MediaSavvy

I will be enjoying a vacation after the holidays and will return to full-force posting after January 10. Have a wonderful holiday, and a happy first week of 2003.

The Internet Advertising Bureau’s new email ethics pledge are designed to improve the ethics of selling mailing lists to advertisers. It says nothing about the ethics of acquiring names, removing names, or determining to whom to sell your name. In other words, it protects email marketers, but does nothing to protect consumers.

ICANN is planning ot add a few new top-level domains to supplement .com, .org, .net, .edu, .gov, .mil and the newly-created domains that no one wants.
I don’t necessarily agree with Bob Frankston that domain names per se are the problem, but it seems to me that we’re all poorly served by the current system.
Why not introduce a thousand new top-level domains, or ten thousand? From the perspective of Verisign/Network Solutions and the competitive registrars, it’s not desireable because it eliminates the current artifical scarcity that makes dot-com domains saleable (if not as valuable as they were in 1999).
But the market is meaningless. People are getting hurt because of the pretend-authority of a dot-com address.
When I bought mediasavvy.com, the incumbent speculator was asking $1500 for it. He settled for $175, including five years’ registration. I’m currently trying to buy a domain that has expired a week ago, but the registrar still hasn’t released it.
The current system is corrupt and corrupting. Domains should be cheap as dirt and easy to get.

Snark Hunting features a quiz exploring the slick, opaque, and forgettable names that Landor Associates extrudes for its customers (e.g. Avolar, Midea, Avaya, Spherion, and Onity). (Thanks, WebWord)
As Snark Hunting says in an earlier piece:

Why do most naming and branding firms stink out loud? These days, asleep-at-the-wheel branding firms assign naming projects only three objectives:
1. Create consensus among the decision makers
2. Find a name that is trademarkable
3. Secure a reasonable URL
The missing step of course is branding, the most elusive step for branding consultants. That’s the one where the goal is to create an identity that supports a unique positioning proposition, differentiates the brand from its competitors, is memorable, interesting, evocative, a deep well for marketing and advertising; indeed, is an advertisement in and of itself.

They’re letting the customers off the hook. A lot of corporations don’t know what they are or what they do — let alone what they stand for. It’s easy to be sympathetic with the desire not to close off options, but this also leads a lack of focus that is obvious to our customers. Does your company know it’s own identity? Score your company’s home page:

• Subtract one point for every picture from a clip-art CD (two points if it’s of people in suits, three points if those people are seated around a table or talking on a phone). Add one point for every picture of a physical product, non-executive employee, or person using your product.
• Subtract one point for every use of the word “solution”, innovation”, “technology”, “values” or “community” and add one point for every mention of an actual product or service your company offers for sale.
• Imagine ten potential customers reading your home page. Add one point for each who could identify the industries that are the source of the majority of your firm’s revenue. Subtract one point for each who cannot.
• Imagine those same ten potential customers again. Add one point for each who can state definitively whether they fall into a clearly-defined category of customer (“small-business owner”, not “people who wear suits and talk on cell phones”). Subtract one point for each who cannot.
• Subtract five points if your home page features a Flash animation with moving words other than products, or identifiable industries; abstract geometric figures; or clip-art. Subtract another five points if it’s a splash screen.

Warning: this scale is not linear.

High-speed access monopolies have been raising prices gradually for years, until the flow of new customers has decreased to a trickle [PDF], according to ARS Research. (Thanks, Medialife)
ARS predicts that the next step will be the introduction of tiered levels of high-speed access, such as sub-300K service for less than $40/month. As the access monopolies continue to eliminate competition like DirecTV Broadband, we can expect to see them charge us for services that cost them nothing, but are valuable to us.
Directory Assistance used to be free. Back in the 70s, AT&T started running ads on TV “educating” the public about people who were too lazy to pick up the damn phone book and instead used 411. Twenty years later, they were charging $1.25 for a 30-second call to Directory Assistance. That’s $150 an hour.
The onging campaign against “bandwidth hogs” is the first step toward charging you for bandwidth.

Tim O’Reilly reminds us, “The Right Term is Copyright Infringement“, not piracy or theft. We’ve allowed the copyright industry to colonize our vocabulary on this issue. It also leads to outrages such as the use of federal cops, criminal law, and federal prosecutors to resolve civil disputes. (Thanks, Dave Winer)
This follows hot on the heels of another indispensible column by Tim that begins the indisputable thesis that Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy and reminds us that we’ve allowed the copyright industry to own the issue of fairness to artists.
It’s great to see someone who controls a lot of copyrights to take this stand.

MediaGeek not only pointed me to this great log of news on media ownership rules changes, but asks the correct question about it: “how many of these articles don’t come from the business section of their respective publications?”

The digital divide is growing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Of course, it has to close soon, because Internet penetration among households with incomes over $80,000/year is now more than 90%.
I don’t know who came up with the phrase “Digital Divide”, but it’s brilliant. It (unintentionally) redirects us from the growing divide between the rich and the poor in this country. Should we focus on ameliorating the digital divide or on helping the poor with income, housing, education, and medical care? How can we focus on the digital divide when Republicans and Democrats alike are targeting income, inheritance, and dividend tax breaks at the rich?
The real digital divide is that the poor depend on schools and libraries for Internet access–and these systems are under lockdown from the religious right and their whores in DC.

Online shoppers are buying the same old things from the same old merchants, according to Gartner, who call it “playing it safe”. I call it developing habits. Not many people mentioned that they were buying from online-only retailers, but it looks like an unaided-recall survey, which would disproportionately benefit established brands. No wonder online businesses advertise online.
The Internet is maturing as a medium. Although the number of Internet users continues to grow, they’re becoming set in their ways.

Online businesses are more likely to use online advertising. I’ve been saying this forever, and here’s further proof from Double-Click and Nielsen.
Sectors that spend more than ten percent of their advertising budgets online included employment services (41 percent of $41 million in ad spending), media companies (15.5 percent of $479 million), retailing (15 percent of $3 billion), and travel 12 percent of their $788 million).
Categories that depend on branding, rather than online selling–such as pharmaceuticals, consumer packaged goods, and automobiles–are not spending much of their ad budgets online.