com.  You have to actually copy and paste this in and remove the spaces. 

    These guys are pretty high on the scumbag meter.  Unsuspecting people will enter their cell phone number and start getting texts, which they will start paying for if they aren’t careful and take action.

    I click on a lot of links in Google Mail to see what works from a marketing perspective.  Frankly, Gmail is starting to take on a more Hotmail-like feel with the continual ads for shady thing like this.  It’s too bad that Gmail doesn’t have some sort of "customer filter" where we could choose to block ads from disreputable companies.  Or, if a company gets enough block requests, their CPC should rise.   Ad based email programs work if the ads are unobtrusive, or even better, relevant.  When they are scams, they just turn people to other email programs.

    Rant over, I hope this campaign fails.  I for one, will click on the ad every time I see it, so they pay the $.25 over and over again but never get a conversion. 

  • The Latest Time Killer

    I’ve been doing a lot of blog surfing lately, looking for political sites that should be linking to MyElectionChoices.com (tip: you all should).

    One of the political sites I ran across derailed me for the better part of an hour with a referral to this addicting little game: Desktop Tower Defense.

    My top score is in the 1300 range, around level 28.  Those damn black things start going nuts around level 25, then the flying thingys start bringing down the house.  Definitely worth checking out. 

  • Everyone who has ever complained about an NBA ref…..may be right

    So, it turns out that a few million NBA fans may have been right all along.  All of the compaining about NBA officials making ridiculous foul calls to affect a game, might be actually true.

    http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=2943095

    So, how big a deal is this? I think the most important question is, "Is there only one ref involved?" It seems impossible that one guy could bemixed up in this, doesn’t it?  And it seems further unlikely that the mob launched this idea in 2006. There’s a real possibility that this goes back 10-20 years, with 1-10 refs per year.  I mean, why not?

    And how does the NBA address Mark Cuban now?   If this guy did any important games that the Mavericks were involved with, Cuban has every right to be suspicious.

    Bottom line – the technology is around now where millions of fans are a more reliable barometer of whether a player or ref is doing his job well.  The fans may need to have a bigger play inhow we police these things. 

  • Idea for Soccer on US TV

    So this is unrelated to anything.  But here’s a thought about televising Major League Soccer games.

    Problem: The most common complaint about soccer is that there’s not enough scoring.  But if you do something goofy to change the rules, then no legitimate player will come (or stay) here.

    Solution: Well, if there are 12 teams, why not have a set schedule so all 6 games occur simultaneously.  Say every Thursday and Sunday.  Now, on your TV broadcast, you have a regional game, and live look-ins on the other 5.  So lets say thare’s an average of 2 goals per game in the MLS (I have no idea what the real number is).  That’s 12 goals in 90 minutes, or every 7-8 minutes.  I think that would be stimulating enough.

    You have to fix the schedule so that the start times make sense for home fans.  Maybe each week one set of home fans would get an inconvenient start time, but Monday Night Football games end after midnight, so that doesn’t seem to be a deal-breaker.

    Thoughts? 

     

  • Viral Spiraling Out of Control

    How much of this campaign will be about issues, and how many people will be voting based on who has better supporters making YouTube videos?  Check out this CNN story about Hott4Hillary.

  • Politics 2.0

    So, Hillary Clinton received much press and fanfare for allowing her supporters to nominate what should be her campaign song.  The theme of that seemed to be, "Hillary really connects with her supporters."

    So then what do you say about Mike Gravel, a much smaller budgeted candidate who is really using User Generated Content as a way to get his marketing materials produced.  From his MySpace blast:

    Please send your Gravel 2008 Flyers, Banners, and Graphics to [email protected]. We will be posting the best ones on the main website for others to use. Please feel free to be as creative as you’d like. Thanks to all of you for your support!

    Maybe the Internet can equal the playing field a little.
     

  • Launch of MyElectionChoices.com

    MyElectionChoices.com%20logo.gifAfter a few weeks of tinkering, we’ve launched the 1.0 version of MyElectionChoices.com.  The site will continue to evolve, but in its current form, visitors get to choose topics they care about in regards to the 2008 Presidential Election, then select positions they agree with from various candidates. 

    At the end of answering a few topics, visitors then find out which Presidential Candidates they share political views with.  Since we have statements from 17 candidates, there’s bound to be a couple people that you’ve never heard of.

    There are still plenty of improvements to be made, but give it a whirl and let me know what you think.  There’s a Groups option at the end to make it easy to invite others and compare how certain groups compare aggregately to National Averages.  And there’s a survey at the end as well that will help us shape the constant revisions.

  • Feeding America’s Forgotten People

    I’m on the East Coast this week visiting relatives and friends, and doing a little work along the way.  Watching all the July 4th fireworks makes it easy to think about who the "Average American" is. 

    Now, in the tech world, it’s easy to forget that the Average American does not have a 130 IQ and make $100k a year.  In fact, most of the young admins and marketing coordinators in these places probably don’t even map to the needs and wants of the "Average American." 

    I took a bunch of trains and subways this week, seeing people, and recalibrating my own view of who this Avg American is.  You see a lot of tourists, janitors, cab drivers, and unemployed folks in inner city neighborhoods if you walk a few streets from most train stations and subway stops.

    But then today I helped my Aunt deliver lunch to 12 houses, since she is a Meals on Wheels volunteer.  These really are the people you forget about, for the simple reason that you have no way to ever see them.

    I didn’t know what to expect as I walked to the front door of recipient #1, who my little card said was a 85 year old with a bad heart.  His door was unlocked and he gratefully commanded me to come in his house and set the lunch next to him.  The TV was on, and the house showed signs of a residence that doesn’t get cleaned very often.  And he was genuinely gracious in his thanks for the meal.  

    Other stops during teh day switched between being more or less depressing.  There was a 50ish gentleman who easily weighed 500+ pounds, and I was left to speculate why his mattress and box spring was in his living room.  There was the 70 year old with Parkinsons who seemed physically well-off, but showed the signs of mental struggles, and I tried to figure out why there was a bath tub in his hallway.  Two people failed to answer the door, and I stood with feelings of paranoia and dread that someone was laying on the other side of the door calling for help, but I could not hear.

    The whole trip took a couple of hours, and obviously jarred my brain enough that I decided to use space in a marketing and technology blog to discuss it.  So, I guess to attach it to the overall theme, I should say that when we think of who "The Average American" is, we need to make sure we calibrate the scale to keep in mind the people we never see – the poor, the sick, the homebound, the old, the people in mental institutions and the rest of those tucked away in corners of the city where we don’t go.  This "average" person is not a cell phone toting, broadband user sporting an ipod and ripping mp3’s from TorrentBox.

    And in case you have 2 hours a month which you are looking to fill up with something rewarding and thought provoking, here’s a link to Meals on Wheels.

  • Inspiration from an Unlikely Millionaire

    If you had an Internet connection at work in 2000 or 2001, one of your colleagues forwarded you a link to HotorNot.com.  You played with it for somewhere between 5 minutes and 8 hours, helplessly clicking on the neverending stream of pictures of people who wanted you to judge how good looking they were.

    About 1% of this crowd probably wondered if the founders were making any money, or if they simply launched the site for fun.  Well it turns out they were making GOBS of money.  Giant trucks were backing up and dumping bars of platinum into their backyard.  In a nutshell, it proved that a simple idea, at the right time, with the right people, was infinitely more powerful, satisfying and worthwile than simply attending weekly staff meetings.

    Well, if you read techCrunch you probably already wandered over to this blog post from the CEO of HotorNot. If you have ever considered running off and starting your own idea, here are some wise words to help get you moving in that direction.

  • Supreme Court Ends 96-Year-Old Ban on Price Floors

    I haven’t seen too much of this floating around the blogosphere yet, and maybe it’s my paranoia kicking in, but this morning’s Supreme Court ruling piques my curiosity.

    From the New York Times: The Supreme Court on Thursday abandoned a 96-year-old ban on manufacturers and retailers setting price floors for products.  In a 5-4 decision, the court said that agreements on minimum prices are legal if they promote competition.  The ruling means that accusations of minimum pricing pacts will be evaluated case by case.  The Supreme Court declared in 1911 that minimum pricing agreements violate federal antitrust law.  Supporters said that allowing minimum price floors would hurt upstart discounters and Internet resellers seeking to offer new, cheaper ways to distribute products.

    So, why is this interesting to the Internet and Ecommerce world?

    What’s unclear from the article is how far the price floor extends.  Let’s use Harry Potter books as an example.  Even though the franchise sells more books than anything else being published, retailers actually don’t make that much profit on the sales.  Thanks to major chains like Wal-Mart and Amazon selling the book at discount as a way to get people into their stores, the retail price hovers below other books. 

    But now it seems that the Harry Potter Publisher could set a minimum price if it wanted, effectively stopping Amazon from pricing below the competition.

    This has further reaching effects if you start taking into account all the Amazon Associates and Ebay sellers out there.  These companies have done a great job creating as close to a free market economy as you can get.  Now, the law looks like it’s going to allow the stifling of that free market, putting the power back into the hands of producers, who can now decide the prices before they even reach the market.  And I don’t have any idea how this affects the secondary market for items.

    Another example is a widget system like Mpire.com whose whole reason for being is to help consumers find the lowest prices on items being sold on the web.  Well, if this "lowest" price is being set by the manufacturer, how does any small discount retailer make any noise to grab a customer?

    Unless I’m reading into this wrong, this appears to be a strike at Internet Ecommerce.  Manufacturers don’t like when there is little surplus in their supply and demand graph, and have now artificially manipulated the system to get that surplus back.  I’m sure there will be more to come on this.