Making Sense: Choices
- Why Snapchat is Valuable: it's All About Attention. Danah Boyd: As a result, I watch teens choose not to open a Snap the moment they get it because they want to wait for the moment when they can appreciate whatever is behind that closed door. And when they do, I watch them tune out everything else and just concentrate on what’s in front of them. Rather than serving as yet-another distraction, Snapchat invites focus.
- Tesla Can Topple the Car Dealer Monopoly. Bloomberg: By carrying the standard for retail market liberalization, Tesla shows that it aspires to be more than a green gimmick, but heir to the best traditions of American innovation. And that's a revolution worth getting excited about.
Making Do: Exceptions
- Promotion Addictions. RSR: the biggest challenge facing brands as they engage with these digital coupon distribution sites is whether their ultimate goal is audience or targeting. These sites aren’t made for targeting, unless you mean by acquiring an audience that represents a specific swathe of shoppers – price conscious moms, for example.
- Pixel and Dimed. Fast Company: The reason these people make good headlines is precisely because they are outliers.
Making It: Native
“If you look at the most successful [web] companies, they really found a great intersection between what people are there to do and what advertisers want to do. They made the formats make sense.” [Ben Silberman, CEO, Pinterest]
- Go Native, Ad Man. Om Malik: to me native advertising is a sales pitch that fits right into the flow of the information being shown. It doesn't interrupt--native ads don't pop up or dance across the screen--and its content is actually valuable to the person viewing it. And that, in turn, leads to a higher percentage of users engaging with the ad, and to greater effectiveness.
- Publishing as a Product, Pageviews as Users, and What It All Means. Taylor Davidson: But new “attention” metrics aren’t what make Medium, Upworthy and others compelling as new publishers: what’s more interesting is how they’re built differently to think about publishing as a product and readers as users. In a web seemingly ruled by social networks, building a next-gen publisher isn’t just about creating the “flywheel” of user-generated content, it’s also about understanding the users themselves at a level traditional publishers simply aren’t architected to do.
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