George Simpson

Articles by George All articles by George

• CEOs Who Belong In Hell in MediaDailyNews on 06/14/2018
  

  If you read the stories recounted by the "Financial Times" about Martin Sorrell as a manager and top banana at WPP, you learn that he was cruel to his reports and pretty much lived by his own rules. None of this comes as a great surprise.

• Frenemies: Fact Or Fiction? in MediaDailyNews on 06/07/2018
  

  It's ironic that in "Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else)," Ken Auletta tries to document how advertising has changed -- and before his book even hit the shelves, the landscape had shifted again, enough to render the remarks made by Martin Sorrell (whom Auletta leans on heavily) out of date.

• Facebook's Holy Trinity: Fake, Porn, Hate in MediaDailyNews on 05/17/2018
  

  If you like your numbers big and scary, consider that Facebook reports it has taken down almost 1.3 billion fake accounts in the past six months and removed 21 million "pieces of adult nudity or porn" and 2.5 million instances of "hate speech."

• How Can You Trust What Isn't There? in MediaDailyNews on 05/10/2018
  

  A trade association representing the local broadcast television industry released a study that claims 80% of respondents agreed they trust news on local broadcast TV, 75% trust TV station websites, and only 28% trust news from social media.

• Why You Should Subscribe To My Live Streaming Service in MediaDailyNews on 05/03/2018
  

  I don't need the NewFront to see the writing on the wall. If I don't launch my own streaming service, some other MediaPost columnist will slip in and grab a toehold in the market.

• Navigating The Tech 'Personal Experience' Minefield (Boom!) in MediaDailyNews on 04/26/2018
  

  I saw this unattributed study stat in a story this week: "34% of millennials said they need to have a personal experience with a tech brand before making a purchase, compared to 25% of Gen X and 17% of baby boomers." Unfortunately, the author did not go on to define what millennials mean by having "a personal experience with a tech brand." So naturally, I am confused (again).

• Is The Internet Frankenstein's Monster? in MediaDailyNews on 04/19/2018
  

  Is the Frankenstein we created a terrible beast - or, at heart, a gentle giant? Because for now (until AI really arrives) the Internet is simply a series of cable, routers and computers, and there is nothing inherently evil about it. My elder son, Will, likens it to a car - which in itself is not a dangerous object, until you put an idiot behind the wheel. But that is the point of the argument now: Have we put too many idiots behind too many wheels?

• Senator, Have You Ever Been On Facebook? in MediaDailyNews on 04/12/2018
  

  Zuck's Senate hearing was an education -- not about Zuckerberg, who looked like he had pregamed with some combination of Thorazine and Xanax -- but about just how uniformed about technology our congressional representatives are.

• Will Yelling At AI Make Me Feel Any Better About Your Product? in MediaDailyNews on 04/05/2018
  

  Can artificial intelligence actually help brands get me out of phone-tree hell?

• The Stink On Data: Will it Ever Go Away? in MediaDailyNews on 03/29/2018
  

  Facebook has put a stink on user data that may not be alleviated before Washington steps in with new privacy regulations to make the use of data -- at least by digital advertisers -- a little harder and perhaps a lot less accurate.

Comments by George All comments by George

• Advertising Meets Its Slippery Slope by Gord Hotchkiss (Media Insider on 05/08/2018)
  

  Interesting column Gord, but your premise seems to rely too heavily on what consumers have posted to social media, and less so on how sophisticated big data has become at combining data sources such as grocery story check out and online searches and credit card purchase data, etc. that in the aggregate can paint a pretty accurate portrait of almost any individual. If past is indeed prologue, as a marketer I would want to know more about purchases and search history than say political leanings and what kind of stories they retweet.

• Sandberg On TV: Facebook COO Came Across Like An Angry Robot by Adam Buckman (TVBlog on 04/10/2018)
  

  It is incredible hard to prepare someone to be interviewed on national TV, if they have a massive ego and think they are smarter than the interviewer.

• Let's Skip All This And Go Right To Impeachment by George Simpson (MediaDailyNews on 03/22/2018)
  

  Did you miss the whole part about living and dying by the sword?

• Can Social Media Be Trusted Anymore? by George Simpson (MediaDailyNews on 02/22/2018)
  

  While that sounds a little like the NRA justication for allowing the sale of assault rifles, it begs the question of if in their current states Facebook and Twitter are worthy of trust. I am leaning towards no. What do you think?

• Is Facebook Too Big To Fail? by George Simpson (MediaDailyNews on 01/18/2018)
  

  http://bit.ly/2H8DW12

• Is Fox News 'State-Run TV? If So, Which State Is Running It? by Joe Mandese (Red, White & Blog on 01/24/2018)
  

  Doug: I assume you know that Tucker Carlson founded the Daily Caller, right?

• Trump's Future Plans May Be TV by Wayne Friedman (TV Watch on 01/11/2018)
  

  EIGHT years? Wayne, you're killing me.

• I'm Not Sure There's A 'Going Back' Anymore by George Simpson (MediaDailyNews on 12/14/2017)
  

  Hey Doug welcome back. I completely agree with you. Traditional media has its problems from bias to outright fraud, but having seen it close up for years, it is one of the best such systems in the world. The public has historically never trusted the press. To me the best you can do is read accounts of the same event from multiple sources. What is going on now I think transcends the usual distrust of the media.

• A Brief History Of Internet Display Advertising -- And The People Who Hate It by George Simpson (Digital News Daily on 12/07/2017)
  

  There is a link in the word "history" in para 1. Thx.

• The Nation Could Use A Giant 'Says Who?' by George Simpson (MediaDailyNews on 11/09/2017)
  

  "Each quarter, China's government, through its state media agencies, spends hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy Facebook ads, according to a person with knowledge of those deals, who was unauthorized to talk publicly about the company's revenue streams. "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/08/technology/china-facebook.html?_r=0

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