Allen Stern. (Photo: Facebook)

Allen Stern, one of the Web's original bloggers and founder of CenternetWorks, has died. Mr. Stern established himself early in the New York startup scene, shining a spotlight on tech companies when few others did. His sister posted the news on Mr. Stern's Facebook account, but didn't indiciate the cause of his death. [CNET]

Careful, your sponsored content is leaking: “Brands are everywhere, and brands have now leaked into what has been traditionally the editorial space." [New York Times]

Why does Google pay Neal Mohan, its VP of display of advertising products, more than Carmelo Anthony? Because the visionary "predicted how brand advertising would fund the Internet." [Business Insider]

In the United Kingdom, some lucky Facebook users are being charged up to £10 to send private messages to celebrities as part of a trial run. The scheme had a U.S. trial run in January when it cost $100 to message Mark Zuckerberg.  [Guardian]

California already prohibits using your phone to text or call while driving. Recently, an appeals court ruled out using maps as well. Regulations against changing Spotify playlists are presumably next. [AllThingsD]

AdAge, MediaBistro, Motley Fool, Business Insider and dozens of others all weighed in on Coke’s study, which “finds online buzz has no measurable impact on short-term sales”--driving thousands of tweets, likes and comments between them. (By “weighing in,” I mean they repeated the same few facts derived from the same presentation originally reported by AdAge in its “Buzzkill: Coca-Cola Finds No Sales Lift from Online Chatter” story.)

The chatter about this story was so immediate, so loud and extreme that Coke rushed to walk back the claims--reassuring the blogosphere about its devotion to social media. Coke’s senior vice president of integrated marketing communications and capabilities, Wendy Clark, was compelled to post on the company’s website promising that "with social playing a crucial role at the heart of [Coke's] activations," the company is committed to continuing to invest in social campaigns.

It's an ironic microcosm of the real impact of online buzz. You can't say for sure why or how it works, but clearly when there is enough noise in the right circles, it drives real people to do real things.

However, the idea that advertising or chatter on social media is going to drive short-term sales of soda is stupid (and that's all Coke's study ascertained). I'm not even sure that social media buzz can lift sales in the long term. Not with a brand so well known.

Perhaps social media isn’t working for Coke because they’re not doing a very good job at it. Perhaps their ads are targeted poorly. Perhaps their 61 million Facebook fans aren’t generating much value because Facebook has surreptitiously walled off up to 85 percent of those fans and charges exorbitant rates for reaching and communicating with them. Maybe nobody wants to tweet (or listen to tweets) about 100-year-old sugar water. Who knows?

None of the potential reasons say much about social media buzz as a whole. (This is why data scientists warn about generalizing from a single example.)

But one thing is well established: social media is incredibly effective at taking something totally unknown and making it known, sometimes in a matter of minutes.

I've seen this with my own clients and with myself. A blog mention by Tim Ferriss and your book sales skyrocket. A mention on 20/20, not so much. Look at the musician Alex Day, whom I advise, he’s never been mentioned in an offline media source in his life. And last week, based solely on the buzz of social media, he charted higher than Justin Timberlake.

One needs only to glance at Kickstarter, where projects go from $0 in sales to commitments from fans in the millions of dollars. How do people find out about these projects? It isn’t from the New York Times, at least not at first. Users hear about it from friends who post about their donations, from blogs, and from email and then they spend real money in real time. So we know social buzz is responsible for at least $119 million last year--and that’s on one site. Another company turned $200,000 in Facebook ads into $10 million in revenue. The list goes on and on.

So many marketers and gurus have naturally begun to extoll the limitless benefits of online media and highlighted the decline and influence of other media. But to focus exclusively on that is short-sighted. What they should really be focused on is how to get more from both.

Because in my experience, online and offline media drive each other. Eighty-nine percent of journalists admit to using blogs as sources. Meanwhile, every old media outlet on the planet accuses blogs and social media of profiting unfairly off their work.

Right now, social media is cheap. Its impact is more difficult to track, which has made it easy for charlatans to exaggerate its benefits. On the other hand, other forms of advertising like television, print and outdoor have premiums built into them--premiums left over from when they were the only game in town.

The perfect example of this is Forbes. It's a 100-year-old media brand … but its business model is exactly the same as Huffington Post. Essentially anyone can publish there (leading to a lot of embarrassing articles and crap). Yet, its advertising rates are comparatively quite high. In fact, they claim that they do not have "remnant inventory” (though anyone who has ever read a Forbes article knows how many bogus pageviews the site generates).

If Coke or anyone is buying there--purchasing new media advertising inventory at old media rates--of course it’s going to be ineffective. Old tactics are growing less efficient, but their prices remain high. New tactics are developing, but their value and proper cost is still ambiguous and can fluctuate.

Because of rapid technological disruption and advancement, knowing what works is even harder. At this intersection of old and new, there is all sorts of confusion. What is this worth? What is that worth?

Coke’s study says social media doesn’t work. Facebook and Datalogix have an equally persuasive study that says it does. In fact, they say that Facebook ads work just like television ads, subtly influencing you whether you know it or not. And 50 years ago Ogilvy was trying to figure out if television ads worked at all compared to print. Nobody knows anything.

And that’s my point: don't expect the debate to be settled--ever. Because it never was in the first place.

Marketing is a mercurial business. It's based on gut and "creativity." If it wasn’t, the Don Drapers of the world wouldn’t get to keep their cool offices and expense accounts.

Marketing has always been hard to track–the idea that advertising and PR and “brand awareness” drive sales is, at its core, based more on common sense than it is on data.

And at the end of it, the only thing we can say, whether we’re talking about classified ads or Facebook messages, billboards or online display ads, is this: certainly spending all these billions doesn’t hurt.

That’s all we really know. The rest is opinion.

Ryan Holiday is the bestselling author of  Trust Me I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator and a PR strategist for brands and writers.

(Photo: Pornhub)

When it comes to advertising, it's hard out there for a porn company--not that one of the Internet's biggest porn websites really needs to advertise itself. As all those pearl-clutchy "Vine's Porn Problem" posts will tell you, porn is everywhere on the Internet, and most of those NSFW videos can be viewed on PornHub, a popular adult video streaming site.

Now, BuzzFeed reports that PornHub has created a totally SFW Super Bowl ad, only to have it harshly rejected by the bigwigs at CBS. (We've reached out to CBS in order to independently verify that it rejected the ad.)

The adorable ad features an elderly couple happily sitting on a bench. That's basically it. Then the Pornhub logo flashes on the screen at the end. Sure, kids could presumably see that and Google "Pornhub," but we'd argue it would be one of the least offensive Super Bowl ads (lookin' at you, GoDaddy).

Pornhub has created a (SFW) website where users can vote on whether or not the ad should've been rejected; so far 82 percent of people agree the ad should air.

This is the first pic that comes up when you Google "Dell dude." (Photo: DKMedia.net)

The "Dude, you're getting a Dell!" guy gained a modicum of fame in the early aughts for popping up in random Dell commercials and surprising enterprising college students and old people with a Dell computer. (Really? This? I asked for an Apple Powerbook...)

Now, Ben Curtis has reemerged onto the tech scene, exciting dudes everywhere with a nostalgia boner for old computers. And Mr. Curtis claims he knows exactly how to solve Dell's recent financial woes: hire him back, obvi.

“I think they’re making a huge mistake and simply need to bring back the Dell Dude!” Mr. Curtis told Bloomberg. "That’s it. That’s all they need to do. If they brought me back, their sales, stock and media presence would skyrocket. That is by FAR the smartest move they could make."

Mr. Curtis was fired from Dell after he was caught buying a bag of weed while wearing a kilt, which seems like the most dude thing you can possibly do. But unfortunately for Mr. Curtis, Dell was none too impressed with having a stoner for a spokersperson. Since his 2003 firing, Mr. Curtis has been bouncing around from one low-budge acting gig to the next, and is clearly anxious to get back onto TV screens everywhere.

Dude, are you sure this recent bid for relevancy has nothing to do with your struggling acting career? Either way, publicly begging for your old job back is only slightly less humiliating than a massive tech company getting advice from its former bro spokesperson.

Ain't care. (Photo: Facebook.)

Caught your breath from Instarage yet? We sure hope so, because here comes another move that's sure to inspire another round of e-riots on Planet Zuck. Ad Age reports that Facebook is prepping to launch video ads by April of next year. They'll appear both on the desktop and mobile versions of the site.

Worst of all, sources tell Ad Age they'll be set to autoplay. Bold move, Mark! Facebook might even enable the audio, which would probably be the most annoying thing Mr. Zuckerberg has done since, well, ever.

Don't think you'll be able to escape the ads by rapidly scrolling down the page:

On the desktop version of Facebook, the video ads are expected to grab a user's attention by expanding out of the news feed into webpage real estate in both the left and right columns -- or rails -- of the screen.

Ad Age talked to a number of ad execs who predict the ads won't be limited to an advertiser's Facebook followers. And there's even a special nod to all of you who are worried that the Internet is destroying our ability to concentrate:

Facebook is leaning toward capping the length of these video ads at 15 seconds.... That decision could also mean that 15-second video ads would become more prevalent elsewhere on the web.

Man, it takes that long just to find the off-button for autoplay ads.

Plans are still in the works so all these details could change before the beginning of next year. So feel free to pitch an absolute fit, Facebookers. But if we've learned one thing from the history of Facebook, it's that Zuck DGAF.

Kim K, queen of the selfies. (Photo: Instagram)

Much ink has already been spilled over Instagram's new updated terms of service, which specifically states that it can use your photos for "advertising and promotions." Twitter users erupted in outrage over the news, with many techies claiming they would soon be quitting the service. Wired wrote a helpful how-to on how to download your photos and delete your account. Photographer Clayton Cubitt, who is not at all hyperbolic, called it Instagram's suicide note. Gizmodo called everyone whiny babies and offered a counterpoint: "shut up."

While the hype may be somewhat overblown (we highly doubt the masses quit Instagram over this), the ambiguity introduced by the new terms has understandably led to much confusion. If all you take is brunch photos or pics of the sunset and don't mind those showing up in ads, bully for you. But what happens if Instagram decides to use photos of your young siblings or children to advertise a product? As Anil Dash put it, “It’s very likely they’d use a photo of my son to sell stuff to my parents, without me knowing."

That concern also extends to users as young as 13, who are also subject to Instagram's new policy. As Bloomberg points out, taking photos of underage users for ads raises some thorny privacy and safety concerns.

And what about the BaddieBey's, Riri's and ChampagnePapi's of the world? Celebrities have also become prolific users of the seemingly-intimate photo sharing service. Instagram’s new TOS says the service has the right to share your photos, username, likeness and metadata with third party advertiser. This means they could feasibly take a photo of Kim Kardashian’s cat Mercy (RIP) and use it in an advertisement for the SPCA. As it did with professional photographers, this invokes questions about how much control you have over own content and likeness.

Some celebs are already worried about this. On his Google Plus page (lol), Star Trek actor Wil Wheaton writes:

Here's what I'm wondering: if Kaley Cuoco uses Instagram to share a photo of her and Melissa Rauch doing something silly, does that mean that Instagram can take that photo and use it to advertise for something silly without compensating them for what becomes a use of their likeness for commercial purposes? I can see that being a pretty serious shitstorm if it happens.

It’s unlikely that Instagram will alter its policy to protect celebrities. For all its celebrity-courting, famous people on Twitter use the service pretty much like the rest of us. But it also seems unlikely that publicists will be okay with the service making money off of their clients’ likenesses. Either way, it would behoove Instagram to clarify just how it intends to use our data before Snapchat starts looking like the only safe place to share.

(h/t to HeyVeronica, who got us thinking about this whole thing.)

Update:

Turns out celebrities really are angry about this whole Instagram TOS update. P!nk tweeted that she'll be quitting, as will Saved By the Bell star Tiffani Amber Thiessen, whom we did not even know had an Instagram

Soon, he'll be able to hear YOU. (Photo: Fonesea)

When last we checked in on creepy technologies that wholly encroach on your sense of personal privacy, Microsoft had registered a patent that would allow the Kinect to detect how many people are in a room and stop playback on a movie if it sensed more people than the copyright allowed. But a new patent filed by Verizon takes that concept a step further by allowing a set-top box to observe what's going on in your house and serve you ads based on what it hears.

According to the patent, the device will detect "an ambient action performed by a user during the presentation of the media content program" and during the commercial break run ads based on whatever action you're performing. The patent provides the helpful example of the Verizon box detecting that people are "cuddling" and serving up "a commercial for a romantic getaway vacation, a commercial for a contraceptive, a commercial for flowers, a commercial including a trailer for an upcoming romantic comedy movie, etc." Because nothing says romance like one of those awkward Trojan Fire and Ice commercials.

Ars Technica points out that Verizon is far from the first cable provider to patent such technologies; in 2008, Comcast patented a technology that would target programming based on how many people are in a room.

If this is the future, we kind of want off the ride.

(Photo: OKFocus)

The Merry Pranksters

From Old Spice’s viral “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign to the contentious Skittles spot that made One Million Moms cry bestiality, bizarre or aggressive advertising has become commonplace in our internet-addled society. To nab the attention of customers toggling between screens, advertisers frequently toe the line between inappropriate and outrageous, but few are as unabashedly controversial as the Queens-based OKFocus. Named to AdAge’s Creativity 50 in July, OKFocus is a rebel brand’s dream, equal parts design snob and attention-seeking internet troll. And as advertising moves online, OKFocus clients like Google and the Museum of Contemporary Art have taken note.

Helmed by Ryder Ripps, Jonathan Vingiano and Jules LaPlace, the boutique digital firm has implemented its fair share of next-gen, buzzy web products, including a live online dance party for Smirnoff and a game for Google Plus’s video-chat system that, using facial recognition technology, allows users to draw on the screen without using the mouse or keyboard.

The boundary-pushing agency is perhaps most notorious for its foray into pranksterism with WhoDat.Biz, a domain lookup site that purported to be the first company born of rapper Kanye West’s new startup, Donda Media. Users were shocked: did the stylish rapper just put out an ugly update of Whois.net? It took several hours before tech blogs realized that OKFocus was behind the viral prank. In one fell swoop, OKFocus called attention to the internet’s false preconceptions about Mr. West’s startup and demonstrated how dangerous the hive-mind can be when it latches onto bogus news, serving up a valuable lesson for brands and consumers alike.

What differentiates the agency’s aesthetic from others is its devotion to levity, to the idea that design can and should be fun. By mixing this philosophy with cutting-edge web technology, OKFocus creates products that stick in the minds of users long after they’ve moved onto the next big thing. As Mr. Vingiano put it in an interview with The Creator’s Project, “There’s something about this lack of humor in modern web design that is just so appalling.”

When OKFocus realized, for example, that New Yorkers frequently complain about unreliable L train service, they devised Is the L Train Fucked?, a single-serving website that flashes “yes” or “no” depending on the train’s status. By capitalizing on zeitgeist-y controversy and translating it in a humorous way, the trio behind OKFocus have established themselves as expert buzz-builders, unafraid of deploying a good stunt. As TV advertisers rush to out-weird themselves, OKFocus’s trolling instincts seem like the natural evolution of an industry obsessed with going viral.

Next: Dan Loeb, Third Point LLC: the Poison Pen

Back to the beginning

Mr. Webb

The Undercover Ad Man

Of all the “if you build it, they will come,” social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, Tumblr seemed the most advertising-averse. Floppy-haired founder David Karp memorably betrayed a visceral distaste for the stuff. It “really turns our stomachs,” he said in 2010, following that up with a vow not to become “wildly profitable” by slapping an AdSense ad on the otherwise elegant dashboard of all 80 million Tumblr blogs. But it seems as though the microblogging site’s methodical approach toward making money has paid off—thanks in part to guidance from Rick Webb, a 20-year veteran of the ad industry and co-founder of digital consultancy Barbarian Group, who was attracted to Tumblr for its aversion to the “crap” ads that permeate the web.

Tumblr, founded in 2007, released its first paid products (Radar and Spotlight) earlier this year, which offered, “exactly what people wanted, the ability to amplify the message to a larger audience—but they hadn’t built a business around it,” he said.

Not long after Mr. Webb’s arrival, Mr. Karp was showing up on Advertising Week panels next to reps from Pepsi, convincingly crowing about the “brave new world” his platform offered for “native” ads—Silicon Alley’s new favorite synergy. (Unlike intrusive interstitials or annoying banners, native ads help brands capture users’ attention by forcing them to act like any other publisher and create content worthy of getting passed around.) “All we do is ask for your birthday,” said Mr. Webb. “We don’t sell ads against you getting a divorce or getting engaged; we’re trying to do it without selling the soul.”

And unlike the fall 2011 Fashion Week flameout, in which brands eager to advertise on Tumblr were turned off by the dearth of ways to measure the effectiveness of their efforts, Tumblr now has analytics options. One is an in-house service that shows off the impact brands can get from ad-spend metrics—like how long your post lives before it stops getting reblogged, which the company is eager to show off. Union Metrics, which offers a similar service for Twitter, has also licensed Tumblr’s firehose of data. Its service, which is currently in beta, helps brands capitalize on where conversations are happening with their product and influence pick-up.

During Mr. Webb’s short tenure, Tumblr hired its first global head of sales, poaching Groupon’s senior vice president of sales Lee Brown. Listed beneath the site’s many job openings for engineers, you now see postings seeking “evangelists” in ad-friendly categories like consumer electronics and home decor. “We’ve had people come up to us like, ‘Don’t ever put ads on the platform!’ Well, we must be doing it right, because we already do,” he said.

As for Mr. Karp’s infamous queasiness, Mr. Webb said that, as a product guy, “David was speaking as individual who uses the internet and watches TV. Every once in a while, one of the TV ads surprises and delights you. How often does that happen on the internet?” Part of the reason, he went on to explain, is that the $50 billion in brand advertising on TV “is not moving over” to the internet, where it’s still direct advertising. But in a way, Tumblr’s insistence that advertisers go native and use the same tools as users—eschewing invasive behavioral advertising or geotargeting—has helped attract big clients like Adidas. Consumer packaged goods and automobile companies are also coming onboard, making Tumblr suddenly feel up to the size of its $800 valuation.

Right now, noted Mr. Webb, it’s “only really appropriate for big brand advertisers looking for a large demographic. Can we ever just buy America? Can we ever just buy Brazil? That is probably a thing they would like to do.”

Next: Deborah Estrin, CornellNYC Tech: the Entrepreneurial Egghead

Back to the beginning.

(Screencap: YouTube)

Shooting off some borderline-rude half-baked review of a product or service is kind of a Twitter rite of passage; the platform would simply cease to exist if crochety tweets were suddenly outlawed. Now, the Wall Street Journal reports that your anti-iPhone 5 tweets are actually being used by competitors to mount compelling advertising campaigns. Hey, at least you're not just shouting into a void? (You're mostly shouting into a void.)

While this might be a good time to remind yourself that no matter how few followers you have, your tweets are indeed public, the off-hand remarks of dissatisfied customers are being harnessed to create ads that are actually pretty funny and realistic. Take Samsung's anti-iPhone ad, a Betabeat favorite, which includes classic iPhone hipster lines like "Yeah, yeah but they make the coolest adapters." The Journal reports that that ad was partly sourced from anti-iPhone tweets.

Of course, ad agencies are being careful not to reflect the opinions of a very vocal minority, also known as "people with Svbtle blogs."

The Web "is like a fun-house mirror in that it gives you some great real-time feedback, but it is skewed because not everyone speaks and those who do tend to speak a lot, so you do have to be careful in how you use it," one digital media agency exec told the Journal.

If ad agencies get too Twitter-heavy, we might end up with a bunch of whiny commercials that resemble SNL's "Tech Talk" sketch.