Change management is the issue, not meeting management. I worked for an agency who hired productivity consultants[1] to help with meetings, email, and time management. I thought it was a very courageous choice. It’s extremely hard to measure the impact of this type of engagement, and some people hated it. The system was good though.

I got a ton out of it. I took their suggestions. I’ve tried many productivity systems but theirs seems to be the only one that stuck (other than GTD).

Full disclosure: they sent me a Starbucks gift card for being a stan

[1] https://doublegemini.com/

I do web analytics consulting. One of my first projects at a digital marketing agency in 2021 was investigating weird traffic patterns for a global logistics firm. The findings are summarized in this blog post[1].

Bot traffic has been an issue for years. It has given rise to a new cottage industry of ad fraud detection services, none of which I’ve found particularly valuable. It always comes down to “so what do we do about it?” and no one seems to know how to get bots to stop viewing or clicking on paid media placements. Consumers use Google search and are on FB, IG, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc., and there aren’t really competing ad networks with “fewer bots”. So they keep buying fake traffic knowing that a significant chunk of it is invalid.

I don’t see anything changing unless big tech companies making billions in ad revenue have a large enough incentive to do so. At the moment they have plenty of incentives to keep things as they are.

“Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” - John Wanamaker

[1] https://jimalytics.com/industry/youre-buying-bots-an-inconve...

I'd suggest legislation. It's like when hotels or rental car companies tack on additional fees and consumers hate it but don't have much incentive to cooperate to change it. Consumers don't unionize much, but maybe we should?

But maybe not legislation, because it might upset a ton of people. Any time a social media site goes through and seems to get rid of bots, people complain about how many "followers" they've lost. The fake user/clicker situation is quite pervasive, and a lot of parties, not just the advertising networks, benefit from the inflated numbers.

But it can be so insidious..."wow, that video got 1M YouTube views? Must be very popular!" Orrrr a lot of those views were from bots? Who knows?

So maybe a better approach than legislation is to talk about how the ad/bot fraud can both help us and hurt us and not demonize one side but see how we all may be implicated in it somehow. Maybe that will help us to be more aware of the problem and not fight against people, but try to work together to solve it.

Given that Wanamaker died in 1922 it’s safe to say his quote was in the context of a different problem entirely (which still exists, on top of the bot issue). Maybe it’s time to update to “three fourths”?