Archives for the 'advertising' Category
Zune: congratulations and condolences
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
Back in the day, I had myself a very nice time watching and writing about the release of Microsoft’s first Zune device: Zune: welcome to the gamble Zune’s CNN Train Wreck Zune: this pretty much sums it up Ceci n’est pas une Zune post Zune: when will the hurting stop? Zune: words fail me After [...]
Friday’s Brain Dead Emails
Friday, May 2nd, 2008
The McKinsey Quarterly Goes Social The McKinsey Quarterly dropped me an email yesterday to let me know about the exciting new features that they’ve added: RSS feeds and social bookmarking! A very social and up-to-date organization, apparently. Interesting, then that they still follow the distinctly anti-social practice of sending me email from a dead address, [...]
Amazon: third time, no charm
Thursday, February 28th, 2008
Oh, my. After enthusiastically endorsing Amazon’s data-driven email segmentation practices not once but twice, the third time turns out to not be the charm at all. Here’s what I just received: Let’s call out the operative paragraph: As someone who has shopped for electronics at Amazon.com, you might be interested in the Archos DVR Station [...]
Scenes from an apartment in Brooklyn: more on my wife and television
Friday, November 30th, 2007
My wife and I are zoning out in front of the television (again), and a commercial for a furniture store comes on. It informs us that if we buy their living room set we can “experience luxury beyond your imagination.” My wife frowns for a moment, and then says, “Beyond my imagination? What, is the [...]
Apple, iPhone, Branding
Monday, October 1st, 2007
Another object lesson for Elinor Mills—and anyone else who actually believes that companies “own” their brands these days. Apple didn’t “give” internet users a way to interact with their brand, offering an explicit conversation; instead, an internet user saw an apt parallel between Apple’s branding and their unfortunate actions regarding the iPhone and 3rd party [...]
Let’s talk brand, shall we?
Thursday, September 13th, 2007
Over on CNET, Elinor Mills appears to have been wildly unimpressed with the conversational marketing summit. While there’s some interesting stuff to chew on in what she has to say, I’m surprised and a little taken aback by how aggressively Mills rejects the idea that brands are conversations: And what’s this with the slogan of [...]
My Contribution to iPhone Day
Friday, June 29th, 2007
STeR’s [sigh...I've got to say the word] mashup of the default iTunes ring and Aesop Rock’s “Mars Attacks,” for your listening pleasure.
The Barnum Perversion
Thursday, March 15th, 2007
…or, “What Fresh Hell is This? On my Discovery of Whois Spam.” A year or so ago I first encountered user agent spam, and was nonplussed: did someone really think that an admin (i.e. someone who might actually be running through server logs) would react positively to spamvertising “an interest free line of credit of [...]
Zune: words fail me
Monday, February 26th, 2007
Administrative note: I know you feed subscribers are getting a double dose from my earlier del.icio.us link, but this is so sad that it bears repeating: Zune marketing continues its unhinged, erratic lurching towards absurdity. Microsoft note: Look, make me a reasonable offer and I’ll take on Zune marketing. Come on, it could be fun [...]
No, no — what’s wrong with U, Microsoft?
Tuesday, February 6th, 2007
…or…Just stop whining and buy the fucking XBox, bitches. Maybe there’s just some cultural subtlety that I don’t get, but it seems a little weird to me that Microsoft is running a site that’s apparently supposed to help them figure out why the Asian market isn’t buying Xboxes hand over fist, with a marketing spin [...]
