hey, it's noah

I hate to make my first post in awhile be totally random and ridiculous, but I can’t help myself. Apparently an English professor got tossed from Starbucks for refusing to order a bagel without cream cheese. That’s right, when she refused to say “without butter or cheese” she was “forcibly ejected.”

<rant>
This just happens to be a pet peeve of mine as well. Without even going in to how ridiculous the whole Starbucks lexicon is, when ordering coffee or a bagel at any establishment the default should be additive free. That means when you order a coffee it should come without milk or sugar unless you specify and when you order a bagel it should come without cream cheese and untoasted. It really does drive me insane when I take a first sip of coffee and it’s all sweet when I asked for just coffee. I’ve also gotten in to an argument at Starbucks with a “friendly” barrista who insisted that I had to order my coffee not sweet if I wanted it that way. When I told him that was not the case at any other Starbucks I had ever been to, he insisted I was wrong.
</rant>

Via: Plain by Default // NoahBrier.com

Digital ad agencies are not economically incented to sell more of their client’s products.  They are economically incented to deliver ad impressions.  This leads to poorly thought out media plans and a complete lack of innovation in terms of planning and campaign strategy.  Too often digital ad agencies rely on fancy creative to wow their clients and neglect to create a media plan that fully leverages the internet’s amazing ability to actually sell more product.

In general I agree with all of this, except for one small point: It’s mostly media companies that are incentivized to deliver ad impressions, I know very few big creative agencies that are also planning their media, especially for Fortune 1000 clients. (That, of course, is not to say that this split is a good thing or that creative agencies don’t have a whole other set of messed up incentives.)

I just got done reading The Big Short, which is the third book in my personal series of trying to wrap my head around how we managed to so fundamentally screw ourselves over (Gillian Tett’s …