Irritation Advertising Part One: Web Pages

I have a confession to make. I use AdBlock Plus in all my browsers. I simply don't see ads.

The reason I block ads is because of the really spammy ones. The ones that whir, flash, jigger around in my peripheral vision, shouting "Look at me! Look at ME! LOOK AT MEEEEEEE!"

Advertisers really think that the way to get my willing compliance is to annoy the living crud out of me - or give me a migraine? (Seriously: that's a thing. I don't need more migraine than I already have. It's very effective aversion therapy for adverts.)

So they spoil it for everyone else. I don't mind sidebar ads, provided they don't compress the actual content into a Brazilian-waxed mini-strip down the middle. I don't mind ads that don't jump up and down like a clingy, demanding three-year-old, having tantrums when I don't pay attention. Sometimes, targeted ads that play nicely will even get my clicks. But the others, the irritating ones, have poisoned the well for the rest, because you can't filter for "spammy", so I block the lot. And I'm very, very far from being alone in this, as industry stats illustrate so well.

I appreciate that this breaks the unwritten compact between content consumer and producer: that the presences of adverts - even if not the deliberate click-through - are what pay for the content we consume.

So, this is my message to the advertising industry, and to the content makers: get your act together.

• Advertisers: stop equating causing irritation with getting attention. Would you reward someone for stamping on your toes?
• Producers: apply controls on who advertises through you, and how they do it. Play nicely, and come down hard on those who won't.

Do these things, and consumers might stop routinely using AdBlock Plus and its rivals.

AdBlock is not the disease, it's the symptomatic treatment for one. Cure the disease, and patients won't need the medicine.

Get the money in...but in the right way!

We recently cancelled our contract with a cloud services provider (who shall remain nameless). They're not a big player...and perhaps that was the problem.

We were hoping to buy virtual Windows servers from them, to host our enterprise software platform, so we'd signed up for a month to try it out. And during that period it transpired that the only payment methods they offered were PayPal or Skrill manual payments. No subscription service, no Direct Debit or even a continuing credit card mandate. We'd have to pay months in advance, to be sure of continuity of service.

Now, if it's, say, an online magazine membership, that's OK...ish. This isn't. It's the kind of service on which you build mission-critical systems - and those have to work, and be bullet-proof. Their failure is, quite literally, not an option.

So that led, with considerable regret, to the email I sent today:

(Please forward these comments to your management team.)

After due consideration, we have decided to terminate our relationship with [your company].

Although the Windows VPS service appears stable and fast, we cannot risk the commercial damage of having our mission-critical systems offlined by a missed manual payment, because you do not provide an easy automated funding option.

PayPal, particularly without a subscription option, is simply not a professional way to collect fees. It would only require one staff member to be ill, or on holiday, and a manual payment therefore missed, and our Windows-based enterprise platform would be downed. (To be blunt, we expect our suppliers to work for us, not vice-versa.)

And whilst there is the possibility of paying well in advance, we feel that our money would provide us more benefit in our own account, until needed elsewhere.

We have stopped our server, and hereby terminate our contract with you. Please cancel our service.

Jon
--
Jon Green
Managing Director, Adeptium Consulting Ltd. http://www.adeptium.com

The company in question had very helpful, friendly, tolerant customer service - their reply says volumes about that:

Dear Mr Green,

Thank you very much for your e-mail.

As requested, we will cancel the following subscriptions at the end of the contract:[...]

Even if we can not keep you as our customer, we would like to express our gratitude since we valued our business relationship very much.

We would be pleased to hear from you again, and we wish you much success in the future.

If you have any questions or need help, please do not hesitate to contact us.

There's a lesson in this. It doesn't matter how excellent your product, nor how keenly you price it, nor how helpful your staff: if you make things too difficult or risky for people to use your services, all the rest was for nothing.

It's a lesson I hope I remember when I need it!

Banksy, Billboards, and Targeted Adverts

So I got into a bit of a discussion on Facebook. It was all about some controversial, but interesting, words from Banksy. You probably should go read them, and come back to this. I even set up the link to open it in a new window, because I'm just nice like that.

A former and well-respected colleague, Wail Sabbagh, contended that billboards and the like were little different from postcard adverts in a newsagent's window. How I replied to that is what forms the main thrust of this blog. I said:

"I've spent too much time in the States to let that one pass! I hate in-yer-face advertising, everywhere; unavoidable. It's all "Look at me! Look at ME! Look at MEEEEEEEE!", and has recently led to the trend towards "annoyance advertising" - "It doesn't matter if you irritate the cr*p out of people so long as they're looking." The bloody-awful whistler accompanying one DIY barn chain's adverts is an example of that. In our house, it's target practice time for the MUTE button.

The world doesn't revolve around advertising, but that message hasn't quite reached the US: you have to go backwoodsing to get away from placards everywhere and TV that doesn't let you watch 10 minutes without badly-made sales pitches. It's an extreme - but it's going the same way here.

So I've sympathy with the sentiments behind Banksy's comments, if not his conclusions.

Although I'm not entirely happy with the personal-information culture behind it, I welcome the move towards targeted advertising. Instead of a gazillion products in my face, a gazillion-minus-epsilon of which I'm never going to want to know about, I get stuff that's actually relevant to me and has a chance of making a sale too, if they don't annoy me too much telling me about it.

I will be delighted when targeted, effective advertising undermines the case for big billboards, and for placards blighting every green and grassy roundabout, and we can finally do away with that environmental spam and see the world around us properly again.

Maybe Banksy has a point.

And that set me thinking further.

You'll notice, if you don't have adverts blocked, that there are ads around this blog too. I'm hoping they're targeted; that they are relevant and interesting to you. If they're not, tell me. There are things I can tweak.

Let's take it as assumed that, in a capitalist society, adverts are not optional if business is to survive. (Of course, the same is true in Communist states too, it's just that they're "advertising" state policies, initiatives, propaganda and the like.) Let's also assume that most billboards have little or no effect. They're an outmoded way of promoting a product or company: unless there's something truly novel being advertised, the expenditure is rarely recouped in revenues. There's limited evidence that TV advertising yields any better benefits for the price.

That leads us to online advertising, then. From a business perspective, it's fantastic. At last, there's a direct, tangible link between cost of display and revenues: the "click-through rate" and "completion rate" (CTR and CR) are metrics we can use to determine precisely how effective both the advert, and the spend on it, are. Better still, customer profiling, whether personally-identifiable or anonymised, based on prior purchases and clicked ads, allow the marketing industry to be laser-accurate in the types of adverts shown to a given viewer. They're going to be interesting. It's stuff that the viewer's already shown an interest in seeing, maybe buying. The CTRs and CRs don't lie.

And this could mean the end for billboards, placards, environmental advertising as a whole. ("Minority Report"-style personal promotion aside, but that's a while yet to come.)

The question is...how much privacy are you prepared to sacrifice, if it means we can finally tear down every advertising hoarding in your life?

Odeon, Customer Service, And How Not To Do It.

This incident is pretty trivial, but it really got me thinking about customer service.

So...I get O2 Priority Moments with my mobile contract, and saw that there was a special offer: 45% off a large nachos/drink combo at Odeon. As it happens, I wanted to see a new film, Pacific Rim, so that sealed the deal: I save that offer, book tickets through Odeon's mobile app, and off I head to my client's local Odeon.

At the cinema, and off to the food section. Now, let's be honest. Cinema snacks are grossly overpriced: they exploit a captive market, and encourage customers to spend almost as much on noisy grazing as they do on the tickets. A tray of nachos, with a squirt of cheese sauce and a bucket of drink, normally costs £7.50. Even with the discount, at £4.13 it's not cheap, but at least I'm not going to taste tooth grindings along with the corn. So I order it, and, whilst it's being dispensed, pull down the offer on the phone.

Fail. Repeatedly. I keep getting, "The server isn't responding. Try again." Now this isn't entirely true: the server has been very helpful; she's already delivered my nachos and drink, but I think they meant the one on the network. I show the lady that I've got the offer, it's there on the phone, but something's gone wrong where they dispense the magic offer codes. She can't enter a code that I can't give her, and doesn't have an override on the till, so calls a supervisor.

I show him the same thing, and he says, "Sorry, the problem's at O2's end. I can't give you the discount."

I explain that I've clearly got the offer, it's there, it's saved, all it needs is a till override, and we can go ahead. "Sorry, the problem's at O2's end. I can't give you the discount."

"But it's an Odeon offer, O2's just providing the access." "Sorry, the problem's at O2's end. I can't give you the discount."

We go round this loop several times. It's like talking to Robocop.

Eventually, I point out, "Look, the food's been opened and served. There's a slush drink melting. I wouldn't have ordered this lot at £7.50, I'm certainly not paying £7.50 for it, and it's going to go to waste if you don't sell it, so let's use a bit of discretion and get this paid for."

You guessed it. "Sorry, the problem's at O2's end. I can't give you the discount."

Inevitable, wasn't it? I look him in the eye, say, "What a damned waste of food," and walk off.

It's not like I'm unknown at that cinema. I go there probably at least once a week. I'm a regular. The supervisor could have said, "Look, I can't put this through the till, but I've seen you here before - as a goodwill gesture, why don't you just take the food on the house this time? Sorry the system didn't work, but hopefully it'll be fixed for next time. Enjoy the film!" I would have walked away a happy customer, they wouldn't have lost any more (let's face it, the food was headed for the dumpster anyway), and honour would have been satisfied.

Instead, I felt like I was dealing with the worst kind of traffic warden, I was left with a bad taste in my mouth, and I'm not inclined go back to the Guildford Odeon for the rest of my contract's length. It's a shame. I know the manageress - she's really nice, and she deserves better of her staff, but I just don't want to deal with Robocop again.

Would you treat your customers this way?

Oh, and the film? Great. Go see it.

But if you do that at an Odeon, just don't order any discounted food that you wouldn't be prepared to pay full price for.

Seven Steps to A Successful Exhibition Stand Demo

I recently responded in a thread in the TV Connect group on LinkedIn, setting out some tips on successful exhibition-stand demonstrations. VidMind's CEO, Danny Peled, suggested I wrote up my comments as a blog piece. Seems like a jolly good idea, so here it is.

There's live, and there's live. If you want to do a demo that's not basically faked up, you have to de-risk it to the umpteenth degree. There's a number of rules you follow for successful demonstrations. Here are mine:

1. If humanly possible, have all the necessary server fire-power you'll need on-stand. You don't want to rely on off-site equipment unless there's no other option (see point 3);

2. Show power is notoriously bad. Even when it works, the voltage isn't always stable, and you could well have equipment killed by voltage spikes. So put all your servers and key equipment on uninterruptable power supplies (UPSes)! Fully charge the UPSes beforehand, and test them. Get a good idea how long they'll last without mains power, so you know how quickly to shut down your stand kit if (who am I kidding?...when) power goes. On the show floor, put the UPSes on surge protectors;

3. Do everything from pre-loaded data on-site: if you're dependent upon Internet content, or off-site servers, I promise that your most important demo of the show will fail spectacularly;

4. If you can't avoid internet connection, never ever use site networking. Not only is expo network service larcenously expensive, it's usually dial-up slow, heavily contended, may be insecure, and is always highly unreliable. It's far better to get a load balancer/firewall, and plug a rack of cell network dongles into it - each from a different cell network, so that you have redundancy if one of them goes wobbly. You'll get broadband-equivalent speeds - especially if you've LTE available - in stark contrast to show networking. The staff on nearby stands will be crying with envy. (And there's nothing sweeter, when they're the competition!) Best of all, even if you throw the net dongles in the bin at the end of the expo, it'll still have cost you far less than buying from the organisers;

5. Hire a hotel suite, and set up the hardware there, before you move it to the show. Sort out the cabling and networking issues beforehand. Label up the wiring, so it's plug-and-play on the day. Practise the pitch and the demo, in the suite. This is particularly important if you've hired local demonstrators for the show! Get them to the point where a visitor will think they're getting it "canned", it's so smooth - and then, when you're challenged, say: "Go on then, you have a go." Trust me, this is a golden moment! And you'll have differentiated yourself from all the canned, faked demos around you, and created some belief in your product.

These last two points apply whether you're doing a canned demo or live:

6. Get your kit installed on the show floor as early as possible; if necessary, buy early access. Make sure you have your last-minute panics days from the "last minute", to give you time to get out to Best Buy or PC World to replace that broken network switch, the cable that got driven over by the fork-lift, or whatever;

7. Security! Think this through, end to end. Secure everything you can, every way you can. Have redundant kit if possible, and keep it off-site but near at hand. If stand kit goes missing - even just a vital cable - the commercial damage can be catastrophic. A new IPTV supplier (I'll spare their blushes) turned up to their first IBC, to great fanfares and acclaim for their rather innovative début product. I was working a stand that year, but wandered over on the last morning to take a look at this new marvel...to find a stand full of long faces. Some light-fingered oik had pocketed their one demo model! Don't make the same mistake...or you may as well have just spent your entire show budget on an exotic expenses-paid holiday for your favourite staff.

Five Things I Never Travel Without

In the first post, "Five Things I Wouldn't Be Without", I covered the five items you'll never find me separated from. Now, as promised, the five items I always have with me when I travel abroad.

I'm making the distinction here about travelling abroad, rather than just an overnighter to another town, because for a Brit the difference is pretty important. For us, travel to another country usually involves travelling light. Unless we're taking a car ferry or the EuroTunnel, we can't just throw half the house in the boot (or trunk, if you're American) and drive off. We're going by plane, train or boat, and either way we're going to be carrying our life in bags with us.

I'm a huge fan of one-bag travelling. A number of years ago, I stumbled across a wonderful site: onebag.com. [Apologies to anyone who was misdirected when I mistyped it as one-bag.com in a previous revision!] It's not a commercial site, but it's all about travelling anywhere by plane, with just a carry-on bag. Now, I'm also a big fan of Virgin Atlantic - but not their truly dumb 6kg carry-on maximum weight. That necessitates a few special items...

1. My CabinMax convertible backpack

The CabinMax range is excellent, lightweight cabin luggage, and my travel companion for several years now has been my Flight Approved Backpack. Its 44L capacity is as much as you're permitted on most carriers, but it weighs only 880g, or 1.95 lbs, which leaves you over 5kgs for contents even on stingy old Virgin Atlantic. The backpack shoulder straps have been sturdy enough to survive everything I've done to them, and I've been pretty brutal to them so far. It's inexpensive, strong, feather-light and comfortable, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

2. My AyeGear vest

I bought an AyeGear Vest last year, and it's been a wonder! I can fit my 13" Ultrabook in one inside pocket, several phones and gadgets in others, all sorts of odds, ends, batteries and cables all over the place, and thread a pair of mobile phone earpieces through the convenient loops provided...and nothing shows! Which is good, when I'm carrying several kilos extra on my body... Again, it's comfortable, versatile, doesn't look too shabby, and is wearable luggage. I could conceivably even pack a lightweight change of clothes in the big back pocket, and travel with nothing but what I'm wearing.

3. Noise-cancelling headphones

The constant rumble of long-distance air flight is a stressor, but not one that travellers recognise; well, not as much as the screaming kid two rows back, or the salesman soomeone poured into the next seat along, suffering from advanced logorrhoea. Terminal logorrhoea, if he doesn't shut up soon... Airline headsets are, let's face it, rubbish. They manage to combine a total lack of noise barrier with all the fidelity of a 1950s crystal radio earpiece. There's only one solution to the passenger peace problem, and that's active noise-cancelling headphones, preferably the over-ear type. Just remember to carry spare batteries. Due to an unfortunate tendency to chew through the cable when I'm concentrating, I can't recommend any one make. At least, until someone brings out a model with munch-proof wires...

4. Earplugs

As good as noise-cancelling headphones are, they aren't comfortable to sleep with...particularly once you're in your hotel room, and the next-door neighbours' come-all-ye keg party has moved on to the all-in orgy stage, with a full percussion section. You need peace. You need quiet. Actually, you need a Glock 17, but inexplicably the hotel doesn't list one on the room service menu. Apparently they're bad for business. Earplugs are the answer, and you need good ones. I love Flents Quiet Time plugs, and get a fresh supply whenever I'm in the States. I notice they've brought out a Super Sleep model that's shorter, so less likely to be knocked out in your sleep, and I may well pick up a whole load next time around.

5. Ziploc bags

No, really! I store power cords with phones, give data cables their own bags, use large ziplocs to store used undies, keep part-finished bags of Doritos fresh, put each currency in a separate ziploc - the uses are endless, and the bags are weightless...well, nearly enough. You can even put your nice Google Nexus tablet in a ziploc (two, nested, if you're feeling paranoid) and read Kindle books in the bathtub! Just make sure that you use the type that seal end-to-end if you want to do that: the ones with a "zip runner" aren't always waterproof enough. I travel with one roll of smallish bags, and one of really large ones. One word of warning: ziploc bags are slippery, so be careful when you open your luggage, or half its contents will slither around your feet!

Five Things I Wouldn't Be Without

This article on LinkedIn set me to thinking: which five items would I not travel without?

It's a great question. After a while, I realised my answer really depends on what's being asked. Things I'm never without, or articles I always carry when I travel away from home? So I'll answer both. In this article: which five things am I never without? (In the next: which five items I never travel without.)

1. My Android smartphone

OK, I admit it, I'm a geek. Well, you knew that from the title of the blog, so it's no surprise, right? But I'm a real tech geek too; always have been. So not only do I carry a smartphone (currently an HTC Desire Z, because I never want to be without a proper keyboard), but it's an Android phone - of course! - and I write new apps for it when I've a spare moment.

The thing is, it's the hub of my business life. The calendar syncs with Google (using a Gmail email address no-one knows but me), so that I can see my calendar whether I'm at a PC, on a tablet (my Google Nexus 7 is wonderful!), or just have my phone. I use Catch Notes to store my thoughts, information I need to capture, and other sundry bits and pieces that run my life. It's my first port of call for email - it has no problems juggling seven mailboxes! - and if I need to relax, the Kindle app's ready and waiting for me. I might switch to a different handset, but there'll always be an Android in my pocket.

2. My memory stick

Not just any memory stick, either: a 64GB USB3 stick. I don't carry stuff that's business-critical (at least not unencrypted), but it has my music collection, a bunch of PC and Linux software I use regularly, and a whole load of other data I need to hand. The cloud's all very well - and Adeptium Consulting, my consultancy is proudly an Amazon Web Services partner - but it takes forever to download tens of gigabytes, ten forevers to upload that much, and it's clearly not feasible to do that on a mobile phone connection, or someone's home broadband with a usage limit. The internet infrastructure simply hasn't caught up with Big Data volumes, or even Moderately-Sized Data volumes, so for the time being, sneakernet (these days with a USB stick rather than a floppy disk) still reigns. I'm thinking of getting an encrypted stick, possibly the iStorage DataShur, but I'd like it to be USB3 capable.

3. My glasses tool

About seven years ago, I came to the painful realisation that I needed reading glasses. I now have more pairs than I can count, yet never seem to have a pair to hand. So I suppose that one of my items ought to be my prescription glasses - let's face it, I'd be stumped without them - but that's a bit mundane and obvious. Also, they're now so much part of me now that forgetting them would be like leaving an arm behind.

However, there's one item that's pretty much unavoidable, once you're carrying glasses, and that's a glasses tool. I like rimless specs - I'm not all that vain, but it's one of my indulgences - and they always seem to need tightening up. So on my keyring there's my glasses tool. The centre part of the body unscrews to show a tiny cross-head screwdriver at one end, an equally diddy flat-blade at the other, and there's a nut spinner at the far end of the tool. I've been surprised how many other things I've fixed with it, too...

4. A pen

As you'll have gathered by now, I write. As a left-handed writer, I prefer to use a keyboard, because writer's cramp - pushing a pen, not pulling - is a swine, and even I can't read my writing a month later, unless I've written in B L O C K C A P S. However, I never quite got out of the habit of making sure I've always got at least one pen with me, and preferably several. If nothing else, it means I can do the Sudoku puzzles in the Metro and Evening Standard papers when I travel through London!

5. My pocket meds pack

Unfortunately, I'm a migraine sufferer. For anyone who doesn't know: migraine is not a headache. Headache is just one of many migraine symptoms, and sometimes not the worst. But I'm a businessman and a techie, and I need a working head for both of these. So I carry a little blue pocket meds pack. Inside it you'll find a couple of doses of rizatriptan - a medication that can abort a migraine if taken quickly enough, or considerably reduce its severity if not so early - ibuprofen, and paracetamol (acetaminophen, for USAns) or co-codamol (paracetamol + codeine).

Other migraine sufferers might be interested to know about some preventative therapy I'm using these days: Berocca (or its Tesco equivalent), magnesium, zinc, co-enzyme Q10 and large amounts (100-400mg daily) of riboflavin, also known as vitamin B2. The whole lot together seem to boost the efficiency of neural cell mitochondria, and this can help a lot of sufferers of classic-type migraine. The riboflavin dose may seem excessive, but it's a recommendation from UK's National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, the body that advises the UK Government on medicines and therapies.

In the next episode...

...Five Things I Never Travel Without!