Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Local Man Impeached

Despite the breathless ranting and record audiences of the cable news networks and some dynamite investigative reporting by major news organizations this year was a particularly brutal one for local news operations, especially newspapers. Print revenue was down nearly 20%. All of us should be particularly concerned about the plight of local newspapers. They’re a […]

Learn More December 23, 2019

Baby Jesus In A Cage

I suspect that many folks, myself included, view Christmas in their minds– not the one unfolding at the mall — as a quiet, welcome break from the increasingly shrill and combative world of everyday. We turn down the news, turn up the Christmas music and attempt to adhere to the holiday’s essential meaning: Hope. Peace. […]

Learn More December 20, 2019

Duct Tape and Baling Wire

There are some movie scenes for which I’m an absolute sucker in almost any movie: The moment where it looks like the con has failed… but wait! The detective gathers everyone in a room and explains what really happened A good translation gag (e.g., the translator says something different from what the person actually said; […]

Learn More December 18, 2019

Small Change…Big Tears…Great Advice

Month after month the folks at NextAfter treat us –without charge — to their online library of testing treasures. These are folks in quest of answers to the fundamental question: Why do people give? In fact, they’re obsessed with finding the answer in the digital world. Their Research Library contains, in their words, “the results […]

Learn More December 16, 2019

Are We Improving on Silence? Offline Edition

This week, we’ve seen how normal reporting on Facebook and Google advertising is flawed because many of the donations that are directly attributed to advertising would have come in anyway. But there are two important additional implications we haven’t discussed: Conversely, the direct attribution model ignores revenue lifts outside of the direct click, or even […]

Learn More December 13, 2019

Are We Improving on Silence? Social Advertising Edition

We talked Monday about how it’s difficult to test something versus nothing, how few do it online, and how eBay found their search engine ads weren’t nearly as effective as they’d thought when they ran a pure test (in fact, losing money) because many of those people would have come to their site anyway. It […]

Learn More December 11, 2019