Search Results for: advertising

Groupon actually lost $413 million in 2010.

Diving into the S-1, it turned out that Groupon only considered itself profitable because it used a peculiar accounting metric of its own creation — adjusted consolidated segment operating income, or ACSOI.

Basically, Groupon was taking the money it was spending on advertising to acquire new subscribers to its email and not counting that money as a quarterly, recurring expense — but as a one-time, capital expense, the way Google might account for the cost of building a new server farm. 

Groupon was saying that ACSOI helped it figure out the ratio between the amount of money it needed to spend on marketing to acquire a subscriber and how much that subscriber would be worth to the company over the long haul.

But marketing expenses are not typically accounted for this way, and people looked at Groupon as though it were trying to pull a fast one.

“Inside Groupon: The Truth About The World’s Most Controversial Company.” — Nicholas Carlson, Business Insider

See also: “Groupon Therapy.” Vanity Fair, August 2011

Inside Groupon: The Truth About The World’s Most Controversial Company

Longreads Pick

Groupon actually lost $413 million in 2010.

Diving into the S-1, it turned out that Groupon only considered itself profitable because it used a peculiar accounting metric of its own creation — adjusted consolidated segment operating income, or ACSOI.

Basically, Groupon was taking the money it was spending on advertising to acquire new subscribers to its email and not counting that money as a quarterly, recurring expense — but as a one-time, capital expense, the way Google might account for the cost of building a new server farm.

Groupon was saying that ACSOI helped it figure out the ratio between the amount of money it needed to spend on marketing to acquire a subscriber and how much that subscriber would be worth to the company over the long haul.

But marketing expenses are not typically accounted for this way, and people looked at Groupon as though it were trying to pull a fast one.

Published: Oct 31, 2011
Length: 34 minutes (8,558 words)

Here are some details about Lynda Barry that didn’t appear in her autobiographical song. She’s a cartoonist whose weekly strip, “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” was a staple of alternative newsweeklies for almost 30 years. (Next month, the publisher Drawn & Quarterly will release “Blabber Blabber Blabber,”  the first in a 10-volume retrospective series of her work.) She dips Copenhagen tobacco and fights against wind farms. She e-mails stupid YouTube links to her old buddy Matt Groening, the creator of “The Simpsons.”

Barry reinvented herself as a creativity guru as the market for her comic strip dried up, publishing two boundary-blurring books on inspiration and teaching writing workshops for nonwriters. Barry’s advertising copy is clear: “THIS CLASS WORKS ESPECIALLY WELL FOR ‘NONWRITERS’ like bartenders, janitors, office workers, hairdressers, musicians and ANYONE who has given up on ‘being a writer’ but still wonders what it might be like to write.”

“Lynda Barry Will Make You Believe In Yourself.” — Dan Kois, The New York Times Magazine

See more #longreads from Dan Kois

Lynda Barry Will Make You Believe In Yourself

Longreads Pick

Here are some details about Lynda Barry that didn’t appear in her autobiographical song. She’s a cartoonist whose weekly strip, “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” was a staple of alternative newsweeklies for almost 30 years. (Next month, the publisher Drawn & Quarterly will release “Blabber Blabber Blabber,” the first in a 10-volume retrospective series of her work.) She dips Copenhagen tobacco and fights against wind farms. She e-mails stupid YouTube links to her old buddy Matt Groening, the creator of “The Simpsons.”

Barry reinvented herself as a creativity guru as the market for her comic strip dried up, publishing two boundary-blurring books on inspiration and teaching writing workshops for nonwriters. Barry’s advertising copy is clear: “THIS CLASS WORKS ESPECIALLY WELL FOR ‘NONWRITERS’ like bartenders, janitors, office workers, hairdressers, musicians and ANYONE who has given up on ‘being a writer’ but still wonders what it might be like to write.”

Author: Dan Kois
Published: Oct 27, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,102 words)

Meet the Newest Longreader: Joyce King Thomas

I’m thrilled to announce a new partner in Longreads: Joyce King Thomas. Joyce is the former executive vice president and chief creative officer of McCann-Erickson. She created Mastercard’s “Priceless” campaign, among other outstanding work.

Joyce will be working with me on advertising initiatives for Longreads. She and I actually go way back: She’s been a longtime Longreads community member (here’s her page), and we both share a passion for journalism.

Two years ago, I launched Longreads simply because I was looking for something to read. What I hadn’t expected was that this community would preside over a renaissance for long-form storytelling on the web.

The audience is growing by leaps and bounds (use of the hashtag on Twitter has quadrupled over the past few months), and every day I hear more great ideas from Longreads Members about how we can improve.

With Joyce as a partner, I feel truly lucky, and with her onboard we’re laying the foundation for a broader editorial and curator network. There’s so much more that we’d like to create to serve this community, and advertising (along with the generosity of your Longreads Memberships) will help support this growth.

She and I will be working with a small number of brands that want to help support outstanding storytelling, and create some cool stuff in the process. If you’d like to request an invite to participate, you can reach Joyce here.

We’ve also worked closely with publishers, and we’re going to continue to do that in new and interesting ways that will be relevant to readers. And of course, we’ll always be open and totally transparent about how we do everything. I’m glad to hear from anyone—members, publishers, authors, curators—who wants to know more or get involved.

It has been a incredible two and a half years for Longreads, and I’m thankful to the entire community for its support as we continue to grow.

The Web Is a Customer Service Medium

The Web Is a Customer Service Medium

The Web Is a Customer Service Medium

Longreads Pick

The web was surprisingly good at emulating a TV, a newspaper, a book, or a radio. Which meant that people expected it to answer the questions of each medium, and with the promise of advertising revenue as incentive, web developers set out to provide those answers. As a result, people in the newspaper industry saw the web as a newspaper. People in TV saw the web as TV, and people in book publishing saw it as a weird kind of potential book. But the web is not just some kind of magic all-absorbing meta-medium. It’s its own thing. And like other media it has a question that it answers better than any other. That question is: “Why wasn’t I consulted?”

Author: Paul Ford
Source: Ftrain
Published: Jan 6, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,603 words)

Geoff Van Dyke: My Top 6 Longreads of 2010

Geoff Van Dyke is deputy editor of 5280 Magazine in Denver.

***

The Future of Advertising, by Danielle Sacks, Fast Company

A must-read for anyone in the media business.

Innocence Lost, by Pamela Colloff, Texas Monthly

Instrumental in getting a Texas man off death row and out of prison.

Burger Queen, by Lauren Collins, The New Yorker

Deep, revealing profile of chef April Bloomfield.

The Jihadist Next Door, by Andrea Elliott, New York Times Magazine

What happens when an American is the face of the Islamist insurgency?

Hackers Gone Wild: The Fast Times & Hard Fall of the Green Hat Gang, by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, Rolling Stone

Sex, drugs, and hacking … it doesn’t get better than this.

What Good Is Wall Street, by John Cassidy, The New Yorker

How banks made trading, which has no social value according to Cassidy, their major source of revenue.

Lessons in Fame from P.T. Barnum's Autobiography

From Lapham’s Quarterly, lessons on fame and advertising from The Life of P. T. Barnum, which was published in 1855.

“Put on the appearance of business, and generally the reality will follow.” And what follows then? Profit. How is this miracle achieved? First, through false superlatives and inflated rhetoric, e.g., “The world-famous _______ is the greatest one ever seen.” Then, through repetition: if one asserts a claim often enough, the claim (true or untrue) achieves, as we say now, traction. But the process requires faith, “to teach you that after many days it [your investment] shall surely return, bringing a hundred- or a thousandfold to him who appreciates the advantages of ‘printer’s ink’ properly applied.” The making of money in this formulation of the new gospel is a sign of blessedness, and instead of prayer to effect a particular outcome, we have advertising.

In a world in which every truth is fungible, advertising begins to substitute for the news. One of Barnum’s brilliant, almost genius-level aperçus, was that you could create news through advertising, and the advertising itself becomes newsworthy. If you advertise forcefully, the advertised object, even if perfectly vacant and without qualities (think: Paris Hilton), becomes a topic of conversation. Truth value is always trumped by hype, and hype in turn is fueled by controversy. Any news is good news. Barnum discovered that if your show generates angry letters to the editor, so much the better: people will be compelled to see the spectacle for themselves “to determine whether or not they had been deceived.”

Read the story

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Hatching Monsters: Lessons in Fame from P.T. Barnum’s Autobiography

Longreads Pick

“Put on the appearance of business, and generally the reality will follow.” And what follows then? Profit. How is this miracle achieved? First, through false superlatives and inflated rhetoric, e.g., “The world-famous _______ is the greatest one ever seen.” Then, through repetition: if one asserts a claim often enough, the claim (true or untrue) achieves, as we say now, traction. But the process requires faith, “to teach you that after many days it [your investment] shall surely return, bringing a hundred- or a thousandfold to him who appreciates the advantages of ‘printer’s ink’ properly applied.” The making of money in this formulation of the new gospel is a sign of blessedness, and instead of prayer to effect a particular outcome, we have advertising.

Published: Dec 27, 2010
Length: 10 minutes (2,653 words)