A Surreal Trip to a Domain-Names Conference

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been shocked by the cold financial reality I watched unfold at this auction during NamesCon, an annual conference for the domain-names industry. Why would approximately 1,400 people voluntarily come to Las Vegas for four days to talk about domain names if there wasn’t money involved?

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 The comparisons are pretty hard to ignore—in their idealized forms, the domain name industry and Las Vegas are manifestations of the fantasy of making something from nothing, wealth seemingly conjured from thin air but dependent on very old, very fraught infrastructure. 

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Some TLDs are hot right now (.io), and some single words are always a good investment (lotions.com, furs.com), but good TLDs and good words together don’t always work (as was explained to the owner of furs.io and lotions.io in one session). Long-time domainers also had oddly specific advice—”Hyphens make your domain less valuable—unless you’re in Germany” and “.info is a dead zone.”

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Michael Cyger, the operator of domain industry website DomainSherpa.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/domain-names-dot-horse/516438/ 

http://www.domainsherpa.com/ 

http://thedna.org/ 

 

Incessant Consumer Surveillance Is Leaking Into Physical Stores

For the past five years or so, brick-and-mortar retail stores have been trying to catch up with their online counterparts in tracking and personalization. Joseph Turow, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania, has been studying the marketing and advertising industries for decades. He chronicled the most recent developments in retail surveillance for his forthcoming book, The Aisles Have Eyes, which will be released by Yale University Press in January.
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What’s interesting is that there are different apps that will interact with the store’s marketing dynamics that have nothing to do with the name of the store. There’s a company called InMarket which has its software in many, many different apps. So if you have, say, the Condé Nast app, it can wake up when you walk into the store and tell the store that you’re in, and what kinds of stuff to offer you, and stuff like that.
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The ability to run through thousands of datapoints about you and compare them with thousands of datapoints about people you don’t even know, and then come up with a sense of what you will buy or not buy at what price: That’s the goal. The goal is to come up with a price for you that you accept based on the product they think you would want.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/10/incessant-consumer-surveillance-is-leaking-into-physical-stores/504821/
http://yalebooks.com/book/9780300212198/aisles-have-eyes
https://www.inmarket.com/

Does Advertising Ruin Everything?

In his new book, The Attention Merchants, the Columbia University professor and writer Tim Wu traces the history of the advertising business from its origins in the 19th century to the modern phenomenon of ad-blocking software on websites. Wu is widely known for his previous book The Master Switch, a history of media companies, and his coining of the term “net neutrality.”


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Many of the early ad men specialized in selling medicine. Many were former preachers or related to preachers. In the 19th century, advertising drew from traditions of religious propaganda, and the idea that our advertising culture draws from religious practice is fascinating to me.
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The attention-merchant business model is in constant need of growth, and the way it has grown historically is either to find new times and space where we’re not occupied or to more subtly exploit the time that is already there. 
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I would say we need a new covenant—a new deal between advertisers and consumers, to make some times and places off limits.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/10/tim-wu/504623/
https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780385352017

 

The Age of the Wordless Logo

MasterCard unveiled its new logo earlier this summer.

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With increasing frequency, MasterCard said, it would do away with using its name in the logo entirely. The focus would be more on the symbol than the words.

MasterCard’s move reflects a wider shift among some of the most widely recognized global brands to de-emphasize the text in their logos, or remove it altogether. Nike was among the first brands to do this, in 1995, when its swoosh began to appear with the words “Just Do It,” and then without any words at all. Apple, McDonald’s, and other brands followed a similar trajectory, gravitating toward entirely textless symbols after a period of transition with logos that had taglines  like “Think Different” or “I’m lovin’ it.”

  Some marketers believe that debranding can make global brands appear “less corporate” and “more personal” to consumers. 

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/the-age-of-the-wordless-logo/499166/ 

 

What Killed the Jingle?

Ad campaigns with jingles worked best with repetition, which was well-suited to an era when there were three main TV channels and advertisers could reliably reach the same viewers over and over again. But today’s viewers are not quite the captive audiences they used to be. By 2013, there were 189 channels in the average cable package. That audience fragmentation has multiplied with the rise of streaming services and digital recording devices. Now viewers may watch few commercials, if any at all.
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Ad agencies have changed their tack accordingly. They started borrowing techniques from the film industry for commercials, including story arcs and background music that evokes a feeling or mood. Jingles, by contrast, are preachier and more instructional. The inclusion of pop music has made commercials even more aspirational, but the sell more subtle. It’s about the brand experience, and not just the product.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/what-killed-the-jingle/497291/