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And you call this an analysis?

And you call this an analysis? Twitter’s new CFO on Facebook…

On mobile there are fewer ads since there is no right hand rail. But mobile monetizes better which is rare….a key question here is why does mobile monetize better? Is it due to higher prices per click or higher click through rates. If its the latter ie click through rates than its enormously positive because higher click through rates are highly correlated with better ROI which leads to ad spending.

What about: because ads on mobile are much larger? They take up the whole damn screen, rather than being small and unobtrusive as on the desktop. Unobtrusive is a nice word, but what it means is that nobody sees them. And what happens on mobile, ads being huge and people having large, fat fingers, is that people click on them, whether they intended to do so or not. Fat fingers. That’s about all the “magic” of mobile if you ask me.

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From the blue “e” to the white “f”

Remember when the average Joe thought that Internet Explorer’s blue “e” icon somehow stood for “the Internet”? You thought that was bad?

Many in the world are at risk of growing web-literate, so to say, thinking that the Internet is a white “f” on a blue background on their Android phone.

And any time you speak of “Social Media”, you’re doing them a favour.

Facebook, plus of course Instagram, Whatsapp for those who like things simple, and their own Messenger, which they are styling after Line and WeChat and trying to make into a platform in its own right, is not “a” Social Network, but rather THE Social Network. The new AOL, as Jason Kottke said back in 2007. Facebook is what we used to have before Facebook, i.e. the Open Web, but behind closed doors, delivered very well and a bit sanitised. There are plenty of reasons why you should be worried.

One of the main reasons why I am worried is precisely because you are not.

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Wanamaker was more than right

Turns out good ol’ John Wanamaker was more than right:

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.

– John Wanamaker

Google admitted that 56.1% of all the impressions served on Google’s Display Network — that is, served by a serious company, not by an un-named organisation running a dubious ad network from the middle of nowhere — could never have been seen.

But that’s only half of the story. Or 56% of it, if you wish. The more interesting part, and the one nobody talks about, is: what do you track? Tracking systems will tell you that a user “has seen” a certain banner ad and will speculate that even though he did not bother to click on it, he was in fact influenced by it when, on a later date, he encountered another ad or did a search on Google, clicked and then converted.

But can we trust this to be true, especially when Google is selling not merely Adwords on the search results, but a large part of the banner ads as well via Doubleclick? Another good question could be: is this guess done on ads that the users have seen, or on those served to them? A further one: why do we “attribute” part of the merit to banner ads nobody clicked on, but fail to do the same with print, radio or tv ads?

More Proof That Social Media Marketing is Bullshit

Some friends who are always eager to convert me to the immense power of Social Media pointed me to this article on Econsultancy. To which my first reaction was: wow, 0.1% of KLM’s total revenue comes from Social Media! Ain’t that nice? ;-)

Another friend chipped in: and I’m sure it’s all retargeting.

That’s right: it’s not the “conversations” — in no fewer than 11 languages, soon to be expanded to 14 — that drive this massive 0.1% of sales. Nope. It’s almost certainly advertising on Facebook and Twitter. And not normal advertising that helps build the case and the need for a product or a service, but retargeting, i.e. advertising that “just” closes the sale once most of the job is already done. If this is the best they can do to convince us that Social Media is a force to be reckoned with, they’re in trouble.

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