Archive for November 4th, 2011

C’mon man: A college course on Jay-Z ???

November 4, 2011

You just can’t make this stuff up.

Parents are shelling out about $5,000 in tuition money so their kids can probe the deep thoughts of rapper Jay-Z.

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Excerpted from Wash Post : Jay-Z 101

Rapper Jay-Z is now being examined in the ivory towers of academia.

One of the most popular courses at Georgetown is — SOCI-124-01 “Sociology of Hip-Hop — Urban Theodicy of Jay-Z.”

Prof. Michael Eric Dyson asks:  “What’s the intellectual, theological, philosophical predicate for Jay-Z’s argument?”

He says that Jay-Z’s work has proved to be powerful, effective and influential. And it’s time to wrestle with it.”

When the class reached its 80-student enrollment cap the first week of the semester, Dyson relocated to a bigger room that could seat 140 students. That’s the official head count, anyway.

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Tell me again why we’re behind in math & science …

Thanks to JMH for feeding the lead.

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Forget demographics … segment markets based on buying behavior.

November 4, 2011

TakeAway: MasterCard and Visa are entering the business of market research by tracking online purchases and using the info to identify market segments and target them.

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Excerpt From WSJ: “Using Credit Cards to Target Web Ads”

Visa  and MasterCard are using what they know about people’s credit-card purchases for targeting them with ads online.

This strategy is a technological feat: tying people’s Internet lives with shopping activities.

Some of the ideas, for instance, a weight-loss ad to a person who just swiped their card at a fast-food chain — then track whether that person bought the advertised products.

Currently, Web ads generally are based on a person’s online behavior but not information tied to his or her identity or activities in the brick-and-mortar world.

“There is a lot of data out there, but there is not a lot of data based on actual purchase transactions. We are taking it a level deeper…it is a much more precise targeting mechanism.”

MasterCard is pursuing a plan to sell marketers an analysis of anonymous, aggregated data sorted into marketing “segments,” such as people with a high propensity to be interested in international travel.

Visa is also currently pitching the ability to use cardholders’ anonymous buying histories, in aggregate, to tailor the ads people see online.

That would let advertisers, for instance, show cat-grooming offers to people in one area, and dog-grooming ads to people somewhere else, based on the group buying behavior in the areas as a whole.

Edit by ARK

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