Mark Cuban was sounding off about how bad and unethical advertising adversely affects the brand value of the channel that’s airing it. He makes some decent points, but I think it’s more about him getting up on his soapbox and telling us how cool HDNet is for being discerning.

Viewers are saavy enough to figure out that broadcasters don’t necessarily endorse the advertising they air. Moreover, I think that a network which airs above average content coupled with bad advertising is doing fine by me, because a viewer tunes in for the content and tolerates the advertising.

I’d be left slack-jawed if I ever came across someone who said, “I won’t watch CSI (or Desperate Housewives, or Grey’s Anatomy, or…) because the network aired a get-rich-quick infomercial at midnight the day earlier. I can’t imagine anyone basing their viewing preferences on something like that because viewers think all advertising sucks. Some more than others, but it all gets in the way.

Another reason viewers are relatively immune to this bad advertising is the fact that all the channels are airing TVCs of this kind. Since there isn’t someone who overtly bans them, they’re all over the place and no one really notices where they are and where they aren’t.

Even in this case, there’s something to be said about the power of ubiquity!

It would be a completely different story if a channel went all puritanical and started speaking out against dodgy ads and refused to air them. I’m sure you’d then see a ground swell of support from viewers.

Three things would cause this:

1. They’d realise that they’re being considered when a station decides what advertising to accept
2. People would realise that they could piggyback the cause
3. Other stations would feel the pressure to raise their own acceptance standards

Alas, that’s not going to happen and, frankly, I don’t think anyone really cares if it doesn’t.

Technorati Tags: mark cuban, commercials, infomercials, advertising, network televison, advertising standards

I just read that British Airways has cut out Richard Branson’s cameo in Casino Royale and also blurred out a Virgin Atlantic logo that appears during the movie. It’s hard not to laugh at a seemingly paranoid BA because the move is going to be reported pretty widely in the press. There’s no way that an action like this is going to win them any points.

I also don’t believe that a benign cameo and a bit of competitive product placement would adversely affect BA’s passengers’ perception of BA. They should’ve left the scenes in and ignored the thing altogether. After all, the passengers will have already bought their tickets and gotten on your plane before being exposed to anything.

The risk of negative buzz is quite a bit greater than any upside they’re going to see.

We screen all films before they’re used on our aircraft so that we can control the content of what is displayed,” the (BA) spokesman said on condition of anonymity, in line with company policy. “We have full control over what is shown.

We all know that there’s no love lost between the two, esp since Branson quite regularly goes after BA for things they shouldn’t be up to, but this seems like taking matters too far.

It rings of pettiness more than anything else and it’s certainly not something that’s going to help the BA brand perception any. Virgin comes off as being the bigger company.

Probably the best PR bit in all of this is the fact that Virgin Atlantic left BA’s scene intact when it ran Die Another Day!

Paul Charles, a spokesman for Virgin Atlantic, said was a shame BA felt the cut was necessary. He said Virgin made no changes to “Die Another Day” a Bond film featuring British Airways, adding his carrier’s policy was not to edit the movies it shows.

Technorati Tags: richard branson, casino royale, ba, british airways, virgin atlantic, censorship, product placement

Google’s really going fast and hard at my data. I just searched for something at Google.com and noticed some new “features” they’re offering which I found really disturbing, namely Web History. It aims to make your Internet activity much easier to track and manage. It aims to make your searches more accurate and relevant. It aims to give you some insight about your online habits.

It aims to do all of this using the data that you allow it to collect from you. You and millions of other people.

To you, you’re just one person and you can see how the service is great and will help you. To Google, you’re one tiny bit of a huge amount of data that’s going to help them pretty much figure out how people behave online. That information will, in turn, allow them to release new apps, improve their advertising and search algorithms and, essentially, make more money and be more dominant.

All of this makes me a little uncomfortable. My resentment towards Google seems to grow a little bit every day because of how pervasive its tools have become. I continue to use their search engine. I have a GMail account, though it only exists to collect AdAge newsletters. I flirted with Google Analytics. I use Google Browser Sync. I’ve made some serious money off Adsense. And as I write this paragraph, I realise how long this list is and how reliant I have become on this company. Again, all of this makes me a little uncomfortable.

The funny thing is that I don’t really know why it’s bothering me so much. I have no problem with Microsoft’s dominance. I, in fact, champion MS when people slam it. I don’t really worry about privacy to the degree that most people in the West do.

Because I can’t put my finger on the source of my irritation, I can only conjecture that it stems from the fact that Google has become a massive company. It’s not only the really good company that did search well and was vying to kick Yahoo’s ass, but it’s now a company that is kicking everyone’s ass.

It’s not the nerdy underdog anymore. It’s morphed in to the cool guy, the school yard bully. And no one likes the cool guy or the bully.

I can’t root for Google anymore. I don’t get surprised by new stuff it puts out. Rather, I look for problems — stuff that I can complain about.

That’s how this post started out. I read about Web History and immediately thought, “Damn, they want more of my data.” I didn’t bother to see what it offered me, how it could make things easier for me, how it could make search better for me.

I don’t think my complaints, or those that others are voicing, are invalid. They’re legitimate issues and concerns. And I think that it’s hard these days to like Google. No matter what it does.

Technorati Tags: google, invasion, privacy, data mining, doubleclick

Follow up to This Bloody Thing Called Worldcall and Bloody Worldcall… continued

It’s been a fortnight since my Worldcall-issued modem died and they still haven’t managed to give me a new one. What a bunch of incompetent twits.

In the last week, I’ve received four calls from them with each person asking me the stupidest of questions:

• What type of modem do you have? (Webstar DPX-2203. Shouldn’t you know this already?)
• What is your modem’s MAC ID? (Twat, the modem’s with you, not me. I don’t know.)
• We have your complaint listed. What is the problem? (I told him to read the file. He did, said sorry and hung up.)
• Can you clarify that your address is correct. (I told him, he said okay and hung up.)

On Monday, I called them and asked for an update. I was told that I will get a call back. I did get one about two hours later. The man was polite, seemed understanding and spoke with some authority. He wanted to know why I had my VoIP telephone connection listed at one address and the Internet connection for the same account listed at another address. I told him that I didn’t. He said I did. I said I didn’t.

Eventually, I figured out that when I transferred the connection nine months ago to my new home, they mustn’t have updated their VoIP records. Why do they have separate records for VoIP connections when it’s all dependent on the same hardware and account number? God fucking knows.

I told him that I hadn’t ever used the VoIP aspect of the connection and had actually asked them to stop the service about a year ago. He responded with another question, “Why do you have a VoIP modem then?” I replied that I don’t just decide which modem I should have — I take what you give me and you never exchanged my VoIP modem, so I just continued to use it.

Eventually, after all of this frustration, the man apologised for the delay in getting me a new modem and committed that I would have a new one “tomorrow,” meaning Wednesday.

Wednesday came and went without a visit or a phone call from Worldcall.

I called again today and told the support person that I would be disconnecting the service if I didn’t get a modem today. He said he has emailed his superiors and I will “definitely” receive a call in a little while. It’s 12:25am now and I never got that call.

However, I did manage to make a call of my own this afternoon — to Maxcom. Their sales person was at my house promptly at 4:30pm. I filled out the forms and I should have two new DSL connections in about three days. I’m kicking Worldcall out of my office as well — dumb shits just lost two accounts for the price of one.

I’m done chasing Worldcall now. But, I will wait to see how long they take to get me the new modem, just out of curiousity. It’ll be amusing the turn the techie away at the gate, whenever he does turn up. Poor guy — he’s going to get an earful from me, even though he’ll probably have no idea what for.

Good riddance.

Technorati Tags: worldcall, karachi, isp, disconnect, maxcom, customer support

Okay, calling it a monopoly is a bit of a stretch, but one has to wonder what this acquisition binge of Google’s is going to end up doing to the competition. DoubleClick and Google were the two largest online ad distributors and they’re one entity now (at a cost of $3.1bn to Google, in case you’ve been in a cave the last few days).

How big a deal is that? AOL’s a good example of the dominance — about 75% of its ad revenue will now involve DoubleClick and Google. That’s got to be a little disconcerting for AOL and others in the same situation.

A bigger concern comes from everyone else who’s in the same (ad placement) game, because Google’s not going to stop with its attempt to corner the online space. Hell, they just announced the deal with Clear Channel today which, coupled with the purchase of dMarc Broadcasting ($1.24bn) last year, shows that they’re crossing over in to other mediums pretty aggressively.

How do you compete with it? How do you even stay relevant? And what do you do when Google uses its might to start doing other things? They paid a ton of cash ($1.65bn) for YouTube and that’s got to be about more than just ad dollars.

Microsoft is whining about the DoubleClick deal being unfair (ironic and a lot of sour grapes, given that they were trying to buy DC as well). AT&T is getting its panties in a bunch as well. They’ve got their IPTV stuff to feel protective about and I suppose there’s a little of “We got broken up, so others should too” going through there minds.

I’m not sure anyone outside of the Googleplex is happy about this, except maybe aQuantive, who’s share price shot up 12 percent after the announcement.

Technorati Tags: google, doubleclick, att, microsoft, monopoly, advertising, adsense