our culture and our lives are run by media. We spend more time looking at media, engaging in media,

talking about media than ever before. But it's essential to understand that someone's got to

pay for all that media. And there are basically three choices. One, we can pay for it. The user can

buy a book or a movie ticket. Two, we can pay for it when we buy something inside the medium,

like eBay, or three, most of all, most of the time. An advertiser can pay for the media. And we do

ourselves a disservice if we pretend that what advertisers want doesn't matter. Hey, it's Ajay.

And this is a special archive episode of the Kimbo.

I've been playing with media my entire career and selling ads for most of it.

Selling ads is really seductive because it separates the people you are dancing for,

the people you are seeking to change, the people you are trying to impact from the people who

are paying for it. What that means is if you can find a happy advertiser, a sponsor, somebody who's

willing to show up and pay the bills, you can then turn around and create the work that you'd like

to create for the people you want to create it for. Unfortunately, this siren song of advertising

usually leads to people with good intentions either not finding an advertiser because they don't

understand what advertisers want or perhaps even worse, finding an advertiser who wants something they

don't want and creating a product or service that they're not proud of. So yeah, sometimes it can

work great when you find a generous, patient sponsor who lets you make the work you want to make,

you've created yet another building block of our culture. But often it leads to things like the

Facebook scandal. This is a short podcast about how that came to be and why it matters.

There are two kinds of advertising, brand marketing and direct marketing. And until very recently,

almost all advertising was brand marketing. Brand marketing, the John Wanamaker rule is,

I know that half my ads don't work, I just don't know which half. Brand marketing is the idea that

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