AS YOU LIKE IT. Life tailored to your wishes (and your wallet).

Get the information you want. Porter Airlines recently offered to finance a study about the impact of increased air traffic at its Toronto hub.

Hmm, let’s see now. Would you trust a study about the impact of crack, financed by your local drug dealer? How about the stuff in “promoted tweets”? Or in Facebook’s “sponsored stories”? Hard to tell hard facts from paid facts nowadays.  So educate yourself and attend the PAID CONTENT Conference in New York, 17 May. 

 

For one thing, you can update your vocabulary. Remember the term “admen”?  They are now called the ATTENTION INDUSTRY. Remember infomercials? They are now called NATIVE ADVERTISING. And it’s not about profit, says Tumblr founder David Karp. Not at all. That METRIC is of no importance! (Globe & Mail, 26 April)  Oh, sorry. I totally misinterpreted the motives of the Attention Industry, but now I get it.  They are into relationships – the PERPETUAL DIGITAL RELATIONSHIP with their customers. For other buzzwords check out: event.giga.com/paid content.

Get the big wedding you want without the expense normally associated with it. If that METRIC is important to you, I suggest you invite friends, colleagues, and family to a pre-wedding fundraiser (formerly known as a wedding shower). And

Get the style of bump you want. Choose between trashy and classy -- between Kim Kardashian’s in-your-face clingy outfits and Kate Middleton’s barely-there haute couture dresses. If you prefer the latter and care about THE METRIC, why not introduce a pregnancy fundraiser? The schedule will be tight, mind you. You’ll have to squeeze it in between wedding and pre-birth fund raisers (formerly known as baby showers).

Get the reputation you want. After the building collapse which killed 600 people, the Bangladesh garment industry is facing a severe crisis. They need to learn to MANAGE better (Globe & Mail, 30 April). And we are not talking about safety and building codes, silly. We are talking about MANAGING their image. I suggest reps of the Bangladesh garment industry visit the Paid Content Conference for creative ideas. Promoted tweets are an excellent option – Long and elaborate lies may be tricky, but 140 characters are a MANAGEABLE length.  You could quote Finance Minister Abdul Muhit’s explanation that the disaster was NOT REALLY SERIOUS….IT HAPPENS EVERYWHERE (South China Morning Post, 4 May).

Get the food you want with Gwynneth Paltrow’s latest cookbook It’s All True, which involves cutting out coffee, bread, and alcohol. Oh wait – that IS the food I want! I may have to cut out Gwyneth Paltrow.