This alleged recession...

I know this is a peculiar time of year with festivals and present giving and rich food.  But today is New Year's Eve, and stores are closing early.

The supermarket had decent length queues of ordinary folk buying ordinary provisions.  Argos, which pretends to be a shop, but is a weird warehouse, had huge queues, even here in Bracknell.

The local TV store was doing a roaring trade.  Yes, a discount was available and we asked and got a sneeze under 10% off an already discounted price.  The guy who served us said it had been busy all day and showed no signs of slowing.

So the recession is all media hype, surely?

A few bankers did bad deals and got caught out with a bad loan book, and now we all have to suffer!

This alleged recession is the result of heavy media marketing.  I still blame Robert Peston and the BBC for doomtalking all the time.  Add the Idiot Shrub and that fool Gordon Brown to the mix (the words "Could not run a piss up in a brewery" come to mind) and you have the recipe for an "I'm all right, Jack" recession.

So is anyone actually running the world?

Adsense revenues are definitely on the rise

So far December 2008 has outstripped November 2008 by 10% and we have a few days left to run, though the days are non work days in the main, or "odd" work days, so a huge increases is unexpected.

Comparing to December 2007, albeit on a small number of sites, shows a 60% rise year on year.  If we factor the sites up to be similar in number and quality to 2008 (by impressions and clicks) then the rise is 10-20%

My view is that the recession is driving this.  People are pushing hard for every last drop of business they can.  Those who push hardest will not necessary win, but they are in the faces of more people than those who push least, and stand a better chance, if their offer is good, of gaining that business.

I wonder if revenues will drop after the recession

Be careful how you advertise

I have just added Google Adsense adverts to my personal web site (linked in the left hand margin if you really want to see the minutiae of the Trent life!).  I did it out if silliness, really.  I don;t ever epxect anyone to click them, but you can never tell.  And I also read, I'm sure it was on iMedia Connection, but I can't find the article at present (So I've asked Gavin over there to see if he can remember it, too),  an article about being really careful when you place adverts not to screw up badly with content and advert topic.

In the UK I have one page on the site that often carries adverts at the top for Gay Parship Dating, and at the foot "Meet Married Women".  I'm not sure what that tells you about me!  I really have no current use for either market segment, but Google parsed the page that way, so I must!

I asked a good friend in Germany to have a look, and this is a screencap of what he is served as adverts!

If you peer hard at  the advert you can see that there are two adverts for boys' schools and two adverts for gay contacts.  The top of the page has wedding rings advertised on it in Germany.

It's also wonderful to know that Shopping.com sells Gay Boys.  There is a market, obviously!

Now the page is about a part of the British Public School system!  Amusing in itself, but interesting how Google parses it and serves the adverts.

But, if you advertise your school, do you want it next to an advert for gay contacts?  And if you advertise gay contacts, do you want an unpleasant social stereotype to be presented by implication from the advert next door?

A lot more care is needed when placing adverts, I think.  But I'm not sure that Adsense is tailorable enough.  It's been ages since I placed adverts.

Privacy: Is it overrated?

I just read Chris Marriott's latest piece at iMedia Connection.  Come on Chris, you grabbed a headline, and then you went on to argue for privacy like never before.  You gave a great example of someone wishing to be recognised wherever he goes.

And you used that to pretend to argue against privacy.  

That's like arguing that you should never wash your hands because they'll only get dirty again soon.

You gave a great case for targetted and high precision marketing based on what you know about the potential customer, but you failed on one big area.  You failed on the permission front.  If I give you permission to know about me, and if I give you permission to market to me, then and only then can you use what you know about me to market to me.

Oh I know that, deep inside the article, you sort of said so, but your entire business at Acxiom Digital says "Make Every Communication Count."  I got the straight from your website.  And the article looks much more like a gung ho "Pokemon 'Gotta catch 'em, all' piece than a controlled and rifle targetted marketing piece.

What I'd expect to see is a decent set of Fair processing Notices along chatty and friendly lines.

"We want to make sure we tell you about relevant stuff, and only relevant stuff.  Is that Ok with you?"

The thing is, in the European Community, you have to do this stuff.  If you don't then EC Directive 2002/58/EC comes and bites you in the butt.  In the UK that's the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003.  In Spain that's a regulator who is funded by fines coming to get your clients.  In the UK the Information Commissioner is getting stronger powers.

But most of all, we, Joe Consumer, we hate intrusion.  We hate it, resent it, and bite back. Captain Cruiseline calls me from Florida because he validated my number.  Indians called Global Market Research keep calling me to try to sell me some sort of finance report, and, trust me, i am going to work out how to zap them.

And, if your clients start to rifle target their marketing to me without my permission because I've behaved in a particular way on a website that analyses that behaviour you can bet your life that privacy matters, and it matters all the way to a formal complaint to the regulator about their behaviour.

I'm sure you are advising permissions, Chris.  After all you have a UK part to Acxiom and understand this stuff, but I'd sure like to see you advocate them far more strongly.  I think you hid it pretty well, though.

The marketer who understands how to market and grant me my privacy, that is the marketer that stands a chance of getting my business.

Adense revenues rise. Is this what recession is about?

As the world reels from the self induced financial crisis, and as governments take increasingly interesting steps to influence the economy, I am seeing, not as a sample of one, but over the seven or eight sites I operate that carry advertising, that revenue from embedded adverts from Google Adsense is ahead this month based upon last month.

If this turns into a trend I'll track it and do exciting things with graphs!  So far it just looks interesting and is very much what I expected to happen.

In a recession we all fight harder for what is stated to be a dwindling volume of business.  That means that we use channels to obtain business that we may not have used before.  There is a huge but finite number of available Adsense impressions, and the auction prices get driven up slightly with every new advertiser, down slightly by every new publisher.  Obviously only Google has authoritative figures, so all I can do is to report a gut feeling from my own sites.

That gut feeling is based on our position this month, eight days in, that means that we will end the month about 50% up on last month.

This month is distorted a little by pre-Christmas feeding frenzy, but is not matched by last year's pattern.  At present it's interesting.  I wonder if it is significant?

Finally I am in the 21st century!

In 1996 there was Netscape and Netscape Composer.  In 1996 I came to the Internet and created my very first web site - an amateur affair, prettily styled (yeah, right!) with puffy white clouds on a blue sky background, and bold black text.  

Artistically I draped pictures and stuff all over it.  I wrote about me and my dogs and my family.

And there it remained until the day before yesterday, updated a little, but unloved and stuck in a time warp.  It was a perfect snapshot of all that is appalling with websites of the nineties!  It wasn't so much patina as rust!

Now I am no designer!  If you look at the home page you will see that.  And I've really no idea what the home page is for on a site like that anyway, but the layout is simple and so is the navigation.  As a giggle I even put adverts on it. That's more for fun than anything else!  I really can't imagine any of the four visitors per day clicking an advert!

I took the opportunity to optimise the page file names for search engines, though I do pretty well if you look for Tim Trent anyway.  But I want to find some old, old friends, so I've decided I need to be better optimised in order that we can find them, or rather anyone looking for them finds me.

I really do have to do something with that home page, though.

Why don't all banks have "Spoof@"?

I just received a customer survey email from my bank.  Good old First Direct.  I doubt the email, primarily because they have never sent me one before.

So I did what you do with eBay and PayPal.  I forwarded it to "spoof@firstdirect.com".  I love that facility.  It ought to be a standard.

And First Direct doesn't love it.

Technical details of permanent failure:

Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 550 550 Mailbox unavailable or access denied - (state 14).

Right.  So they don't understand that an emerging standard is present, and they don't know how to handle it.  Isn't that just great customer service?

And the survey?

I opened it.

First it was wider than my browser window which is set to maximum screen size on my laptop, and second, it had too many mandatory questions.  I abandoned it.  No idea if it was genuine or not, though.