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The point I want to make.

You see, I haven't made any money for a while, and I need to, because I desperately need two video cards. Or, more accurately, that was my motivation for clicking on Pay Per Post. You may have noticed - or not - that I haven't done a paid post for some time.

Well, as I said, today I needed the money, and so I clicked onto PPP. And, not only did I find two opportunities, I found the idea I needed for today. It's an idea that's been perculating in the back of my mind, it's all about new media and new economy vs. old media and old economy and it turns out that these two paid opps precisely illustate exactly what I want to say.

And this turns out to underline an idea that I've had in the back of my mind since my days in the newspaper biz; the idea that the most powerful ads were ones that underlined the article(s) on the same page, and vice versa, that an article acually gained some degree of importance by making advertisers compete to be on the same page - whether or not that correlation was real or completely accidental. This was back in the day of knife and wax, and I still think of advertising as my first calling.

You see, I spent most of my time as a newspaperperson designing, writing and physically placing ads. Before that, I designed and placed ads in all sorts of niche media for Judges Guild, an RPG company that specialized in D12 game systems and had a small ad budget that needed to be targeted wisely.

Like most very small companies, Judges Guild lived and died on advertising coupled by word of mouth and had very, very little discretionary income to use for that advertising. Every single penny was begrudged, as it came out of the owner's food budget.

Literally.

Now, I want you to take a glance at all the ads on this site for a moment. Scroll up, scroll down, the article will still be here when you get back. All the graphical and all the text adds are placed here by someone who is taking a few pennies from their food budget in hopes it will make you click on something.

Consider the reality and implications of that. Consider the fact that in many, many cases, these people are taking the entrepreneurial course because it allows them to be creative; or even more viscerally; because it allows them to feed their family about as well as welfare would, but with some dignity and hope attached.

This is also something of an epiphiany for me, and more importantly, it's going to be an important day in terms of illustrating the new reality of web-based media and advertising. You see, it used to be commonly understood that advertising drove media. But in the new media, adverising is "cost plus" - that is to say that advertising is something that the media owner can choose and place, and their success at that relates entirely as to it's relevance.

And second, direct media buys - such as google ad-words, blogpspot, and my own choice, Project Wonderful - are completely depeneant upon the tracking of my niche.

Furthermore, - and here's a beutiful and wonderful thing about the web - I can actually sell advertising "futures." I mean, in a sense. Today's posts, for instance. As a demonstration and experiment, based on my faith in the importance of this serious articles, will carry with them a unique "Project Wonderful" button bar, targeted at SEO optimizers, newsletter engine producers and all others who specialize in marketing the stuff that creative people make.

Ultimately - speaking from practice, direct creative experience and from direct observation of the market, creative people really suck at marketing their own work. And yes, I include myself in that category. Marketing is an entirely separate skillset, so radically different that I would have to say that no creative person should even consider going without at least an informal reality check from a marketer, and vice versa. People who are just getting into flexing their marketing muscles search desperately for things worth selligng - and it's my observation that they tend to run through several painfully instructive relationships before they find the thing, the people or the ideas that mesh with their personal particular talents.

This of course implies that it would make a great deal of sense for an internet marketing agency to scoop up people who are driven to the trade, who want to market, and who need to be put together with a deserving client, so they don't have to do their time in the ghettos of MLM or affiliate marketing.

My illustration of what that would look like is in my next post, and just to underline that, I will be paid for it.

Ethics are universal and ethical transactions always pay off better and over a longer term than unethical transactions. But it's not always easy to find a ethos that expresses one's ethic in a time of extraordinarily rapid change. I've decided to return to the vary basis of life to continue my exploration of that principle; survival, happiness and long-term prosperity are all direct evidence of learning to do the right thing.

Love what you do. Do that. Hire people who love what they do to make you money.

Update: I'm not actually getting paid for this post unless the good people at Pepperjam send me a tip. Apparently I forgot to click the "reserve this post" button. Well, I can hope for tips. Meanwhile, this post says exactly what I had in mind, so I'm stickin' to it.

I was unable to clip the vid at Pepperjam, so I really want to twist your arm to do that. Hint to folks at PepperJam. Never preclude the possibility of viral publicity. This vid should be as accessible as anything on Google or YouTube.

clipped from www.pepperjam.com Unlike most agencies that offer expertise limited to one vertical, Pepperjam offers extensive professional consultation and management services across multiple areas of search-engine marketing (Pay-Per-Click / SEO), affiliate marketing, and online media planning and management.

We have all seen the offenses committed by people who don't believe they need marketing expertise; an offense often committed by a person who would not be fool enough to think that a receptionist existed just to answer the phones. Your marketing strategy, techniques and chosen markets tell people what sort of person you are. From that first introduction, they will or will not consider doing business with you. EVER!

I often shop at a store that sells overstock and the inventory of businesses that, alas, are no longer, and I often see blatant examples of this sort of thing. For instance - tuna in a can, crackers, a knife and a napkin - nice little instant lunch, right?

And so they said - with graphics and packaging that strongly suggested a personal hygene product. Any decent marketing consultant could have saved this product to successfully compete with Star-Kist along with asking the obvious question - who are you to try and compete with Star-Kist with the exact same product?

But this product didn't get that far - at least, not within my demographic. I probably would have noticed.

The fact is that, for all the books and advice written about marketing, it is an intuitive art; one that takes a certain sort of mind to begin with, and then a great deal of time and education making expensive mistakes on other people's dime. The more volatile the market is, the more this is true, except for the exceptions.

Do you know what the exceptions are? I can give you examples of exceptions - like Coke, like Tootsie Roll, like Gold Bond Powder.

Coke, of course, is the poster child for not screwing with an established brand identity, with it's "New Coke," although I happen to think that Pepsi Clear was a runner-up in the "dumb marketing ideas." I call it a near runner up because that's the sort of product that might actually have paid off - with a little better marketing. Clear Pepsi is weird, and it doesn't taste any different than Pepsi. Clear Pepsi with Rum is a clear Cuba Libre - which could have taken the umbrella bars by storm.

New Coke? Well, a good friend of mine, a professional dominatrix and former prostitute had a pithy phrase for this exact thing, which is worthy of it's own acronym.

DFWTM. "Don't [Screw] With The Money."

She was speaking of moving in with a base player, developing a coke habit, or risking your capital. It's funny how people on the edge of being poor have values that are starkly similar to those of very rich people. Neither believe in screwing with their capital assets. In her case, the "assets" were literally the left cheek and the right. She took the ideal extremely personally.

Which is exactly what Coke did, in trying to replace it's formula with "New Coke."

Now, if you are a marketer, these are probably pretty lame, prosaic or even inaccurate examples. You see, I'm a really good example of the sort of person who absolutely SHOULD hire a marketer. I know just enough to be dangerous.

In fact, it's probably true that if I did not love what I actually do more, I could learn to be really good at marketing. It's SO tempting to think that means "I could become good enough to do this myself."

But the fact is, really successful people and really successful companies have gotten that way not because they are "adequte," but because they focus on exellence in their core area of expertiese, and then seek out, track down and if needful, tranqillize and kidnap the flavor of obsessive geek that they need.

See video: Is it not true that the CEO of Pepperjam is the sine qua non of the well-fed, smugly successful geek? Well, that's precisely the sort of marketing geek you want. If he's as geeky as I suspect, he WILL annoy the crap out of you, but if he's as smart as I suspect, he will hire people to interface for him. People, whom I suspect, who understand that having blonde streaks and a smile adds 10% to their bottom line.

That is the sort of expertise you want on your side.

You may have noticed that I have said very little about Pepperjam, the company. Well, that's because I don't have to. At most, I would have needed 100 words plus a link to their video - and that would have been more than they had asked ME for.

But then, I don't take paid posts unless they can become one of MY posts.

The next post in this series will be a general unpaid post about the economics, ethics and reasons for monetizing a website in the first place, based on my experience in print and online journalism.

In order to make all these posts appear in the proper, top-down order, I'm backdating all the posts I make today, so that they appear below the first, explanatory post. I mention this because I do not ordinarly do this, but for today, I'm going to consider today's posting to be a whole which will be linked and promoted as such. In other words, if you are reading as I'm writing, the next post will be below THIS post.

Speaking of the New Media...

One of the marvels of these here "Internet Tubes" is the marvel of telepresence, wherein some good internet angel allows you to talk to your client or boss in real time, face to face, without having to cram your busy entrepreneurial butt into Business Class for three to seven hours while inhaling every new flu bug known to man.

Insert obligitory reference to Isacc Asimov's "The Caves of Steel" here. Few realize that far from being a Disutopian vision, his idea of a society that starkly limits interpersonal contact was his own fondest desire.

Mine too. The fact is, that aside from making it possible to "do bidness" across vast spaces, telepresence will also allow you to "do bidness" across certain sorts of interpersonal divides as well.

But more importantly, it's emblematic of a change in the way "bidness" is done, the sorts of people you will be doing it with, and of course, the time frames in which you will be doing it.

Telepresence is just one example of technical capacity that is making the "old economy" obsolete and the new economy mandatory. Oh, it doesn't hurt that for every telepresent conference, you reduce your carbon footprint significantly. Indeed, that one change alone in getting things done could add to your bottom line while taking huge steps toward a "greener" operation.

The beauty is, while this is a first-class, top tier, status-forward solution, it's still probably going to cost less than the fuel for a single cross-country trip in a company jet.

I suspect that in the future, corporate jets will be reserved for technical people who have to actually - you know - touch things.

Eww.

A Standing O for LifeLock.

I just had a look at LifeLock, those "This is my real social security number" people. Frankly - and probably like you - I assumed that it was a stunt, and what was said in bold red at the top was completely negated with the small print at the bottom.

Come to think of it, it's damn depressing how complacent we have become in accepting as a given that any service we get from any corporation should be written as "Service*".

Now that I think of it, it's a little embarrassing to realize that it took the promise of $12.00 from a trusted third party to even get me to look, but I plead 40 years of disappointment in my fellow man as my reason.

Fortunately for them, their actual cost will be two dollars, for ten of those promised dollars will pay for my first month of their service.

Why? Well, you don't often read advertising copy like this:

If your Identity is stolen while you are a member of LifeLock, we're going to do whatever it takes to recover your good name. If you need lawyers, we're going to hire the best we can find. If you need investigators, accountants, case managers, whatever, they're yours. If you lose money as a result of the theft, we're going to give it back to you.

We will do whatever it takes to help you recover your good name and we will spend up to $1,000,000 to do it.

We don't think you will see a guarantee like this anywhere else from any other company. If you do, let us know because we'd like to do business with them. There isn't much fine print in our Guarantee. To see the details, click here.

Any half-decent lawyer will tell you the reason why you should never ever EVER write something as direct and unqualified as this. You WILL have to live up to those words in court, and they will bury you in frightening examples of the consequences of unwise and unguarded words costing businesses hundreds and thousands of words.

One of the examples I remember most clearly from my journalism and advertising courses is the case of a car dealer who promised that during his "Jungle Madness" sale, you could drive away in a new car for "just a thousand bananas."

Sure enough, someone showed up with a lawyer and one thousand fresh, golden, LITERAL Chiquitas.

They were very over-ripe bananas by the time his lawyer was sent from court by a laughing judge and a snickering jury, but that just added fruit flies to injury.

Speaking of contractual language, I'm in violation of the terms of the agreement by being clear about this being a paid post within the post and it would be technically possible for them to refuse to pay, or request a re-write. You see, they didn't want me to call attention to the fact they paid me to do this - no doubt because they are as cynical as I am for pretty much the same reasons.

It's tempting to gloss over the fact that it took the smell of money to get me to write this - but I'd prefer to be honest, and use the risk of not being paid to underline what is my real reason for going so far beyond the 200 words requested. This, you see, is no longer about that.

These are the sort of people you should absolutely do business with, even if you don't absolutely need to. And I'm not embarrassed at all to be seen doing business with people like this. Hell, if they write employment contracts and job descriptions like they do websites, they might actually be the sort of people I'd be willing to work for.

That advertising copy above is the reason. They have deliberately created conditions they will have to live up to.

That lack of weasel-wording, the complete absence of equivocation, the blunt promise of "Whatever it takes, up to a million bucks" is damn refreshing.

If you believe in the idea of the free market, as I do, and believe that it absolutely depends on people who are not just willing, but absolutely determined to play fair, then you need to sweeten the pot for them. You have to choose to deal with people who are willing to stand by their word, live up to their obligations and go the extra mile. You also have to start expecting that standard from everyone else, with no excuses.

Putting binding promises into one's advertising copy inspires in me ten thousand times the deep warm fuzzies that can be derived from a kiloton of adhesive imitation chrome fish.

The promise implied by a chrome fish over the door of a place of business is one that cannot be enforced in a temporal court of law, one not even as impressive as membership in the BBB.

Todd Davis - well I don't know what or who else he believes in - but he surely does believe in the sort of fish you could fry in front of the ninth circuit court and it's a big enough fish to feed a multitude.

I can count on the fingers of one thumb the number of times I've had the legitimate opportunity to say something as nice as this about anything regarding the economy or the practices of American business institutions. I've gotten so damn jaded and cynical, so bleak and depressed that frankly it's become difficult to blog.

What started out as a five minute, money-making chore turned out to take a couple hours of utterly blissful wordsmithing and the high point of my day. And that, Mr. 457-55-5462, is worth ten bucks to me. Hell, it's worth twelve.

I would love to be able to write a story like this every week, and have every word be true and as heartfelt as these. I'm rubbing your nose in the fact that AT THE MOST, I was paid $12.00, in response to the obvious rhetorical question.

My skills are for sale, my my good name is not. Even if it WAS, it would take a minimum of five more decimal places plus benefits, a golden parachute and a pension to compromise my virginity in that respect.

One should should set one's price high enough that it discourages temptation. And I'm afraid that many "persons of significance" have lowered the bar to a point where even minimal standards make a decent assessment of self worth seem positively inflationary.

But it's nice to be recognized for a job done well and honestly. One of the few ways I'm sure something I've said has been read and appreciated is the sound of virtual coin clinking into my PayPal account. Money, as Robert Heinlein said, is the sincerest form of applause.

And by that means and in the same spirit I am suggesting to you that you give Lifelock a standing ovation. "Pour le encouragur le autres"

The business of business is the bottom line: The bottom line is human value.

It's a very simple idea, so very simple that only a Harvard business degree and a few years of martini lunches could conceal it from you. Alternet articulates:

Immigrants Come Here Because Globalization Took Their Jobs Back There

By Jim Hightower, Hightower Lowdown. Posted February 7, 2008.

Excerpt from Page 2:

Although you never hear it mentioned in debates on the issue, you might start with this reality: Most Mexican people really would prefer to live in their own country. Can we all say, duh? Pedro Martin, who has seen most of the young men and women in his small village depart for El Norte, put it this way: "Up north, even though they pay more, you're not necessarily living as well. You feel out of place. Here you can walk around the whole town, and it's comfortable. Life is easier."

Their family, language, culture, identity and happiness is Mexican -- yet sheer economic survival requires so many of them to abandon the place they love.

Again, why? Because in the last 15 years, Mexico's longstanding system of sustaining its huge population of poor citizens (including small self-sufficient farms, jobs in state-owned industries and subsidies for such essentials as tortillas) has been scuttled at the insistence of U.S. banks, corporations, government officials and "free market" ideologues. In the name of "modernizing" the Mexican economy, such giants as Citigroup, Wal-Mart, Tyson Foods and GE -- in cahoots with the plutocrats and oligarchs of Mexico -- have laid waste to that country's grass-roots economy, destroying the already-meager livelihoods of millions.

The 1994 imposition of NAFTA was particularly devastating. Just as Bill Clinton and the corporate elites did here, Mexico's ruling elites touted NAFTA as a magic elixir that would generate growth, create jobs, raise wages and eliminate the surge of Mexican migrants into the United States. They were horribly wrong.

"Wrong" would imply a widespread, honest confusion about the reality of supply and demand; the impact of restricting access to markets and using the power of government and vertically integrated economies to gain control over entire market sectors, with the ability to dictate wages and prices.

A better term would be - if one is willing to be charitable - a self-deceptive masturbatory fantasy for those who's idea of "winning" dictates that there be "losers."

That's not capitalism, it's theft. In any truly capitalistic exchange, in any truly free market exchange, every party walks away with a profit defined in terms they most value.

Now, a little fraud and graft is tolerable - but not when it's the dominant form of business and governance. Society, business, culture and indeed, the public peace all depend upon people being confident that their investment of power and tax money will bring an adequate and just return for them and a better life for their children.

We are not speaking of an abstract "value," of luxuries and indulgences. We are literally counting in terms of the statistics of life and death, quality of life indexes, infant mortality rates, the incidence of stress-related disorders and of course, the great American sport of "going postal."

All of these things are the consequence of a system of accounting that neglects the consequences of where the money comes from, where it goes, and what it does between here and there.

People do work for you. People buy things from you. People invest in your ideas. If you are hurt, out of work, or just want a decent lunch that hasn't been spat in by an unhygienic slave laborer with a constant, low grade infection - that is also a "People thing."

So the welfare of the people you and your business depend on IS your business.

Literally.

No successful business, nation or economy has ever been or could be a "zero-sum" operation. The result has to be better that what could be done by subsistence-level individuals or small groups. Fortunately, this is pretty easy; the sum is greater than the parts. But only if the person or group in overall charge recognizes that every one of the parts must be visibly better off than they were before being made part of "the sum."

They are your suppliers, your workers, your consumers and your relations, they are your cousins, your customers, your publicity, your quality control; they do everything that you cannot do to make or do whatever is that, as an Important Executive, you do.

The welfare of the country you are based in and live makes your business possible. And even if you "offshore" your business, that simply means that you have another, probably more needy population to be responsible to and for.

You couldn't do it without them. Indeed, there wouldn't be any point, because given an entire business community like you, the only people able to afford your product would be those who were competing with you, or unwilling to settle for your plebeian, mass-produced substitute for craftsmanship.

The fact is, only an economy as robust and as huge as that of North America as a whole could have withstood the depredations and outright looting cheer-led by the Regan Revolution.

Well, the Irish might have been able to "make do" by taking in each other's laundry, but it's pretty much impossible to make do by taking in each other's bullshit.

Without people willing to do for you, you would be doing something far less important-seeming. If you wish it put more charitably, and in all honesty, with equal accuracy; the very real skills you have in critical thinking, decision-making and entrepreneurial risk-taking are worthy of great reward and recognition - but not so much reward that it costs people more to have you around than doing whatever it is you do than to make do for themselves.

You can conceal a negative value for a while, by monetizing the rewards and taking out the costs in seeming intangibles and indirect consequences - but remember, all your peers are doing the same thing - and being forced into gated enclaves filled with Stepford Republicans as an inevitable consequence.

The definition of a "ghetto" is a place where a certain sort of person is forced to live, for fear of the consequences of straying. It may be well-padded, filled with comforts and luxuries - but the more concentrated you are, the more obvious it becomes that it might be more profitable to loot the place than to depend on you for a job.

The US religion of Evangelical Reganomic corporatism has brought matters to that point. The vast majority of people in this nation would be better off if they were rid of people who think of them as a class to be manipulated and exploited.

We have been here before, and I would have thought that the results of dealing with the matter before would have been obvious - even to a Harvard MBA. The post-war "economic miracle" was no miracle, it was the result of people centered policies. Ironically enough, it was a great time to do business, if your idea of the point of being in business was to build a business. Of course, if your entire goal was to suck all the economic value from the area around you into your own pockets, leaving the company and the entire region an empty husk - well, that would be the more "modern" pattern; the ethics of Enron, the values of Ted Haggard, the vision of "trickle-down" voodoo economics.

But I guess you just can't put a price on a good education, the wonders it does perform. Apparently the real magic of Harvard (and Yale, of course) is four years of the conscientious elimination of conscience and the inculcation of an ethic that considers the only ethical duty of a company to be to it's shareholders - and even then, only to the extent that they are more likely to catch you fiddling with the books.

But shareholders are not the only people that invest in or make sacrifices for companies, and increasingly, the neglect of that reality is coming due. It's not just shareholders, it's "stakeholders." And if you look around the business community you will find that the most enduring, most genuinely successful people and businesses are those who understand that if you wanna get, you gotta give, that the only honest deal is where both sides walk away feeling better than they did walking in and that the worker is worthy of his hire - and her self-respect.

I mean, if you don't believe me, ask Armand Hammer. The man has made billions by being ethical. Not in spite of it, because of it.

But then, Hammer has never tried to compete with sociopaths - and it's a sad fact that is the current corporate ideal, despite the clear idiocy of trying to shackle sociopaths to the corporate plough.

People always seem to make the mistake that no mater what the values expressed by the leader of a "team" or a "corporation," that loyalty will buy them an exception from the application of misrule.

Not hardly, not ever, not once in the history of human civilization has this ever been true. The tales of Gilgamesh illustrate this point, if Shakespeare and the Bible are too current for your tastes.

But oddly enough, they don't teach much history or literature to MBA candidates, and no critical thinking that doesn't involve spreadsheets.

Even so, it should be obvious to the great majority that the current situation is unsustainable; an economic and social disaster approaching like a slow-motion avalanche. Just as the Great Depression, the people who will be most completely crushed will be those who are the imprudent and the foolish, the gamblers and the grifters.

Our nation - indeed, our continent - is in an economic position where we cannot afford people who cost us more than the contribute. If that's possibly true of an illegal immigrant flipping burgers, how much more true is it of some party apperatchnk like Chertoff or Brown; pundits as incompetent as Kristol or vicious and vapid twits like Malkin and Coulter?

The people with influence, who trade on their influence, who have profited by the appearance of influence - well, this is where we are, based on the directions they gave. Quo Bono?

Should they not share in the negative profit their hard work has brought to us all?