Marketing Pilgrim

Have you ever been in situation, be it business or personal, where you just got your butt kicked? A time when a competitor cleaned your clock and you walked away wounded because simply had your “you know what handed to you”? I suspect we all have if we are really in business.

How you respond in those situations are insights into your character.

Did you:

1. Slither into a corner or put your tail between your legs to lick your wounds?

2. Accept the defeat, learn from it, go back to the drawing board and figure how to prevent it from happening again?

3. Whine to everybody that you lost because it “wasn’t fair”?

I remember one time in college I went out with a group of friends to this local bar where they had karaoke.  This place was known for not being the safest place in town, but probably the cheapest! We hung out there for a few hours before the karaoke DJ decided to take a break. I am not sure what inspired him, but for some odd reason my buddy, Dan, decided that it was his turn to start singing despite the fact that there was no music, and he had a few too many drinks. Dan, stumbled up on stage, grabbed the mic, and immediately started singing what sounded like an Irish fight song or maybe a cat in heat.

The folks at the Stanford Security Lab are a suspicious bunch. Since they’re studying how to make computers more secure, I guess it comes with the territory. Their current interest is tracking cookies and the Do Not Track opt-out process. Using “experimental software,” they conducted a survey to see how many members of the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI), actually complied with the new Do Not Track initiatives.

What they found is that more than half the NAI member companies did not remove tracking codes after someone opted out.

NAI member companies pledge only to allow opting out of behavioral ad targeting, not tracking. Of the 64 companies we studied, 33 left tracking cookies in place after opting out.

Ah, but we all know how stats can be twisted, so let’s keep reading. The next line says:

Ten years ago, TV commercials were all about food, cars and deodorant. Now you can’t get through an episode of MasterChef without seeing at least one ad for a mobile phone and more recently, a tablet.

As connected devices become more popular and accessible, what will become of our old friend the desktop computer? For the June edition of the Millennial Media Mobile Mix, tablet owners were asked to quantify the shifts in their digital behavior and here’s what they got:

The numbers aren’t huge, but given that tablets are only just becoming something an average person would own, it’s a hefty shift.

Hopefully it goes without saying that trashing your competitors is simply never a good idea. Still, that didn’t stop one of Carbonite’s competitors from doing just that.

In addition to insulting Carbonite, he managed to insult the intelligence of his prospective client in the same email!

“Hey XXX,

I just wanted to touch base with you to see what you thought of the Carbonite reviews I sent you and if it makes you feel safe and secure.    No one in their right mind would, but I wanted to check just in case.

Actually, the one who should be the most concerned is XXX since he is the owner.  If the above email address is not his correct one, could you please forward him these?

Thanks.”

The other day we reported on a “trend” that some developers are targeting Android as their first platform option because the process is less stringent than Apple’s. These days, however, the word ‘trend’ has about as much relevance as the word friend.

Some evidence is the chart below via SAI that shows developers are really most interested in the iOS platform more than the Android and that this is indeed increasing.

So what is it developers? What’s your preference and why? Please make up our mind.