archiving the day

My name is Phillip. I'm a 26 year old account planner,or brand planner, or strategist or whatever you want to call it for an advertising agency in Dallas Texas. My job entails explaining a lot of things which is why I really like it, but I do have a secret desire to be a music critic for one of those really trendy and pretentious music websites (see: Pitchforkmedia or Cokemachineglow). I'd wear ill fitting pants and ironic t-shirts, drink pabst and hate any band that got remotely famous. But I digress.

This blog is built to be a way to chronicle what I'm thinking and reading about on a daily basis, therefore most of it will be stuff I run into at the office. In the end I want to keep a record of things that I see and think during the day. If it helps me focus on interesting stuff then its served its overall purpose.

"the way to be interesting is to be interested" -R. Davies, Important ad guy

My Email: phillip.t.lee@gmail.com

July 8
Most shortsighted headline of the month: "Mobile ad company Admob is about to mint money"

VentureBeat has an article singing the praises of AdMob which is the largest mobile media buying/planning agency (as far as I can tell). The article expounds on the current size of the mobile advertising market and goes on to show a graph (so it has to be true) predicting the future growth of the market.

Made Up Graph

There’s one problem with the premise of the article/the graph/ and Admob’s business model aside from the fact that no one is paying any attention to mobile ads… The problem is that the mobile web is a stopgap doomed to go the way of the teletype machine. Its not that people won’t be accessing the web via mobile phones (or whatever we end up calling the all in one devices we carry). Its that we’ll be able to get the real web like the one you use on a computer.

Nowhere in the article does the author really address the issue of a medium that is constantly changing. The truth is no one knows what’s really going to happen but to me it seems negligent to start putting wild predictions about billion dollar growth out there for real investors to see.  I looked to see if Admob addresses the question on their site and oddly enough Admob’s website isn’t very good and I found nothing nodding to the presence of the real web on the most popular new phone on the market. But they aren’t at fault here for the shortsightedness of the headline. AdMob isn’t a problem and in fact is a great solution for companies that want to advertise on the mobile web they’ll have to innovate with their medium.