We are so used to the notion that the US lags behind the rest of the world in mobile phone use that it is a shock to be told it is no longer true.

I am in San Francisco at the leadership conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies (now formally re-branded as the 4As) and have been hearing some interesting statistics.

They were in a presentation by Cyriac Roeding, an entrepreneur-in-residence at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, the venture capital firm, who used to be head of mobile for CBS, the television network.

Mr Roeding pointed out not only that the number of mobile phones in the US has grown rapidly as a proportion of the population but that the Apple iPhone has shifted the balance of mobile software development to Silicon Valley.

There are now 270m mobile phone users in the US, out of a population of 304m, compared with 223m internet users.

More surprisingly, Americans now send 110bn text messages a month, which has grown exponentially from an average of 48bn per month in 2007, 19bn in 2006, 10bn in 2005 and 5bn in 2004. In other words, the number has been doubling each year.

As a result, Americans now send an average of 400 messages a month each, which is four times the number sent by British mobile phone users, who used to be far heavier texters.

“That is an unbelievable catch-up. There is a fundamental shift going on and I believe that this (Silicon Valley) is now the centre of mobile innovation in the world,” said Mr Roeding, who was born in Germany.

On my travels, I neglected to post the review I wrote for the FT on Monday of Kenneth Roman’s The King of Madison Avenue, a biography of the late David Ogilvy:

In 1989, having dismissed Martin Sorrell as “this gnome” and vilified him in the Financial Times, David Ogilvy took up Mr Sorrell’s offer to absorb Ogilvy & Mather into WPP and make Ogilvy non-executive chairman.

“I’m hard up. I’ve mismanaged my money. I have a castle and a young wife and I need the money. Greed [pause]. There’s also some vanity involved,” he told his board.

Somehow, although uttered at the moment of defeat, without the joie de vivre of much of Ogilvy’s life, it captures the man. Here was the crisp precision of his rhetoric; the beguiling directness; the use of emotion to make the sale; and, yes, vanity.

Ogilvy, who died in 1999, was not the single biggest talent of Madison Avenue’s advertising agencies in the mid-20th century. That prize goes to Bill Bernbach, the Brooklyn-born copywriter whose campaigns for Volkswagen and Orbach’s department store in New York married laconic humour to stark images in a manner that instantly changed how advertising worked.

But Ogilvy, New York advertising’s flamboyant immigrant, approached Bernbach, and outdid figures such as Leo Burnett, creator of the Marlboro Man, and Rosser Reeves of Ted Bates & Company, in his impact.

He burst on to the New York advertising scene, backed by his brother in London, in 1948. A drop-out from Oxford, he had already tried being a sous-chef in Paris and a farmer in Pennsylvania’s Amish country. He fixed his tie with a bulldog clip and wore a scarlet-lined blazer.

You can read the rest here and comment below.

If you feel like a shock, try finding out how many online advertising companies are tracking you every time you use the internet.

One way to do so is to go to the Network Advertising Initiative site in the US (www.networkadvertising.org) and click on the opt-out button that allows you to evade their surveillance. It also tells you how many have been watching you already.

My laptop browser, for example, contains cookies (small text files that hold passwords and other data that are used when you browse websites) planted there by 14 advertising networks, such as Google’s DoubleClick, Revenue Science and Tacoda.

I did not know they were there before I looked, although I suspected some were. I gave permission when I signed up for the sites of publishers such as FT.com or WSJ.com and many others. Even using search engines such as Yahoo and Google exposes you or, more precisely, your browser to being trailed.

“The reality is that people have had little choice in terms of online privacy. Try browsing the internet after switching off your cookies and see how well it works,” says Kent Ertugrul, chief executive of Phorm which crunches data obtained from internet service providers.

You can read the rest here and comment below.

Bernard Arnault presumably knows a thing or two about what sells Louis Vuitton bags, or he would not feature so prominently on the Forbes list.

Still, I was struck by seeing the well-worn face of Keith Richards, the Rolling Stones guitarist, in an advertisement in a glossy magazine for Louis Vuitton. You can see the photo here.

One British brand consultant sums it up thus to Bloomberg:

Keith Richards is timeless and ageless. He’s lived his life on the edge, but he’s not a sleaze bag. He’s lean and mean and he’s still current.

So then, not a sleaze bag but the kind of man whose bag you covet.  According to Mr Arnault, Mr Richards is one of several “achievers who’ve changed things” to be featured in ads for the luxury goods company.

The lesson I take from this is that baby boomers buy a lot of luxury goods and that any baby boomer icon - including one renowned for drug-taking and louche living - is therefore a potential front man.

I don’t suppose that Keef envisaged when the Stones started, nor after Altamont, that he would wind up as the face of Louis Vuitton. But sensibilities change, and so does the luxury market.

The other day, I described my scepticism about advertising networks on the internet and whether technology would replace the traditional interaction between ad sales forces and media buyers.

John Hagel, whose thoughts on business are always worth reading, has chimed in on the topic with a long post. He states the problem facing advertisers intriguingly:

The basic paradox of the Internet can be framed very simply:  The very platform that makes advertising both more relevant and more measurable is the same platform that longer-term will challenge and ultimately undermine the basic role of advertising in communicating with customers.

While I focused on the difficulties of collecting valuable online inventory, John frames the challenge more broadly: the diminishing returns that online advertising is beginning to experience. We may even be seeing signs of that in search advertising, given Google’s travails.

It makes me wonder whether advertising is not simply going to transfer online but will be cannibalised in the manner of other media industries. That has already happened for classifieds; might it spread to display advertising as well? 

Esther Dyson, who knows a thing or two about media and technology (as well as being the board member of 23 and Me who helped me with my genetic sample in Davos last month) wrote an op-ed piece in the Journal yesterday on the internet-based future of advertising.

It caught my attention because of who wrote it and because it was pegged to the Microsoft bid for Yahoo, as was my column on the same topic last week. I found it especially engaging because she agreed with me on one point but then branched out into something else entirely.

Continue reading "Esther Dyson on the future of advertising"

The misuse of language in business is so common that I usually let it pass but I was provoked this morning on walking into the FT’s office in midtown Manhattan by a poster for Brite Smile, a tooth whitening group (I will leave on one side the mis-spelling of "bright").

The poster is for $399 tooth veneers, and the tag line is: The First Affordable Veneers.

If these are the first affordable veneers, it implies that nobody was able to afford veneers until now. This claim is patently false, as a glance around the gleaming choppers at any Manhattan cocktail party will tell you.

What Brite Smile means, presumably, is not "affordable" but "cheap", just as retailers talk about "value" products, as in "value for money" or . . . cheap. There is a defence for the euphemism "value" in that it is vague rather than clearly incorrect.

It reminds me of the signs you sometimes find on British motorways saying "Delays possible until June 2008" as if, after that date, delays will be impossible. Sadly, that is also false.