The drama in programmatic online advertising

In times of adversity, online advertising routines fail. Drastically

The above example of an inappropriate display ad is just one in a range of similar advertising anomalies following the crash of Germanwings flight 4U9525 in March 2015. In the hours and days after such events, newspapers witness an increased online traffic to their websites and reports about the disasters in particular. Unfortunately, such reports are often accompanied by inappropriate advertising. Similarly, users of social media often encounter those ads at those times. Conversations on social media about such inappropriate ads often blame either the websites (i.e., news outlets) or the advertisers. But whose fault is it anyway? How should we understand this? And most important, how should different stakeholders within the online advertising business prepare themselves to avoid such mistakes in the future?

Happy Birthday, New Coke (°March 23, 1985)

Tuesday April 23rd of 1985 the Coca-Cola Company launched New Coke. This still remains one of the major cases in the marketing literature. It often ranks first in all-time lists of marketing fails (such as on marketwired, or in Matt Haig's book Brand Failures). Apart from the obvious failure (for the short version, see below; for the longer version, see Wikipedia), I think it is also a good demonstration of the intangible part of brand value, which I will explain below.

How credibility spoiled this mini-lecture on statistics

In a recent reply to one of our commentaries (Smits et al., 2015), Domenic Cicchetti gave an interesting mini-lecture on effect sizes, power, and sample sizes. You'll find it here. Though interesting in itself, it is a pity that the full scope of his contribution will largely remain unnoticed given a series of credibility issues with the text itself and his position as the "statistics editor" of Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. Given that some of my recent research deals with the credibility of online word-of-mouth communication, and because I feel a bit misunderstood as the author of two earlier commentaries to this journal, I will elaborate these credibility issues.