Tag: marketing

  • A way to sell selling itself, redux

    With the obligatory cynical caveats*, this two-hander article on online advertising at The Correspondent may be a shoo-in for this year’s Most Buried Lede award: Marketers are often most successful at marketing their own marketing. Ouch. Not exactly news, perhaps… but I guess it’s oddly reassuring to have your assumptions confirmed. (But also suspicious; hence…

  • Nudge, hold, spin

    Via Andrew Curry, some sort-of-good news: if you’ve ever suspected, as I certainly have, that the marketing industry is locked into a perpetual arms race with our ability to realise when we’re being marketed at, then the news that “behavioural scientists” (also known as shills) are starting to worry that “nudges” (also known as dark…

  • A way to sell selling itself

    VR/AR is ad-tech. Everything built in studios (except for experimental projects from independent artists) is advertising something. That empathy stuff? That’s advertising for nonprofits. But mostly VR is advertising itself. While MTV was advertising musicians, the scale and creative freedom meant that it launched careers for people like Michel Gondry, Antoine Fuqua, David Fincher, Spike…

  • The critical utopia vs. the consumptive picaresque

    Three things make a post, as we used to say. Here’s Yuval Noah Harari — whose book(s) I really need to make the time to read in full — being roundtabled at Teh Graun: The key issue is that because our power depends on collective fictions, we are not good in distinguishing between fiction and…

  • An open reply to a self-published author

    Email in my inbox this morning; anonymised and dissected for reply here, because if this is indicative of what’s going on out in the ebook trenches, then we’re gonna need more mustard gas. Hey, Paul Raven! Hey. So what kinds of promotional activities are legal, moral & ethical for the EBook Newbie like myself? I’m asking,…