The Best Things We Wrote in 2021

It's been a rough year.

Blog

by Dave Robson

Latest from the Blog

Watch AI Chrystia Freeland Shill Some Dumb App

We bet she’ll be thrilled to hear about this.

Display Advertising: Direct Buy or DSP – Which is Right for You?

Bypassing the middleman usually means a lower price for the buyer. But when it comes to display advertising, this truism ain’t, umm, true.

Google Downranks AI Content. But Google Is Paying Publishers to Create AI Content

Google, what the heck?

Overview of Quebec’s Bill 25

Quebec’s Bill 25, officially known as “An Act to improve the protection of personal information in the private sector,” will profoundly reshape the landscape of marketing and advertising within the province.

Impact on Marketing and Advertising

The Everything App Will Amount to Nothing

Elon’s cringey press release about X as the “everything app” is a case of a billionaire smelling his own farts for too long.

2021, we’ll be okay with your departure. But we wrote some good stuff this year. Here’s our favourite of the bunch.

Being Erica’s Ford Focus Fiasco

Once upon a time, the CBC took product placement so seriously that the main characters of their biggest comedies tried to sell people things. The nadir of this poor experiment was when Being Erica opened with an expended sequence where they tried to sell the audience a Ford Focus.

Zero Click Searches Increased in 2020

These days, most Google searches end without the user clicking on something. Google is getting better and better at scooping the relevant information out of sites and sticking them on the results page. Is this a problem? Sort of, depending on your site.

AI, Content & Manufactured Outrage

Did you hear the one about Facebook removing the town of Biche from its service? AI is doing more and more policing on social media which has led to a cycle of AI screwing up and removing something inoffensive, people using outrage over the removal to push a narrative, and then declare victory when the erroneously removed content is put back up.

5 Ways to Sabotage Your Content Marketing

Is your content marketing not working? You may be sabotaging it with hard sells, too much of a see-what-sticks approach, or poor evaluation of your efforts after the fact.