Search by name, company, title, location, etc.

Ted Mcconnell

Member since April 2005Contact Ted

Long time at P&G running Digital Marketing Innovation. 10 Years consulting in the online Ecosystem, mainly measurement related.

Articles by Ted All articles by Ted

Comments by Ted All comments by Ted

  • What Would Happen If We Let AI Vote? by Gord Hotchkiss (Media Insider on 05/07/2024)

    If the glue that holds society together is rule of law, then how do you hold AI accountable? Until computers and their networking components become accountable, I would say that they should not participate in democracy. They do anyway, by shaping our opinions, as you say,  that is always(?) at the behest of their human masters who somehow escape accountability completely for the clandestine shaping of opinions to bend populations to their will.  We call it advertising. :). 

  • When Is A JIC Not A JIC? When It's A MCCC by Tony Jarvis (MediaDailyNews on 03/29/2023)

    Right on. It's beyond me why big advertisers are not fighting for a real JIC. They have been begging for simplicity for years.  Agencies benefit from the complexity because a) it makes customers more dependent on them, and b) it creates a need for more people. It's a perfect stalemate.  The advertisers want simplicity but they want agencies to do the work.  Into the middle run media companies. The industry association could play a role but they are afraid of the legal implications.  The MRC could do something but they make money from complexity.  So, in the end, advertisers, afraid if their own shadow and unwilling to take responsibility are inadvertently letting the fox rule the henhouse.   Who loses ??  Consumers and advertisers.  

  • Attacks on Brand Purpose Are Unwarranted by Ted McConnell (Media Insider on 11/04/2021)

    Thanks John. Absolutely. Brands in trouble will try a lot of things. Ultimately though, if the product does not perform there is no amount of purpose that can save it. 

  • Facebook Friends Do Not Equal Real Friends by Gord Hotchkiss (Media Insider on 04/13/2021)

    Thanks Gord ... excellent piece, and free test from your daughter. I can imagine the same principle applies to other Marketing communications. To generlize, if the speaker and listener are not in the same group, bad things happen in both directions. Speakering to a mass audience in a mass way might alienate the few intimates, and speaking to them as intimates might confuse the masses. Good Direct Marketers seem to know this in their gut, and as direct Marketers, they can adapt their copy for the audience. Mass marketers seem never to do this, which makes their existing customers feel not-so-special. A Risk for big brands perhaps, and a new use for targeting?

  • The Google Maneuver by Ted McConnell (Media Insider on 02/06/2020)

    Thanks Ed. For sure, this is a smoking gun for anti trust action. I edited that out because I am not a lawyer, and I get beaten up when I talk about stuff that touches on law :). This started a chain of thought that ended up with the idea that publishers could break or discriminate against Chrome simply by not serving content to it.(The http header exposes the browser type). I doubt if they would do that ... but even if they caused one of every 20 Chrome page loads to fail, users would probably switch browsers. It simply goes to show that reciprocal power exists. 

  • Thank You For The Information by Ted McConnell (Media Insider on 11/07/2019)

    Like I said, don't expect free content to be free of bias. Everything you read was paid for by something. Advertising happens to pay for most of what you see on the internet. 

  • Now Hear This! by Ted McConnell (Media Insider on 05/02/2019)

    Thanks Jonathan. Seems like this message is similar to the key points you are making to adveertisers. In fact,  I worked on the Board of Directors of a Radio Station Group for many years, so going in, I am pretty familiar with the issues. I also ran a recording studio for 15 years, so I know sound.  The question at the center of the piece is about why consumers are consuming more audio suddenly. I was speculating,  but it woud cool to see the audio industry create reasons beyond mine, (or validate mine!)  and even invest in some basic research about why consumers are consuming more. While I was at the ARF we did a significant body of work on Audio (David Marans lead it), so that might be helpful. 

  • Advertisers' Access To Justice by Ted McConnell (Media Insider on 12/06/2018)

    Thanks for your comment Bill. you will note the ANA comes off the hero in the Article. And the quote you are objecting to was among the few points made as reported in Ad Exchanger, here:https://adexchanger.com/agencies/ana-confirms-fbi-criminal-investigation-on-ad-transparency/ on October 10th. It was a quote from Bob L. I do not know if he was quoting from the Paper you cite. I was shocked when I read it. I believe the ANA would have encouraged cooperation except for a Legal posture, but I did not want to let it pass. It takes a huge effort to catch these criminals, as you know, and the last thing we need is advertisers thinking they don't need to cooperate. I am sorry that the ANA lawyers kept you from stating your true position (if that is indeed why Bob said that), but it is very important to enable, rather than discourage cooperation in this matter. Without enforcement, your outstanding efforts will be significantly blunted. 

  • The Editorial Purview Of Algorithms by Ted McConnell (Media Insider on 10/04/2018)

    That would be interesting. In MZ's congressional testimony he was very careful to say that FB is not a publisher. One might imagine this is fair because after all, it was a person who said something, not FB. However, the algorithm in effect published it to an audience. So the algo was acting like a publisher. If it quacks like a duck .... It does not seem fair to collect $Billions based on content created by "consumers", and bear no responsibility for any outcome of anyone seeing it. It also does not seem fair that they should have all my data, and then gift it to criminals by virtue of sloppy security procedures. 

  • Unpacking Omar Sheikh's $100B Call On Future Of Data-Targeted TV Ads by Dave Morgan (Online Spin on 05/11/2017)

    Nice Dave. And its not only not implausable, it seems likely, but the sensability does not take 400 pages. All you have to do for an incremental 100 billion is roughly double the current average cpm. How could targeting do that? Its not complicated. If you halve out-of-target impressions at the same cpm, you double the roi. But then, of course, you have more impressions than you can sell, all things being equal. However, targeting allows smaller buyers to buy just what they need, so you make up the difference with fill rate. Think about a Walmart. There are 10's of thousands of Brands. Only a small portion can afford to advertise on TV ... because most brands know that their target is a person, not a demographic. Enabling all Brands to pay only for access to their target, and no others, will bring them to the TV media marketplace. As you know, that's exactly what happened with digital. Data can halve waste, double ROI, and enable access to media for those who did not previously find it productive. It might come at the expense of digital to some extent. In any case, its no stretch to think that TV can double their cpm by introducing radical quality improvements. Even today, in addressable TV, pinpoint targeting gets triple the cpm, and advertisers happily pay. Why? I guess it works. 

About Edit

You haven't told us anything about yourself! Surely you've got something to say. Tell us a little something.