People are waking up to the fact that online advertising isnāt what itās cracked up to be.
Last month, Bob Hoffmanās excellent The Ad Contrariannewsletter noted, āI believe the marketing industry has pissed away hundreds of billions of dollars on digital fairy tales and ad fraud over the past 10 years (in fact, Iām writing a book about it.) If I am right, and if the article in question is correct, we are in the midst of a business delusion unmatched in all of history.ā He linked to an article by Jesse Frederik and Mauritz Martin (also sent to me by another colleague), entitled āThe new dot com bubble is here: itās called online advertisingā in The Correspondent. In it, they cast doubt over the effectiveness of online ads, hidden behind buzzwords and the selection effect. If I understand the latter correctly, it means that people who are already predisposed to your offering are more likely to click on your ads, so the ads arenāt actually netting you new audiences.
Hereās the example Frederik and Martin give:
Picture this. Luigiās Pizzeria hires three teenagers to hand out coupons to passersby. After a few weeks of flyering, one of the three turns out to be a marketing genius. Customers keep showing up with coupons distributed by this particular kid. The other two canāt make any sense of it: how does he do it? When they ask him, he explains: āI stand in the waiting area of the pizzeria.ā
The summary is that despite these companies claiming thereās a correlation between advertising with them and some result, the truth is that no one actually knows.
And the con is being perpetuated by the biggest names in the business.
As Hoffman noted at the end of October:
A few decades ago the advertising industry decided they couldn’t trust the numbers they were being given by media. The result was the rise of third-party research, ratings, and auditing organizations.
But there are still a few companies that refuse to allow independent, third-party auditing of their numbers.
No surprises there. Iāve already talked about Facebookās audience estimates having no relationship with the actual population, so we know they’re bogus.
And, I imagine, they partly get away with it because of their scale. One result of the American economic orthodoxy these days is that monopolies are welcomeāitās the neoliberal school of thinking. Now, I went through law school being taught the Commerce Act 1986 and the Trade Practices Act 1974 over in Australia, and some US antitrust legislation. I was given all the economic arguments on why monopolies are bad, including the starvation of innovation in their sector.
Roger McNamee put me right there in Zucked, essentially informing me that what I learned isnāt current practice in the US. And that is worrisome at the least.
It does mean, in places like Europe which havenāt bought into this model, and who still have balls (as well as evidence), theyāre happy to go after Google over their monopoly. And since our anti-monopoly legislation is still intact, and one hopes that we donāt suddenly change tack (since I know the Commerce Act is under review), we should fight those monopoly effects that Big Tech has in our country.
What happens to monopolies? Well, if past behaviour is any indication, they can get broken up. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is simply recounting American history when she suggests that thatās what Facebook, Google and Amazon should endure. There was a time when Republicans and Democrats would have been united on this prospect, given the trusts that gave rise to their Sherman Act in 1890, protecting the public from market failures like these. Even a generation ago, theyād never have allowed companies to get this influential.
Also a generation ago, we wouldnāt swallow the BS an advertising platform gave us without something to back it up. Right now, it seems we donāt have anythingāand the industry is beginning to cry foul.
Like many, I headed to the Kilbirnie mosque to pay my respects several times after March 15, but I would like the events of that day to be remembered beyond those that. I want our Muslim whÄnau here to know that I haven’t forgotten them, and here is my way of showing that.
Forty-three years ago (September 16, 1976), we arrived in this country.
As we flew from Sydney and into Wellington, my Dad pointed out the houses below to me. āSee, those are the sorts of houses New Zealanders live in,ā he said. I thought it was odd they lived in two-storey homes and not apartment blocks. I was three at the time, so I had no clue about the population density of Aotearoa.
I frequently point out just how cloudy and grey that day was. I donāt remember a summer of ā76āā77, just as no one here remembers a summer of ā16āā17. Only one other car, a Holden station wagon, went along Calabar Road in the opposite direction as we left Wellington Airport.
Before we departed Hong Kong days earlier, my maternal grandmotherāthe person closest to me at that point and whom I would desperately miss for the next 18 monthsāgave me two very special Corgi models at the airport, large 1:36 scale Mercedes-Benz 240Ds. I said goodbye to her expecting to see her in weeks.
As I was put to bed that night by my fatherāit wasnāt usually his roleāhe asked if I wanted to see the cars, since I had been so good on the flights. He got them out and showed me, and I was allowed to have a quick look before they were put back into his carry-on bag.
None of us knew this was the trip where weād wind up in Aotearoa. Mum had appliedāI went with her to the New Zealand High Commission in Connaught Tower in Hong Kong to get the formsābut we had green cards to head to Tennessee. But, my mother, ever careful, didnāt want to put all her eggs into one basket. And like a lot of Hong Kongers at the time, they had no desire to hang around till 1997 and find themselves under communist rule.
It was a decision that would change our lives.
Whilst here, word got back homeāand then out to usāthat New Zealand immigration had approved our application. In the days when air travel cost a fortune, my parents considered our presence here serendipitous and decided to stay. What point was there to fly back if oneās only task was to pack?
Itās hard not to reminisce on this anniversary, and consider this family with their lives ahead of them.
Iāve had it good. Mum never wanted me to suffer as she had during the famine behind the Bamboo Curtain, and to many in the mid-1970s, getting to the Anglosphere was a dead cert to having a better life.
I had a great education, built a career and a reputation, and met my partner here, so I canāt complain. And I couldnāt have asked for more love and support than I had from my immediate family.
My grandmother eventually joined us under the family reunion policy in 1978. My mother and I were her only living descendants.
Despite the happiness, you donāt think, on that night in 1976, that in 18 years my mother would die from cancer and that my widowed father, at 80, would develop Alzheimerās disease, something of which there is no record in the family.
Despite both parents having to make the decision to send a parent to a rest home, when it came time for me to do the same thingāand it was the right decision given the care Dad neededāit was very tough.
A friend asked me how I felt, and I said I felt like āthe meanest c*** on earth,ā even though I knew I would have made the same decision regardless of other factors as his disease progressed.
Immigrant families stick together because we often have the sense of āus versus the worldā. When Racist ā80s Man tells you to go back to where you came from, itās not an experience you can easily share with others who arenāt immigrants and people of colour. So as our numbers diminishedāmy grandmother in 1990 and my mother in 1994āit was Dad and me versus the world, and that was how we saw things for the decades that followed.
That first night he went to live in a home was the same night I flashed back to the evening of September 16, 1976āand how impossibly hard it would have been to foresee how things would turn out.
Heās since changed homes twice and found himself in excellent care at Te Hopai, though he now needs to be fed and doesnāt detect as much to his right. The lights are going out.
Itās a far cry from being the strong one looking after your three-year-old son and making sure he could fall asleep in this new country, where things were in such a state of flux.
One mayoral candidate recently asked me for my advice. I wonāt name who it is, since I want those who contact me to know Iāll keep their communications in confidence.
Now, the first thing to do is to get a time machine and ask me the same question 18 months earlier.
But I can only provide tips for coming third in Wellington:
ā¢ have forward-thinking policies;
ā¢ appeal to thinking voters of all ages;
ā¢ resonate with younger voters who are most affected by them;
ā¢ frighten the establishment with common sense.
I canāt advise how to win since I didnāt. Presumably it is to do the opposite of my approach?
ā¢ Use rose-coloured glasses;
ā¢ appeal to non-thinking voters of all ages;
ā¢ resonate with older voters more likely to vote;
ā¢ suck up to the establishment.
This is with the greatest respect to many previous winners, who actually didnāt do all these things. But they make for a couple of fun Tweets.
I repeat the call to administer the Voigt-Kampff test to all candidates.
I had a call from a nice gentleman working for Google called Shabhaz today. No, he wasnāt about to tell me that I wasnāt on the āfirst page of Googleā: he worked for Google My Business, where they want to verify businesses and suck them into the ecosystem, complete with dashboard and social features.
Iāve always ignored the postcards that come and the one time my curiosity was piqued, the blasted site didnāt work anyway. I canāt remember the specifics now, but I recall my usual reaction: āWhat Google says and what Google does are entirely different things.ā You come to expect it from US Big Tech.
I suppose if you ignore it for enough years, the Big G phones you.
I proceeded to tell Shabhaz all the reasons I hated (actually, thatās not strong enough a word) his firm, but kept repeating, āIām not angry at you, only at your employer.ā And words to the effect of, āA man has to make a living, so I donāt have a problem that you work for them, but this is a firm with highly dubious ethics.ā
He did say, āIf I had that experience, Iād hate them, too,ā and I had to correct him and expand on the stories: āItās not just about my experienceāitās all the things Google does that violate our privacy, not just mine, but everyoneās.ā
Nevertheless, you canāt stay angry at a guy who has had nothing to do with his bossesā incompetence, greed, avarice and tax avoidance, and is only trying to collect a pay cheque, so I agreed to help him out.
Of course, it didnāt work as planned, as updating the address leads to this:
The house has only been there since 1972, and Google Earth has it, but then we all know that Google Earth operates in some kind of parallel universeāparallel to even Google My Business, it seems. One day, I suspect Google will catch up with houses built in the 1970s.
But seriously, with three businesses all linked to my email address (Heaven knows how) I wonder if anyone has ever got any business through Google My Business.
Iāve been on Linkedin longer than most people I know and Iāve never received any work enquiries from it.
And Iāve yet to have anyone tell me that they found my business through Google, so Iām tempted to delete the listings for Jack Yan & Associates and Lucire from the My Business dashboard.
The thing is, I donāt want to read your reviews about my businesses on Google. I donāt want to risk getting piled on by unethical actors, which totally can happen in this day and age. If you want to reach us, thereās a good contact form with all the addresses on our sites.
So whatās the prognosis out there? Since I actually donāt use the site except as a last resort, and have little desire to, your experience far outweighs mine.
On a related note, this also made me wonder about competence.
Iāve never given my permission to be in the Yellow Pages. And the fact that Lucire does screen printing is news to me. Who makes up this bullshit and tries to pass it off as authoritative?
A Tweet to them is so far unanswered, so I may get in touch with them to have this listing removed. This one I can answer: since Iāve never been in the Yellow Pages, I can say, hand on heart, that Iāve never had any business from them. By the looks of it, theyāll never send me anything relevant anyway.
In summary, today’s thought about Google:
With any other business that screws people over this badly and this often, weād avoid it as much as we could. Instead, most go to Google, pull their trousers down, and bend over.
I didn’t read this thinking of Trump, which is what the Tweeter intended. I read it thinking of New Zealand. Heard the ‘If you don’t like it here, why don’t you leave?’ bullshit a lotāI dare say every immigrant to this nation has. English-born American columnist Sydney J. Harris, in 1969, answered it better than I ever could. (I hope the image appears in the embed below, since I see no img tagsāit seems reliant on Javascript.) Presumably this is either the Chicago Daily News or the SunāTimes.
Someone kept an American newspaper from 50 years ago for its historic #MoonLanding coverage. This opinion piece was in it.
Is it just me, or are companies getting more stupid by the day?
July 25, 2019
Marshall Freeman Collections (NZ) Ltd.
PO Box 302-218
NHPC
Auckland
Ladies and Gentlemen:
I am in receipt of your letter dated the 19th inst.
If you are indeed an extension of Plumbquickās credit control department, you should check with them about their procedures.
You may wish to ask the following.
(a) When booking the job, did your client take down my credit card number?
(b) Did your client advise me that if the invoice was not paid that they would charge that credit card?
(c) Did I offer your clientās plumbers payment on completion of the job on the day but they said it would be sorted out with their accountsā department, especially if they already had my credit card on file?
(d) Did your client send out their invoice dated May 21, 2019 with a due date of May 21, 2019, which would result in my reasonably expecting that (b) would take place?
Now, since I am not in possession of a time machine, and considering I received the invoice on May 25, 2019, all four questions above should be answered in the affirmative.
Your client needs to be advised to, first, contact the customer themselves (well before July 19, incidentally), secondly, follow their own procedures, and thirdly, not provide a credit controller with a fiction about a late payment. I have no desire to affect excellent credit that I have spent decades building because of another partyās negligence.
I trust this clears this matter up.
Yours faithfully,
In case you’re wondering, my credit card has been charged.
I also highly recommend Bernie and Pipe Dream Plumbing in Tawa.
Iāve found some forum entries about this, but they date back to the beginning of the decade. I alerted Jetstar to this in March, and the problem has worsened since then.
Basically, I canāt book online, and I donāt know why. Consequently, I booked one flight with Air New Zealand and only managed, after huge effort, to get the other (for a colleague) with Jetstar.
Back in March, I couldnāt book with Vivaldi, but I was able to switch to Firefox. I let Jetstar know.
Now, this strategy does not work.
Before you suggest it, cookies and caches have been cleared.
Hereās what happens after Iāve selected the cities and the dates, and I go to select times. Letās begin with Vivaldi on Windows, which is based on Chromium (which, as we know, is what Chrome, the browser Jetstar suggests you use, is based on):
Switching to Firefox now results in this:
Switching to Edge on the same PC gives this:
Fortunately, I also own Macs, so hereās what Firefox for Mac returns:
The only browser that works with the Jetstar website: Safari on Mac. As I’ve sold my Ubuntu laptop, I was unable to test using that OS.
Not many people would go to that effort, and while Jetstarās Twitter staff (after some pushing from me in DMs) said they would refer it on, I donāt expect anything to happen. Maybe Chrome would work, but Iām not ever going to download it to find out. Why invite Google on to your computer? But if that is the case, it seems foolish to limit yourself to such an invasive browser. My experience is that whatever is blocking me from booking with Jetstar (some may argue that this is a good thing), it is expanding across browsers.
An email sent by me on March 27 to the head office of Lumino (the dentists). Link added for readers’ reference. I’ll let you make up your own minds.
Hi Josephine:
How are you?
I hate to bother you once more, as you had done everything you could to resolve the privacy issues I had with Goody’s subcontractor, Global Payments, last year. I was very happy with your professionalism and your actions. I am pleased to see Lumino has since gone with another provider for its loyalty programme.
I regret having to lean on you again.
As you know, I found it very uneasy that I allowed Lumino to have my private cellphone number and last year I made repeated requests to the Terrace branch to not contact me through it any more. I was given assurances that it would not happen again.
I had a hygienist appointment on November 16, which I cancelled via email due to the ‘flu. I was advised that there would be an opening in March 2019, but by this point I already had in mind I would switch dentists, as each Lumino dentist I was assigned to wound up leaving the practice. Therefore, I never replied.
On November 29, I was sent a reminder that I could book in if I clicked a link in the email. I never did.
Imagine my surprise when this week I received an SMS from Lumino accusing me of missing an appointment (that I had never made) and that there I could be charged for it.
This was the first I had ever heard of a March appointment. Back in November, Lumino would send email reminders (for the real appointments) so I really doubt there was anything booked.
It was rudely worded, in my opinion, presuming the customer to be wrong.
Call me intolerant, overly sensitive, or out of touch with modern communication techniques, but it seems the Terrace branch is incapable of following a basic request and now, it has concocted a missed appointment out of thin air.
Besides, I was not even in Wellington on the date concerned, so there was no way I would have made an appointment for it.
After hours spent on the 2018 privacy breach, fielding those scam calls that came [redacted as it’s something I believe to be true but cannot fully back it up without a few affidavits], receiving cellphone calls from Lumino waking me after four hours’ sleep, and getting tired of making the same request at branch level, I have to draw my relationship with Lumino to a close.
Going to the dentist or the hygienist shouldn’t be this hard, but with Lumino on the Terrace, it’s continually stressful.
I wonder if you could arrange to have my records transferred to Real Dentistry, 62 Rongotai Road, Kilbirnie, Wellington, then delete my details from your database. I have asked Real Dentistry to request my records from Lumino on the Terrace.
Thank you,
Yours truly,
Jack
I never got a reply this time, but I think we know what Lumino thinks of all of this as of today. Note: I contacted Josephine from a different email address, so they do have that to counter me with. Still, I thought I was pretty clear above.
I’ve also not received a reply from Heineken. Might have to get the Privacy Commissioner involved in this one, too.
I know most of you won’t care, since people haven’t abandoned Facebook en masse, and Google remains the most frequented site on the web. But I honestly thought New Zealand firms were better than this.
The new metric system: I’m following the car in front at the correct distance. Cf. the drivers in the other lanes.
Now that I live in the northern suburbs, I have to go on the motorway far more frequently. Itās become apparent that New Zealand has had a complete change of measurement system and I was unaware of it.
I thought we were on the metric system but apparently, there is a new metric system at play these days.
When the āsmartā motorway speed limit signs display 60 km/h, a handful of drivers, like me, go at the old 60 km/h. But there is evidently a new 60 km/h, which we oldies called ā80 km/hā. If the other drivers are not breaking the law, the majority of cars in this country appear to have had speedometers newly calibrated to the new metric system. When the sign says 80 km/h, they will travel at between 90 and 100 km/h. It doesnāt quite explain why, when the sign says 100 km/h, so many drive at 90 km/h, but thatās the incredible nature of the new metric system: unlike the old, itās not proportional.
Iām not entirely sure how the system converts metres or seconds, as I seem to do double the following distance of the majority of drivers. From memory, itās 40 m at 100 km/h, or, if you want to adopt the 1970s slogan from the UK, or the one uttered by the late Peter Brock, āOnly a fool breaks the two-second rule.ā The new metric system at play in New Zealand means that the new 40 m is the same as what we old-timers called 20 m. Or, if theyāre going by the clock, two seconds is what we used to call one second. I assume this new metric system also applies to penis length for men, so they arenāt too disappointed when their 7Ā½ cm is now called 15 cm. Sounds so much bigger, doesnāt it, lads?
Now, I could be wrong about there being a new metric system in this country. Itās simply that many people donāt understand speed and distance, or how road signs work. If you are male and think that 20 m really is 40 m, then maybe you have a small dick and have been convincing yourself otherwise, and the problem is multiplied on the roads. Sadly, however, this lack of awareness of time and distance isnāt exclusively a male thing.
As a nation, weāve been so busy for such a long time blaming āAsian driversā that our standards have dropped like stones. It wasnāt that long ago when we Wellingtonians mocked Aucklanders for their āMerge like a zipā signs in the mid-2000sāyet it seems an increasing number of us in the capital are now just as clueless on how traffic merges into a single lane.
All this makes you wonder if Greg Murphy was right when he suggested we should re-sit our driving test every 10 years.
