Online advertising dollars: Google’s cut from your work is 40 per cent

From Bob Hoffman’s The Ad Contrarian newsletter of May 24: ‘two weeks ago a study by the ISBA and PcW that reported that half of every “programmatic” ad dollar is scraped by adtech middlemen’ and ‘According to a paper written by Fiona Scott Morton, an economist at Yale University, Google pockets about 40¢ of every […]

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The end of the cellphone?

Motorola This is a take that will probably never come true, but hear me out: this is the end of the cellphone era.    We’ve had a pandemic where people were forced to be at home. Whilst there, they’ve discovered that they can be productive on their home desktop machines, doing Zoom and Skype meetings, […]

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Google isn’t working

I’ve done several Zoom meetings since the pandemic was declared, and two Google Hangouts. While I’m not thrilled at having to use two companies with patchy (to say the least) records on user privacy, the meetings (three for Medinge, one for another board I sit on) have been productive, and the only bottleneck has been, […]

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Saddened to see colleagues lose their jobs as we bid, ‘Auf wiedersehen, Heinrich Bauer Verlag’

I am privy to some of the inner workings at Bauer Media through friends and colleagues, but I didn’t expect them to shut up shop in New Zealand, effective April 2.    Depending on your politics, you’re in one of two camps.    TV3, itself part of a foreign company who has made serious cutbacks […]

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Is there a type that works from home more easily?

Olivia St Redfern has featured yours truly in her lockdown day 2, part 1 podcast, so I decided to record another response.    It brings to mind something Steve McQueen once said. ‘I’m not an actor. I’m a reactor.’ As in, he could react to a line from another actor.    Anyone who has seen […]

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Cellphone? What cellphone?

It’s true. I spent time on business development, answering emails, doing tech stuff on our sites, and generally kept on top of things. I often wonder if I would have become an active Facebooker or Tweeter had they been invented and come into my orbit in, say, 2002. We all may have been too busy […]

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Thumbs-up for Thomas and Professional Painting & Decorating Ltd. in Wellington

On Linkedin, they say you shouldn’t connect with people you haven’t worked with, although in the early days of the site, there were some of us keen to connect with the “power connectors”, those who had amassed lots of connections. Who knows if they really had worked with that many people? But before we knew […]

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Carlos Ghosn redresses the balance

It’s been fascinating to watch Carlos Ghosn’s press conference in Beirut, and subsequent interviews, confirming my own suspicions back in November 2018 (as Tweeted and blogged). Carlos Ghosn's criticism of the Japanese justice system isn’t ‘one-sided’ as they claim. For 14 months, they controlled the narrative and the smear campaign against him. He and others […]

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The “fortress America” approach to the internet fuels piracy

There are websites such as CBS News in the US that no longer let us here in New Zealand view them. US Auto Trader is another one. It’s a damned shame, because I feel it’s a stab at the heart of what made the internet great—the fact that we could be in touch with each […]

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Big Tech and advertising: the con is being revealed

People are waking up to the fact that online advertising isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.    Last month, Bob Hoffman’s excellent The Ad Contrarian newsletter noted, ‘I 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, […]

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