2008 Annual Report: Wild Wild East Dailies Blog

Following my last post on the anniversary of this blog it seemed only Obama-like to practice near total transparency in sharing a few statistics with the growing loyal readership base that you all have come to comprise - and so without further adieu, I present to you, The Wild Wild East Dailies (WWED) 2008 Annual Report.


Overview:

What a year. From a base of zero in Feb 08, WWED has accumulated 20,000 views in the last year. Beginning with around 500 in February and March and doubling to around 1000 a month by April, things stayed at pretty much that level until September, which doubled again to 2000, when either the election kicked in or I received a bonus for getting through 6 months without being booted off the Internet. I suspect the election was the influence here as you'll see later when we look at the most popular posts of the year. Also, that's about the time I started delving into political satire and you'll see it was a big ticket item in terms of hits but interestingly enough, the majority of those hits did not turn into loyal readers. November brought 3000 and by December we hit the year's high at over 5000. With plenty of holiday time on their hands, and little cash in their pockets readers took to the Internet with reckless abandon looking for cheap entertainment and the WWED was just the ticket. Holiday traffic stretched from Thanksgiving in the west through Lunar New Year in the east and has now just leveled off to around 3000 per month - but that's a projected 36,000 for 09 and I suspect we'll do much better than that. My goal would be 100,000 but that may be under-achieving. www.Technorati.com ranks the site at 520,000, which doesn't look so impressive until you realize that they track 120 million blogs worldwide - and that puts us well inside the top .5%.


Where you are from:

According to Alexa rankings, the United States is the runaway winner with 72%. Other countries, a real mixed bag from Gambia to Togo account for 20% and Vietnam holds it own at a more than respectable 7%. "Hey, that's only 99%!", your saying. That's because North Korea is the only country in the world without Coke and Internet for its citizens. A chart for just the last few days (below)puts Vietnam leading America with the UK, Canada, Australia and Korea following. Just a quick look at the world map at the top of the page is pretty enlightening and that map has only been tracking since November.

	164	43.97%	Viet Nam
	114	30.56%	United States
	18	4.83%	United Kingdom
	10	2.68%	Canada
	9	2.41%	Australia
	7	1.88%	Korea, Republic Of
	7	1.88%	United Arab Emirates
	7	1.88%	Singapore
	6	1.61%	Thailand
	4	1.07%	Malaysia
	3	0.80%	Unknown	-
	3	0.80%	India
	2	0.54%	Japan
	2	0.54%	France
	2	0.54%	Germany
	2	0.54%	Turkey
	2	0.54%	Serbia
	1	0.27%	Egypt
	1	0.27%	Cambodia
	1	0.27%	Bangladesh
	1	0.27%	Finland
	1	0.27%	Norway
	1	0.27%	Hungary
	1	0.27%	Croatia
	1	0.27%	Greece

In terms of real concentration, the Northeast US is the heaviest with New York city and state carrying the bulk but LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas and Chicago all carry respectable weights.

What do you like:

Suffice to say that the greatest number of entries to the site come from the main page, but many others come in looking for a particular item. Not surprisingly, anything involving Obama scored well but I have to tell you - Sarah Palin was a more than respectable second - in fact her lunacy sparked the biggest post of the year when she entered the race and she scored a healthy #5 with Kim Jong Il as her WWED running mate. Political satire carried 4 spots out of the top 10.

01. 08/August/Obama Splits Ticket - Boots Biden! (1,272)

My first crack at political satire and the biggest at twelve hundred+ hits. Thank god Sara Palin entered the race. This post was helped out by a link from Cracked Magazine that still yeilds hits today. Comedians worldwide are still mourning the loss of Mrs. Palin.

02. 08/July/Paris In The 30s - Saigon Today (680)

This one surprised me - a wonderful memory of an evening in a French bistro with an accordion player and the French Navy dancing. Maybe some proof that the more artistic stuff works too.

03. 08/June/June 22 - Happy Birthday Todd Rundgren (487)

Surprising as well as Todd is a big favorite of mine but not of the masses.

04. 08/April/American Foreign Policy Since WWII (411)

A video rant by Rodney Dangerfield and Sam Kinneson that really takes US foreign policy apart. Funny as hell.

05. 08/September/Kim Jong Il, Ill After Threats by Palin (381)

Who would think to put Kim Jong Il and Sara Palin together in print? I would and have been apparently be the only blogger to do so. I still see the search terms for this post and it still gets respectable hits.

06. 08/July/Obama Brandishes a Bud For The Bubbas! (365)

My first crack at both Budweiser and Obama this post still draws hits even though it's technically politically incorrect to make fun of Obama. Fuck those who can't take a joke.

07. 08/May/Buddhist Funeral Prayer (346)

This made me feel good. I had copied the prayer given to me at a friend's memorial service and it seems one that a lot of people are interested in. It's beautiful.

08. 09/January/Chúc Mừng Năm Mới or Happy New Year in Vietnamese (336)

This just underscores the importance of the Lunar New Year here and also for the tracking response it received from Vietnamese search engines because it uses Vietnamese language - not to mention that it's a nice story as well.

09. 08/November/BarCampSaigon - A truly impressive start (301)

BarCamp is a digital non-conference that brings techies, bloggers, marketing folks, venture capitalist and all sorts of wing-nuts together for an all-day event that ends in free beer. Who wouldn't love it? It was also a great way for WWED to broaden its Vietnamese and Cambodian reader base This post has been featured as the "Best Tech Blog Post of 2008" on the Blog of Baomi.

10. 08/July/Belgian Prime Minister Quits Over Budweiser Purchase! (281)

We end our top ten with another political satire piece that just reinforces to me that there's always a market in funny. As much as I love some of the more artful stuff I do, and the business things, one should never overlook that crass and sophomoric have their place too. It certainly works for the Farrelly Brothers.

Who loves me baby:

Our final category today involves quality - the quality of readers that come, come back and spend real quality time. In our first chart today we look at "Return Visitors". These are people who visit regularly. Some of them may get WWED from a feed - we have around 70 feed subscribers - and others just check in manually from time to time. If you haven't subscribed yet, I urge you to do so. That way you get em' as I write em' and can just preview a headline and decide if you want to read the whole thing. According to stats from both Google Analytics and Statcounter about 10% of the crowd are return readers and based on unique readers (not just page impressions) of more than 16,000 that adds up to 1600 regulars.



The second Chart involves "Visit Length". That's how much time how many people spend here. You can see that 76% of the people blow off in less than 5 seconds but that a whopping 7.8% stay for more than an hour. Amazing. The average visit across all visits is 2 and a half minutes but even 8.4% of you stay for at least 5 minutes. I have documented proof that 3% of the people are hanging out for hours upon hours - some up to 10 or more! And you've got to ask yourself, "Why?". My guess would be the podcast. I think some people may be just popping up the site for a radio station and that's okay by me. Whatever hooks em. Rhona from New York complained appropriately loudly when her podcast went away for a few days - but then she got a new computer and everything was fine. Whatever people's reasons for tuning in I just couldn't be more happy to have them. On an e-com site hits mean money, but in our case on the WWED, quality is job #1. If I write it, they will come. But not if I write shit!

So long as we're not far away from the subject of money, I am prepared to tell you just exactly how much the site has made me all year. $4.86 cents. Yep. Four eighty six. This has come from the little Google ads you see below each post. As far as the PayPal button in the sidebar, goes? Nothin. Zip. Nada. It seems the Radiohead concept has not caught on here yet. But now that we're up a year, and I feel that I have more than done my work, do consider throwing a donation in the pot for a hard working street performer - and I mean seriously - toss me a buck, if you like what you're getting here, and support my work if you will. One of these days I'll have a book I can gig you into buying, but until then, at the risk of sounding like a public radio station, consider a small donation.

Thanks to Rhoda in NYC, Freya in Wisconsin, David and Ted in London, Hugh in Texas, and Nels & Debs & Pat & Tom & Kevin & Steve & Mads & Daniel and all the many thousands who have spent at least a minute here from all around the world. If it weren't for all of you I wouldn't have had to have written such a long-assed post as this!

Cheers 2009!

For more on blogs, blogging and bloggers, check here:

Advertising People & Blogs - The Travis Diaries VI
How to Write the Best Damn Blog in the World
Throw That Blog a Bone!
If Blogs Are Free Are They Worthless?
What If Gutenberg Had a Blog?
If You Like the Blog, Read the Book>/a>
2008 Annual Report - The Wild Wild East Dailies
Blog Redesign WWED
BarCamp Saigon 2008
Attraction vs. Conversion - How to Power Your Blog
Are the Bloggerati Missing the Market?

Anniversary: Wild Wild East Dailies

Today, February 7th, 2009 is the one year anniversary of the Wild Wild East Dailies blog. Whooooooooooooooopiy! ~ To see where it all started, click here.

For more on blogs, blogging and bloggers, check here:

Advertising People & Blogs - The Travis Diaries VI
How to Write the Best Damn Blog in the World
Throw That Blog a Bone!
If Blogs Are Free Are They Worthless?
What If Gutenberg Had a Blog?
If You Like the Blog, Read the Book>/a>
2008 Annual Report - The Wild Wild East Dailies
Blog Redesign WWED
BarCamp Saigon 2008
Attraction vs. Conversion - How to Power Your Blog
Are the Bloggerati Missing the Market?

The Boys of Winter - SIU Reunion 1992

Okay, I know I seem to be getting nostalgic of late, what with posts about old Super Bowl commercials, That Embarrassing 70s Show and Has Beens and whatever, but what it truly is, is an attack of my own Vanity Fair in the fact that I just looked a whole lot damn cuter in those days than I do today. I mean, look at me now. Who wants a cute 52 year-old man? Nobody, that's for sure.

What people do want however, is a chance to page through your old photo album and tell you how cute you used to be, fully well knowing that it will make you feel like positive shit now and thus thus reinforcing their own fragile belief that they look like shit now too, but at least they've got company. The pains we all endure for having been attractive youngsters.

And so with that rather dour introduction I harken you all back to the days of yesteryear - the days when men were men and woman were, well, women. The accompanying photo comes from 17 years ago and was shot on the roof of my wife's and my apartment building, the Belden Stratford, on Lincoln Park West in Chicago. The occasion was the first ever Every-Thirteen-Year college roommate reunion. By whatever serendipity that caused us all to be in the same city at the same time for the first time in thirteen years, we had all planned to go out for a 5-star meal at a first class joint and dressed the part - except for the guy in the middle with the yellow trench coat. I am reminded now, that that was my coat and I had loaned it to him for the shoot because is was just blinding fucking cold outside and it was all I had, aside from what I was wearing.

From left to right, are myself, Tom Kirkhart, Steve Lind and Kevin O. Mooney. You can find us all on Facebook - Kevin has more Facebook friends than the rest of us combined so he's the only nice guy in the lot apparently. Over the course of two years at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Illinois, we all lived in the same flat and shared house duties, cooking and at more than one time, girlfriends - and we all still got along. Feeling fairly sure that none of us will be running for President, pretty much ever, I can also say that there was some marijuana involved. Oh those college boyz. Now professional athletes call it "poor judgement" while being released from their cornflake endorsements.

Tom is currently Chief Marketing Officer at CRM Studios, a video and TV production studio in Fort Worth, Texas. Steve is a National Sales Rep for CBS Outdoor Advertising in Seattle and Kevin is Assistant Professor of Photography at Indiana University as well as running his own studio at Kevin O. Mooney Photography. Along with myself at university we were a self contained advertising agency in our tiny Lewis Park apartment with me handling creative duties as a Graphic Design major, Tom in Radio and Television production, and both Steve and Kevin as Photography majors. Steve and I once threatened to be on the cover of Soldier of Fortune magazine with a shoot we had done for a local businessman, Ricky, who kept and trained attack dogs along with a small hashish trade on the side. Failing to collect the money which Ricky owed to my boss, a sign painter, we escaped with our lives and the negatives, never to see fame in the business of black-ops. Ricky reportedly did a fair amount of jail time later for his turned-out-not-to-be-so-small sideline.

And then there was the time that a lawyer from San Francisco paraded into my office at Student Center Graphics and proclaimed that he needed a bunch of creative advertising guys to run his father, a Democrat, for a high county office - his (the lawyer's) only problem being that he didn't have any money, but would happily pay us in pot, he claimed he had procured for the Jefferson Airplane, to be downgraded that year to Starship. We took that job.

Upon moving into our shared apartment, Steve and Kevin wasted no time in converting the downstairs bathroom into a darkroom with the benefit that Tom and I could look at all the female photography students and aspiring models they had managed to convince to disrobe for the camera in the name of art. Amazing how many girls bought that shit. And then there was the time Tom and I spent an entire afternoon painstakingly drilling holes in the wall, before a huge house party and wiring Steve's room for sound, with a microphone - TV announcer style - placed under Steve's bed, and Tom and I, set up in his room next door with a huge reel-to-reel TEAC tapedeck to record Steve's horribly rehearsed advances to yet another young lady with the line, "Do you wanna come to my room and see my portfolio?" Unfuckingbelievable. The latter tape from the house party that evening, that ended in Steve's room, would provide us all humour for months - squeaking springs and all - nearly as funny as the reverse sound piping we did later to pump the Todd Rundgren song "Can We Still Be Friends" into Tom's room during the absolutely tearful dumping he was giving his latent hippy girlfriend duJour. Her name was Sunshine. Gimme a fucking break.

All this from a disparate bunch of young men just hungry for knowledge and feeding at the trough of academia in the pursuit of the creative arts. The only one of us who never had any bad shit done to him was Kevin. I froze his underwear once along with the other guy's by disguising it as ground beef, soaked and wrapped in aluminum foil, and stacking all of it in the freezer and telling them all that I was storing it for a friend. Dumbshits. They bought this for days while the stench of unwashed Jockeys and the minute-by-minute desire to just piss myself laughing finally brought me to surrender. The boyz had earned this unholy prank after throwing me out the front door in the snow one night - buck-assed naked- and flashing the porchlight on and off for all the neigbors to see, while I danced and froze my skinny little butt off.

Who needs enemys.

The photo and stories today were all inspired by a one Wayne Borg, a friend of ours from the dormitory days who just popped up on FaceBook last week and started dragging up 30 year old muck after that long of an absence. Thank you Wayne. You asshole.

But mostly, thanks to all these boys of winter. A few days ago I was lamenting the fact that my Super Bowl commercial didn't make me rich and famous or some other silly-assed shit and the guy said to me, "But Dave, you've got the stories. You've got great stories". Thanks everyone. The stories come from you. To quote Henry Miller, "Life becomes a spectacle and, if you happen to be an artist, you record the passing show." I just write em' down.

What exactly is a Brand Provocateur?

Just tonight I noticed that another advertising person in the US is using the job description and title of "Brand Provocateur" on her Twitter Page and it made me wonder, "Did she write it all on her own and I wrote mine all on my own?", or is there the possibility that that person saw mine and said, "hmm, I like that" and used it as well. It is always possible that two minds, thinking about the same thing, can come up with the same answer to the same problem. But not usually. So I'm taking this opportunity to claim © Brand Provocateur (along with the term ©Siliconmunists) and state my own philosophy on things of this nature:

At the time of my writing, a year ago or so, I made certain to Google the term, to make sure I wasn't infringing on someone else's creation, and nothing came up - so I felt very clear in coining it. Google it today and you'll find that my credits for the term include 8 of the first 10 mentions on page one. A while ago I wrote to Hugh MacLeod of http://www.gapingvoid.com/ and asked him if he coined the phrase, "Digital nomads"? Hugh wrote back to me, "No, I wish I had", and that to me seemed the way things like this should go. Hugh however, has written extensively on the term "Social objects" and anyone using it, including Mark Earls recently, has quite rightfully credited Hugh as a practitioner of the theory - and Hugh in turn, has rightfully attributed the coining of the term to anthropologist and Jaiku founder, Jyri Engestrom. And so I do the same, whenever I use terminology that may not be common in the lexicon, yet. This is all part and parcel to the spirit of the Creative Commons license that accompanies this blog which states, basically, that anybody may use anything printed here, so long as they credit the original author and are not using the term or idea to make money or create derivative works. But coining a term and defining a concept are two entirely different things and so, I'm going to do a bit of defining at this point.

Suffice to say that for me, the concept of "Brand Provocateur" was born out of the concept of an Army "Agitation officer" that had been explained to me quite a few years ago. The Agitation Officer's role was to be a member of the team but to also strategically agitate the troops when things seemed to be going too much by the book and so in being a Brand Provocateur I believe my job is to provoke, incite with insights, and generally stir up the soup in an organization on behalf of a brand with the charge of invigorating, or reinvigorating the energies that make the brand endearing to consumers in the first place. Essentially, I get paid to kick up shit, because most companies have a hard time doing that from the inside. My post "Into the Gapingvoid" uses a passage from my book to illustrate the difficulties of instituting change from within:

From Wild Wild East:

"Burnett would struggle in the years after that, loosing client upon client, all for different reasons, but the message was clear: this was a company tied to the images of the Marlboro Man and the Keebler Elves struggling to come to grips with a vision and technology that was much more Mario and Pokemon."

I told people for years that my job was to be the exact opposite of everyone else at the agency, that by sheer force of individuality and a measured detachment I provided a service that they desperately needed – objectivity. But it's hard to maintain that kind of freedom once you become part of an organization because the organization won't let you. They hire you because you are different but then try to make you the same as they are. This is pure organizational psychology. There is little one can do about it – within the organization, that is.

But the art of Brand Provocation need certainly not be a negative one - rather it is a process of reviewing, rethinking and repositioning a good deal of already familiar attributes in new and enlightening ways to reawaken a brand in the eyes of it's participating users, along with discovering new avenues for brand dialogue and excecution as well. As a Brand Provocateur, clients should expect me to use constructive provocation, dispassionate aggression, and certainly here in Asia, not disrupt the personal harmony of the people involved. I witnessed Stan Richards break up an office scuffle once with the line, "Look boys, around here we get paid to get mad at the problem, not the people". And so it should be with any Brand Provocateuring I do. Is "provocateuring" a word? Aw hell, it is now. Or maybe it should be Provocateering? Here are a few guidelines I use to define the disciplines of BrandProvocateur:

1) A Brand Provocateur is practising an art, not a science

Remember that and you will never have to argue against the defense of "But we've never done it that way before". In art, that statement alone becomes the very reason you are doing something. The lack of logic is the logic itself.

2) A Brand Provocateur is dispassionately aggressive

My definition of dispassionate does not means that you have no passion, or cannot recognise it - rather I use it to define all passions as having a sort of equality. If a consumer truly hates your product his/her opinion is at least as valuable as one from someone who loves it - maybe more so. Approaching all passions, dispassionately, with an aggressivness to uncover a full range of emotions will open far more doors of opportunity than had you only focused on things that you or the people who are paying you liked.

3) A Brand Provocateur uses schizophrenia as a tool

So the minute you have an idea, invert it. Attack it. Write it over in the voice of a twelve year old girl, then a cat, a criminal mind, a prophet, a ninja, your mother and maybe Simon Cowell. That will be a good start. Then you'll simply get more ideas rather than the same idea differently stated. Try it. I'm not kidding.

This year begins with financial problems all over the world, and it doesn't take long for those problems to filter down to the marketing world. But we all know the opportunity side of that coin as well, so the horizons for those of us who do choose to wear the mantle of Brand Provocateur should indeed be bright. I hope more people choose to use the term. Because, I apparently, am not the only one who thinks it's right for the times.

... if you're a Brand Provocateur as well, or need one, make sure to leave a comment. To know more about Brand Marketing Training in Vietnam, go here <

Sweet Dreams IV: All In A Mouse's Night - Interpretation please?

1) Holding on to the rear fenders of two old cars, a Studebaker and a two-toned Rambler, I am dragged heroically, like a cowboy charging his enemy between two horses, but this is done in some sort of a normal parlance as I am having a conversation with a woman in the backseat of one of the cars and I feel no fear. This is just how things are. My friend, Tom Nelson, is driving and he speaks to me through the rear windscreen whilst holding up a platic wine cork - the kind with the metal aperature that one levers down to make sure the seal is complete - as if he has just pulled the stopper out of the fuel fill pipe, and says, "You might try putting some gas in it next time". 2) Jonathan Hoffman, my old partner from Leo Burnett, sits at a lathe in a dingy old factory with grease smeared all over his face and hands. He smiles broadly as I walk down the aisle of the shop towards a set of swinging aluminum doors and enter into what can only be described as a Wal-Mart-like office setting - rows and rows of blue cubicles under even more rows and rows of flouresent lighting in a scene resembling the last shot in Raiders of the Lost Ark - a cavernous, huge, clean, bizarre space that goes on forever. I have been asked to review the design for an electrical device, a not very technical intrument that is simply a switch where two sets of contacts will touch two other sets of contacts whenever a button is depressed. This is my design somehow and it works precisely. It is pointed out to me that what I have done is akin to a fine suit and I am a tailor. 3) We have traveled an hour and a half. I smile.

For more Sweet Dreams Click below:

VI: I Woke Up Drunk Today
V: Homecoming
IV: All In A Mouse's Night
III: Fragmented Fermentations
II: Strange Dreams
I: White Huskies: Interpretation please?