June 20, 2006
In a consumer-control era, the effectiveness of traditional advertising has been called into question as people spend more time on the internet and otherwise bypass the ‘commercial breaks’. Viral marketing or word-of-mouth advertising has become increasingly important, helped by the popularity of social networking sites like MySpace where information spreads quickly.
This week, JWT, the oldest advertising agency in the US, and now part of the WPP Group, has purchased all the ad space on The Huffington Post home page. Video ads, designed to be easily forwarded, from Ford, HSBC, Levi’s and others will run on HuffingtonPost.com. “In addition to looking at impressions, we can now look at what is shared and what is linked, and learn which ads work and which don’t,” said Sarah Bernard, HuffingtonPost.com general manager.
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Earlier today, we brought you the debate of hedgehog vs fox in politics and business. In a nutshell, hedgehogs are radical thinkers who may or may not be proved right. In our view, a true hedgehog is an iconoclast, an independent thinker who doesn’t conform to the prevailing doctrine of the times.
Karl Marx, with his revolutionary Das Kapital, was a hedgehog who heralded a new political and social paradigm. In Business, Bill Gates is also a hedgehog. He personifies the PC revolution by democratizing the technology, without which the internet would not have permeated the globe.
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The British newspaper Guardian reported a survey on the affinity for blogs between Americans and the British.
The study into newspaper readers’ online and offline habits finds that blogging in the UK “has less than half the popularity it enjoys in America.” According to the research, just 13% of those surveyed in Britain had read an individual’s blog in the past week, compared with 40% in the US. The lowest levels of response were for people who had actually written their own blog: 3% in Britain while 7% in the US.
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Isaiah Berlin: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
Philip Tetlock: “Hedgehogs remind one…of Churchill’s definition of a fanatic: someone who cannot change his mind and will not change the subject.”
What does it say about the intellectual war between hedgehogs and foxes? The European wars of religion, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ended by both Catholics and Protestants signing up to the maxim cuis regio, eius religio (whoever’s territory it is, his religion will rule there), signifying that intellectual exchange had been able to achieve no more than a truce.
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The ever thought-provoking John Kay wrote on today’s FT about why we’d be better off with fewer hedgehogs.
Kay gave a plug to Philip Tetlock’s new book, “Expert Political Judgment“, of which one of the most gratifying conclusions is talking heads on TV and pundits on newspapers are no better than the rest of us. What’s most interesting is Tetlock’s use of Isaiah Berlin’s metaphor from Archilochus, from his essay on Tolstoy, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” to illustrate the difference of intelligence.
Here is a simple test: do you agree that “it is annoying to listen to someone who cannot seem to make up his or her mind?” and “the most common error in decision-making is to abandon good ideas too quickly?” Or you’re the type “when considering most conflicts, I can usually see how both sides could be right” and “I prefer interacting with people whose opinions are very different from my own”?
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By now if you haven’t watched Connie Chung’s farewell cabaret, you’re so definitely out (of the loop).
If you recall, YouTube took off last December through the popularity of an SNL mock rap video, “Lazy Sunday”, starring Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg, a two-and-a-half-minute paean to New York’s Magnolia Bakery, Google Maps and C. S. Lewis. It was a smashing success with over 5 million hits, a viral phenomenon.
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