So I’m sitting in a pub in Notting Hill with three friends, one old, two new, all three “in the business”. The two new friends don’t have all my history and the old friend encourages me to tell the story of my layoff from a big company back in the late 90’s.

One of my big complaints about this company, and many companies for that matter, is that they go to layoffs too quickly, and blindly at that. Instead of cutting programs that haven’t made money for years, they make broad cuts so as not to take out people with “history”.

In this case, what drove me nuts about this layoff was that I got the axe (of course, that drives anyone nuts), and some people who hadn’t made the company money in years got to stay. I named names, because the old friend knew who they were, and referred them as two people that were hanging on to “dead tree media”.

Two of the three looked up, and went for the web browser built into their phones… they were checking if the domain name “deadtreemedia.com” was available.  It was, but for some reason, no one could check out from any of the domain registrars, so they gave up.

Later that day, after a few more pints, I gave it a try… and, from what you can see, it worked.

Now, what am I going to do with this great domain? I’m going to add to the myriad of advertising blogs out there of course.

I did think it through a bit (I had some time on the train between site seeing), and decided my unique selling point for this blog will be “a longtime interactive marketer, complains about traditional marketing”.

That should do me for awhile… until someone figures out what a cool domain this is and offers me a pile of cash so I can retire.

Thoughts? jeff@deadtreemedia.com

J.