Tag Archives: advertising

Tinfoil hat society…

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Let’s take a minute and look at the headlines tonight: Ebola is loose in the United States for the first time in recorded history, they’re protesting for democratic reforms in China, Europe’s economy appears to be at stall speed, and it wouldn’t take much more than a stiff wind to push ours in the same direction, the Secret Service is letting armed felons within arms reach of a sitting president. In general, civilization seems to be beset and besotted at every turn.

300px-Tin_foil_hat_2I’ve never been a dues-paying member of the Tinfoil Hat Society, but I do think the world we live in bears a closer look. Two things immediately jump to mind: 1) It doesn’t matter if it’s the local station, the cable networks or the internet, bad news makes people want to look and generates revenue from advertising sales; 2) Most of the asshattery I see in the world more or less confirms my preconceived notions about people as a group; and 3) Just by virtue of the law of large numbers, even paranoid people have to be right occasionally.

I could probably get a thousand new views a day if I gave this site over to ranting and raving about global conspiracies. The fact is, after having spent my adult life in public service I have my doubts about any organization being able to pull together a grand scheme to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids. More importantly, I throughly doubt their ability to do it in anything approaching secrecy. I mean I’m not allowed to build a 10 slide PowerPoint briefing without soliciting input from at least 14 other people, so you can understand how I might doubt the ability of an unknown global organization to rig the economy, unleashing a pandemic, and engineer a catastrophic war between East and West in complete secrecy.

I tend to think the long laundry list of things that go wrong are attributable to not much more than our collective bad decision making catching up with us. It feels like a simpler and more rational explanation than a transcontinental conspiracy bent on controlling everything everywhere. I’m pretty sure I’m right about that.

Then again, my assumption of being right won’t keep me from picking up a box of latex gloves, a few bottles of alcohol, and some surgical masks. Just in case.

Wall-to-wall…

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I’m a news junkie. Most weekends, you’ll find the television parked on FoxNews, CNN, or SkyNews running as background noise while I go about the day. While I’m not selling short the importance of knowing why a fully-loaded Boeing 777 inexplicably disappeared three weeks ago, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that at this point, we don’t need 24×7, wall-to-wall coverage of it as a news story. In fact, I’d go so far as to posit that “nothing new to report” is the antithesis of “news.”

Like any other television outlet, the news channels aren’t so much about their content as they are avenues to put consumer’s eyes on advertisements. Even after three weeks, apparently the missing airliner story brings in the viewers, so that’s what they’re staying with. As with most stories of this type, the fact that it’s still commanding the top over every cycle says more about us than it does about any of the news outlets. Still, I’m a little curious what else has been happening on the planet while we’ve all been busy looking at grainy satellite photos of a decidedly empty slice of the Indian Ocean.

It feels like a fair guess that there might be one or two other vaguely important things going on somewhere. I’m sure right now this story feels like the most important issue in the world for the friends and family of the people who are still missing, but for the rest of us, it’s starting to feel a lot like rubbernecking… and that’s just tacky.

Adverts…

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WordPress makes it mercifully easy to keep a mosty respectable blog up and running without forcing you to master all the behind the scenes nonsense. I’ve long since given up on ever wanting to be by own webmaster. It would just be one more thing that I don’t have time to do right and would result in doing a half-assed job that would, in turn, make me crazy.

There are a few things, that WordPress lets you tweak without forcing you into managing your own page. This morning, while I was renewing my lease on adfreebannerhttp://www.jeffreytharp.com and making sure it mapped over to WordPress, I picked up one of these extra options.

Starting today, you should be reading this and every other post completely ad free. If I’m going to spend time making sure you have daily updates, pour ridiculous amounts of time into other projects, and make a half-hearted effort at marketing it, the only ads I want you to see are the ones that put cash in my own pocket. I guess we’ll find out this time next year if the return on investment pays off. Even if it doesn’t in a purely dollars and cents terms, running ad free gives the place a much cleaner look. That by itself is probably worth eating a little extra cost.

The next time you see an advert featured here, you can buy with confidence that you are helping to subsidize my writing habit, rather than putting money in the cold hands of a faceless corporation. With that in mind, why don’t you go ahead and check out the Retail Partners list to the left of this post and find yourself something to read?

Why we blog…

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I got an email this afternoon from “a new media agency headquartered in the UK” wondering if I was “interested in selling advertising space on jeffreytharp.com.” The sender promises that advertisements would be unobtrusive and that they can pay an annual upfront payment for the advertising space. While the email does track back to an IP address in Uxbridge, England it’s safe to say that it qualifies as one of those sounds too good opportunities.

The truth is, I’m not blogging for advertisers. I’m not blogging to sell banners or to generate click-throughs or even to climb in the Technorati ratings. Mostly I’m blogging because I think I can turn a pretty phrase now and then and it seems that people are kind enough to humor me by reading it on a regular basis. If I happen to sell a few of my own wears in the process, so much the better – but this blog isn’t now and never will be written for the sake of generating a few pennies of advertising revenue. The complete lack of a coherent campaign for selling my own book should pretty much tell you where advertising falls on my list of priorities.

I think everyone that blogs harbors some kind of secret dream of being the next breakaway hit… and while it would be incredible to be on the receiving end of millions of hits a day, if I get there through the merits of the written word, that’s awesome. If it take shilling for some advertising company, well, I’ll keep my day job (at least 4 days a week) and enjoy the 20-30 people who check in around here on a regular basis.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Pandemonium. Despite the common perception, I’m a quiet guy. I enjoy reading. I enjoy writing. I generally enjoy activities that limit the amount of social interaction that are really required of me, though with some effort, I can make a good showing when I do need to make nice with a crowd. If you ever want to really throw me off my game, all you really need to do is drive up the noise level in the room and my nerves will start fraying on command. My blood pressure will spike and I’ll end up using most of my available focus to simply avoid biting someone’s head off. It’s not a recipe for great productivity. Maybe I really should have looked into career opportunities as a research librarian or lighthouse keeper if the whole writing thing doesn’t take off. That or possibly move my desk into an anechoic chamber.

2. Air conditioning. I’ve been known to keep it cold in the house. I’ve been known to keep it cold in the truck. What I don’t do is keep it so cold in either of those places that I need to wear gloves and a coat while I’m inside either of them. I mean it’s fun to have to stop every few minutes to keep your fingers from stiffening up and making typing damned near impossible, but it seems to me that maybe the best course of action would be to moderate the indoor air temperature a bit rather than setting it to arctic and throwing the blowers on full blast. I’m not a fancy big city engineer or HVAC specialist, but it seems to me that there are some settings on the dial between Ice Age and Sahara that someone might want to test out.

3. False advertising. Walking into a supermarket and you can usually expect to come out with groceries. Walk into Best Buy and you can usually expect to walk out with electronics. Walk into a bar and you can usually buy beer. If you think you can walk into a shop advertising out front that ‘We Sell Silver” and walk out with silver however, you would be wrong. Apparently what they meant by that sign was “We Buy Silver.” Clearly the meaning of “buy” and “sell” have been lost somewhere in translation.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Springing forward. For the last 100+ years, we have jiggered with the time in the spring and in the fall. Maybe that made sense when everyone was a farmer (and maybe it didn’t), but in the 21st century there’s really not much of a practical reason to spring forward or fall back since our activities are more or less standardized to the clock rather than to the relative position of the sun in the sky. I say ditch the time change nonsense. Pick one, stick with it, and move on. It’s just one small pain in the ass that we can all agree belongs in the 19th century?

2. Follow-through, or failure thereof. I’m a simple kind of guy in a lot of ways – like when I tell you that I’m going to do something. Excepting completely unforeseen and unavoidable circumstances, when I say it’s going to get done, it will be done on time and to standard. My frist mistake is probably expecting the same from other people. At a minimum it would be nice if they had the common decency to let a brother know they’re going to let him flap in the wind and look like a douche canoe. Really, how effing hard can it be to throw together some PowerPoint slides and send out an email? Apparently, it’s of a scope and scale that exceeds preparing for the Normandy invasion… I’m pretty sure those jokers got their slides on time.

3. Truth in advertising. The Dear Leader of our beloved People’s Republic of Maryland wants to raise the gas tax this year, except he wants to do it without calling it that. So instead of ending up with a proposed bill to raise the gas tax, we end up with a bill to reduce the gas tax this year and then supplement that reduction by phasing in a sales tax on gasoline over the next three years. Oh look, he’s reducing the gas tax! Sigh. I know most people are either dumb as a box of rocks or not paying attention, but if the Dear Leader wants to jam his hand even further into my pocket and take more money from my magical shrinking pay check, I wish he’d have the fortitude to stand up and at least call it a tax.

So here’s the deal…

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I took every spare minute I could scrounge up over the last six months and wrote a book. Thanks to the generosity of a few friends, What You Didn’t Learn in College: A Field Guide to Surviving the Cubicle Wars is now working its way through the editing and “beta” process. In a couple of weeks, the plan is to have this little gem available as an ebook through three primary retail channels: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords. Eventually, Smashwords will spread that distribution out to other retail outlets like the Apple iBooks, Kobo, Sony, and others smaller venues. I’m still looking into ways to bring the book to market in print that don’t require a) dealing with a publisher or b) cost a small fortune and result in boxes of inventory sitting in my basement.

Rest assured, as soon as the editing is finished and the retail side is up and running, you’ll be among the first to know. In the meantime, there are a few things you can do to support the cause:

1. Follow me on Twitter – @jdtharp

2. Like my new “official” fan page on Facebook and share it with your friends

See how easy that was? No fuss, no muss – Just a few clicks and your good deed for the day is done. Now all you have to do is sit back, relax, and stay tuned.

Stock out…

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I’ve been reading alot of articles in the last 12 hours about how strange it is that the new iPad hasn’t appeared to sell out on launch day like the previous two models have. If the lines I saw yesterday were any indication, I don’t think it says anything at all about demand for the new device. I suspect, and it’s purely my conjecture without any actual supporting evidence, that it has less to do with demand and more to do with who’s at the helm of Apple, Inc.

Steve Jobs, hallowed be his name, was a master showman. He excelled at sales and building drama surrounding every new product. Constrained supply at launch was every bit as much a marketing tool as print and television ads. Tim Cook, by contrast, is a master logistician. His specialty is filling the supply chain so that the products get to the right place, in the right quantities, at the right time. He’s spent his career doing his best to avoid stock outs, as they tend to show a point of failure in the supply chain. I’m not saying that one approach is better or worse, because either way Apple, Inc is walking away with a giant bag of cash.

As a half-assed one time logistician myself, I can certainly understand and appreciate Cook’s approach. In the long run, I suspect having the product on shelves and available to customers on demand is a superior approach to sales than cranking up the hype machine to full tilt. You’re selling an iPad, a device that almost sells itself. You might have needed the hype for v1, but now that you’re miles ahead of the competition and gaining ground, it’s all about meeting demand.

Forgive me my blasphemy, Saint Steve.