Cookies for Cookies
Look, you hate marketers and advertisers hitting you with ads all day.
We get it. We marketers ruin everything.That’s why we’re here to negotiate with you, the consumer. This is our proposition.
Interested? Follow along.
“Marketers ruin EVERYTHING”
Gary Vaynerchuk
None of this is probably true and likely completely made up, but in the early days of the internet, we had banner ads. They were simple.
We wanted to display our ad on a website, and we paid for it.
Yo, that GeoCities site is trending bro, let’s put our ad to our totally legit dating site on it
The math was also simple. The person with the website would pick an arbitrary number between $1 — $100,000,000 and we’d counter over MSN or AIM and end up somewhere between $0.99 — $100,000,000.
If our hunch was right, the traffic comes through and we’d make cha-ching. If not then well, sucks to suck.
Then came the Cookies.
What a marvelous invention by really smart people to do really groundbreaking things that would’ve changed the course of humanity.
Of course, we marketers saw this as an opportunity to really see if our $100,000,000 was well spent.
Cookies (not to be confused with the consumable ones, which we will cover later) are basically the internet equivalent of gum. Once you step in it, it kinda sticks to you for a very long time.
It’s a bit more technical than that, but for the sake of time, let’s just assume it’s magic gum.
This magic gum/cookie sticks to you whenever you visit a website. It was intended to do cool things like help you remember your passwords or make sure that you were actually you.
Kind of like how when you walk into your local bar and the bartender knows you by name.
Christ Jimmy, it’s only 11 AM on a Monday. Again? Already? I’m not even stocked yet with that bottom shelf Tequila that you downed yesterday.
So we totally abused the latter part. Now we knew how many people visited our totally legit dating site whenever they click our ads. And website owners now knew how many people actually came to their website.
It was the golden era of internet marketing. Website owners and Marketers enjoyed peace symbolically.
Look Rick, you totally screwed me last time. That $100,000,000 ad deal for that piece of baloney website that you call ‘dank’ only has like 4.5 visitors! And 1.5 of them was your MOM!
Shortly after that, the term CPC (kuh-puh-kuh, or Cost per Click) emerged which began leveling the playing field.
CPC allowed for a fair-market valuation of the ad placement for both marketers and website owners. Whenever someone clicked on the ad, the website owner made money. And if nobody did, no harm no foul.
Everyone except Paul in Design who spent a week designing the ad banner pixel by pixel on MS Paint. He was really emotionally distraught.
CPM was also introduced around this time, but it’s really like the really weird cousin you have to deal with every holiday season. So for the sake of time, we’re going to skip this.
But then one day, a Johnny somewhere got smart and greedy and said:
What if I hire the best and brightest from Ivy League Schools as unpaid interns and entice them with Unlimited Energy Drinks and Free Pizza to sit around and click all the ads on my website over and over again with new cookies every time!
So Johnny probably is chilling in Monaco right now because he made out like a Pirate reaping the Booty. Other Lil Johnnies heard through the grapevine from disgruntled interns of Johnny’s success and aimed to replicate it.
During this time, different countries around the world came online. We can attribute this phenomena to World of Warcraft or WoW for short. Lil Johnnies found other interns around the world and promised them fame and fortune by doing the same thing.
This became known as Clickfarming.
It became so lucrative, that industrious parents around the world in rural agricultural regions invested in computers and got their children onto Clickfarming rather than traditional farming.
This became so rampant that advertisers were running out of money quickly, but the problem was that their numbers looked SO good.
Have you SEEN our Q1 Click Numbers? They’re somewhere north of 150,000,000,000 unique clicks! That’s more than the ENTIRE WORLD POPULATION. Amazing.
The solution: they had to raise capital.
So using this false information, they raised billions of dollars to continue pumping ad budgets. You may be asking yourself, “wait, where the hell is common sense in all of this?”
Remember, this was also the same time when Pets.com aired on the Super Bowl.
Consequently, and probably inevitably, this led to the 2000 Dot-Com Bubble and Recession.
When advertisers ran out of money to spend, Clickfarms all over the world were hurt because the dollars suddenly evaporated, and kids now had to go back to school or to the actual farm.
Fast forward a decade and a quarter or so — the economy’s finally back in swing and finally starting to embrace technology and the internet again.
This can be attributed to three unrelated things: World of Warcraft’s Expansion Packs, Bitcoin, and the iPhone. Not in that order.
The world’s going mobile and advertisers are starting to open our checkbooks to ‘internet marketing’ again. Somewhere along the way, Cookies were pumped with steroids and came out with super features that were widely embraced by Websites everywhere.
They could now see:
- how long you stay on a website
- where you’re visiting the website from
- what you do while you’re on the website
- link your website visits together
And a bunch of other privacy invasive stuff. Of course, as usual, as the Prophet Gary says:
“Marketers ruin EVERYTHING”
Gary Vaynerchuk
So we invented this ‘new age’ strategy called: Remarketing
Bill, what do we call this new idea we conceived. It’s kinda marketing, it’s kinda advertising, but it’s not really either one…
I don’t know… remarketing?
BRILLIANT. IT’S SO SIMPLE. YOU’RE HIRED.
… but I already work here.
Remarketing (or retargeting, whichever term you prefer) is simply using Cookies as a way to know who you are from a bazillion other people on the internet, and putting a different set of ads in front of you, either to recapture your interest or make you feel slightly more uncomfortable by saying we know what you looked at and we know you want it.
Say Betty, were you using my computer again to browse the internet again?
No Honey, why?
My Facebook feed is filled with ads for “Betty! Get Divorce Lawyers in Your Area! Quick Divorces in 24 hours!”
You can imagine how creative we can get. So we admit, we have a bit of a penchant to abuse good things. Between Remarketing, Pop-Up Banners, Pandora Ads, Instagram Ads, Poorly Designed Snapchat Filters, we’ve ruined quite a lot of things.
Apple’s latest move is to completely block Cookies on their devices and browsers!
This is heresy. Why is this a bad thing you might ask?
Because, we the marketers and advertisers of this world, fuel your selfie addiction. Think about the world without us for a second.
Without Advertisers, there would be no:
- YouTube
and probably a dozen or so of your favorite websites that you spend a ton of time on every day. And if you are saying to yourself, “Well, I’d just pay for the service instead of ads!”
Please. Look yourself in the mirror and say “I’d pay $10.00 a month to use Facebook” without laughing. We’ll wait.
Well, why don’t you just try to come up with something else! Yeah, sure, it only took us a decade to come up with remarketing.
And if you even suggest that we go back to the dark dark days of advertising without Cookies, let me remind you that the last time that happened, the economy collapsed. So you see — we’ve come to a stalemate with you. This is where the Cookie crumbles.
You don’t like us, but the world would be a bleak filter-less place without us.
If you’re ready to come to the negotiating table, this is our best offer. No counter-offers. No rebuttals or this deal goes stale. It’s a take it or leave it scenario. We’re all in on this one.
Cookies for Cookies.
Literal Fresh-Baked Cookies for Imaginary Internet Cookies.
Are you kidding?
Would we be here if we are?
So here’s how it works. Obviously you as the internet denizen of the world, generate some economic value to us. Your attention that you give us is worth something to us and our shareholders.
We could pay you to look at our ads, but that gets really messy with exchange rates and inflation and all that.
A Literal Consumable Cookie however, is inflation-free, recession-proof, and has economic value.
If you compare it to this chart with Girl Scout Cookie prices over time, you can see that Cookies actually gain economic value predictably and consistently. Try to get those returns in the Stock Market.
Best of all: You can eat it.
So we both agree that Cookies for Cookies is a fair economic exchange on both sides. We keep churning the internet gears that fuel your life, and in return, warm delicious cookies keep your stomach fueled and hopefully not churning.
To logistically make this work, we will work with local bakeries and sweet Grandmothers all over the world to build a network of cookie bakers. Every month, in allowing us to keep our Cookies, you get to receive new fresh baked Cookies.
The more that you deliver to us in economic value with our Cookie, the more physical Cookies you receive.
It’s actually quite simple.
However, the road ahead is quite long, treacherous, and unforgiving. To make this a reality, we will need to utilize a tool from our abusive uncle’s toolshed, the Network Marketer’s pyramid.
If you share this with 4 people, and they share this with 4 people, and those people share that with 4 people, very soon, we will be able to reach even the very chill Monks in Mongolia.
This is Our Call to Action
Let’s make this dream a reality.
In the comments below, we need PEOPLE, ADVERTISERS, and BAKERS.
- If you are a BAKER, please comment: “I’m Baked”
- If you are a PEOPLE, please comment: “I’ve read the terms and conditions”
- If you are an ADVERTISER, please comment: “Please allow us our daily cookie to not repeat the mistakes of the past”
With enough momentum, we hope to share this valuable data and research with our shareholders and raise capital to acquire Pepperidge Farms and Girl Scout Cookies Brand to begin the process of vertical integration that’s currently fragmented state of the advertising industry.
Thank you for your time and consideration,
A Marketer
