OK, so your 30 second ad on television pimping your latest toilet bleach may be as good as worthless at this point. Your audience is actively ignoring your self-obsessed propaganda, and you know it. But it feels too scary to change the approach that has “worked” for decades.

Here’s a tip to make the transition smoother: you can lift that ad out of the useless pile ever-so-slightly by simply giving the viewer an incentive to want to pay attention. Give something back. Free X if you prove you want our product by doing Y. Here’s today’s top tip for saving money on cleaning products. Yes it’s counter-productive, but as our customer we love you and actually care about your experience from an altruistic perspective.

30 seconds of swirls and product images with branding is totally worthless. 30 seconds of improving my life makes me want to say thank you (and likely financially).

Today, I came to the realisation that a sales assistant for my personal bank had tricked me in to upgrading my account, by inflating its benefits, to help her commission quota. I am now offended.

The only viable commission scheme for any type of sales environment is rewarding representatives for doing what a customer wants. For making a customer happy. Not for making the bottom-line happy. Scam-esque sales like this do not help the bottom-line in the changing world of consumers taking charge.

While I’m on the soapbox, it grates me that we are lending money to banks day in day out and they act like they are the ones doing us a favour.

Professionals in the middle of their cisco training are usually in a microsoft training as well as any other security training program right then, so that they can speed up the process of acquiring an mcp, followed by an mcdst.

I passed a BT van today, which had the ‘openreach‘ logo delicately sprayed on its wing. I instantly realised my love for the word ‘open’, and became envious of not having the right to the name ‘openreach’ (pretty pathetic, maybe).

You take a word like ‘open’, and every connotation is positive. Open fields for children and dogs to run in. Freedom. Choice. “Go ahead, it’s fine, it’s open”.

Closedreach would be out of business within a quarter.