Introducing Scroober, Ad Blocking For Outdoor Ads

Scroober 2.0

NEWARK, NJ - A new start-up is turning heads here in the greater New York City area. Scroober promises to help provide ad-free options for users who want to do without the intrusions of outdoor advertising.

The Scroober app works by giving consumers who are being bothered by outdoor ads the opportunity to summon Scroober Hired Goons(TM), who either stand in front of the offending ad, or take more aggressive action against the placement.

"For us, it was a no-brainer after the success of ad blockers," said Scroober CEO Tony "Fat Tony" Toney. "Outdoor advertisers take up a lot of mobile bandwidth by blocking cell phone signals. Plus, dey get in the background of selfies, so we feel completely justified by being uh, whadyacallit, disruptive. Yeah, disruptive."

Scroober works through direct donations from its users, who also have the option of tipping. Some customers have complained about what Scroober refers to as surge pricing, which tends to happen when the Scroober associate is much larger than the customer.

"I love the convenience of Scroober," says a client who requested to remain anonymous with an increasing amount of desperation in his voice. "My Scroober associate was extremely professional, prompt, and direct. Also, surprisingly good with buzzwords, really. I don't think I'm going to be able to use the word 'synergy' for a long, long time."

Since Scroober's associates are independent contractors, the company avoids legal liability and health benefits. "Ah, dat's allright," says contractor Antonio "Knuckles" Anton. "I likes setting my own hours and living by my own rules. I gets lots of exercise and fresh air, and I know I'm doing good for my family. Besides, when youse hit a billboard, it don't hit back."

"Outdoor advertisers have kind of brought this on themselves," said online advertising professional and fourth-wall breaker Dave "Tony" Mountain. "Their failure to control frequency, respect the privacy of their users, and simply not make ads that were good enough to avoid the general public's desire to want to not see them made something like Scroober an inevitability. But maybe they'll use this as a magical way to make better outdoor ads."

"What our investors like about Scroober is how it gives local craftspeople in your area -- your dockworkers, carnies, nightclub personnel, substitute teachers and copywriters -- the chance to add to their revenue stream," said CFO Anthony "Numbers" Anthony. "Plus, dey get to do something they love, which is, uh, disrupt. Yeah, disrupt."

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Making Your Own Fun, With Numbers

Dave Atell Rules

This week at my gig, I've gone into serious nerdery as an analyst... all in the pursuit of making something simple for the end user. Taking inspiration from the sabermetric baseball analysis that first fired my imagination as a kid, I'm attempting to role up a myriad number of metrics into one index. The goal is to give my co-workers and clients something where they don't have to deal with all of the complexity, but still get a sense of what makes for a better and worse campaign, both in its own category and as a global performer. It's been a ton of number crunching along with heavy thought processes, and there are times when I just have to get up and take a walk, before my eyes get fixated and my brain fogs up.

It's very different from past gigs, but the reason why it's fun -- and yeah, hours with numbers can, honestly, be fun -- is because I'm learning new things about our consumers and clients, and what I learn today frequently opens up something new I can learn tomorrow. There's also the fact that I'm learning not just from what our internal teams are doing, but also what runs through our pipes that originated in outside sources.

I can't get into the absolute details of this, of course, because that's proprietary, and something you need to be a client to learn. But what I've got is a mix of right and left brain, numbers producing actionable creative moves, creative moves creating discernible differences in analytics.

This isn't the first time I've had this kind of professional experience, and honestly, once you've had it, you pretty much don't ever want to work a gig that doesn't offer that opportunity. I'll even go one further. If you are at a company that's at a certain headcount or early stage in its evolution, you might need this kind of learning engine... and if you don't have it, you're probably not going to make it in the long run. (There have been gigs where you would think that you were going to get this, but the reality was less than that, mostly because of shortfalls in other teams.)

The key, of course, is actionable insight, from statistically significant sample sizes, and in aspects you can replicate at scale -- and to not lose your edge from the number work. These aren't easy to find, but they are out there, especially in industries that aren't at the forefront of innovation. Or, that you can port from other consumer categories.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Five Paths To Terrible Marketing

A good friend of mine is a DJ for a college radio station, and needed a theme for her set before an upcoming fund drive. On a whim, I suggested "Love Songs For Terrible People," because the kinds of challenging singer-songwriters that make me happy tend to go in that direction. She's taken the suggestion, and the set will happen this week. Happy to help, really.

As I took my dog out for his walk this evening, I started together my own play list of songs that would meet the criteria. Then, I had the small thought; what would tips for terrible marketing and advertising pros look like? And the suggestions came even faster than songs. They include...

5) Focus on single metrics only.

Do you do banner ads? Concentrate only on click rate. Email? Only open rates matter. Radio and outdoor are wins if you can track the placement to call center volume, business reply cards to mail-in reply rates, and so on, and so on. Anyone that tries to discuss complexity in these matters is clearly trying to disguise weak creative, or some other issue. The world isn't complex, and marketing success or failure is all about making one magic number move.

4) Aggressive short-term strategies are totally worth it, especially in online.

Hey, remember that magic metric stuff? Let's spike your click rate. No one remembers things like fake close boxes, Windows-style UI, clickbait treatments and other gray / black hat moves. Plus, the Internet is filled with easy going people who never complain about anything, and aggressive testing just goes down the memory hole. You also totally won't lose clients and staff over this sort of thing.

3) Testing is for the untalented.

You just know this is going to work, right? So much so that you don't need to isolate the variable, get a clear sense of the impact moving forward, document the findings to convince other clients to roll to the winning practice, and so on. Don't let anything slow down the speed of your genius! (Including hidebound concepts like statistical significance. That's just for academics.)

2) Ignore the history.

Hey, it's a brave new world where all of the rules have changed. Social media isn't anything like social media of the past, mobile won't follow a similar path to desktop and laptop, and the fragmentation of the audience that's been proven out in broadcast doesn't have any impact at all on your business. Oh, and seasonality is for offline. Has no bearing in what you do.

1) Your industry is unique, and has nothing to learn from other consumer categories.

Your customers are very, very special snowflakes, who never overlap with other demographic rules of the road, and consequently, can only be spoken to in the way that they've already been spoken to. (Shame, really, we might have been able to do something creative.)

Anyway... hopefully you've gotten the point by now. Marketing is actually very complex, because the world is complex. There are very few marketing mediums that work in total isolation, with no carry over or other considerations. Direct response in any medium is great, but if it doesn't convert well or profitably, you're not going to have a business pretty soon. Making everything simple works only if you can get everything down to an ROI metric, and even then, you have to judge in context to opportunity costs, and with the likelihood that less trackable channels are not getting enough credit.

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Got any other paths for terrible marketers? Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

The Media We Deserve

The News Process

Going off the reservation today, and working outside of marketing and advertising. We'll get back to it next week, I promise.

So in the past week or so, the following items have hit the news.

> There is a strong possibility of blue skies and water frozen under the surface of Pluto, of all places. If there's heat being generated under the surface, which seems likely... well, um, possibility of life? Seems unlikely, but no more than water, really.

> The Hubble Telescope is pointing at a cluster of highly unlikely matter just at the edge of the Milky Way, which is either a combination of wildly improbable geographic events... or maybe, just maybe, a massive planned structure befitting an advanced alien civilization.

> The most rigorous test of quantum theory ever carried out confirms that objects can manipulate others at a distance, which means that monumentally fantastic stuff like loopholes and teleportation just might actually be possible. No, seriously.

> There's a massive asteroid that's just going to miss the planet in less than two weeks. Ye gads.

Did you miss these stories? More likely than not.

Now, did you miss the "news" that a movie from the '80s that involved time travel hit an anniversary? Or did you miss the "news" that there is a new movie coming out that dates back to the same era, and has excited lots of people who like to dress up in costume outside of Halloween?

No, no, no, you did not.

The potential for life, and another place in the solar system that might one day be a useful way station in our eventual migration to other worlds, should be an astounding deal. I would, personally, love to hear what major religious figures would say about what this would mean for the various books. (I'm thinking that other worlds are just for practice.) Wormholes could make the game-ending distances between worlds less, well, game endish. An alien civilization would simply be the biggest news event in human history, and create a massive consideration of whether or not contact would be worth the risk. Our own history of interaction with life that has lower forms of technology is not particularly encouraging on this front. And a big damned rock entering the atmosphere would be the biggest weather story ever.

But by all means, folks... let's talk about a movie or two some more. Since those have sponsors.

There's an old saying in political science circles; people get the government they deserve.

I guess the same goes for media now as well.

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Please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Blood Money

Bail Or Bleed

There's a story in the New York Times today that's just amazing in its awfulness, but wait for it; there's marketing and advertising later. But first, the story.

In a rural town in Alabama, there's a circuit judge who has decided, in his infinite wisdom, to present poor offenders with the following choice: donate blood or wear handcuffs.

No, seriously.

This isn't a case where you've got a judge who has just gone off the reservation with his own cleverness. He pretty much refused to talk to the NYT's journalist, which isn't what you do when you are in love with your own brain. No, what we've got here is abuse of the underclass, done by people who are acting as if the poor are just a free resource to be exploited. It will likely stop with sunlight, and there's few source of light to equal the Times.

But while I suspect the terrible judge that did this is well on his way to a post-professional career as a cable news pundit, simply removing the egregious problem is far from good enough. The bail system, along with the prison-industrial complex, is just one of those hidden horrors of American life. Feel free to go view the John Oliver clips for more detail on that. And in the extremely unlikely event that you are not getting why it's awful that poor defendants are being given the opportunity to contribute to a blood drive with the promise of a reduction in sentence, well... legal precedent, folks. In that it's not like you need both of your kidneys, either. Or eyes. So long as you are treating the most vulnerable in a society as if they were not worthy of humane treatment, no half measures.

Which brings us to the promised marketing and advertising bridge. Just like our backwater judge, the Web experience without ad blockers has been this forced bargain for users, who have been treated as if they had no palatable choice in the matter. Most have just shrugged and rolled up their sleeve to take the pinch, but once you have an out, you're going to take it. You might have even been inclined to donate before, but being forced to took all of the goodwill out of the equation.

Finally, this is a value exchange that seems antiquated, just because it has been in place for a very long time. That doesn't mean it will continue, of course. But when a poor exchange gets a spotlight, it's usually not long to stay.

With any luck at all, really.

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Please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Words, Numbers, And Bill James

Credit Where Due

Sometimes, I run into people in a professional context, and when they get the gist of what I do, they don't understand how it came to be. Most people have a clear concept of who and what a copywriter is -- someone who sweats over words as if people still read, or ever really liked to do that. That person is supposed to have a massive amount of books in their life, a seeming disregard for designers, and their head in the clouds as they think about Big Ideas and how words can bring them home. Close your eyes and picture this person, and you've probably got patches on the elbows, paper everywhere, and all kinds of things to spur creativity in the work space. Or whatever cliche of writer works for you.

Now, analysis. Very different person, right? Lives in spreadsheets, dreams of automating the copy with machine intelligence, would have gone into accounting but needed just a hair more excitement in their life. If they gamble, it's poker, and it's with a disturbing ability to calculate odds, to the point of making sure the game is no fun at all. The work environment is austere and severe, they are efficient to the point of obsessiveness, and so on. You might trust them to run your stock portfolio or pick your fantasy sports team, but consult on your creative? Never!

How can you get both of these people at once?

Well, more importantly, how can you not?

Creatives who don't look at the numbers -- any numbers, so long as they have statistical significance -- are flying blind, and doing that without even owning the plane. Analytics people who don't look at the art are missing the chance to diagnose the work and solve problems in ways that clients can truly appreciate, because the lessons learned are rarely something that doesn't have legs outside of the immediate project. Combine both, and you get a learning engine, and learning engines are the only way, in my opinion, that you can hope to keep getting better at your gig. (And staffing for both roles just means conflict and complication, and in the start ups where I've usually worked, isn't realistic.)

As for how you get this way... well, beyond the sheer usefulness of it all, I credit Bill James.

James, for those of you who are not afflicted with the sports problem, is a wildly influential writer and analyst who set out to learn the intricacies of baseball. Rather than just accept conventional wisdom about what kinds of players were best, James dug into the numbers, discovered all kinds of actionable learning points, and was eventually proven right, over and over again, with the sport more or less taking his work and amplifying it. If you've seen "Moneyball", you've seen the impact of James.

To me, James was just a voice in a book that told me it was OK to think about sports, rather than just watch and react to them. That in thinking about these things, it was also possible to learn things that others did not know, and that in writing about them, to bring the art back in. (James is, at his best, a flat out terrific writer, and some of his stuff has stayed with me for decades.)

Thinking about stuff that others do not can be time consuming and debilitating, but it can also be very lucrative. I recommend it.

To my fellow writers... stop being afraid of analysis, and analysts. They are here to help, and if your copy doesn't need help, you are a very, very special unicorn. To my analytical brethren, dabbling in creative is more fun than you might think, and if you can develop the knack of giving actionable feedback to creatives, they will love you forever. And invite you to wildly better parties than you would get to on your own.

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Please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

I, For One, Welcome Our RoboHon Overlord

Japan Is A Confusing Country

Meet RoboHon, soon to hit store shelves in Japan, and a gadget that's going to save the world for marketing and advertising professionals.

No, really.

You see, this cute little 7-inch robot does all the things your smartphone does -- with WiFi and LTE and a tiny little screen on his back -- but also with cameras for eyes, facial and voice recognition software and -- the game changer! -- a projector.

So the fact that it can walk, talk, sit down and dance is all kinds of adorable. It's also pretty great that a phone doesn't have to look like a phone, because, well, that just seems inevitable, really, especially in a society where customizing items to your taste seems like a Constitutional right. And while I, personally, can't imagine ever being anything but socially mortified to use him (her? Seems more like a him to me) as my always-on-me digital device, I do love this: having the ability to project mobile display, because in that single and glorious moment, I am no longer wedded to a mobile Web experience that is so frustratingly small.

Imagine, if you will, your smartphone being able to give you the same screen as your desktop monitor, whenever you wanted it, by just pushing out to a screen or wall. At some point, the wall would be replaced by holograms. And hey presto, I've gotten away from responsive design, sites that are borderline unreadable without ad blockers, and maybe more, really. I've also probably, once we've got full interconnectivity with the Internet of Things, phones that can just broadcast to any available screen with a takeover.

We are, of course, years away from all of that. But the first step is likely to seem as left field as a phone that doesn't conform to any of the usual rules of phone.

And if you can make anything, really, into a phone?

Well, I can think of plenty of other objects that could be made more intriguing with a phone, and with projection hardware hard-wired...

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Please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

The Secret to the NFL's Success: Artificial Scarcity

More Ball, Please

I'm an NFL fan. I've been to games in over a half dozen cities, haven't missed a game from my favorite laundry in decades, even when they were hopeless (and they've been hopeless far too often, really). I think I've even seen all of their preseason games, have owned multiple jerseys and other pieces of clothing, have been to the Hall of Fame, and ran my own fantasy league for the better part of a decade. (Live single round auction keeper league, if that helps to establish my nerd cred for you.) I blog about sports for fun, and have picked every game against the spread, badly, for years.

And like every NFL fan, I am spending an extraordinary amount of time, as a fan, not watching football.

Let's take the actual telecasts themselves. By the clock, a regulation game is sixty minutes long, which is spread out over a little more than three hours of actual time. This is where you might want to rail about the incessant commercial breaks, but it's more than that, of course. There are delays for instant replays, timeouts, penalties and halftime. Even if there were, somehow, no commercial breaks in a game, it would not finish in less than two hours, and we know that from, well, watching the occasional high school game. 

But let's go further. According to a number of studies, the actual time that is taken up by game action is somewhere in the range of 11 to 12 minutes. The rest of the time is taken up by huddles and dead air, which is why, if you are like me, you find yourself developing special levels of distaste for various announcing teams. With only 16 guaranteed games a year, that means a little more than three hours of actual game for the year, and even if your club goes to the Super Bowl, it's all of four hours. Compare this to MLB (over 50 hours of game play), the NBA (over 65) or NHL (over 82), and suddenly, the comparative ratings of the different leagues makes a lot more sense. Even if you don't want to go off the actual game time, just comparing the season lengths means that one NFL game is worth 5 NBA or NHL games, or 10 MLB games. Missing an NFL game is, to many fans, inconceivable. Missing an NBA, NHL or MLB game is, well, routine.

Would NFL ratings really go down if there was, say, not just more teams and a longer season, but an entire second league? Probably not, actually. The USFL, the last major rival pro league in the U.S., was shown on ESPN and ABC in the 1980s, and routinely pulled in better ratings than MLB in the spring season. College football does great ratings as well, especially when it's a playoff game. (And sure, Arena Football and the Canadian league also exists and don't rival the ratings, but the rules are different and the teams might not be local. Different world. There's even a women's league that dresses the players in, well, best not discussed.)

If pro football were a true marketplace, rather than an artificial monopoly, there would be more than one league, in more than one season. It would be more like, well, what the rest of the world calls football, with the best teams from lesser leagues moving up, and the worst teams moving down. There wouldn't be eight months a year where fans of the sport watch other sports, all the while more or less wishing they were watching football, or watching meta football events like the draft, scouting combine, or free agent signings. (NFL fans would talk about how there wouldn't be enough quarterbacks to make for watchable games, but that's a red herring. What makes bad QB play difficult to watch is the gulf between the best and the worst, which is why every non-NFL football fan is fine with their game.)

No one I know is clamoring for NFL2, ready for a second fantasy league, or would immediately flip their team allegiance for new laundry in new locations. But if the rules were the same, and franchises were promoted or relegated, they would care very, very quickly... and we'd also end the blackmail game that franchises can play against local governments for stadium concessions. 

It will probably never happen; too many NFL owners are way too happy with the way things are, and the league isn't exactly hurting for money. But I do know this: markets that profit from artificial scarcity do not get to enjoy that scarcity forever. Especially when there's this much money at stake, and television networks that are desperate for live programming that pulls in big ratings.

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Please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Advertisers Need To Know More About Us

Forever In My Feed

Six weeks ago, my eldest was just starting her sophomore year at high school. (She's 15, and don't worry -- this is actually about marketing and advertising.) We live a little less than two miles from her school, and there is no convenient bus or mass transit option. Historically, my wife would provide taxi service, but she's now got a part-time job, so my eldest is scrambling to figure out a way home for a few days every week. Walking and biking are options, and so is just staying at the school late at extra-curricular activities, but that's up to three hours after the final class where she's just hanging out. This will all stop being a problem, perhaps, when she's driving and we can think about getting her a car, but for now, it's a bit of a strain. Her books are heavy, and she's fashionable enough to not want to be sweaty at class on a bike or from taking a half hour hike, maybe alone.

Oh a whim, I started to poke around the Web to see if there might be another transportation option. That's when I saw the hoverboard. You have probably seen them on the news or YouTube. They are kind of like a Segway without a podium, and there's a picture of one at the top of this column. Some go up to 10 mph and can operate for up to an hour, so hey -- maybe an option. It looked small enough to maybe fit in her locker. I read some reviews, went to a few sites to price options.

Then I showed it to her, and got the kind of side eye and shade that only a fashionable 15 year old can throw. Oh well. Transaction averted; not the first time that Dad's Idea got shot down. No worries.

Anyone that has thought about buying something on the Web, and wound up not doing it, knows what happens next. The hoverboard has been in my banner ads ever since, with an ever-changing number of prices and shipping options, from an ever-changing number of vendors.
I could, of course, opt out of these banners by clicking on the AdChoices logos, or maybe clearing my cookies, and so on. I am, of course, not going to do this, because no one in the world ever has done that, because honestly, who has the time? Besides, if the hoverboard was not in my ads, it would just be something else.

Now, some see this kind of thing as proof of Advertiser Malfeasance, or an invasion of privacy, or just one more instance of modern life going to hell in a handbasket. (Have you ever noticed that handbaskets are the only carrying containers for trips to the netherworld? No one's going to hell in a backpack. But I digress.)

I see things a little differently. I see an advertising medium that, far from getting too much information on the lives of individuals, just isn't getting enough. In my case, that the hoverboard is a no sale.

In a few more months, I'll shop for some other stuff as part of my Q4 gift giving. My retargeting banners will reset to whatever new thing comes into my life without a purchase. But offline, I'll still be watching football games... and unless there is Congressional action or some spectacular bit of public relations misery, I will be seeing ads for daily fantasy leagues, auto insurance, mobile phones and services, trucks and fast food.

I don't play daily fantasy leagues, and never will. My wife works for an insurance company, so I'm out of market there, thanks to her employee discount. I got my phone four months ago, and won't replace it for another 18 months at least. I've never bought a truck, and never will. I don't do fast food. There's no way to opt out of any of those ads. (And honestly, I think I'd pay money to not see any more daily fantasy league ads. I also don't think I'd be alone in making that purchase.)

Eventually, online advertising will grow up and consolidate targeting files, because there's money in better targeting, and much of the infrastructure is already in place, especially with advertising being much more tied to purchase. Much later, targeting will also occur offline, and I'll stop seeing all of those lovely ads that are so irrelevant to my life.

There's simply too much money in doing things smarter, and life for consumers will also get better. Smarter will happen, as soon as we move past this incomplete amount of information. And just because we're used to dumb ads in non-digital mediums, that doesn't make them less dumb.

(Oh, and as for what my kid wound up doing, rather than pioneering a new transportation fad? She's now pretty much hanging out at her best friend's house after school, who lives pretty close by. And giving me side eye for new and better things.)

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Never Give A Sucker An Even Panacea

Would I sell to you?

So as the continuing fallout from the Volkswagen engineering fraud continues to hit the news, there's one point that continues to hit home for me.

Honestly, how did so many people get fooled by this in the first place?

I drive a hybrid hatchback, in that I'm something of a hobbit (honestly, I've met middle schoolers that are taller and heavier than me), and clean tech appeals to me in a major way. I recycle, walk, run, bike, turn off lights and so on, and so on. For years, my family lived without a clothes dryer, and just used lines and racks. I'm not as far along as we might be one day -- no solar panels on the roof, and we don't compost -- but I do my part.

It's not as easy as not doing your part. You can, and will, save time by using a dryer, dumping everything in the same trash can, driving everywhere, etc. You might save a few bucks as well, but you'll have to take a little sacrifice, from time to time. You know, like a grown up.

I like my hybrid a lot, but it has tradeoffs, mostly from torque. If I need exceptional giddy up, I'm going to pay for it with poor mileage, and I better turn off the air conditioning and the econo settings to get it done. So I just don't drive the car the way I used to drive other cars, and I drive proactively to not put myself in those situations. I still drive at or faster than the traffic around me, but with much less in the way of sudden acceleration. I used to own a two-door sports car with a stick shift, and in terms of being fun to drive, there's no comparison; that ride was a hoot. I get 18 miles per gallon more with the hybrid, and accept a little less fun in my life for the payoff. I didn't have the means or interest in paying a lot more for a Tesla, or the tech chops to make my own electric supercar. So I compromised with my hybrid.

Volkswagen, with the promised clean diesel (never mind the idea of a fossil fuel having clean slapped in front of it) offered, and its buyers believed, in a fraudulent tradeoff. You could still be green, have the same get up and go, and not have to pay for the bleeding edge Tesla. All of the benefit, none of the pain. Automotive panacea.

Not very surprisingly, it was a lie. Just like, well, just about every panacea ever sold. Drugs, even life-saving ones, have side effects. Patriotism, faith, fitness, all great virtues in moderation, but all can be taken too far, or have unforeseen consequences. Those solar panels might not be made under the best working conditions, or be as reliable or potent as other sources, at leas for a while. Adult life is filled with choosing the lesser of two evils, from going to the doctor or dentist for preventive care to voting to buying insurance. The only people who get to believe in panaceas are kids, and they get away from it soon enough.

So while I have sympathy for the defrauded VW owners, who are suddenly driving cars that are worth a lot less than they were before, and feel like they've been taking advantage of...

Well, that sympathy is not total, because on some level, you had to know better, didn't you?

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Please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the agency boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Awful, Awful Peeple

Urge To Say Mean Things Rising

So there was a lovely example of utter and complete Start Up Fail this week in the media. First came the news in the Washington Post that a new start up (Peeple, because the concept alone wasn't creepy enough without hinting at clandestine viewing) was coming to be "Yelp for everyone", where users would get to post reviews of, well, anyone they'd meet.

After the WaPo shot the fish in the barrel for a few hundred words for privacy violations and the rights of the general public to not worry about getting their lives ruined by a problem neighbor with time on their hands, social media joined fire. Now, the founders are backpedaling to say that the reviews have to be positive and approved by the named user, so the too creepy but potentially voyeuristic and useful site is being replaced by non-stop fluffery that's unseen outside of a talk show couch.

A few points:

1) There is, of course, next to nothing shown here that you can't already do with other applications that you've already heard of; you can write a blog that says how so and so kicks puppies, start a Facebook page over how your 4th grade teacher is in need of abuse, and so on. The fact that no one uses them for this purpose, because it's beyond the pale of human decency and can't drive sustained traffic on its own, seems to have eluded everyone involved.

2) While the truth is always a defense against libel and slander, it's also generally difficult to prove, and expensive when court is involved. It's hard to imagine how a successful Peeple rollout wouldn't result in a great deal of work for the nation's lawyers, which is yet another reason to really dislike this.

3) Honestly, did we need another way to be horrible to each other?

4) Short of paying the site to not be on it, how is this a business?

No one reads the Internet for B+ opinions, and that 1 and 10 ranking rule isn't going to make for nice moments among humanity. We also, as individuals, tend to limit our marketability moments for, well, professional marketability, and to have who we are while on break or vacation or whatever impact our professional lives is always dicey... and even more so when, unlike a lapse on social media, it wasn't entirely self-inflicted, and indicative of a lapse in judgment.

I get that this is now a gig economy. But it really does not need to be a bad gig, with always-on criticism. Work-life balance, people.

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Brand Kid, or the Tuba Paradox

It's all about the Benjamins

This weekend, I took my eldest daughter, a high school sophomore, on her second college trip. We're trying to spread these out over a good period of time, so that she doesn't apply to any place she has not gotten a sense of, and that we don't rush when we get closer to a decision.

The school we visited would be a reasonable choice. It's far enough away so that commuting home on weekends seems unlikely, and as we're committed to giving her a residential college experience rather than a commuter one, that matters. One of my old college friends works for the school in IT Administration, so we got to see some stuff you don't get in the usual tour. The school does a few things very well, and if every visit is as productive as this one, this is going to be a great process.

My friend has been working in academia for most of her life, and knows a lot about, well, a lot. After quizzing my kid about her likes and dislikes, and getting to a comfort level with her overall intellect and ability to withstand direct questioning, the conversation went into a discussion that went far beyond the college we happened to be sitting in.

What my friend described was a situation where the process roughly mirrored the world of venture capital and start up businesses. The best schools may have a bigger sticker price for tuition, but they also have more to offer in terms or scholarships, grants and opportunities. It struck me as the same story and trade-off that you get by taking less money in salary to work for a more stable business, with better benefits, but potentially a worse title and chance to learn faster.

Third and fourth tier colleges are struggling to overcome demographic shifts in the marketplace to stay in business, just as third and fourth tier start ups struggle against competitors with deeper pockets and better engineering. If you are willing to go to places that others are not, or have strengths that are uncommon, your prospects are brighter -- in college and in business. While going to a bigger school might seem to put you in line with a bigger alumni and social network, small schools are frequently more tight-knit and provoke a better outcome.

On some level, it should be noted, this all seems contrary to the goals of a better society. Education should be about a meritocracy, a levelling agent between calcifying income classes, and a more or less equal playing field... and nothing described above really fits with that. But on another, it just makes sense, especially since this is likely to be one of the most important decisions my daughter makes in her life... and affluent parents just aren't going to sit idly by and not try to give their child an advantage. What's a better item to spend on?

Turning back to the conundrum that colleges find themselves in, let's say you are the dean of admissions at a school that is known for an active music program, a great English department, and a science school that hasn't been able to attract top talent. You would appreciate the registrants that want to study English... but what you really need are kids who want to study science. And if one of them happens to play the tuba, and you don't have one of those right now? You're going to make that kid your best possible offer, and do everything you can to make sure that they are part of your next class. But if the tuba trick becomes known, and suddenly there are thousands of tuba players in the market, that skill loses its magic.

It was all good information, and got my kid to stop being afraid of applying to better schools, and to not let sticker price start and end all decisions. Hopefully, it will all end with what all parents want -- a college experience for their kid that's as good or better than what they had. And the right fit for her needs.

Oh, and one last thing, in re how all of this relates to marketing and advertising?

New technologies, especially with remote learning and the Internet of Things, are just going to grease the skids for also-ran schools in the US, who were already on the very wrong side of trends in regards to population. That level of serious worry permeates the presentations of even schools that are above that tier. And as more and more information about positive outcomes after school are shared, it's going to get harder and harder for the ordinary to survive.

On some level, it was all oddly reassuring. I've spent my life being convinced that academia was a place that just raised tuition prices without regard for the pain and suffering of parents and students. Turns out, they are as subject to market forces as everyone else.

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Ad Blocking vs. Mobile Blocking

Yes, So Very Sorry

For the past couple of weeks, AdLand has been awash in discussions about ad blockers. What was previously the province of a growing but tolerated number of techies is now mainstream behavior, ever since Apple supported the programs with their new platforms, and popular blockers have gone to the Droid system as well. With exceptional abuses like publishers producing 4X the memory bloat on trackers for cookies and ads as opposed to content, and data plans costing real money, it's easy to see why the apps are popular, despite the moral culpability. Besides, as the history of the music industry has shown, if you give people the technology to steal without any real threat of consequence, people will steal.

All of which has left me with one very small, and very out of touch and out of the demographic, question.

What is so wrong with the desktop and laptop experience that has made all of the traffic go to phones, anyway?

I understand, honestly, why some forms of content work better on mobile. If there is, well, Adult Utility going on, a screen that is more portable is clearly preferable. Certain dayparts are also going to be dominated by mobile. But what we're seeing from a data standpoint now is that it's not just the screen that is preferred in those hours, it's also the one that you use when you have the option to use something bigger, in the evening and weekends.

Why, especially when the mobile Web experience is so much worse than the desktop one, let alone something that puts you at risk for data issues that just don't exist on other platforms?

If you went to a print magazine and told them that they had to make a second version on much smaller stock, they just wouldn't do it. But everyone makes a mobile site.

Laptops are similar in real price (i.e., the lack of a contract) to smartphones, and dramatically less likely to be lost or dropped. They also let you type without the constant threat of error and/or auto-correct, and there's all kinds of extremely useful apps for those machines. Many of them with significantly less bugs and other issues. There's the nasty problem of people treating laptops as Work Only, and not wanting to put their personal browsing history on a machine that can be traced by an employer, but honestly. Having a second laptop isn't going to break the bank of most people.

There is, however, almost no sexiness in having the latest and greatest laptop. And that, really, is the crux of it, isn't it? Smartphones are stylish, customizable, and take away the point that people never really wanted -- the relentless literacy, since there's this big imposing keyboard that makes you type -- eww, words! -- and replaces it with an endless junk drawer of apps. Hoarding without the shame, on a screen no one will ever see but you.

If I were in charge of an upscale online publisher, I'd advertise my publication's full-size version -- aka, the actual Web site -- on my mobile site. I'd investigate having longer and better versions of my content that lived on full-sized hardware only. I'd put all of the cool Easter eggs that my content team could deliver on that site as well. Then, I'd price my ads to match the much better experience for full-sized viewing. I'd also try to put the ad-blocking software in place, again, for full-screen viewing only.

I'd also probably run the site into the ground in a month.

Which, judging from the hue and cry coming from online publishing over ad blocking, just means I'd get to the same place as everyone else. Just in less time.

But at least I'd have a dramatically better epitaph for that career.

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Please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the agency boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.