2008 August archive at Gypsy Bandito

Archive for August, 2008

Meet Joe Brennan

Published August 26, 2008 in Internet, Politics and Video. 0 Comments

If you work in PR, then you’ve probably seen Thank You For Smoking, and if you haven’t, you should (excerpt clip here). The main character is Nick Naylor, and he’s a lobbyist for big tobacco — an idea that I’ve flirted with.

Well, this is an interview with Joe Brennan, the Nick Naylor of online gambling. He’s the President and CEO of the Interactive Media Entertainment & Gaming Association (iMEGA), “an association dedicated to the continued growth and innovation of the Internet.” I met Joe at the NGG conference in Montreal a couple weeks ago. What a mensch.

Share This

I Can Haz Affiliate Marketing

Published August 25, 2008 in Marketing. 0 Comments

I little while ago, I mentioned how I had started contributing to OneDegree.ca — a “central gathering place for Canadian Online Marketers.” Well, today, they published the last installment of a 4 part series on affiliate marketing that I put together for them. Here are some links to each intallment (so you can browse the ones that matter to you):

I got my teeth cut in affiliate marketing while working at SearchAnyway — a PPC search engine feed provider and affiliate network. I’ve done a few things since then, but have found myself back in the world of affiliate marketing.

For the last few months, I’ve been working for Share Results, an affiliate marketing agency with a strong relationship focus. But this is a place for new media, not shameless marketing spin, I’ll spare you the pitch. But if you’re looking for way to increase online sales, I urge you to check out the articles above, and then decide for yourself whether affiliate marketing (and possibly Share Results) is for you.

Share This

FourQuestions.tv Launches

Published August 15, 2008 in Art, Video and Vlog. 0 Comments

A few months ago, I showed off my new toys and said that I had something new cooking. Shortly after, at the first session of Third Tuesday Montreal, I refused to tell Joseph Thornley just what it was all about.

Time passed and that one project changed into two (and got held up a bit as a result).

Well, the first part has finally launched. It’s called FourQuestions.tv, and it’s a series of web vignettes/character exposés. There’s a few up, and a few more to come, but here’s a sample.

Share This

Unilever’s Bad Math

Published August 14, 2008 in PR. 0 Comments

UPDATE: Since posting this, I’ve received a number of emails that convinced me to edit the post considerably. In light of those edits, I deleted some comments because they didn’t really apply to the edited text. I made a mistake the first time around, and hope you’ll understand that I’ve tried to retroactively amend the record.

So yesterday, I posted about the Dove Onslaught[er]. It’s a video that casts Dove in a much less “progressive” light than how the brand recently positioned itself with the Dove Evolution and Dove Onslaught videos.

The Irony: A mad viral campaign has left Dove vulnerable to a grassroots driven PR crisis a couple years later.

Since I’m an impressionable thug who’s susceptible to mob-mentality (and have probably precluded myself from ever doing any work with Unilever in the future anyway), I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon and tell you all about how Unilever sucks at damage control, and thinks that we’re all f**king idiots.

Like the Onslaught video from Dove, Onslaught[er] features a young girl in the context of the world she’s facing. Instead of a white, freckled, red-headed American girl dealing with a sex-sells culture, however, the girl of Dove Onslaught[er] is an Indonesian girl, about 10 years old, who’s facing a future of environmental catastrophe. Text layover in the video reads:

98% of Indonesia’s lowland forest will be gone by the time Azizah is 25.

Most is destroyed to make palm oil, which is used in Dove products.

Talk to Dove before it’s too late.

Well, that’s just what I did. I sent them an email that read: Continue reading ‘Unilever’s Bad Math’

Share This

Dove OnSlaughter

Published August 13, 2008 in Advertising and Video. 0 Comments

Remember the Dove Onslaught Video? The one where Dove comes out looking like a progressive company because they challenge standards of beauty that erode the self-esteem of young girls?

Well, this is Dove Onslaught[er], and it brings to light a side of the company that isn’t so progressive after all.

I’ve asked Dove to comment on this. I guess we’ll just wait and see what happens.

Here’s the original Dove clip:

Share This

The Real Google Killer?

Published August 12, 2008 in Search Engine Marketing and Politics. 0 Comments

When you work in online marketing, it’s kind of hard to not see Google as the end-all of the internet that’s even capable of killing democracy. In reality, though, they’re just another company who is completely dependent on laws and an economic system that can be changed (or even replaced) by the prevailing powers that be (like the government) at the drop of a ~~hat~~ bill.

Case in point: both Google and Yahoo! recently started offering their users a way to opt out of their respective targeted ads, and as Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch noted, it most likely has to do with both of them ~~responding to~~ fearing Congressional scrutiny over the intrusiveness of online advertising and behavioral targeting:

The truth is that both Yahoo and Google would rather take symbolic action themselves than be forced to take a more draconian one later. Who’s going to bother to opt out of ad targeting? Some people will, but the vast majority of people probably won’t. What would really mess up Yahoo’s and Google’s advertising ROIs is if Congress mandated that ad-targeting (via cookies) be opt-in. They’d surely get even fewer people opting in for those cookies than they will now get opting out. I know I’m too lazy to do either.

If users suddenly had to opt in to behaviorally targeted ads, Google and Yahoo! would pretty much be f**ked as far as revenue streams go. As Google CEO Eric Schmidt concedes, “the vast majority of [their] revenues comes from text ads.”

Laws that compromise that could be the real Google Killer. It’s hard to imagine how Google could survive such a blow long enough to find an sufficient alternative source of revenue to exist in their present form (i.e.a publicly traded company that dominates search engine marketing and is headed by Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt).

In fact, under such circumstances, we may very well see a more conventional form of corporate entity, the media conglomerate, who’s had trouble surviving because of technology companies like Google, come along and swallow it up.

Just imagine: Congress deals Google a debilitating blow, and Rupert Murdoch comes in and buys up the shattered pieces, picking up all that technology and user-data at an all-time premium low.

Share This