I did not partake in crazy Black Friday events this year. Though one of my fondest memories will always be squeezing past the unruly Black Friday mob at Best Buy with my dad one year and ending up the sixth and seventh people into the store, I decided that sleeping was a more valuable use of my time.
The family and I left the house around 2 to pick up some Black Friday scraps. Looking back, it was probably the safer and easier thing to do. At least we had less of a chance at being trampled to death. In these economic times, the level of crazy seems to rise exponentially to the dollar amount saved from a discount. When resources are scarce, people tend to revert back to a more primal nature and gather as much of the resources for themselves with even less regard for the well-being of those around them.
To avoid all of that, we casually strolled through the piles of clothes tossed haphazardly across store floors, around the DVD bins whose contents had long been ransacked, and past flustered and angry store personnel just waiting for their shifts to end. I managed to snag a few good DVDs - Pan's Labyrinth and Primal Fear being two of them. Pan's Labyrinth is an excellent movie if anyone has not yet seen it. And Edward Norton debuted his major movie acting career with Primal Fear. How could I resist?
Personally, I love how casual we were this year about Black Friday. I don't know if it's a sign of the current economic struggle or just our timing, but there were no mobs and no insanely long lines at the cash registers. There were always free parking spaces. But I think the best reward for our nonchalance is the 40% discount we received on a new laptop at 9:30PM, hours after most people were done Black Friday shopping.
Microsoft was offering a 40% discount on anything in the HP online store if you searched with Live.com. Of course the whole system was backed up, and most people couldn't make it past the customary "Oops, the page you are looking for does not exist. Please try again later" page. The thrill of possibly getting such a discount reminded me of my old Neopets days, hitting refresh just hoping to get that rare, pixelated item. I had fun just constantly refreshing the page while playing Super Smash Brothers on a separate screen. Persistence paid off, and once again, I can say that Black Friday was a complete success.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Warning: Advertising talk ahead
I've been thinking a lot about advertising's continuous progression towards the eventual monetization of every little action leading up to a sale. I can't help but wonder what will happen to the world of marketing as we lose ourselves inside an illusion of security once we start believing our dollar values are correct.
Perhaps I should give some background to my concerns. It's no secret that the traditional advertising business has been shaken up due to the increased level of measurability and accountability digital advertising provides. That'syesterday's last week's news. When you market online, you can track every little click, every time the mouse hovers over an ad, every item you toss into a virtual cart. With traditional advertising, the best you can do is sit there and hope your ad was seen or heard by someone in your target audience. Anyone. But who's to know?
Once the ability to trace actions to money is available, every action now has a value. Of course this value will fluctuate given a multitude of circumstances, but there's a number somewhere nonetheless. And when there's a number, there's math to be done. Advertising used to be so unstructured, where companies just tried random copy and creative materials. The revolutionary direct marketer and copywriter David Ogilvy championed the use of testing to actually make advertising recommendations credible. And now we're to the point where every click online is valued.
The newest trend I've noticed is the increase in modeling and valuation of online actions. There are now even more formulas, and everything you do online potentially has a dollar value attached to it. Did you just look at a product? Did you put something in your virtual cart butt hen decide you don't want it anymore? All of these actions are worth something to the marketer. And you can bet they'll try to determine just how much those actions are worth if they haven't done so already.
My concern is - what if we start becoming too dependent on these models? They are, after all, still just guesses, albeit smart guesses. Are there any consequences that we can't see yet?
One of the main reasons for this current economic meltdown is the extensive use of models whose origins eluded the majority of the people working with them. The models were used to price the really crappy mortgages based on how high the risk of default was. However, models are simply frameworks meant to guide predictions. What people didn't take into account was that the real world cannot simply be squeezed into a formula because its nature is to be chaotic. And that's the same issue that the new marketing valuation models will soon encounter. This BusinessWeek article explains what I'm trying to say in a much more eloquent fashion.
The final question, after all of that background and speculation, is, "Have we considered the risk in building these new marketing valuation models?"
Perhaps I should give some background to my concerns. It's no secret that the traditional advertising business has been shaken up due to the increased level of measurability and accountability digital advertising provides. That's
Once the ability to trace actions to money is available, every action now has a value. Of course this value will fluctuate given a multitude of circumstances, but there's a number somewhere nonetheless. And when there's a number, there's math to be done. Advertising used to be so unstructured, where companies just tried random copy and creative materials. The revolutionary direct marketer and copywriter David Ogilvy championed the use of testing to actually make advertising recommendations credible. And now we're to the point where every click online is valued.
The newest trend I've noticed is the increase in modeling and valuation of online actions. There are now even more formulas, and everything you do online potentially has a dollar value attached to it. Did you just look at a product? Did you put something in your virtual cart butt hen decide you don't want it anymore? All of these actions are worth something to the marketer. And you can bet they'll try to determine just how much those actions are worth if they haven't done so already.
My concern is - what if we start becoming too dependent on these models? They are, after all, still just guesses, albeit smart guesses. Are there any consequences that we can't see yet?
One of the main reasons for this current economic meltdown is the extensive use of models whose origins eluded the majority of the people working with them. The models were used to price the really crappy mortgages based on how high the risk of default was. However, models are simply frameworks meant to guide predictions. What people didn't take into account was that the real world cannot simply be squeezed into a formula because its nature is to be chaotic. And that's the same issue that the new marketing valuation models will soon encounter. This BusinessWeek article explains what I'm trying to say in a much more eloquent fashion.
The final question, after all of that background and speculation, is, "Have we considered the risk in building these new marketing valuation models?"
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Yes We Can, Together
On Tuesday night, I witnessed something that finally made me really proud again to be an American and doubly happy to have been in New York. No, I'm not talking about the fact that Obama is our newest President-elect, though that certainly played a big role. I was extremely happy to see that the enthusiasm had returned to our nation.
Voter turnout was a record high. The AP reported that there was about a 64.1% voter turnout rate. We haven't seen that kind of interest in the elections since the sixties. Also, a record-breaking 138 million people came out to vote. People actually got up early to vote. Many people ended up waiting in hour-long lines that wrapped around themselves.
And once the new President-elect was announced, people in New York (and elsewhere) flooded the streets to celebrate together.
The crowds in Union Square about 20 minutes after CNN declared Obama the winner of the 2008 elections. There was a giant flag that people were crawling under and flapping up and down. By the end of the night, the flag had disappeared, mostly swallowed by the crowd. Everyone was ripping apart the flag, an action that might typically be seen as disrespectful. But that night, it was almost symbolic, as if everyone were getting a piece of America. Hopefully, the government of the next four years will again be for the people.
This guy was walking right up Broadway in Times Square with a flag trailing behind him.
I needed a quintessential New York photo of a hotdog stand... especially one that supports Obama/Biden.
I don't think our country has gotten together like this, shared a moment together since the period directly following 9/11. It makes me happy when I can see that we can all put aside our differences and come together as a country. I know Obama's election has not bound our country's citizen's together the same way 9/11 did, but we can all admit that we're living through yet another moment that'll certainly go down in history. And though America may still be divided by social and economic ideological differences, there are signs that show we're moving towards a more cohesive country - something we haven't seen in a long while. I think even those in other countries are starting to sense a change, that America might move away from being the arrogant, elitist country that we were for the past eight years and actually work with other nations to come up with globally beneficial plans.
Voter turnout was a record high. The AP reported that there was about a 64.1% voter turnout rate. We haven't seen that kind of interest in the elections since the sixties. Also, a record-breaking 138 million people came out to vote. People actually got up early to vote. Many people ended up waiting in hour-long lines that wrapped around themselves.
And once the new President-elect was announced, people in New York (and elsewhere) flooded the streets to celebrate together.
The crowds in Union Square about 20 minutes after CNN declared Obama the winner of the 2008 elections. There was a giant flag that people were crawling under and flapping up and down. By the end of the night, the flag had disappeared, mostly swallowed by the crowd. Everyone was ripping apart the flag, an action that might typically be seen as disrespectful. But that night, it was almost symbolic, as if everyone were getting a piece of America. Hopefully, the government of the next four years will again be for the people.
This guy was walking right up Broadway in Times Square with a flag trailing behind him.
I needed a quintessential New York photo of a hotdog stand... especially one that supports Obama/Biden.
I don't think our country has gotten together like this, shared a moment together since the period directly following 9/11. It makes me happy when I can see that we can all put aside our differences and come together as a country. I know Obama's election has not bound our country's citizen's together the same way 9/11 did, but we can all admit that we're living through yet another moment that'll certainly go down in history. And though America may still be divided by social and economic ideological differences, there are signs that show we're moving towards a more cohesive country - something we haven't seen in a long while. I think even those in other countries are starting to sense a change, that America might move away from being the arrogant, elitist country that we were for the past eight years and actually work with other nations to come up with globally beneficial plans.
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