Out With A Bang

Having finally got my Twitter-ass into gear and kick-started www.twitter.com/MrRickWaghorn into life – as opposed to servicing ‘backchat and #ncfc’s needs via my alter ego @MFWrickw – I duly stumbled on what the rest of the world was talking about tonight.

Or rather what @craigmcginty and @vagueware were.

This… http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_reboot

I must admit I’ve skimmed through the last three or four pages.

There was enough lines in the opening page to keep me amused on a Wednesday night; to even drag me away from Grand Designs.

The one about ‘caveat vendor’ replacing ‘the old doctrine of caveat emptor…’, for example.

‘In other words, ‘Let the seller beware as well as the buyer.’ In other words, there is a definite, positive burden on the seller for the first time to tell the truth.”

And this…

‘We should tap into the massive parallel processing power of people around the world by giving everyone the tools to track, analyze, and publicize financial machinations.

‘The result would be a wave of decentralized innovation that can keep pace with Wall Street and allow the market to regulate itself—naturally punishing companies and investments that don’t measure up—more efficiently than the regulators ever could.

‘The revolution will be powered by data, which should be unshackled from the pages of regulatory filings and made more flexible and useful.

‘We must require public companies and all financial firms to report more granular data online—and in real time, not just quarterly—uniformly tagged and exportable into any spreadsheet, database, widget, or Web page.

‘The era of sunlight has to give way to the era of pixelization; only when we give everyone the tools to see each point of data will the picture become clear…’

Apologies for cutting and pasting at such length. There is, I hope, a method in such copying madness.

Because, for me, all the above gives a grander theory to everything that we try and seek to do with Addiply.

As opposed, I guess, to You-Know-Who…

For those who have not followed the life and times of our DIY, self-service advertising system – as now championed by the People’s Republic of South Devon…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=246

.. it was, in part, driven and developed by the thinking we installed in our banner ad management sytsem for www.myfootballwriter.com/norwichcity

www.twadservices.co.uk

… in which we gave every one of our advertising clients a unique log-in code; empowering them, in an instant, with the ability to check our numbers for themselves.

For little, local businesses brought up on being told that their £750 half-page ad on P17 of the Evening News was seen by 75,000 potential customers – honest – this was something of an eye-opener.

Now, all of a sudden, ABCs, readership figures as opposed to circulation numbers – the ‘reach’ beloved by The Newspaper Society – is replaced by one password; and there it all is… their very own click-through rate in all its 0.02% glory.

Oh, boy… isn’t that click-rate crap? Er, yes. By and large people don’t click through to a carpet wholesalers website when reading their footie… but look at the number of times your banner has been seen this month…

Because wittingly or not, from day one we’ve felt this need for a spot of ‘caveat vendor’.

That we owed it to our little local advertiers to tell the truth; that we felt there was a ‘positive burden on the seller for the first time to tell the truth….

That what we were doing was ‘giving everyone the tools to track, analyze, and publicize financial machinations…’

In our case, it was the ‘financial machinations’ that came with buying banner, sky or button ad space on a newly-launched local football website… What am I actually getting for my money here, Rick..?

Here you go… Here’s the ‘tools’ you need to find out the figures for yourself.

It is an in-built logic that continues to work its way through the DNA of Addiply… You want to place a text ad on one of our beta triallists… Fine, here you go… Here’s our list of publishers; here’s the rates they themselves have decided to charge.. and here’s the traffic that they are currently driving…

http://www.addiply.com/index.php?option=com_addiply&Itemid=69

Caveat vendor. Caveat vendor. And it’s my use of the bold… because spot the terms that, hopefully, have started to become familiar on OWAB of late…

‘The result would be a wave of decentralized innovation that can keep pace with Wall Street and allow the market to regulate itself—naturally punishing companies and investments that don’t measure up—more efficiently than the regulators ever could.

‘The revolution will be powered by data, which should be unshackled from the pages of regulatory filings and made more flexible and useful…

Sign up for an Addiply ad and you get the data; the click-throughs, the views… the works. You know exactly what every advertising buck you spend on Addiply is delivering; because of caveat vendor… because in selling our advertising space to you the hyper-local/niche buyer we have decided to be open and honest from the start.

No smokes and mirrors.

‘Only when we give everyone the tools to see each point of data will the picture become clear…’

Exactly. In these troubled economic times, my little NR2 hyper-local advertiser might only have £20 left by way of an ‘advertising’ budget.

To my mind – and, I suspect, to the mind of many out here in small-mediaville – he deserves to know exactly what he’s getting for his £20.

And we tell him.

Caveat vendor.