pre-commerce is “buying stuff that doesn’t exist yet”.

In more grown-up words, it’s a framework for companies to cheaply establish market demand for a new product idea and acquire the cash flow to produce it.

Pre-commerce is the retail industry answer to the startup industry “MVP” methodology. In Silicon Valley and its extended kingdom, the MVP or Minimum Viable Product is a method used by budding entrepreneurs to evaluate their ideas in a cheap and risk-free manner.

email is a powerful communications medium, and mass email campaigns are a necessary component of doing business on the internet. And even though email marketing is so often a mass medium, it’s possible to make your campaigns feel more personal (or at the very least, more intelligently targeted).

But insincerity masquerading as personalization, however well-intentioned, is jarring.

And anecdotally, I was told last night
a) that it’s commonplace for people with lots of followers on Pinterest to be offered money to pin certain items;
b) that such offers are frequently accepted;
c) that such “sponsored pins”, for lack of a better word, are almost never disclosed as such.

This bothers me; it feels as though it’s advertising dressed up as editorial.