More general posts about the world of marketing, advertising and sales.
Beware Substack. I received a newsletter today that I had never heard of, so I unsubscribed—to find that I had allegedly signed up to everything that the user publishes. Not bloody likely. This wasn’t a case of being on someone else’s Substack and accidentally clicking ‘Yes’ to other suggested newsletters. Normally there’d only […]
Read More… from Beware Substack—and TV3 makes terrible design and marketing decisions
Back in 1990, this was a missed opportunity to have a humorous tie-in between Abbey National and Jonathan Lynn’s film Nuns on the Run. Almost as good as the idea I had for Elizabeth Arden. You may also like Is your favourite 1980s’ celeb here? Carry on designing MG taps into BMC’s small-car […]
Does this still work? Amanda and I were checking out cars last weekend and a sales’ rep tried to interest us in one by saying it was the top selling in its segment in Australasia. My first (unvoiced) reaction to this is: there are a lot of stupid people out there. If you can imagine […]
Read More… from A product’s popularity is of no concern to me
Francis Saele posted a link to an article by Steve Carey in Inc. on his Linkedin, and I found it very worthwhile sharing, too—even if Inc.’s firewall comes down on you saying that you’ve exceeded your quota of free articles. (That quota appears to be zero for some of us. Fortunately there are always ways […]
Sadly, while these Autocade visitor numbers look rosy, Cloudflare does count bots, even if the bots go no further than notching up a “visit” on the system. No data are transferred to them. Fortunately, we have our page-view counter, and with every known “AI” bot blocked on our end, including a bunch that Cloudflare […]
Read More… from Switching things around: a post about bots written by a human
Bob Hoffman has his book, Inside the Black Box, available on his website as a free download. It’s a fascinating read about how online advertising is largely a con, with lots of ad fraud, made-for-advertising sites (MFAs), and opaqueness, he explains. Bob is critical about programmatic advertising (25 per cent of programmatic ad dollars are […]
Read More… from The frauds of online advertising, and blocking sign-up bots
After sitting on a panel to approve a bachelor’s programme for one polytechnic, I was dismayed to read right after that some of the courses were being cut. I alluded to a disinterest in learning about design in an earlier post, but I was put right by some young people who said their courses were […]
Read More… from The creative sector adds the most value, and we should be proud to say so
Having seen the number of results for Autocade drop on Mojeek—something which they said was unlikely—I thought it was about time I ran another series of site: tests, using our random cross-section. And I have to report that for some sites, the drop is real. I can’t speak for whether the others have actually removed […]
Read More… from Testing the occidental search engines with site:—Bing most improved
It is disturbing to think that design, which you’d instinctively think is an evergreen profession with constant demand, isn’t capturing young people the way it did for me. In New Zealand at least, educators are telling me there’s less demand for graphic design courses. If people are enrolling, they’re often in-house crews in big companies […]
Read More… from We need great design and brands—now more than ever
Again via Ben Daubney’s blog, which I found yesterday, a site called They See Your Photos, which uses Google’s Vision API to infer information about you. If you feed in a photo, the site provides Google’s output, and it is eerie what they are capable of “seeing”. However, the single photo’s output is not accurate, […]