Maybe it’s because the new Yankees regime is headed by the Boss, Part Deux. Or maybe they just seem softer now that Red Sox Nation has taken over the mantle of "Most Obnoxious Fans Alive." But for whatever reason, the Bronx Bombers trip from Tampa to Virginia Tech to play an exhibition game and visit the student memorials certainly feels like altruism and genuine caring, not a marketing stunt. Amongst all the hate and rhetoric being thrown around the political fields these days, it’s nice to read something like this ESPN.com article.
Category: Personal (Page 36 of 47)
It seems like the winter doldrums have ended, because suddenly the news is awash in one fascinating story after another. Just when I want to sit down and write my own dumb blog, something comes across my Google reader and I end up lost in other people’s work.
So here’s what got started and not completed last week:
- An analysis of the Sonics situation from 4 perspectives. Just the fact that Steve Ballmer can’t get any respect from the Wash Legislature tells you somethng about those folks in Olympia.
- Is Obama airing his own dirty laundry all at once in preparation to hit back at Hillary?
- The Spitzer debacle – If he’s Client No. 9, how freaked out are 1-8 right now?
- The Spitzer debacle part 2: I don’t quite understand how she is going to make $1 Million on this. Is it unfair to say that we, the gossip hungry American people, are the real whores here?
- Is there anything more perfect in the universe than the first two days of March Madness?
- Plus, tons of tech news, an exploding stock market, an investment firm getting a bail out loan, Yahoo merging with MSFT, and on and on and on and on.
I must focus. Will get something completed shortly.
Think about this. As long as Wyoming has been a state, it hasn’t mattered one iota what happened in their caucus. Heck, a caucus was simply a reason to get together in March and have a few beers and celebrate the coming spring.
It’s not a knock against them, it’s just nature. Being Wyoming, they couldn’t risk having a caucus in the middle of a January blizzard. And since barely anyone lives there, no candidates were coming to visit anyway. So they put some guy named "Joe" or "Steve" or "Sam" or something in charge of making sure ballots got printed. And Joe or Steve or Sam had to call a bunch of buddies, or just the same people from 4 years ago, and find a few houses willing to throw a few caucuses.
But not this year. All of a sudden, Wyoming’s 12 little delegates matter. And now you have a whole bunch of guys named Jack or Jim or something calling Joe saying, "Uh, I only have room in my living room for 12 people. On the latest evite, it says 237 people are coming…"
As my friend described it, it’s like being the kid in school who forgot about his science project, grabbed 5 leaves from outside and taped them to construction paper, only to find out everyone has to present in front of a live televised audience, and Hannah Montana and LeBron James are the judges.
Look at Texas, where the Democratic Party had weeks to see that there would be a huge turnout. Yet you have the biggest mess ever imagined, a caucus that people compared to a rodeo. You think those guys are the only ones who are going to be stuck with their pants caught in their lassos?
I mean, pretend you volunteered up to run your kid’s Little League tournament, and then 6 months later you find out the other teams will be from Iraq, Dubai, Pakistan, Iran, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia and the US teams will be coached by Brad Pitt, Bono, Rosie O’Donnel, David Duke and Louis Farrakhan. It’s not your fault. You aren’t prepared for this. It just is what it is.
So pity the poor guy running the Wyoming Caucus. And make sure you tune in.
Too loud to hear!
A few months ago I was at Blog World Expo in Las Vegas, and I was amazed at the cult icon status some of the influential bloggers had achieved. It was really quite cool to see these bloggers in person, and to see them interact with their readers.
So now we see the rise of a new web startup based on this phonomenon. You have your tech moguls like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. You have your giants without household name recognition like Larry Ellison, Sergei Brin and Jerry Yang. And then you have your web celebrities who are really only famous inside the Web 2.0 community. And darnit, these guys deserve press as well.
This is the theory behind Pop17.com a webcast dedicated to the semi-stars of Web land. So if you have your Andy Warhol 15 minutes of tech fame scorecard, you can now add the hosts and writers of this webcast to the list of semi-celebrities who all of us in this alternative world love. Please someone create, "The making of Pop17.com – Behind the Show."
If you are looking for a fun way to spend a Wednesday evening, and especially if you are a Washington alum, come on down to the Douglas Forum at UW for an event focused on Social Media. Here’s the Facebook link.
I’ll be lucky enough to moderate this great panel:
– Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz.org
– Gary Kamikawa, VP Mktg, Mpire.com
– Justin Marshall, Social Media Architect, Zaaz
– Jessica Michaels, Group Media Director, Wunderman
The event runs from 6:00 – 7:30pm and is free.
Ok, so it doesn’t *exactly* say that, but here are a few bullets from a study commissioned by Media agency Starcom USA, behavioral targeting network Tacoda, and digital consumer insight company comScore.
- A very small group of consumers who are not representative of the total U.S. online population is accountable for the vast majority of display ad click-through behavior.
- Heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks.
- Heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000 and are more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites.
- We can’t count on click-through rate as our primary success metric for display ads; Starcom is more reliant on shifts in brand attitude metrics and analytics tying on-line exposure to sales as the true measures of online advertising efficacy.
- While the click can continue to be a relevant metric for direct response advertising campaigns, this study demonstrates that click performance is the wrong measure for the effectiveness of brand-building campaigns.
- For many campaigns, the branding effect of the ads is what’s really important and generating clicks is more of an ancillary benefit. Ultimately, judging a campaign’s effectiveness by clicks can be detrimental because it overlooks the importance of branding while simultaneously drawing conclusions from a sub-set of people who may not be representative of the target audience.
So, why am I writing about this? Well, reports like this are not written for fun. No one just says, "I wonder what a haevy clicker looks like." There was a purpose for this report, and it’s goal is to obvious lay the groundwork for explaining to marketers that they shouldn’t be spooked by the fact that no one clicks on ads anymore. Here is an ad network simply building a research report so that their sales guys have an answer for the question of, "Why are my clickthroughs so low?" Now they can say, "Well you don’t need clicks. In fact, clicks are bad. You want the impressions, so let’s do some more CPM deals!"
Now, this of course flies directly in the face of logic. "But look – we have a real research paper saying clicks don’t matter!"
It’s a funny report when yout think about it. When Internet advertising got started, accountability was touted as one of its strengths. Now that ads don’t get clicked on, they want to throw accountability out of the equation. Moral of the story – take everything you hear in advertising and marketing with a big grain of salt….
Something must have been in the air this weekend. Because as Barack Obama was sweeping through the caucuses, two UW MBA Teams were busy shouting "Yes We Can" as well.
Down in California, the UW VCIC Team brought pride back to the program with a win in the Regional Championship. The team now preps for the International Competition in Chapel Hill, NC. The UW has won this event twice, back in 2004 and of course in the "dynasty" year of 2006 🙂
A mere 3000 miles away in Winston-Salem, NC, the UW won the Wake Forest Marketing Case Competition. This was the first win for the school, after a 2nd place finish in 2006 and 3rd place in 2007.
Aside from the pride and satisfaction these wins bring, the students also win cash, so now’s the time to hit them up for the bar tab. But more importantly, what is now a 5th year of success in VCIC and a 3rd year at Wake Forest, proves to be real proof that a foundation for success has been effectively laid. These aren’t "flash in the pan" single wins. The school is now establishing constant success at these regional and national events. And that is something the faculty, alumni, the Seattle community and current students can really take joint credit in.
Congratulations, all.
In the very early days of PC Casual games, you had to buy everything you wanted to try. But once the internet hit, and you could try out demo versions of the games for free, the market absolutely exploded.
Well, I think we’ve finally reached that moment in Mobile Games, thanks to our friends at Movaya. Here is their latest release:
The Movaya team is excited to announce the beta release of Movaya TryNBuy: the first off-deck, cross-carrier try-before-you-buy system for mobile game sales in the US.
Movaya TryNBuy is a patent pending licensing system that allows consumers to download games over-the-air to their mobile devices and try games on their handset. Upon purchase, the games are unlocked.
Try-before-you-buy was a major driver in the huge growth of casual games on the desktop and now Movaya is bringing this to the mobile marketplace.
Movaya TryNBuy is configurable on multiple levels including length of play, and number of plays.
Movaya TryNBuy is now available online at www.bustedthumbs.com and will be rolled out to Movaya’s publisher and merchant network over the coming weeks.
To get more information on Movaya TryNBuy, please visit our website.
So, I would love to go into detail about the NFL Experience, a giant travelling tradeshow attached to Super Bowl 42. And so I slogged out the 30 miles to God forsaken Glendale to file a report at 1:00pm on Friday.
However, much to my chagrin, the NFL didn’t have an experience for the public from 1:00 to 3:00pm. During those hour, it’s only experience is for season ticket holders and special guests. Since I had already burned a half day and $10 in parking, I gamely decided to see what else the NFL had for me.
Unfortunately, the only experience I was allowed, was Westgate Center.
Now I need to properly frame Glendale Stadium. And I think the best way to do this is to weave in a popular conspiracy theory. You see, 10 years ago there was this giant expanse of desert wasteland far west of Phoenix. The conspiracy theory is that a bunch of rich guys bought up this worthless property. Then, for some unexplained reason, a highway was built through this wasteland, a giant loop that ran around Phoenix, from I-10, all the way around the city and back to I-10 on the other side. Shortly thereafter, legislators decided all this open land with this convenient highway would be an ideal place for a new sports stadium. And since the stadium was so far removed from ANYTHING, the natural solution was to build a hockey arena as well, and build up the property around the stadium with hotels, bars, restaurants, condos and shops.So if you google Glendale, what you will see is 2 huge stadiums, a shopping mall, and then acres of empty land in all directions. Desert wasteland which is now worth a fortune.
But I digress.
Now I’m out amongst the cacti and my only option is to go hang out by the shopping mall and hope for the best. To be fair, Westgate is pretty cool if you are looking for a place to grab food and drink before a game. All the standard chain bars are there (Margaritaville, Bar Louie, Fox Sports, etc….)
But this really re-iterated the point that at Super Bowl Weekend, you need VIP or Insider Status if you want to do anything cool. Sure, they have parkinglot exhibits and stuff liek that, but without any kind of priority access, you are really getting about 10% of the total experience. That’s not a lament or complaint, just a realization. And now that I think about it, I kind of remember things like the NBA and MLB All-Star Game being the same way (but I had the access then, so I didn’t care…)
So, no great report from NFL Experience. I heard secondhand stories that it was crowded, there was no food and the exhibits were so so. So, i probably lucked out.