Wikipedia and Amazon Own (Most) Proper Nouns
Amazon and Wikipedia own most of the world’s most valuable proper nouns. Try Googling any famous person, and you’ll get Wikipedia. Google any beloved book, and you’ll find Amazon—unless the book has been made into a movie, in which case you’ll end up with Amazon subsidiary IMDB. Read the rest of this entry »
09.6.09Claude Hopkins Would Have Loved Bittorrent
There are many second-best books about advertising. Ogilvy on Advertising
Even if you don’t sell things for a living, being a good judge of advertising is a pretty useful talent. With that in mind, I’ve reread Hopkins’ book every year or two, just to stay sharp. And this year, I noticed something startling: Hopkins, writing in 1923, would have loved software piracy. Read the rest of this entry »
| Posted in Advertising | No Comments »
Steganographic Typo-Based URL Shorteners: Add a Link With Zero New Characters
Watch out, j.mp! Back off, tinyarro.ws. You can shorten a URL down to zero characters by steganographically embedding it into the text. Think of it this way: how many potential typos could be autocorrected for a given sentence? You’ve got the off-by-one errors, like “typ[“, the random capitalization errors (“tYpo”), transpositions (“tyop”), and full-word off-by-ones (“yu[p”). The word “typo” alone has:
- 24 off-by-one-character potential typos.
- 9 random capitalization errors (discard all-caps and capitalize first letters).
- 3 transpositions.
- 6 full-word off-by-one errors.
This gives you 42 unique ways to misspell typo, and in all cases it’s fairly easy to determine that the original word was “typo.”
What I’d like to propose is a service that uses typos to encode URLs. You visit a site, input your tweet and URL, and get, as an output, a tweet with a strategically insert typo (or typos). Someone who sees this tweet can input the text into the site, and get the URL that’s mapped to that particular set of typos.
Imagine! Instead of reading something lame and garbled like:
@ev this is a neat microblogging service: http://bit.ly/xE2sK
You could say something clean and space-saving, like:
@ev yjod iS a neta micRolbohhing sevriCe:
Don’t think of it as transmitting 140 characters at a time—think of it as transmitting 1140 bits—meaning there are far, far more potential unique tweets than there are atoms in the universe.
(Note: I have no interest in implementing a steganographic URL shortener, but it might be an interesting exercise. It’s probably possible to have an effectively infinite number of embedable URLs without making things unreadable. Maybe adding some backend analytics could tell you which typos result in a click-through and which don’t. If anyone does anything like this, please let me know.)
09.4.09In Defense of the WWF 9/11 Ads: Good Ad, Wrong Client
This is terribly offensive, unless you happen to think it’s true. If it is true, the only offensive bit is that anyone would think that Tsunami deaths are okay. The problem isn’t the content of the ad: the problem is who paid for it. Read the rest of this entry »
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Why Car Ads Waste So Much Money
Why do car company accounts make people so stupid? Where the Suckers Moon made me wonder. Everyone invoked knew how to make ads, sell cars, or both. And yet Wieden Kennedy made ads that sold no cars, and Subaru paid them well to do it.
| Posted in Advertising | 5 Comments »
Randall Rothenberg’s Where the Suckers Moon: A Story About Falling for Stories
Where the Suckers Moon is a story about trying to sell a decent product by turning it into a political movement. Or a hip trend. Or a trend-free anti-trend. Or beautifully-produced anti-art. It’s a story about finding roundabout ways not to get to the point.
In short, it’s a story about an award-winning ad agency that burned through millions of dollars trying to sell an attractively-priced, middle-of-the-road product as anything but that. If you’ve ever wanted to waste millions of dollars on someone’s flash of creative insight (or wished someone would waste millions on yours), you should read it. Read the rest of this entry »
| Posted in books | 1 Comment »
The Copy Quotient
Here’s how you know whether or not to fire your copywriter, in five simple steps:
- Use rank checker to find out where you rank for a particular keyword on Google (for best results, you should be in the top ten.
- Find out how much monthly traffic that keyword gets, using Google’s keyword tool.
- Multiply that by the percentage of users who click on a search result of that ranking.
- Find out how many visitors you get from that keyword (if you’re not using Google Analytics for this, you’re probably doing it wrong).
- Now, divide #4 by #3. If the result is less than one, your headlines aren’t doing their job. Consider drastic action.
Twitter is Overhyped—Which is Why It Will Succeed
In April, I decided Yelp would Make It. They’re growing fast (like lots of companies that tank), they’re offering a fun product (like about half a dozen competitors in their own industry), and their users love them (like, oh, everybody). But what Yelp did in April was simpler: they hired Cuil’s former PR guy. Cuil pulled off the PR coup of the decade when they managed to get portrayed as the Next Big Thing for about a week.
That’s the kind of advertising you can’t buy. Which is why it’s too bad they didn’t get their money’s worth. Google deflated the announcement by beating Cuil’s numbers, and talking numbers down. But what really killed Cuil is that you can’t build anything on it. When you’re looking at platforms to build something on, the most overhyped is likely to win. Read the rest of this entry »
08.28.09Metcalfe Was a Pessimist
The value of a network grows at roughly the square of the growth rate of the users. That makes sense for telephone networks—add one more user to a network, and the number of new connections available goes up by the number of existing users.
Classically, this breaks down because the first people to add it get the most out of it. Maybe a phone was crucial for the first few people to use it—but the next phone sold today is probably going to replace an old phone, replace borrowing somebody else’s phone, or complement an existing Skype connection.
But Metcalfe’s law can break in the opposite direction, and I think we’re seing that in social media. In fact, I think we’ll see a lot more of it. Read the rest of this entry »
08.27.09Pity the Bookmarkleteers: Bookmarklets and SEO
If you love to get links, you’ll love this: imagine having an online app users flock to, evangelize, and use on a daily—or even hourly—basis. Imagine that it solves a serious, growing problem, in a pleasant and unobtrusive way.
Now imagine getting a smidgen of a fraction of the attention (and link-love!) you’re due, and you’ll you what it’s like to be Arc90. Read the rest of this entry »
| Posted in SEO | 2 Comments »