Day: June 25, 2005

The Rubber Coyote

Ah, summer on Cape Cod and it is time for the lost-kitty posters to start crowding each other out for space on the phone poles and bulletin boards of the village. Ever since rabies crossed the bridges a few years ago, (despite the state’s best efforts to immunize the critter population with vaccination-laced bait) there has been more and more paranoia about the wildlife in our midst.

 Coyotes are the latest theme to dominate the summer cocktail parties, replacing Lyme Tick Disease and the Wind Farm as the horror of the season.

 Tonight I was at the home of a person (who shall go unnamed) who has been visited several times by coyotes in his backyard, visitations that cause hysteria in his two young daughters who fear for the lives of their two schnauzers. This person has used the power of online searching and buying to order a life-sized rubber coyote, which now stands, rampant, head back in a howl, in his backyard. Beneath it is a remote-activated speaker which emits the pitious sounds of a lost fawn, the horror of a wild pig being savaged by a pack of coyotes, a rabbit being devoured (which is chillingly infantile), and a coyote calling his pack of friends to share in supper.

 

After a demonstration of this animatronic display, the unnamed person brought out a new crossbow with a   red dot laser sight and sank a bolt from across the yard into the flank of the rubber coyote.

It went thunk.

My host reasoned that while he was planning on illegally knocking off a coyote out of season, he would not be discharging a firearm within the city limits and therefore was only half-illegal.

I recommended that he seek out a newsstand and find a copy of Critter or Varmint magazines to help him in his quest.

 

 

Custom Robotic Wildlife – Coyote & Fox Decoys

 

Internet Advertising Projections for 2006 — who has the numbers?

IAB Resources and Research would appear to the touchstone for compiling various predictions about year-to-year growth of online advertising.

Unfortunately — for me, since  I need a solid prediction for ’06 now — the Internet Advertising Bureau is only showing estimates cooked up a year ago, and those include estimates for paid search, which by itself is arguably 25% of the category.

 

 

 

My worry working with expectations of growth in the high twenties and low thirty percent range, is two-fold:

1. Paid search shows no sign of slowing (save for some major click fraud discredit) and is, if one extrapolates Overture and Google Revenues, at least 20% of the spend and is not a space I play in).

2. The rapid rebound of spending between late 2003 and the present is widely predicted to flatten through the next four years and 2006, barring the development of a compellingly profitable new ad model accepted by marketers, could be the year that the CAGR starts to stagger.

 

 

 

 

 

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