Old Media gets smacked by German blogosphere

Here's the story:

- German ad agency launches expensive, lame ad campaign to convince people to "cheer up".
- Campaign gets ridiculed on German blogosphere.
- Head of ad agency writes memo dismissing blogs as "the toilet walls of the Internet".
- Memo gets leaked onto internet.
- Head of ad agency gets ridiculed on German blogosphere, and has to issue an apology (although it's obviously not a sincere apology).

Looks like Old Media is getting a bit frustrated. I guess this agency was happier in the days when agencies would just produce their campaigns, and consumers would consume them. Kind of annoying that those consumers can talk back now. Especially if your campaigns suck.

Link: MediaGuardian.co.uk | Media | German ad boss apologises to bloggers

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Spain’s secret to economic success- not looking good

Update: Wow, sensitive topic, judging by the emails I received commenting about these statistics. Some very good points raised by readers, whose mood generally ranged from circumspect to downright pessimistic about Spain's economic prospects. - Spain's population has boomed from 40 to 45 million in the time period in question, all due to immigration. So a large, maybe entire, portion of additional hours worked has come from this raw increase in labor inputs. Very true... - Much of the sector growth has come in low-productivity services such as construction & tourism, even as higher productivity manufacturing has been shrinking. Also very true... Yet these points don't disprove the problem. They merely explain it. Increasing your country's output by increasing input (just add people!) is a 3rd world strategy- first, get everybody a job. But it doesn't actually make anybody wealthier. Real wealth comes from only one place: productivity. If you aren't increasing your output per unit input, you are not becoming wealthier. Period. It's mathematical. The things that have made Spaniards wealthy this decade are unfortunately not very solid. All the EU funds invested in Spain every year are not creating wealth, but simply transferring it from the rest of the EU to here. Similarly, money made from booming house prices is not weath created, but rather transferred from future home owners to current ones. So yes, we can explain that declines in productivity are affected by one-time immigration booms, or transitions to alternative sectors. But the trend should still be a huge concern to all of us here in Spain. ** end of update! ** From the latest Economist, a pretty amazing statistic:

Spain's economic growth stems from industriousness, not ingenuity, according to a study by the Conference Board. Total hours worked rose by an annual average of 3.8% in 2000-05. Labour productivity, or output per hour, fell by an annual average of 0.6%. By contrast, Ireland's growth came from both sources, with labour productivity rising by an annual average of 3.0% and hours worked increasing by an average of 2.2%.
This is the great chimera of economic growth. All growth boils down to two things: increasing units of input (more people, more hours worked, etc.), and increasing units of output per unit of input (productivity- getting more done). I think it's fine for countries like China to grow first with increased inputs, but wholly unacceptable for country like Spain to depend on this. Increasing hours worked isn't exactly a long-term, sustainable strategy for growth. Maybe more scandalous is that productivity in Spain has been decreasing every year for almost a decade! In peacetime, during an era with the most productivity-enhancing tools ever known to man (computing power, mobile phones, internet, etc.)- for Spain to be unable to increase its productivity is scary. This nifty graph is also provided:
Media_httpwwweconomistcomimages20060128cin190gif_ykivncoznfejjtr

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Full Circle in US-European tech infrastructure race

Om (and many others) are talking about how European fiber to the home networks are starting to pop up everywhere: plans have been announced for Amsterdam, Paris, and now Vienna. ADSL2+ is everywhere, triple-play is cheap, and incumbents are under massive competition. Broadband Europe is on fire compared to the US.

But I've just returned from the US, where I was astonished to see ads for mobile phone plans around $40 per month for 1,500 minutes! Good luck finding a deal like that anywhere in Europe. Yeah, yeah... US penetration is still lower, Americans don't SMS as much, etc. But the fact is that American mobile telephony is far, far cheaper than in Europe- and price is the most important attribute, so in my book that makes the American market far more advanced than Europe's.

Funny, because six years ago it was the opposite: Europe was easily ahead of the US in mobile, and the US easily ahead of Europe in Internet access.

Link:  Om Malik on Broadband : ยป Now Vienna Plans a Fiber Network

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I’m back

sorry for the absence in blogging, and hope everyone is having a great start to 2006! To celebrate my first post of the year, I've finally made my long-overdue switch from TypePad to WordPress. A number of reasons for this change, but the biggest has to do with community- the WP community is much more active, creative, and helpful with each other than the TP folks. Anyway, look forward to some good posting in the coming weeks. Lots of interesting things happening :)

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About Me

I'm 32, live in Barcelona, and am the head of Properazzi, a European real estate search engine. More professional details available on my LinkedIn profile. You can reach me here:

  • email (preferred!): yannick@properazzi.com
  • mobile: +34 627 420 131
  • skype: yannick
  • or post a comment on my blog

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New Europe: Sarkozy does Podcasting

A month ago, Nicholas Sarkozy caused quite a stir when he posted a comment on the blog of a movie director critical of his policies.

Now, he's broken new ground again by being possibly the first major politician to do an interview by Podcast.

The video interview (in French) is here

I've previously written that Sarkozy's use of the Internet could make him the Howard Dean of European politics; during the interview Sarkozy discusses the use of email campaigns and blogs, and I wouldn't be surprised if he decided to use the Internet to his competitive advantage in the 2007 presidential elections. He clearly is more comfortable in the medium than any of his major rivals.

Some other comments/thoughts:

  • Within two days of being posted, the podcast was seen by 10,000 people
  • Rodrigo Sepulveda makes a ***very*** interesting observation that podcasts fall outside the regulations of media airtime of candidates. The politician that can figure out how to be "virally heard and seen" on the internet will have a very big advantage of exposure over those that don't
  • The interview was conducted by Loic Le Meur, a French serial entrepreneur and SixApart's European head. When was the last time a European politician accepted to be interviewed by a blogger, or rather, someone not a professional journalist?
  • Sarkozy was ok with being addressed in the informal "tu" form during the interview. This is pretty cool. I can hardly imagine Jacques Chirac accepting to do the same.
 

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Tractis gets funding

David Blanco has gotten in touch with news that his startup, Tractis, has won the DMR Foundation's Entrepreneur's Prize for 2005. This means 200k Euros of seed funding to get the project off the ground.

Tractis is an interesting idea of using Web Services to manage and broker all kinds of contracts. They presented at WebDosBeta, and as far as I know are the first startup since the conference to get funding.

Congrats, David!

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Robert Cringely, Champion of the Google-watchers

In a former life, Robert Cringely must have been a writer of Edwardian ghost stories.

Everybody writes about Google, but only Cringely has managed to raise the game of speculating about Google's "master plan" into terror-inducing literary art.

His writing is part detective novel ("The probable answer lies in one of Google's underground parking garages..."), part serialized pulp fiction ("Game over. And next week I'll take it one more step..."), part global conspiracy theory ("...as Google takes over the role of trusted third-party info-escrow agent for all world business..."), and mostly sheer terror and scary stuff ("...as a result, Google becomes overnight a major phone company, a major video entertainment provider, a major player in home automation, and even medical telemetry...")

Mark Evans says his "brain hurts" when he read Cringely. Personally, my spine tingles with fear of the mysterious, much terrifying Google Ghost haunting all the industries of the world!

Given the mind-blowing Google projects he describes in his last three columns, here, then here, and lately here, I wouldn't be surprised if he decides to top the storyline along the lines of "Google employees are really lizards from outer space; I just narrowly escaped the Googleplex with proof..." or "My team of archeologists have just cracked the ancient Incan myth fortelling the coming of The Great Search Beast, and I can now share with you what humanity must do to survive..."

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Ouch!

This is hilarious.

I will suggest a 21st century version of the old saying:

"you can't fool every blogger, even some of the time"

...and once one blogger (and Google) have figured out your fraud, you ain't fooling anybody again.

Hat tip to Hugh

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