Merkle CEO Michael Komasinski: “The best thing about today’s advertising is the strong focus on the customer experience. Building marketing strategies that place the customer at the center of every interaction makes advertising less superficial. We can now tangibly and positively change how customers experience a brand across the entire customer journey…Hands down, the largest issue in online advertising is the lack of data transparency and control standards. We need a common set of policy rules and technical standards that enforce transparency on behalf of consumers. It would be ideal from a performance perspective to have a unified “source of truth” attribution number that Google, Facebook, Adobe, etc. could align to and optimize from.”
NYT on why Thoreau lives on: “Thoreau suggested that the busyness of life — the frenetic pace of our jobs, the demands of our bank accounts, the status that we seek and never find — should never be the exclusive focus of living. Can we, as Lightman puts it in his essay, free ourselves from the “rush and the heave of the external world”? This is the lesson of Walden Pond: that our immediate concerns usually obscure the important ones, and almost always distract us from what is ultimate, the chance to live and die with the knowledge that we have tried to “truly live.””
Renée DiResta on Amplified Propaganda: “You don’t need fake accounts to spread ampliganda online. Real people will happily do it…Today there is simply a rhetorical war of all against all: a maelstrom of viral hashtags competing for attention, hopping from community to community, amplified by crowds of true believers for whom sharing and retweeting is akin to a religious calling—even if the narrative they’re propagating is a ludicrous conspiracy theory about stolen ballots or Wayfair-trafficked children. Ampliganda engenders a constellation of mutually reinforcing arguments targeted at, and internalized by, niche communities, rather than a single, monolithic narrative fed to the full citizenry. It has facilitated a fragmentation of reality with profound implications. Each individual act of clicking or resharing may not feel like a propagandistic act, but in the aggregate, those acts shape conversations, beliefs, realities.”
