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In a recent - and rather controversial - post on TechCrunch Eric Clemons postulates that advertising on the Internet is dead. He received a huge number of responses to his article and posted a response at the bottom of his original article that basically summed up what he already said, while also claiming an article in The Economist agreed with him.

So what is the basis of his claims that advertising is dead?

He makes three basic claims: First, the people don’t want to view advertising. Second, that they don’t trust advertising. Third, that they don’t need advertising.

The first two claims are somewhat true. However, this is nothing new.  Those have been true since advertising first started in any medium. Obviously TV and radio would be much better if there were no ads right? I mean, we could just watch the shows straight through with no “annoying” ads getting in the way. Ads that make claims like “Tide makes your whites whiter” I mean, do we really even believe it when they say it about themselves?

Yet, somehow, ads continue. Why? Repetition and research. In order for an ad to “stick” with a consumer they have to see it multiple times. At which point they start thinking about the product. If it is in an area where they need said product (like laundry detergent) the consumer might ask around, research on the Web and even try the product themselves to see if it works. This could be further enhanced if they see a sale or coupon for the product, making the decision that much easier.

This leads to point three: That consumers don’t need advertising. Sure they do. They even want it, even if the claim in polls says no. Even if consumers claim to not like it, ask yourself or others you know if they respond to ads about sales at their favorite store or a sale on a product they have been eying. You know it happens. Everyone does this. I get e-mails from Tiger Direct, for example, that tell me about great sales they are having on products. I appreciate knowing about them so I continue to get the e-mails. How many of these type of e-mails do you willingly get (not talking about spam, talking about e-mails you opted to receive)?

What the Internet has done is made it easier for people to research products, but they still learn about the products via advertising.

As to the Economist agreeing? Hardly. The Economist points out how well advertising works on some sites - just not on others. They aren’t even talking about the effectiveness of the ads, they are talking about revenues for the sites that run them. This is a totally different thing.

Advertising can work for companies that are using it, yet not generate enough for the site that shows the ads. Sites have a limited number of visitors and advertisers generally spend only to the point where it makes them money, while still paying for ads. A site can only support so many ads with so many customers. Once they reach saturation, there isn’t more money to be had (unless they get more traffic).  So a site might not be able to gather enough revenue to support themselves with advertising alone. But that is a business model issue, not an advertising issue.

Lastly, advertising does work, but thanks to the recession companies are doing less of it right now. This is hardly the time to claim the death of advertising when companies are spending less on everything across the board. Advertising more is something many companies would like to do, but can’t because they must take care of the basics first (like paying employees, paying suppliers, etc) and with lower sales they just can’t spend the money on ads.

Advertising is hardly dead. Yes, there will be changes over time, but that is nothing new. Advertising has always adjusted, from newspapers, to radio, to TV to the Internet. It will continue to do so for a long, long time to come as well.

Note: This was originally written by me and published on PivotLab’s SEO Blog

Matthew SEO

Virtual worlds and social networking sites have something very much in common with each other. Both, in their most basic form, exist to allow people to connect with each other. In the case of places like Second Life, new friendships are formed along with old ones, perhaps. Though in Second Life it truly can be a “second” life since you can be whoever or whatever you want there.

Social sites like MySpace and Facebook, however, tend to be based on in who you really are (at least in theory). The idea behind these sites is to let you catch up with friends or people you know from diverse locations and share stories, thoughts, ideas, videos, pictures, whatever.

Facebook even has a lot of great games that you can play with friends from all over the world, not to mention TONS of other social applications.

Facebook, which I use, is not without its issues however. But one great thing about Facebook is that they appear to, at times, listen to their user base. Lately, there have been two great examples of this.

First, Facebook changed their Terms of Service without informing their users that they were doing so. These changes were pretty drastic. To sum up: They own everything you put on your page on Facebook and everything you link to and all your pictures and videos and everything. Forever. Even if you stop using Facebook.

Now, setting aside how ridiculous a lot of this is  (so, if I link to a New York Times article, Facebook now owns it? Wow, won’t the Times be surprised)  that is a pretty serious change.  I mean, there isn’t even the ability to opt-out.

This created an incredible amount of outrage.

The result is that Facebook first tried to clarify their policy saying that they didn’t really mean what they said. Shortly after that, however, Facebook switched right back to their old TOS. A solid example of a company making a massive mistake and then fixing it.

Well, they have done it again, but in this case it is usability. After changing their look less than a year ago, they have done it again. Now it is harder than ever to do the primary function of Facebook – keep up with friends. In what some postulate is an attempt to compete with ultra-simple Twitter, Facebook simplified things. But they went way, way too far.

The result is that the user base is very, very upset. Now, what everyone really wants from Facebook, has been set-aside. So why stick with them, right?

Facebook is listening and has announced that they are going to make some changes based on this feedback and make it easier to follow friends again.

Facebook still has a lot of issues. A huge problem brewing is their privacy policy, in which basically once we install a third-party application, we have no privacy at all. No, I don’t know why that game of scrabble needs access to my whole profile. But I know I don’t like it.

Social networking is still relatively new. Every company has had stumbles. Some never recover (looking at you Friendster). However, I have to give credit to Facebook. While they are far from perfect, at least they are listening. Sometimes.

Note: This was originally written by me and published on the Rising Tide blog.

Matthew Technology

When the Spartans took to the court last night, they easily had 90% of the crowd behind them. North Carolina had solid representation, but it is hard to have a crowd advantage when the opponent’s school is just 90 miles away.

Unless, of course, the home crowd does something like have a “White Out”, which effectively takes away home court advantage.

The reasons to hate the “White Out” movement are many. First, it is called “White Out”. The name fits, because just like the erasing fluid, a “White Out” erases the fans. White is a stupid color for sports fans, if you can even call it a color. If you were going to list the most intimidating colors, white wouldn’t even make the list.

Nothing white is even scary. Pillsbury Doughboy? Frosty the Snowman? I mean, the last scary white thing was the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man and that was over 25 years ago.

See? Even in a sailor suit he is scary!

Furthermore, the only people that wear that much white are very old, very retired people from South Beach, Florida. There is a reason for this. It is because white is very, very boring. It isn’t just to reflect away the heat, they also wear it because it is boring.

North Carolina was the home team, technically, in this game. This means that they wore white. Not to mention their other color is, and I got this from their official Web site so I wouldn’t get it wrong, “Really Wussy Powder Baby Blue”. It is such a light blue that it is almost white. It wouldn’t take much for a UNC player to imagine that the crowd was, in fact, behind them. Though it would have been confusing as to why the crowd got so quiet after the first minute of play.

I hate “White Outs” in almost all cases. Whenever I see a fan base doing this, I find it exceptionally lame. The only time I ever found it even remotely cool was the first time I had ever seen it done. It was several years back when the old NHL Winnipeg Jets did a white out during the playoffs. It was quite the sight to see. The whole crowd was white (and not just their clothes). The stadium was white. The ice was, of course, white. If I had been a player on the opposing team, upon seeing this crowd, I would have thought, “WOW! How did they get all these old people to come up here from South Beach, Florida? This is spooky!” I wouldn’t have been intimidated so much as disconcerted.

The only time I can think of when a “White Out” is ok is if the team involved had colors of white on white. It would be a horrible color scheme to be sure, but at least then all of the fans wearing white would make sense.

Now I know MSU has two school colors – Green and White. But the white exists to give the green just that much more POP. It wouldn’t work all by itself. It needs the green.

As a side-note, when I am at an MSU game of any kind, I am always vaguely disappointed if I am on the side of the area/stadium that has to say “Go White” as opposed to “Go Green”. Green is just that much cooler.

Now, imagine Ford Field if it had been 90% green. It would have been a sea of green. UNC would have no doubts as to who the fans in the crowd were supporting. The green is dark enough that the whole atmosphere of Ford Field would have changed. It would have seemed that much darker, that much more sinister for the visiting team. Instead of the lights being reflected back, the green would have absorbed the light. It would have been an impressive and actually intimidating sight. If the Spartan fans in attendance had done this, if they had worn the Green than I firmly believe that the game would have gone differently.

The Spartans might have lasted 2 minutes into the game instead of 1.

Wow North Carolina is good.

Matthew Random Thoughts

Scientists at Aberystwyth and Cambridge have developed a robot named Adam that can perform experiments, and more incredibly, draw conclusions from those experiments.

For the first time ever, a robot has gathered scientific knowledge independently from people. This is a pretty incredible breakthrough. We can now see robots learning without people programming that information into them.

This seems fantastic until they become self-aware and start building terminators to destroy us all.

I kid, of course.

However, I do have a long-standing bet with a friend of mine dealing with robots and their possible effect on our future society, in the very-near term.

The bet states the following will happen by 2015:

• Robotics in the workforce being among the primary issues in the house
• Planes will start to be flown completely remotely and unmanned
• Unemployment will be at least 30%
• 50% of all minimum wage jobs will be replaced by robots

My friend is on the supporting side, I say it won’t happen – at least not by 2015. I believe that in the end the economy can adjust even if robots become as prevalent as he believes. I also believe that while robots might indeed take over a lot of jobs, there are some they just can’t or will not be allowed to do. Think about robot pilots. While perhaps an “improved” auto-pilot could be approved in the future that could basically fly and land the plane, I refuse to believe that no human pilot and co-pilot for that matter would be left out of the cockpit. I just don’t see people reaching a level of comfort where we trust an airplane entirely to a robot with no human “backup”. Sure, we have the Predator now, but that has no people inside. That makes all of the difference.

So who will be right? Let’s all hope I am. Unless you are ready to welcome our new robot overlords.

However, robots are a never-talked about reason for job loss. Check out this video from Drew Carey who points out that many, many more jobs are lost due to robots than have ever been lost because of out-sourcing. Sure, it is tongue-in-cheek, but the point still remains: Robots have taken over an incredible number of jobs. Of course, there are a lot of positives to that as well (which is why I don’t believe the 30% unemployment number – at least, due to robots).

My hope is that more nations will draft something like South Korea’s Robot Code of Ethics. This is based on Issac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics and basically ensures that robots will not be able to harm people or allow people to come to harm.

While it is true we are a long way away from needing such rules in robots now (learning the genetic patterns of yeast, as Adam has done, hardly seems life-threatening) it wouldn’t be a bad idea to set these forth early, so that the standard is understood by researchers going forward.

Because I don’t think any of us want a robot server at McDonald’s gunning us down because we didn’t like our Big Mac.

Note: This was originally written by me and published at The Rising Tide blog.

Matthew Technology