Just because you can doesn’t mean you should

For years, you’ve been unable to do something.  Then new technology comes along – and suddenly you can.  So you do.

It’s an entirely human instinct - but not one to be thoughtlessly followed.  It’s unwise to assume that just because you’re now free to do something from which you were previously debarred, it must be in your interest to grab it.  It ain’t necessarily so.

Ever since the advent of mass media, marketing people have bemoaned their lack of precision.   ‘I know that half the money I spend on advertising is wasted.  The only trouble is that I don’t know which half’ is a hoary old saying that has no undisputed source, no historical validation and is almost certainly apocryphal.  The fact that it survives at all is evidence of the marketing world’s continuing uneasiness about what is seen as ‘waste’. 

You sell, say, disposable diapers. You buy, say, 30 seconds’ worth of UK television time.  You reach, say, 10 million households.  Yet there are only 2.5 million UK households that include babies of...