Monday, October 13, 2003 Study: Auto TV Ads 'Wasting Money' And this is news? Some of the worst ads on T.V. are the Car Dealers, yelling and screaming and generally being obnoxious. In his book, Your Marketing Sucks Mark Stevens makes some great points about this also. Only two thirds as many car buyers (17 percent) said that they were influenced by TV ads relative to those (26 percent) who said they were affected by online search engine listings. The Cap Gemini study showed that word of mouth, at 71 percent, was the largest self-reported influence. Ad Age reports. [this is a summary - go to our web site for the complete entry, links, comments and categories] [marketingfix] 8:58:13 AM    comment [] Snoop Software Gains Power and Raises Privacy Concerns "Earlier this year, Rick Eaton did something unusual in the world of high technology: he made his product weaker. Mr. Eaton is the founder of TrueActive, which makes a computer program that buyers can install on a target computer and monitor everything that the machine's user does on the PC. Spying with software has been around for several years but Mr. Eaton decided that one new feature in his program crossed a line between monitoring and snooping. That feature is called 'silent deploy,' which allows the buyer to place the program on someone else's computer secretly via e-mail, without having physical access to the machine. To Mr. Eaton, that constituted an invitation to install unethical and even illegal wiretaps. He made the change, he said, 'so we could live with ourselves.' " You should assume that any public computer has keystroke logging software installed - numerous instances are pointed out in this article - the site requires free registration to read it. (Marc Erickson) [Lockergnome Bytes] 8:46:16 AM    comment [] Random thoughts from the past couple of days I'm in The Tattered Cover on Saturday and am looking at Books on CD and the thought struck me. Why is it so damn hard for the companies that publish these, to put in plain site whether or not the CD is abridged or unabridged? And speaking of abridged, with the state of the current compression technologies, why is any publishing company doing abridgements anyway? If I wanted an abridged version of a book I'd subscribe to Readers Digest. I'm on my way to work Saturday and upon arriving downtown I'm keenly aware that there are way to many Denver Police on the streets. Granted most of them are sitting in Starbucks and also a couple of doors down at the Noodles & Company, so I feel very safe and protected while having lunch and some coffee. After a few questions and scrounging for the days paper, I figure out that they are all down here for the Columbus Day Parade. Now to add to the mess of closed streets downtown is the Parade is holding RTD's Market Street Station hostage and not letting any of the busses into the station to make their scheduled stops. We had to load up on the street and more than a few people missed their bus. What is it about balloons that attracts Real Estate Sales, Apartment Complex's and Car Dealers, to put up a bunch of helium filled multi coloured balloons to attract or attempt to attract potential clients? Did I miss something in Marketing 101? Has anyone done a study on the ROI for balloons? Has anyone done a Power Point Presentation on the colour and type of balloon most likely to bring in a client that will complete a purchase? Why don't we see any T.V. commercials or hear any Radio ads on the wonderfulness of a business's balloons and why we should come shop and do business with them? Looking to the southwest near dusk on Sunday night Pikes Peak is outlined in a rose coloured hue as the sun sets over the front range. Later Sunday evening, I'm wondering where the full moon is, only to find a big Pumpkin coloured moon making its appearance in the eastern sky, pearched on the tips of the DIA roof. 8:31:03 AM    comment [] Productive Monday It's been a productive Monday so far. I cleaned up 200+ e-mail's from my inbox and now have a managable 75 sitting in there that still need my attention. At least all the clutter is gone. 7:54:47 AM    comment []