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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘marketing’
17.03.2023
The gargantuan full-size 1971â6 Pontiacs (Laurentian, Catalina, Parisienne, Bonneville, Grand Ville and Grand Safari) went up on Autocade last week, and they reminded me of the golden era of Pontiac illustrations. That era didnât stretch into the 1970s that much: you saw them for the 1967s through to the 1971s, before photography took over.
I had some saved up over the years on the hard drive, and a few went into my blog gallery when that was still public (Google will have you believe it still is, with a lot of their top 50 devoted to it; so much for that search engine updating quickly).
First up is the 1967 Bonneville, with its sharp, new grille emphasizing width and sportiness. I believe this image came by way of Twitter, pre-Musk.
Hereâs the 1969 Bonneville, probably the year that was the zenith for a lot of GM divisionsâ designs.
Iâm unclear on the origins of this scan, but it was shared on OnlyKlans when I used it. Itâs the 1969 Firebird 400.
From the gallery are the 1969 GTO convertible and Firebird, showing just how right these two designs were for the era.
And here are two 1971 Canadian Pontiacs, the Laurentian and the Parisienne Brougham, which sat on the 124 in wheelbase rather than the 126 in of the US Bonneville, Grand Ville and Grand Safari that year. You can feel the white country club of the 1960s just barely hanging on before the decade gave way to more brown shades and gritty urban decay. The garish pointy noses (which Bunkie Knudsen tipped Ford off to when he went to work there) and vinyl roofs all contributed to a heaviness that the decade characterizes for me.
Tags: 1960s, 1967, 1969, 1970s, 1971, 2023, advertising, Autocade, car, GM, illustration, JY&A Media, marketing, Pontiac, USA
Posted in cars, culture, design, marketing, publishing, USA | No Comments »
21.07.2022
Iâve been meaning to link Rand Fishkinâs âSomething is Rotten in Online Advertisingâ for some time, so here it is.
He writes, in his second and third paragraphs (links in original):
Where to even begin⌠Should we start with the upcoming loss of third-party cookies? The bizarre Google & Facebook duopoly teamup against anti-trust action? The rise of online ads as a money laundering & terrorist-funding tactic? Or maybe we should talk about brandsâ ever-shrinking ability to attribute ad clicks. Hundreds of millions in provable ad fraud. Disturbing privacy issues that remain unaffected by GDPR or other government efforts.
No wonder a lot of savvy people believe adtech and the entire online advertising industry are due for a subprime-mortgage-style reckoning.
Itâs a well written piece, covering ad fraud, the incentivization of ad fraud, and real-world examples, including this:
The world’s biggest con continues. The con artists don’t need to do three-card Monte any more. They can just get into ad tech. Rand’s piece is well worth a read.
Tags: advertising, deception, fraud, law, marketing, technology, Twitter, USA
Posted in business, internet, marketing, technology, USA | No Comments »
16.05.2022
Itâd be unfair if I didnât note that I managed to see a âCreate postâ button today on Lucireâs Facebook page for the first time in weeks. I went crazy manually linking everything that was missed between April 25 and today.
Maybe I got it back as it would look even worse for Facebook, which still live-streams massacres as a matter of course in spite of its âpromisesâ after March 15, 2019, if white supremacist murderers had more functions available to them on the site than honest business people.
The upshot still remains: get your supporters going to your website as much as possible, and wind down whatever presence you have on Facebook. You shouldnât depend on it, because you never know when your page might disappear or when you lose access. Both are very real possibilities.
Bob Hoffmanâs newsletter was gold this week. It usually is, especially as he touches on similar topics to me, but at a far higher level.
This weekâs highlights: âBlogweasel calculations indicate that adtech-based targeting adds at least 100% to the cost of an online ad. In order for it to be more efficient it has to be more than twice as effective. I’m slightly skeptical.
âAn article in AppleInsider this week reported that, “Apple has revealed to advertisers that App Store search ads served in a non-targeted fashion are just as effective as those relying on targeting via first-party data.”â
Indeed, ads that might use the page content to inform their contents (contextual advertising) work even better. Why? The publisher might actually get paid for them.
Iâve seen so many ads not display at all, including on our own sites. Now, our firm doesnât use trackers, but we know the ad networks we use do. And for whatever daft reason, there are ad networks that wonât show content if you block trackers. (Stuff is even worse: their home and contentsâ pages donât even display if you block certain cookies.)
If we went back to how things were before tracking got this bad, the ads would be less creepy, and I bet more of them would displayâand that helps us publishers pay the bills. If you donât like them, there are still ad blockers, but out of my own interests, I would prefer you didnât.
I came across Drew Magarryâs 2021 article, âThereâs No Middle Class of Cars Anymoreâ, in Road & Trackâs online edition.
âYouâre either driving a really nice new car, a deeply unsatisfying new car, or a very old used car.â Drew notes that there are nasty base models, and also fully loaded ones, and the former âtreat you like absolute shit, and everyone on the road knows it.â
It seems whatâs happening is that the middleâthe âGLsâ of this world, as opposed to the Ls and GLSsâis getting squeezed out.
It says something about our society and its inequality.
Interestingly, itâs not as bad here with base models, and that might reflect our society. But look at the US, as Drew does, or the European top 10, where cheap cars like the Dacia Sandero do exceptionally well.
This goes back many years, and Iâve seen plenty of base models in US rental fleets that would make a New Zealand entry-level car seem sumptuous.
Finally, the legacy pages are reasserting themselves on Autocade. When the latest version was installed on the server and the stats were reset, the top 20 included all the models that appeared on the home page, as Mediawiki recommenced its count. Search-engine spiders were visiting the site and hitting those the most.
Fast forward two months and the top 20 are exclusively older pages, as visits from regular people coming via search engines outnumber spiders.
Until last week, the most visited page since the March reset was the Renault MĂŠgane II. It seems the Ford Taunus 80 has overtaken the MĂŠgane II. Peugeotâs 206+ (207 in some markets) follows, then the Ford Fiesta Mk VII and Renault MĂŠgane III.
Before the reset, the Ford Fiesta Mk VII was the top model page, followed by the Taunus 80, then the MĂŠgane II, Opel Astra J, and Nissan Sunny (B14).
Probably no one cares, but as itâs my blog, hereâs the old, just before the switchover:
And hereâs where we are as of tonight:
You can see the ranking for yourself, as the stats are public, here.
Tags: 2022, advertising, Autocade, Bob Hoffman, Dacia, Facebook, inequality, JY&A Media, marketing, Mediawiki, privacy, society, technology
Posted in business, cars, internet, marketing, publishing, technology | No Comments »
01.05.2022
Some of the articles in Lucire are still manually designed in Dreamweaver, and those need to be added to the social networks in a similar way. There we use Zoho Social to update things.
In practice, we only do Twitter, as IFTTT then takes care of reposting our updates to Facebook. Today, I noticed that IFTTT has failed to take any of our Tweets to Facebook since April 25, for no reason I can work out.
We also cannot use Zoho Social to make Facebook page updates, so the fault does not lie with these individual services, but Facebook itself.
First Zoho Social said I needed permission from the page admin to add images, but I am the page admin; then it said I could not post at all.
I went to Facebook for the first time in goodness knows how long to discover there is no way to enter a post manually there, either!
I tried using the Meta Business Tools, but I canât be authenticated, since they require you use an âappâ (none of which I have heard of), a physical security key (strange to me as I have no idea what one looks like or where it goes), or a cellphone (yeah right, like Iâm going to give Facebook that very personal detail for them to sell).
It looks like another massively stupid decision on Facebookâs part, so odds are weâll cease to update any of our Facebook pages going forward. It will take too much effort to figure out how to fix this. Even if we could type into Facebook, we don’t want to be feeding in every headline and link manually.
I ceased to have any respect for Facebook many years ago, but kept things going there for the sake of our readers. But if they are shutting down the pagesâcertainly all their functionality is disappearingâthen we will have no choice but to end our updates there.
PS.: If any of you are wondering, I am definitely the admin, but I can’t do any of the things Facebook says I can:
If I access the options under ‘Page Owner’, apparently I can report ourselves, but nothing more!
Looks I still can post to a page where I’m not the owner but a contributor, but I can’t post to one where I’m the owner and admin:
Remember how a page settings’ page usually looks?
Here’s Lucireâs:
The only options I have as admin are:
And before you ask, there are no page ‘violations’ other than one post from years ago, because US sites can’t handle artistic nudity where you can’t see anything inappropriate. Genocide and misinformation are fine, though.
I think what Facebook does is let you work on pages that aren’t yours(!)âit wouldn’t be the first timeâbut not your own! It really is this daft there.
Tags: 2022, bugs, Facebook, marketing, promotion, social media
Posted in business, internet, marketing, publishing, technology, USA | 1 Comment »
13.04.2022
I always thought One: a Consumer Revolution for Business was one of Stefan Engesethâs best books, if not the best.
He recently posted on Linkedin: âreaders have told me that the book can lead to a better understanding of people and society (which can end wars).â In the interests of peace, he thought heâd give away his book for free, as a PDF, subtly retitled One: a Consumer Revolution for Peace.
âI originally wrote the book to start a consumer revolution,â he says. âAnd today it is consumers, through social media, who are demanding nations to end wars. I have thought about updating the book, but now I realize that the content could be the DNA for change and to build a better future on.â
Hereâs his original Linkedin post, and you can grab your copy of this excellent book here.
Tags: 2000s, 2005, 2022, antiwar, book, business, marketing, peace, Stefan Engeseth, Stockholm, Sweden
Posted in business, marketing, Sweden | 2 Comments »
10.01.2022
For homeowners and buyers, thereâs a great guide from Moisture Detection Co. Ltd. called What You Absolutely Must Know About Owning a Plaster-Clad Home, subtitled The Origin of New Zealandâs Leaky Building Crisis and Must-Know Information for Owners to Make Their Homes Weathertight, and Regain Lost Value.
My intent isnât to repeat someoneâs copyrighted information in full, but there are some highlights in there that show how the erosion of standards has got us where we are today. Itâs frightening because the decline in standards has been continual over decades, and the authorities donât seem to know what they are doingâwith perhaps the exception of the bidding of major corporations who want to sell cheap crap.
The document begins with the 1950s, when all was well, and houses rarely rotted. Houses had to have treated timber, be ventilated, and have flashings.
They note:
By the time 1998 rolled around, NZ Standards, the Building Industry Association, and BRANZ had systematically downgraded the ‘Belts and Braces’ and were allowing houses to be built with untreated framing, with no ventilation, and poorly designed or non-existent flashings and weatherproofing.
Councils accepted these changes at ‘face value’ without historical review. They issued building consents, inspected the houses, and gave Code of Compliance Certificates. Owners believed they had compliant, well-constructed buildings, but they did not.
Shockingly, by 1992, the treatment level for framing timber could be with âpermethrins (the same ingredient as fly spray)’, while one method used methanol as a solvent and increased decay. By 1998 âUntreated Kiln Dried Timber (UTKD) was allowed for framingâ. The standards improved slightly by 2005 but itâs still well off what was accepted in 1952 and 1972.
We recently checked out a 2009 build using plaster cladding and researching the methods of construction, including the types with cavities, we are far from convinced the problems are gone.
Talking to some building inspectors, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence on how shaky things still look.
Since we moved to Tawa and made some home improvements, we realize a lot of people in the trade do not know what they are talking about, or try to sell you on a product totally unsuited to your needs. This post is not the place for a discussion on that topic, but one day I might deal with it.
However, I am surprised that so many of the tried-and-trusted rules continue to be ignored.
Sometimes people like me go on about âthe good old daysâ not because we don rose-coloured glasses, but we take from them the stuff that worked.
Itâs not unlike what Bob Hoffman included in his newsletter today.
As Iâve also no desire to take the most interesting partâa diagram showing that for every dollar spent on programmatic online advertising, a buyer only gets 3¢ of value âof real display ads viewed by real human peopleââI ask you to click through.
Again, itâs about basic principles. If so many people in the online advertising space are fudging their figuresâand thereâs plenty of evidence about thatâthen why should we spend money with them? To learn that you get 3¢ of value for every dollar spent, surely thatâs a big wake-up call?
It wonât be, which is why Facebook and Google will still make a ton of money off people this year.
The connected theme: rich buggers conning everyday people and too few having the bollocks to deal with them, including officials who are meant to be working for us.
Tags: 1950s, 1970s, 1972, 1990s, 1992, 2005, 2020s, 2022, Aotearoa, Bob Hoffman, crime, fraud, Google, history, industry, marketing, New Zealand, online advertising, real estate, standards
Posted in business, internet, marketing, New Zealand, technology, USA | No Comments »
31.12.2021
Weâre probably far enough along from the event for people not to know which one I am referring to, as Iâve no wish to embarrass the organizers.
Earlier in 2021, we saw a weekend event that would take place at the âJohnsonville Community Hubâ. No address was given other than that. Both Duck Duck Go and Google seemed to think this meant Waitohi, the new library and swimming pool complex.
We arrived there to find that no one knew of this event, but maybe we could try the community hall next door?
No joy.
There was the Collective Community Hub on Johnsonville Road but their website made it clear that it wasnât open at the weekend.
We hung round Johnsonville for a bit and decided we would check out the Collective place, just to see it up close.
Sure enough, thatâs where the event wasâit was open at the weekendâand we got there after everyone had packed up.
They were very apologetic and we told them the above. They had noted, however, that there had been more information on Facebook.
To me, thatâs a big mistake, because I donât know what their Facebook page is, and even if I did, there was no guarantee I would see it for a variety of reasons. (Try loading any fan page on Facebook on mobile: the posts take unbearably long and few people would have the patience.) A search for the event on both Duck Duck Go and Google never showed a Facebook page, either.
A similar event posted its cancellation on Facebook exclusively, something which we didnât know till we got there, and after getting puzzled looks from the party that had booked the venue, I randomly found one organizerâs page and clicked on his Facebook link. Again, nothing about the event itself came up on Duck Duck Go or on Google.
In the latter case, the organizer had the skills to make a web page, a normal one, so was it so hard to put the cancellation there?
You just canât find things on Facebook. They donât appear to be indexed. And if they are, theyâre probably so far down the resultsâ pages that they wonât be seen. If youâre organizing an event, by all means, post there to those who use Facebook keenly (a much smaller number than you think, with engagement decreasing year after year), but it is no substitute for getting it into properly indexed event calendars or on to the web, where regular people will put in search terms and look for it.
Facebook is not the internet. Thank God.
Tags: 2021, Aotearoa, Duck Duck Go, event marketing, events, Facebook, Google, marketing, New Zealand, promotion, search engine, social media, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara
Posted in business, internet, marketing, New Zealand, Wellington | No Comments »
21.12.2021
With Lucireâs Twitter restoredâit was a huge distraction over the last two months with various automatic posting gadgets needing to be reprogrammed, and the Twitter-to-Mastodon cross-poster still does not work (itâs what happens when you modify things that are working perfectly well: itâs impossible to put them back)âwe wanted to get some of our social media back up to speed.
So letâs get back to rubbishing Facebook, shall we?
Because whenever we post, whether itâs through another program or directly on Facebook, the post just does not show on the page itself, unless youâre on the ultra-slow mobile edition (m.facebook.com) where youâre likely to give up before the posts begin to load. You have to wait many hours, even a day, for something to appear on the full-fat web version.
This reminds me of those days when our Facebook walls stopped updating on the 1st of each month, presumably because someone in Menlo Park had to flip a switch to tell the website that the new month had begun. And they wouldn’t do it till it hit midnight in California since everyone on the planet must live in the one time zone.
Whatâs the bet itâs a related glitch that existed at the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012, but we need to wait till midnight in California for Facebook to know it’s a new day?
Hereâs the mobile version (albeit viewed on the desktop) earlier on Tuesday:
And hereâs the web version, still unchanged 12 hours later, with the newest post after the pinned one from December 18.
Lesson: donât use Facebook if you wish to tell your audience something urgently. You are better off sending an email: theyâre more likely to see it in a timely fashion. And if your following isn’t that big, and you need your fans to know something urgently, it might actually be quicker to telephone them! Social mediaâforget it.
Tags: 2021, bug, Facebook, incompetence, marketing, social media, technology
Posted in internet, marketing, technology | No Comments »
04.12.2021
Iâm starting to understand Xiaomiâs naming conventions but itâs a mess, especially coming from a marketerâs point of view.
I ordered the Note 9, which is superior to the 9. So far so good.
But what Iâm getting is not whatâs called the Note 9 here (or in any export market, from what I can tell). Itâs the Note 9T, since it runs the new MediaTek Dimensity 800U and not the âoldâ MediaTek Helio G85. Hereâs hoping the case I ordered through a Chinese vendor is for the correct phone since the two have a different shell.
Itâs not just any Note 9, but the Note 9 5G, which apparently has minor differences between the regular one and the 4G. Will it mean a very different case? Who knows?
Thereâs also a Note 9 Pro, which doesnât have 5G but has some superior specs but only runs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 720G. And that Note 9 Pro is the Note 9 Pro Max in India because what the Indians call the Note 9 Pro is the Note 9S in other export markets.
Pro doesnât always mean a better spec in China: the Marvel R crossover, for instance, has four-wheel drive, but the Pro model has rear-wheel drive, although better equipment inside.
Itâs appeared on some British and Philippine sites but one site purporting to show all available variants of the Note 9 (including Chinese ones) doesnât have this model.
Out of sheer luck, since I was never after the most powerful, I seem to be on to one of the better phones in the Note 9 line-up. In terms of real-world use, weâll soon see.
My Meizu M2 Note (Meilan Note 2) isnât lasting the day in terms of battery capacity, and it seems to drain very rapidly once you head south of 50-odd per cent. A quick browse of a few pages yesterday, using the 4G, saw it drop from 55 to 42 per cent in minutes, then into the 30s even after I switched off the screen and reception. With that and the missed calls, its successor cannot come a moment too soon, even if that successor weighs 199 g.
Tags: 2021, car, cellphone, China, marketing, Meizu, naming, R, Roewe, SAIC, technology, Xiaomi
Posted in China, marketing, technology | No Comments »
28.11.2021
Digital art by David MacGregor
I hope the media will say more because David MacGregor had packed so much into his 50-something years on this planet. Here is my tribute on Lucire. Not everyone can claim to have discovered Rachel Hunter, created the Family Health Diary TV commercial format (and others), founded the first online men’s lifestyle magazine in New Zealand (Emale, or to give it its official form, eMALE), conceived and co-founded Idealog, and won a heap of advertising, marketing, and magazine publishing awards in the process. A brilliant man who never stopped creating.
Tags: 2021, advertising, Aotearoa, Auckland, friends, friendship, marketing, New Zealand, publishing, TÄmaki Makaurau, TV
Posted in business, internet, leadership, marketing, media, New Zealand, publishing, technology, TV | No Comments »
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