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The Titanic sinks
January 12, 2016
Dear Publishers, Ad Blockers Aren’t the Problem: You Are
  • Posted By : Hal Thomas/
  • 0 comments /
  • Under : Marketing , Technology

David Chavern, president & CEO of the Newspaper Association of America, recently penned an opinion piece on Digiday entitled Ad blocking threatens democracy. The convoluted logic in this article illustrates a big part of why newspapers and other many news publishers continue to struggle.

It suggests that users — and their increased use of ad blockers on publishers’ websites — are the main problem, an assertion that places blame squarely on the people that publishers used to call customers and charges them with freeloading, a nice word for stealing. (We already know how well that course of action worked for the music industry.)

Pointing fingers at users is convenient because it absolves from responsibility the publishers themselves who often make a crap product no one is willing to pay for and who pollute good content and destroy UX with more ads than a NASCAR stock car.

And people are just sick of it. (Cue Twister Sister.)

The solution — if there is one — lies not in asking, “What do newspapers (or local TV news programs, etc.) look like in the 21st Century?” The solution lies in asking, “What does a news organization (local, national, international) look like in the 21 Century?” The latter is question is not predisposed to a particular media solution.

Answer this question correctly and then you can have discussions about content delivery mechanisms and monetization strategies, things which must first account for the needs/wants of the end user rather than the advertisers.

Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and HBO have proven that people will pay for quality content they can’t get anywhere else. So does such a thing translate to news? I don’t know.

It could be that news is now so ubiquitous that people will no longer pay for it regardless of its “quality.” And if that’s truly the case, then it’s time publishers stop pretending the ship isn’t sinking and start looking for lifeboats.


June 22, 2015
Stupid Brand Tricks: Heinz QR Porn
  • Posted By : Hal Thomas/
  • 0 comments /
  • Under : Marketing , Technology

Heinz ketchup is the latest contestant on Stupid Brand Tricks, which highlights the ways brands routinely embarrass themselves with their marketing.

Last week, the ketchup maker was called out by a German customer for a QR code that links to a porn site. Apparently the QR code was from a campaign that gave German customers the opportunity to design a label for the ketchup bottle. The promotion concluded and Heinz did not renew the campaign domain name, so naturally a porn company scooped it up.

heinz-qr-porn

As Grub Street put it, “it’s unclear which is worse: having a porn site assume the old web address, or it taking months before somebody actually scanned the code and made the discovery.” Also, it makes you wonder how old the ketchup was, doesn’t it?

Heinz, of course, apologized and even offered the customer the chance to design a label. The porn company responded by giving the guy a free membership to its website, so at least there’s a chance that this story has a happy ending.


June 10, 2015
WTF is the Marketing Cloud?
  • Posted By : Hal Thomas/
  • 0 comments /
  • Under : Marketing , Technology

A recent piece by Digiday sought to uncover what (ostensibly) smart, savvy business professionals knew about marketing cloud applications. According to Digiday,

We sent our video producer to the Hudson Square neighborhood of New York City–home of such venerable ad agencies as Edelman Digital, Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal + Partners and Havas–to find out if the food truck crowd knew just what the cloud is and how the marketing cloud fits into it.

As it turns out, the people they talked to are just as confused as everyone else, so Digiday and one of their sponsors created WTF is the Marketing Cloud, a thorough and informative 29-page read that explains the history/evolution of The Cloud and its more recent iterations.

You can download the PDF for free and spend the rest of afternoon reading, or you can buy us a drink and let us tell you about it. (And the time we hung out with Donal Logue on a movie set or the time we met the Kalashnikov girls in Vegas.)

Which one sounds more fun? (HINT: We’re partial to bourbon.)


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