Tuesday, December 07, 2010

Don Draper: Scourge of business, hero of information

Ezra Klein on Don Draper: Scourge of business, hero of information is about what Google is doing to the advertising business, with added Mad Men clip.

"But I don't take much pleasure in the poor performance of online advertising. The advertising industry was benevolently inefficient. It enabled pretty much every mass information medium we've ever had. Newspapers and radio and television and the Internet (Google, Facebook, etc.) are all brought to you by the advertising industry. There's perhaps no single sector that has done as much to advance human knowledge as the people who sell you soap and cars and soda. They overcharged businesses for ads in order to subsidize producers and distributors of information (and, of course, make themselves rich). The problem with Google, Karmazin once told the company's founders, is that they're messing with 'the magic.' And they are."

No comments: