Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The Super Bowl is one of the great magnets of American culture because of its place as Backup Christmas. Everyone gathers around the multiple gods of wings, beer, M&Ms in the colors of the competing teams, ads, betting squares, strangers passing as friends and occasional flickers of sport, and it all reduces us to a…
Airlines’ Premium-Economy Trick Carriers are banking on the psychological allure of marginal luxury. Airlines have once again wrung a new social class from flying. ( Alex Cochran ) Let’s say you receive an unexpected financial windfall. What’s the first thing you’re spending money on? If it’s a lavish vacation—how are you getting there? Americans top the…
Who doesn’t love a good funnel? Today, we’re going to make a nice colorful funnel using the latest data from some of the ad industry’s most reliable sources to trace a dollar spent for programmatically-bought display advertising on its exciting journey from your pocket to the bank accounts of middlemen, con men, crooks, and the Bermuda…
Hack the SEC A good plot for, like, an insider-trading Hollywood thriller would be if the villains hacked into the computers of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC, after all, is maybe the world’s greatest repository of material information about public companies. Companies are constantly filing earnings releases, merger announcements, management changes, proxy…
Inside the Turmoil at Jezebel Nine people have left the website since March. Those we spoke to cited executive overreach and dwindling resources Jack Koloskus In March, G/O Media — the parent company of several former Gawker Media websites including the feminist blog Jezebel — hired former Forbes and Marie Claire editor, Lea Goldman, as…
BuzzFeed’s four-year-old programmatic business is the engine of its advertising growth. That muscle will come in handy as publishers and marketers enter the usual frenzy of the fourth quarter against the backdrop of the delta variant threatening to derail ad creative and campaign budgets. On its road to becoming a public company, the publisher wouldn’t…
Al Lord, the former chief executive of student-loan giant Sallie Mae, has a complaint about higher education: The price of college is too damn high. Paying for his grandchildren’s education in recent years, he said, left him appalled at the tuition bills that land on his desk every semester. For those who know (or in…
A new Forrester report forecasts the end of digital and display advertising as we know it as consumers move away from experiences in which they can be interrupted. That’s in part because consumers are putting more trust in digital assistants to make decisions on their behalf, but, naturally, it’s also because US marketers wasted roughly…
Hacking. Disinformation. Surveillance. CYBER is Motherboard’s podcast and reporting on the dark underbelly of the internet. Tech companies have repeatedly reassured the public that trackers used to follow smartphone users through apps are anonymous or at least pseudonymous, not directly identifying the person using the phone. But what they don’t mention is that an…
The Pill Helped Start the Sexual Revolution. What Will Phexxi Do? Saundra Pelletier is marketing a new form of birth control to women wary of hormones. Ms. Pelletier’s back is tattoed with feminist symbols.Credit…Michelle Groskopf for The New York Times June 10, 2021Updated 12:20 p.m. ET SAN DIEGO — If you’re a woman aged 18…