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This pretty much made my day.

THIS APPEARED ON CRAIG’S LIST

The question
What am I doing wrong?

Okay, I’m tired of beating around the bush. I’m a beautiful (spectacularly beautiful) 25 year old girl. I’m articulate and classy.
I’m not from New York . I’m looking to get married to a guy who makes at least half a million a year. I know how that sounds, but keep in mind that a million a year is middle class in New York City, so I don’t think I’m overreaching at all.

Are there any guys who make 500K or more on this board? Any wives? Could you send me some tips? I dated a business man who makes average around 200 - 250. But that’s where I seem to hit a roadblock. 250,000 won’t get me to central park west. I know a woman in my yoga class who was married to an investment banker and lives in Tribeca, and she’s not as pretty as I am, nor is she a great genius. So what is she doing right? How do I get to her level?

Here are my questions specifically:

- Where do you single rich men hang out? Give me specifics- bars, restaurants, gyms

-What are you looking for in a mate? Be honest guys, you won’t hurt my feelings

-Is there an age range I should be targeting (I’m 25)?

- Why are some of the women living lavish lifestyles on the upper east side so plain? I’ve seen really ‘plain jane’ boring types who have nothing to offer married to incredibly wealthy guys. I’ve seen drop dead gorgeous girls in singles bars in the east village. What’s the story there?

- Jobs I should look out for? Everyone knows - lawyer, investment banker, doctor. How much do those guys really make? And where do they hang out? Where do the hedge fund guys hang out?

- How you decide marriage vs. just a girlfriend? I am looking for MARRIAGE ONLY

Please hold your insults - I’m putting myself out there in an honest way. Most beautiful women are superficial; at least I’m being up front about it. I wouldn’t be searching for these kind of guys if I wasn’t able to match them - in looks, culture, sophistication, and keeping a nice home and hearth.

it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
PostingID: 432279810

THE ANSWER
Dear Pers-431649184:

I read your posting with great interest and have thought meaningfully about your dilemma. I offer the following analysis of your predicament.
Firstly, I’m not wasting your time, I qualify as a guy who fits your bill; that is I make more than $500K per year. That said here’s how I see it.

Your offer, from the prospective of a guy like me, is plain and simple a crappy business deal. Here’s why. Cutting through all the B.S., what you suggest is a simple trade: you bring your looks to the party and I bring my money. Fine, simple. But here’s the rub, your looks will fade and my money will likely continue into perpetuity…in fact, it is very likely that my income increases but it is an absolute certainty that you won’t be getting any more beautiful!

So, in economic terms you are a depreciating asset and I am an earning asset. Not only are you a depreciating asset, your depreciation accelerates! Let me explain, you’re 25 now and will likely stay pretty hot for the next 5 years, but less so each year. Then the fade begins in earnest. By 35 stick a fork in you!

So in Wall Street terms, we would call you a trading position, not a buy and hold…hence the rub…marriage. It doesn’t make good business sense to “buy you” (which is what you’re asking) so I’d rather lease. In case you think I’m being cruel, I would say the following. If my money were to go away, so would you, so when your beauty fades I need an out. It’s as simple as that. So a deal that makes sense is dating, not marriage.

Separately, I was taught early in my career about efficient markets. So, I wonder why a girl as “articulate, classy and spectacularly beautiful”
as you has been unable to find your sugar daddy. I find it hard to believe that if you are as gorgeous as you say you are that the $500K hasn’t found you, if not only for a tryout.

By the way, you could always find a way to make your own money and then we wouldn’t need to have this difficult conversation.

With all that said, I must say you’re going about it the right way.
Classic “pump and dump.”
I hope this is helpful, and if you want to enter into some sort of lease, let me know.

(Via Howard Lindzon.)

Awesome validation from the Mixx 2.7 conference.

Joseph Crump, executive creative director, Avenue A | Razorfish

We're at a major inflection point where our reach does not equal our grasp. My point of view is that great ads make people lean forward and we've created a lot of mediocre messages. at some fundamental level, it will cause people to be engaged and not feel that they're being 'messaged at.' Two whole years ago, it was difficult to make TV people do the transition from. And there are a lot of trade-offs that will have to be made during that process.

Andrew Markowitz, director, Digital Marketing, Kraft Foods

By tapping user content, a company like Kraft can and is becoming a content creator. "People are going to look at Kraft as a content company. We are just as viable a content creator as Conde Nast is or Joe Smith down the street."

Great coverage by paidcontent as usual.

Everyone is talking about Facebook as a platform.

The one cool app I'd love to see is the usage of Facebook for authentication, just like MSN passport, OpenID, and so on.

Imagine the possibilities if you could login to New York Times or Hotmail using your facebook ID, without any site-specific registration. The convenience alone is enough to accept very targeted advertising, effectively exporting facebook profile data to advertisers. A simple acceptance of TOS following the first login would allow Facebook do rev share with publishers, almost without any effort.

No other online property generates this much personal information about its users, both contributed by users themselves and by users about other users. The killer app is to use that data across the entire net, creating a supernetwork parallel to Google.

Press release here.

Let's recap:

Google, a media company, buys out DoubleClick, a technology company

WPP, an agency, buys out 24/7, a technology company

Microsoft, a technology company, buys out aQuantive, an agency and technology company

AOL, a media company, buys out AdTECH AG, a technology company

If there is anything to be read between the lines, it's the fact that technology companies will all be making their money from advertising, thus becoming media companies. Agencies are in the same business as media, with the basic goal of reaching people, without the ability to add the same amount of value. Traditionally reaching people required media suppliers because of the high barrier to entry. Now they compete with media, but media is increasingly driven by technology (search engines, etc.) -- so they are becoming technology companies.

And everyone is stuck trying to assemble reach from very fragmented audiences. The only player assembling any significant, targeted reach is Google. Agencies, technology companies and media thus all compete with Google.

P.S. I've been in love with AQNT for a long time.

Confirming the rumors that were floating around for the past month or so, WPP announced its intent to acquire 24/7 Real Media.

This announcement is just one of many that came in the recent months, including Google's acquisition of DoubleClick, Publicis' acquisition of Digitas, Yahoo!'s acquisition of Right Media and today we also have AOL's announcement of acquisition of AdTech AG.

At first it may seem that this is simply another expression of the digital M&A frenzy, where all big media are trying to make sure that they generate revenue consistent with the growth of the sector. However, two of these acquisitions are particularly interesting: WPP + 24-7 and Yahoo + Right Media.

Going through with this transaction, WPP gains a number of significant advantages over their competition. Just like DoubleClick, 24/7 is a faily diversified company that provides solutions to both advertisers and publishers. In essence, it generates revenue from advertisers by offering traditional ad serving solutions, SEM/SEO services, video streaming, etc.

Where it gets really interesting is in their publisher offering, where they operate both a media network and offer publishers ad serving technology. Traditionally, advertising agencies are bound by the non-compete rules with their clients. An agency that has Ford as a client cannot provide services to Ford's competitors. On one hand, by acquiring 24/7, WPP puts itself in a position where they can effectively generate revenue from their traditional clients' competitors, simply by serving competitors' ads on third-party publishers and networks.

Although traditionally that would have been frowned upon, this is a sign of times changing. For an agency, offering specialized technology services is one of the few ways of diversification. This technology is also an area where they can add tremendous value to the product by channeling client needs and strategically driving the technology.

On the other hand, WPP gets much closer to publishers, and hence the audience, opening a whole new realm of opportunity for their existing clients. The cost of executing clever media strategies may be balanced out by retainer agency revenue; it should be easier and simpler to push forward innovation in video, behavioral targeting, telephony and other emerging channels.

Interestingly enough, while talking about this transaction, WPP's CEO Martin Sorrell said that the catalyst for the deal was Google's agreement to buy DoubleClick. That, in itself, is a very strong statement that emphasizes a long-running trend of advertisers and agencies increasingly becoming media, and media becoming advertisers.

While comparing their move to that of Google's, they inherently approve of Google's strategy: "use technology in a manner that devaluates and deflates traditional industries by extracting inefficiencies in existing processes."

Following this strategy rather than fighting it is the right approach to drive change within the company. Will they get rid of the publisher services? Will they try to get a piece of the ad exchange action? All this remains to be seen, but it's definitely a giant step forward for a traditional advertising agency. It is also a bigger scale validation of our own strategy that we're been working on for the past seven years. Exciting stuff.

David Henderson points to the Piper Jaffray report titled The User Revolution: The New Advertising Ecosystem and the Rise of Internet as a Mass Medium. Caution: it's 425 pages.

Although it's a rather longish overview of the industry, the interesting part is in chapter 12 -- the agencies and their new role:

Agencies are rapidly evolving to become more complicated, technology-focused entities

There is a continued horizontal integration within the agencies combining the best-of-breed offerings

We expect large, multi-national traditional agencies to have eventually full interactive capabilities largely through acquisitions of pure-play agencies

Current focus of agencies are in engagement marketing, usergenerated content and viral marketing, and in Web-focused creative and video

If you're moving away from blanket mass media campaigns modeled on the traditional media, the solution is inevitably technological. The agility and intelligence required in order to be relevant online is gradually becoming a technological challenge. This has been our vision for quite a while, and it's the reason why we do ad serving and rich media in-house and have specialized technology ressources on staff.

Another interesting observation in the report is something Piper Jaffray calls "the rise of communitainment." Content doesn't become popular in a vacuum -- the hits are propelled by communities and you can see the phenomenon live on a number of platforms.

Business 2.0 article talks about the Triple-A business model: Ajax, AdSense and arrogance.

It's basically a metaphor for the idea of companies being started with the purpose of building an audience. With Quigo and AdBrite so far leading the way, 2007 should be ripe with new alternatives for AdSense in many niches, in many different formats.

Imagine a specialized alternative to AdSense that acts as a channel -- travel, business, venture capital, auto. The market of niches in media should be complemented by a market of niches in advertising.

A fantastic video of Milton Freedman, probably the greatest economist alive (at a venerable age of 93), is interviewed by Charlie Rose. Opinions on everything from China and India to euro to the state of US economy and its debt.

Brilliant man, and a great interview. My PVR is often filled out with Charlie Rose shows and I can rarely catch up. This video pretty much shows why.

There are also some links to the PBS series with Milton Freedman from the 70's, 80's and 90's.

It's just embarassing to have the YouTube acquisition as the latest post here, so this is a desperate attempt to get back on the blogging bandwagon.

For the first time in my life I actually watched a significant portion of the Oscars ceremony last night, in glorious high definition although Videotron could barely handle the bandwidth.

As if to follow-up to mine and Chris Quenneville's talk at the Infopresse Web 2.0 conference, the trend of fake-empowering consumers by having them sing the praises of the products was all the rage. Dove was the worst, it literally made me cringe with a crappy 30sec spot shot by some lady with a crappy camera.

Here is the thing: I, as a consumer, don't care who shot your crappy 30sec spot. If you're doing TV advertising, chances are you will not impress anyone with the fact that it's not done by your usual ad agency. Doritos did the same for Superbowl, and it just doesn't matter.

I'm not even questioning the talent of amateurs producing these ads, although it was far from mind blowing (and keep in mind, that's the best both Doritos and Dove got as submissions). What I hate is this false pretense of empowering people and being more "real", just because you ran a contest. That's really all it is -- glorified contests, and let's not overblow it into anything more than that.

At the risk of joining the web-wide blogger circle-jerk, I will have to chime in after a two month blogging hiatus. It's just too big of a new to pass up.

All the opinions are pretty much out there on TechMeme. Unsurprisingly, opinions range from "bubble 2.0" to describing the brilliance of the move.

Either way, YouTube accomplished with video what Google has accomplished with "traditional" search. There are many examples of how culturally important it became -- it was mentioned in the Oscars introduction ceremony, Jay Leno has a YouTube segment, etc etc. This is an important indicator, and Google knows -- they went the same route themselves back in the day.

Because of this cultural significance, YouTube and YouTube alone has the leverage to solve the biggest media problem out there. Making copyright work for everyone, creating a value chain out of unbundled, redistributed and rebundled content, and making all that more efficient than what traditional TV has to offer.

Google is the best positioned to solve that problem given their experience on dMarc (radio), books, print ads, and obviously PPC ads, as well as their existing relationships with traditional media outfits. For instance, the Google/News Corp deal took a whole different meaning. YouTube, on their end, already have deals in place with Universal Music, CBS, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, and Warner Music.

It's going to be great to see how this deal will spur the growth of online video in general. New opportunities, more reach in online video -- and hopefully more attention to be drawn out of traditional media consumed via traditional channels. That means changing the way advertising is done with video.

technorati tags: google, youtube

Brilliant. Microsoft outlined their vision for a distributed, grassroots game developer community (Article on BBC). This could be very disruptive and very successful. There is an amazing number of game developer communities on the Web, ranging from complete game development to mods for popular games like Battlefield 1942/2.

With this type of major support, however, we can imagine developers getting paid for their work since the infrastructure for ordering and paying for content is already there with Xbox Live.

Let's hope Microsoft will not screw this up.

Technorati Tags: xbox microsoft games community

The web is still abuzz from the AOL search data fisco. The Internet proletariat covers the story -- TechCrunch as usual ruling the show.

On a more interesting note, Something Awful has a huge thread on the subject, with specific examples of interesting searches which pretty much demonstrate why this is important. Each block contains some search queries from the same user.

Fraud

12319719 how to fake an illness injury to get workers comp or medical leave 2006-03-16 06:19:46 1 http://www.fiu.edu
12319719 how to fake an illness injury to get workers comp or medical leave 2006-03-16 06:20:56 16 http://www.workerscompinsider.com
12319719 how to fake an illness injury to get workers comp or medical leave 2006-03-16 06:20:56 20 http://www.americancontractorsiniraq.com
12319719 how to fake an illness injury to get workers comp or medical leave 2006-03-16 06:23:12 28 http://www.insurancefraud.org
12319719 how to fake an illness injury to get workers comp or medical leave 2006-03-16 06:23:12 40 http://starbulletin.com

Crime

4865342 how to make drugs 2006-04-15 03:47:02
4865342 how to make juarwiana 2006-04-19 10:30:02
4865342 how to make cocanie 2006-04-19 10:30:30
4865342 how to make cocaine 2006-04-19 10:30:41 1 http://www.textfiles.com
4865342 how to make cocaine 2006-04-19 10:30:41 7 http://www.interdope.com
4865342 how to make drugs with cough sruop 2006-04-19 10:33:26
4865342 how to make drugs with cough syrup 2006-04-19 10:33:38
4865342 how to make drugs with cough syrup 2006-04-19 10:33:39
4865342 how to make majiana 2006-04-19 10:34:22
4865342 how to make marijuana 2006-04-19 10:34:29

...issues

5820892 i am fat and i was raped and now i am a lesbian
5820892 i am not a lesbian anymore
5820892 i do not believe that my daughter is a lesbian
5820892 i do not like to be asked my age
5820892 i lost 50 pounds with zetacap
5820892 i lost weight with zetacap
5820892 i paid a lot of money for the healing codes
5820892 i stopped my lesbian behavior
5820892 i too zetacap and it did not work
5820892 i was a lesbian for only 5 years
5820892 i was brainwashed in to thinking i was a lesbian
5820892 i was confused about my sexuality for a couple of years
5820892 i was fooled into thinking i was a lesbian

Crime, suicide

397791 how to kill yourself 2006-03-01 21:16:08 2 http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net
397791 how to kill yourself 2006-03-01 21:16:08 3 http://www.mouchette.org
547759 how to kill some one with out getting cought 2006-05-26 09:50:33
547759 how to kill some one with out getting cought 2006-05-26 09:51:29

It's surprising that people use search engines just like you would expect them to talk to 2001: A Space Odyssey HAL. What do they expect when they search for "i miss my boyfriend", "why are you so cold to me on mother's day" or "why are the men in my life including my son emotionally beating me"?

Privacy concerns aside, this is really fascinating stuff, and I'm just hoping that some serious studies will come out of this -- anything from sociology to long tail theory. This was, after all, the original purpose of releasing the data.

technorati tags: aol, search, privacy, data

A terrific write-up of a Korean online company, CyWorld, in last month's Business 2.0. I've been following CyWorld for quite some time now, but the news now is their attack of the US market. The American version of the site is already live and sports some users.

The article focuses on the business models and differences between Asia and America as far as revenue goes. It's quite clear that Americans will not pay for customization of their online characters, so the shift to advertising -- novel forms of it -- is something to follow.

Most importantly though, the question is whether they can top their Korean revenue of $300K per day in the US?

technorati tags: korea, cyworld, myspace

Misleading title, because it's not really web 2.0 they're dipping toes in.

Looking at everything that matters on the Web now, it's quite clear that one of the main trends is aggregation. It's all about picking the best out of the same class -- curated consumption, if you will. The participative platforms that really took off and that take the eyeballs away from the big media, by their nature, are more relevant because of the impartiality.

For links, there is digg, delicious, techmeme and tailrank.
For music, last.fm and pandora.
For books, librarything.
For video, youtube.
For businesses, Judy's book, Yelp.
For real estate, Zillow.
For events, eventful.

This is not to bore you with yet another "best of web 2.0" list. All of those are aggregators, where products and services are put against each other, allowing consumers to filter based on their criteria -- which can be anything from price to social popularity.

The definition of web 2.0 is participation, and that means sharing. Sharing your playlists, your links, your product preferences, your recommendations. Unfiltered.

What we see now is advertisers taking only that last part -- without aggregation -- and sticking it on their sites. After filtering the negative reviews out.

A few recent examples include Sheraton, which put up customer stories on their front page. You can share yours, too, provided that it's not a bad experience, of course.

Aleve is another one, where you can actually see video of the oh-so-satisfied customers. You can share your own story. Here, too, only successful stories.

I'm sorry, but how is this different from infomercials which are also made to look authentic? Is anyone actually supposed to believe these stories and take them as unbiased reviews? Am I the only one who can't look at these without rolling eyes uncontrollably?

There are three main things that agencies should be doing instead:

If you're building a platform, encourage sharing of product experience from brand ambassadors. It's OK if it doesn't look polished. Sheraton could've also made a photo sharing site for their guests to be used to save vacation photos. There is really no need for reviews -- just having past guests come back and share their vacation photos through their site would be enough.

Making it easier for aggregators to republish product information. As simple as that.

Providing tools and material that can be shared elsewhere. Even simpler.

This applies to the above examples of Aleve and Sheraton, just as it does for virtually any other product out there.

But come on. Let's stop with the biased web-infomercials, shall we?

technorati tags: web2.0, advertising, agency, sheraton, aleve

Ebay bans use of Google Checkout. Unintimidated, Google leaves negative feedback...