Archive for the 'legal' Category

Flirting with Measurement

Sunday, April 15th, 2007

measurement

I’ve been working on a marketing article for several months, but haven’t really had as full a perspective as I’d like to have on the “picture”. It’s grand theme is measurement. I want to describe how a division has taken place in the universe of marketing, into the category of tactics that give effects we can measure and those that yield results we cannot. Online is in the former category. Most traditional marketing is in the latter. I would also describe how it has been (for most of the history of the marketing praxis) a big part of what marketing “does” to try to establish correlations between specific marketing actions and specific sales reactions. I would then go on to describe how the ability to precisely determine ROI (a given with online advertising) has commenced a massive flux in the way marketing budgets are being divided, in favor of measurable online. At the same time, marketing departments and ad agencies are coming under the leadership of “online marketers”… by that I mean executives who came up through the ranks buying and selling clicks. It is likely a grave disrespect to many talented and well-rounded marketing professionals to say that people who understand “traditional” marketing (PR, print, and all that’s not online) are in decline. But I think it’s generally true. Then again, perhaps all I am doing is observing an evolution, and there’s no reason to lament the disappearance of methods that don’t work anymore… or at least that do not work well enough to warrant investing in people who have those skills

Pornography and the Power of Virtual Personae

Sunday, January 29th, 2006
entering virtual spaces

I have written previously about the relationship between the Web and Human Sexuality. I have also explained how the mounting complexity of our societies has had a cumulatively suppressive effect on Human Sex. In spite of the seemingly greater “publicness” of sex, people find themselves somehow less able to manifest their true, individual, unique sexuality. Why is that? Simply because one of the basic requirements of mass socialization is the adoption of easy identifiers, of labels. There is less time to deliberate over subtlety than earlier in our history. What breeds a feeling of contentment in human beings is the same today as it ever was: to feel one’s self a part of a group, and for that, to feel less anxiety for the unknown.

Because modern societies are so large, bringing together people from widely varied backgrounds, value sets, beliefs and customs, they have given rise to universally subscribable cooperative systems for defining what things are. Labels, in other words. To participate in a society is to understand its labeling systems. And because large, modern societies have to accommodate such a broad spectrum of people, the labeling and identification systems such societies create necessarily demand that nearly everyone has to compromise some aspect of themselves in order to be accepted, and that some smaller number of people have to compromise significant aspects of themselves in order to be accepted. It is a bell curve…more


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Our Standards at a Crossroads

Thursday, December 22nd, 2005

Behold, there are no absolutes!

Obscenity, we have learned,

is a relative term. The first Amendment stipulates Free Speech, yet concedes it is the community that decides what goes too far and what is safe within protected bounds.

To judge from all the fuss lately, it seems that porn — as we are defining and producing it today — is close to the line. But if the line moves in accordance with community sentiment, isn’t it logical that some types of Adult material become more acceptable, as others become less.

Let’s take a look at two Adult companies that have found opportunity on Porn’s Rear Line — Lightspeed Cash and Smash Bucks