Monthly Archives: June 2007

Does offline advertising really work, or are you just stupid?

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If advertising worked as well as is commonly thought, there would far fewer advertising salespeople. I’m not saying in all cases “advertising does not work”, rather in *almost all cases* image advertising is not as cost effective as online marketing, and in *many* cases I’d suggest that offline advertising has a negative ROI for the sector with which I’m most familiar – marketing travel destinations and tourism related businesses.

Yes, I can easily prove this. Just give me any offline advertising campaign set of “successful results”, using whatever measure you care to define as “successful results”, and I’ll show how you can duplicate the effect for 1/2 to 1/10th the cost online. I may even be willing to fund this “experiment” for a destination or travel business if I could blog the results here.
I think big ticket / big brand advertising may work because it scales well. ATT can do a national campaign, reach people at a low cost per impression. Since almost everybody above age 15 is a very strong potential ATT customer there are far fewer “wasted impressions” than, for example, with a national campaign for Oregon Travel where you are advertising to many who simply can’t afford to make the trip or are very unlikely travel candidates.

Obiviously promotion of a destination or a business is critical to success. However promotion of things is done in many ways direct and nuanced. I’m suggesting that image advertising is low on the list of important promotion forms. I eat at the best restaurant here in Talent – Avalon – because experience shows the food, service, and ambiance is consistently very nice. When travelling I like to ask locals for recommendations rather than read a bunch of advertisements, though best is to have internet available so you can surf around to find the best restaurant. (I don’t like surfing with my Treo but I think with the iPhone we’ll pass the tipping point with mobile browsing for travel stuff).

For destinations here in Oregon like Southern Oregon or the Oregon Coast I’d suggest, somewhat educatedly based on 10 years promoting travel here online, that websites are responsible for more than 50% of the “promotion related increases” in Oregon travel economic activity. I’d guess, also somewhat educatedly, that the largest share of travel related economic activity is best attributed to word of mouth and general life trends rather than free internet or advertising or direct promotion (e.g. people visiting relatives, attending events, or people retire and finally have the time to “drive the west coast”, etc, etc).
The advertising mythos is as pervasive as many others, and the more I study “image advertising” the more skeptical I become. With auctions becoming increasingly popular offline and online it’ll be very interesting to see how prices will shake out. If the markets are as efficient as they could theoretically be, we’ll soon have some great data sets for comparing values of offline and online ads.

Talent Oregon Wagner Street Project

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Wow, lots of work on the old house this past 10 days without a lot to show for it but I think the “turning point” is near where things will start to feel more like the big progress I was hoping for.

The little back porch is completed with some 3/4″ cedar boards that are really pretty and I got at a great discount of .50 per foot. This wood is somewhat thin for a porch though ~3/4 fir was the most common porch board historically around here so it looks correct.

I’ll seal it with special stain today (Red Cedar transparent deck stain) and it should look super nice that way, though I may eventually have to paint this to be consistent with the house exterior paint job. Historically the (clear and gorgeous) woods used in construction were stained dark or painted.

A bottleneck has been the proper removal / disposal of the asbestos sheet flooring that was in kitchen and popcorn ceiling in living room (which may contain asbestos). You can pay a small fortune to have this work done or do it yourself as owner, so I’m doing it. Like so many environmental “evils”, the story of asbestos is really interesting and confusing. The more I know about the many issues (which is quite a bit now), the less I seem to understand. Here’s a neat asbestos identification guide from NY.

Asbestos went from wonder material used in millions of houses and thousands of schools and buildings to despised cancer-causing nightmare material requiring very special disposal procedures. There is a substantial bureaucracy in place via the DEQ to give advice about removal procedures but they won’t help identify the materials. For that you need lab analysis at $20 per sample. I’m treating the ceiling popcorn stuff as contaminated but should have had it sampled because it’s messy and if it’s *not* asbestos I could do this work faster, but it’s almost done now. The ceiling stuff scraped off smoothly after wetting using a sheetrock taping blade. I covered the floor with the 6 mil plastic required for disposal (2 layers of 6 mil plastic, both layers sealed with duct tape for most of the disposal wrapping though I can also use a cardboard box, sealed with duct tape and then wrapped with 6 mil).

Hey, maybe I AM making good progress!

Airport Security is too darn expensive ?

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My posting over at the Airports Blog says we are spending too much on Airport Security.   This may seem odd to  many in light of the recent foiled terror plot at JFK, but I don’t hear any advocates for huge budget military and security spending balancing the cost of all the security and military spending with alternatives to that approach.

The reason they can’t rationally make the case for current budgets is that the cost is completely out of line with the return on the investments.    Ironically those claiming to be “fiscal conservatives” have become the most flagrant spenders in history, suggesting that the war on terror justifies all budgets because the cost of catastrophe is very great.   The problem with this line of thinking is similar to the big spending social program line – government work is expensive work.    We need to find more effective and cheaper ways to challenge terror, and probably need to factor in many scenarios so we can compare them with alternative investments in infrastructure.

For example I think many would say it is worth it to spend 5 billion government dollars for a 50% chance of thwarting  an attack that would kill 1000 people.   Yet those same folks would vote against spending an extra 5 billion on health care measures that would save 10,000 people.   The second spend is *twenty times* more cost effective than the first.   Sure there are many factors, but this type of analysis should at the very least be fleshed in a bit to avoid what we do now – spend based on political and emotional agendas that bear little relation to cost effectiveness.

My argument is simple -we are currently foresaking a lot of good in favor of fighting bad, and this approach is probably not sustainable for the long term.

Marc Andreessen Blogging = neat

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Marc Andreessen brought us Netscape and wysiwyg browsing and now he’s bringing it via a new blog.   Check it out.  Today’s insightful post suggests that the gloomy predictions of a bubble 2.0 are overblown, and perhaps are simply a function of the human tendency to exaggerate gloom as an evolutionary protective measure.

As a proud primate I’d agree that evolution favors a cautious approach, and in fact probably innovators (like Marc) are actually few and far between partly for the reason that a world full of innovators is not as stable as a world full of … well … the folks the world is full of.  Stability is an evolutionary requirement, so it’s all good.

So, is there a bubble?  I’ll vote … no.

American Express Members Project – finding and funding a good idea

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IMPORTANT:  This blog is NOT  The Members Project Website.   Go HERE for the official site.

The American Express Members Project is a really neat idea – members will submit and review “good deed” types of projects and American Express will fund the winning project up to 5 million. It’s so great to see that the new corporate standard is to step UP to the plate and do really good, really big things. It’s also (finally) considered very hip and cool to do good things, and that’s …. cool.

Mission San Luis Rey, California

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Mission San Luis Rey, California

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck.
I really enjoyed our visit to the San Diego area. The Mission San Luis Rey was beautiful and historically very interesting.

From their information panels with minor editing by me:

San Luis Rey was the 18th in the line old California Missions. Founded by Father Lasuen in 1798, San Luis Rey soon became the largest of all the California Missions. Father Peyri, builder of San Luis Rey, remained at the Mission for 34 years and saw it prosper. Afer the mission was taken from the Padres it became a ruin. Restoration has taken place in recent times and continues today. Much of the former Glory of San Luis Rey as “King of the Missions” can still be seen today.

… and so it can! This is only about 10 minutes off Highway 101 at Newport Beach, CA. Drop by In and Out Burger for a great lunch on the way back on to California Highway 101.

Kit Carson, famous pioneer scout, led Gen. Kearny’s “dragoons” and camped at San Luis Rey in December of 1846.

Outlook Express Spell Check Disabled in Office 2007 – Le Miserable Microsoft, avez vous un fricking clue?

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I installed a new PC yesterday for a State Welcome center that came with the new office 2007 programs. After a day the staff asked me why their Outlook spell checking was working for French only. “Sacre bleu”, I said after throwing in some Francais and noting that only the English words were listed as “wrong”.   Noting the CDs boldly proclaimed “made in Canada” I first thought “ha – it’s those pesky Quebecois poking fun at Les Americains, oui? NON! After the typical 5 minutes of surfing anywere but Microsoft.com to find answers about Microsoft product defects, to my amazement I read this note from MS which states:

NO more OE spelling in English!

At first I thought it was an odd joke site, but indeed it’s true. The staff at this center uses that simple utility *daily* so why is Outlook Express spelling reserved only for the French?  I love France, especially Paris, France and their superior Freedom Fries, but I think we need some spelling help here in the USA as well.

This utility fixed the problem by adding a new English dictionary. I can’t vouch for the program yet since I just put it on, but it appears legitimate and good.

Yet another case where MS is absolutely *clueless* to the needs of users, and arrogantly provides downgrades as you upgrade to newer, potentially even more frustrating versions of Office. This one is pure insanity since the fix is cheap and easy for MS.  Why in the world would they disable English spell checking?  Google would have created a superior dictionary with the upgrade, where MS creates….nothing, and makes it hard to even find out what to do.

Travel and History Blog

Are you a travel blogger?   A local blogger?  Send me a note, I’m trying to collect a list of people blogging travel information for their local areas:   jhunkins@gmail.com

Global Warming – less hype, more science please.

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Yahoo’s got a noble initiative going to “fight” climate change but as with most of these efforts I’m very skeptical this is where so much of the smart thinking, time, and money should go.

I wrote them:   With all due respect to the noble intentions I think I’d rather see Yahoo work on … profitability and web innovations. Warming is so *incredibly* expensive to try to fix it’s better to spend our treasure and time on the low hanging fruit problems of the world: microloans, malaria, aids prevention, etc, and focus on conservation and alternative energy. With China as the leading producing of CO2 I can’t help but think our many noble high tech solutions are just jousting at the energy windmill.

I’m not nearly as skeptical about human induced climate change as my friend Glenn,  but I share his concern about the alarmism and “groupthink” that is now pervasive in the Climate Change community.     Recent IPCC reports have been

My big concern remains that we can’t do much about this and therefore we should tackle the catastophic things we *can* easily fix.  Those are disease and poverty, water, etc.    Incredibly people seem to ignore these basic human health and poverty problems as “insurmountable” when in fact  they are relatively easy to solve with modest allocations of time and money, while people focus on problems like Global Warming and longstanding religious conflicts that likely have *no* realistic solutions for decades, centuries, or even millenia.   Also important is that feeding people and raising standards of health and living leads to much, much smaller populations (this “prosperity leads to lower population” effect is very well documented but I can’t believe how many people think that helping the poor leads to more poor people (the “feed and breed” ideas of Malthus).  This is a very dangerous and wrong assumption and not backed by any research with which I’m familiar).

I propose that well intentioned, rational folks should use a ‘triage’ system where we take major global problems and the cost of their proposed solutions and prioritize these actions on the basis of where we can do the most good for the least money.

But as my friend Linda pointed out wisely last year during our hike in the incomparable Trinity Alps, it’s possible that at least with warming people are inspired to act, and in general these actions are leading to more energy conservation and innovations.    Better *something* good than nothing good, but I’m still going to advocate for a rational, not emotional, approach to all this.