by Mark O'Brien | Feb 20, 2017
The story you are about to read is true. Names, links, and actual terminology have been withheld to protect the innocent and the unwitting from skulduggery and knavery — and to shield the duplicitous and the unscrupulous from the slings and arrows of righteous...
by Mark O'Brien | Jun 29, 2016
Read this. Then read it again: This has spawned a plague of traffic brokers who specialize in traffic laundering at an almost unbelievable scale … “real” traffic is undervalued or, some would say, indistinguishable from fraudulent traffic … everyone is...
by Mark O'Brien | Nov 3, 2015
My colleague and LinkedIn connection, Derrick Martins, posted what he had to have known would be irresistible bait for a word-shark like me. More specifically, he angled for trouble when he published this piece — “Analytics and Big Data: The Skeptics vs. the...
by Mark O'Brien | Oct 27, 2015
People who know me understand I’m not clairvoyant. In fact, most people who know me don’t even think I’m particularly bright. But it took neither precognition nor perception to see this one coming: “Big Data Killed the Marketing Star”....
by Mark O'Brien | Oct 21, 2015
Four days ago, the buzzkills at The Atlantic ran a glass-half-empty article intended to scare the bejesus out of us: “Hangovers: They’re Costing the U.S. Economy”. (The reason for its intent is neither stated nor clear.) It shared the results of a...