New Media Deal – a comment A user calling him or herself “graciouswings” (who left a bogus email address with his/her comment, so I couldn’t email him/her) made a lengthy comment to my New Media Deal posting (posting here, comment at the bottom or here). The meat of the comment was: “advertising doesn’t bug us if it’s not too intrusive and if there’s something in it for us as consumers.” This is simply not true. This notion is based on unfair playing grounds. People don’t like seeing commercials before movies. People _are_ bugged by having to create an account at every website they visit, whether it’s to post a comment, purchase a song, ask a question of tech support, read…
Archives / December, 2005
Four Balls or One Strike?
Four Balls or One Strike? In baseball, four balls is a walk. Today in New York, all it took was one strike, and lots of us were taking long walks – to work, from work, to dinner. Even though I’m a CEO and “management” and part of the establishment, I don’t have a systematic bias against organized labor or strikes. Sometimes, they’re entirely warranted. (Perhaps it helps that my mother-in-law is a senior exec at a major union – hi, Carmen.) Also, to be fair, I am not up close and personal on the issue of the transit strike here, so maybe I’m missing something. Those caveats aside, I have a limited amount of sympathy for the TWU and the…
How Much Marketing Is Too Much Marketing?
How Much Marketing Is Too Much Marketing? It seems like a busy holiday season is already underway for marketers, and hopefully for the economy, shoppers as well. Just for kicks, I thought I’d take a rough count of how many marketing messages I was exposed to in a given day. Here’s what the day looked like: 5:30 a.m. – alarm clock goes off with 1010 WINS news radio in the middle of an ad cycle – 2 ads total. Nice start to the day. 5:45-6:30 – in the gym, watching Today In New York News on NBC for 30 minutes, approximately 6 ad pods, 6 ads per pod – 36 ads total. So we’re at 38, and it’s still dark…
Like Fingernails on a Chalkboard
Like Fingernails on a Chalkboard Anyone who worked in the Internet in the early days probably remembers all-too-vividly how silly things got near the end. Even those who had nothing to do with the industry but who were alive at the time with an extra dollar or two to invest in the stock market probably has some conception of the massive roller coaster companies were on in those years. The memories/images/perceptions all come crashing down in the latest chapter of Tom Evslin’s blook hackoff.com in a manner that reminds me of the sound of fingernails racing down a chalkboard. You’ve heard it before, you can’t forget it, you squirm every time you hear it, but you can’t tear yourself away…
Counter Cliche: How Much Paranoia is Too Much Paranoia?, Part II
Counter Cliche: How Much Paranoia is Too Much Paranoia?, Part II After the original posting, one of my readers wrote in with the following question:I was one of the first employees at a pre-funding enterprise social networking company, after having consulted on doing their business plan for them (not coming up with it; mainly turning the CEO and CTO’s engineer-speak into English). After being asked to participate more fully in the marketing and biz dev aspects of the company, I quickly found myself stymied by the level of secrecy the CEO maintained. Now, I understand that you wouldn’t want important information getting out to competitors, but that can be handled by making that clear to team members. I found it…
Counter Cliche: How Much Paranoia is Too Much Paranoia?
Counter Cliche: How Much Paranoia is Too Much Paranoia? Fred’s VC cliche of the week this week, Opening the Kimono, is a good one. He talks about how much entrepreneurs should and should not disclose when talking to VCs and big partners — companies like Microsoft or Google, for example. In response to another of Fred’s weekly cliche postings back in April, I addressed the issue of opening the kimono with VCs in this posting entitled Promiscuity. But today’s topic is the opposite of promiscuity, it’s paranoia. I was talking with a friend a few months back who’s a friend and fellow CEO of a high profile, larger company in a similar space to Return Path. He was obsessing about…
The Rumors of Email’s Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated, Part V
The Rumors of Email’s Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated, Part V Thank goodness I can finally write a positive piece under this headline, and not a rebuttal like I did here, here, here, and here. It seems like there are signs of an email marketing renaissance left, right, and center these days. First, the industry has enjoyed significant growth this year. Every vendor I speak with in the space except for one or two is posting record numbers — whether they sell data, technology, or services. And lots of vendors have been swallowed up by larger multi-channel CRM or DM companies for nice prices. Every marketer or publisher I speak with is investing more money into their email programs, and…
Six Candles: You Can't Tell What The Living Room Looks Like From the Front Porch
Six Candles: You Can’t Tell What The Living Room Looks Like From the Front Porch Today, Return Path is six years old. I thought I’d celebrate the occasion by reflecting back on how different our business is now than we thought it would be at the beginning. When we started Return Path, we were sure Email Change of Address (ECOA) was going to be a $100mm business. It still may be someday, but it’s not now. If you had told me when we started the company that we’d execute on ECOA but also be market leaders in email delivery assurance (which didn’t exist at the time), email list management and list rental (a huge market by the time we started),…
links for 2005-12-06
Feld Thoughts Brad talks about comp for outside Board members (tags: Entrepreneur compensation)
Holiday Card Anon, Part II
Holiday Card Anon, Part II Last year, I posted about all the holiday cards I received at work that were effectively anonymous since the signature was a scribble and the name wasn’t printed anywhere on the card; no business card was included; and if the sender was relying on the envelope’s return address to clue me in, he or she was out of luck because the cards got separated from the envelopes. We just had the same thing happen last week — Whit received a gift of a holiday tin of Hershey’s Kisses without a card or return address from one of our tech vendors. So remember — sign those cards legibly or include a business card if you don’t…
Deliverability Resources
Deliverability Resources After my last posting on email deliverability, a few people emailed me to ask about different resources that Return Path has published over the last six months or so on the subject. Clicking this link will take you to the white paper download form on our web site, which has all the white papers we’ve written in the past 12 months or so listed, and the most recent one on deliverability pre-checked to get you started. You can check as many of the boxes you want in one shot, and although the download will trigger an email and/or call from someone in our sales department, you can simply respond to the email and tell them thanks but no…