Marketing Mad Scientist – Kevin Lee
type: channel
description: My businesses, investments, nonprofits / philanthropy, passions, activities and life.
date: 2026-05-06T23:15:55Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
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items: Alternative DAF platforms enabling for‑profit impact: Invest with your Donor Advised Fund
items: Large Google Advertisers Demand Justice via Mass Arbitration for Ad Spend Recovery
items: are-llm-based-chat-bots-vulnerable-to-seo-spam-given-the-probabilistic-nature-of-their-responses-if-a-particular-element-of-information-is-corroborated-many-times-across-the-crawlable-web-does-it-inf
items: The duplicate content bonus
items: Journalists who eclipse their employers
items: Protected: Missed Opportunity, QRs for improved response & tracking
items: That time I tried to buy Gawker.com out of bankruptcy
items: PR, Create The Story, Share Your Stardom
items: The reason I invested in Boatbound which became Boatsetter
items: Hack the Eisenhower Decision Matrix with “Time”

Alternative DAF platforms enabling for‑profit impact: Invest with your Donor Advised Fund
type: item
creator: kevin lee
date: 2026-05-02T21:02:16Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Several specialized donor-advised fund (DAF) platforms now enable donors to make for‑profit, impact‑oriented investments in much the same way LOHAS and Realize Impact do, Alternative DAF platforms enabling for‑profit impact LOHAS – Provides DAFs that can invest in any private‑sector impact company, fund, or even entertainment production with an impact thesis, explicitly positioning itself as […]
encoded: Several specialized donor-advised fund (DAF) platforms now enable donors to make for‑profit, impact‑oriented investments in much the same way LOHAS and Realize Impact do, Alternative DAF platforms enabling for‑profit impact LOHAS – Provides DAFs that can invest in any private‑sector impact company, fund, or even entertainment production with an impact thesis, explicitly positioning itself as an alternative to “traditional” DAFs that restrict impact investing in for‑profit ventures. Realize Impact (PHIGs) – Operates as an intermediary that works with any existing DAF. Donors recommend an impact investment; Realize Impact does diligence, makes the debt/equity/revenue‑based investment, and donates 99% of the returns back to the donor’s recommended DAF or other nonprofit for redeployment. RSF Social Finance – Double Impact DAF program – Allows DAF holders (even at other sponsoring institutions) to move idle, ungranted DAF assets into RSF’s Social Investment Fund, which provides customized financing to social enterprises regenerating communities and the planet. Community foundations using PRIs (e.g., East Bay Community Foundation) – Some community foundations now allow DAF holders to recommend program‑related investments (PRIs) from their DAFs into nonprofits, for‑profit businesses, or even individuals, as long as these investments further the foundation’s mission (for example, a Kaiser Permanente DAF loan of 5M USD to support affordable housing). Specialized independent sponsors and advisors – Research from Social Finance and others documents a growing field of sponsors and advisors experimenting with impact‑first DAF offerings and advisor‑managed impact portfolios, responding to donor demand for impact investing options. These players collectively demonstrate that DAF capital can go beyond traditional grantmaking to finance market‑based solutions with clear social and environmental goals. Donor‑advised funds have become one of the fastest‑growing tools in philanthropy,…

Large Google Advertisers Demand Justice via Mass Arbitration for Ad Spend Recovery
type: item
creator: kevin lee
date: 2026-04-18T03:25:27Z
subject: Business
description: The Quiet Reckoning: Large Advertisers Pursue Mass Arbitration Against Google for Ad Spend Recovery Thousands of companies that spent millions or billions of dollars on Google advertising over the last ten-years are now quietly mobilizing to recover what they believe were unlawful overcharges, and the scale of potential damages is staggering. Led by Chicago-based law […]
encoded: The Quiet Reckoning: Large Advertisers Pursue Mass Arbitration Against Google for Ad Spend Recovery Thousands of companies that spent millions or billions of dollars on Google advertising over the last ten-years are now quietly mobilizing to recover what they believe were unlawful overcharges, and the scale of potential damages is staggering. Led by Chicago-based law firm Keller Postman, a growing mass arbitration effort is targeting Google for monopolistic pricing in both search and display advertising, with total potential claims estimated to exceed $218 billion based on current data )mid-April 2026). For larger advertisers, those spending $5 million or more annually, this is not just a legal formality. It is a rare opportunity to claw back years of inflated ad costs that industry observers, agree with me were both systematic and preventable .latimes Running an agency (Didit) and in my role with the eMarketing Association I”ve concierged in over $1 Billion in claims myself. The Legal Foundation The mass arbitration cases do not start from scratch. They rest squarely on the shoulders of two landmark federal antitrust rulings against Google. In 2024, two separate U.S. federal judges adjudicated that Google had illegally monopolized the online search advertising market and the sell-side ad technology market, finding the company had abused its dominant position to artificially inflate prices paid by advertisers. Attorney Ashley Keller, whose firm Keller Postman has previously won mass arbitration cases against DoorDash, Postmates, and Intuit, stated plainly: “Two federal judges have already adjudicated Google to be a monopolist. It seems sensible to seek redress.”adexchanger+2 Because Google’s advertiser contracts contain mandatory arbitration clauses that block class-action lawsuits, Keller Postman pursued the mass arbitration model instead. Under this structure, 25 or more similar claims are pooled together, dramatically shifting leverage toward claimants and increa…

are-llm-based-chat-bots-vulnerable-to-seo-spam-given-the-probabilistic-nature-of-their-responses-if-a-particular-element-of-information-is-corroborated-many-times-across-the-crawlable-web-does-it-inf
type: item
title: Are LLM based chat bots vulnerable to SEO spam given the probabilistic nature of their responses? If a particular element of information is corroborated many times across the crawlable web does it influence results?
creator: kevin lee
date: 2025-02-22T02:52:09Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: The Vulnerability of LLM-Based Chatbots to SEO Spam and Corroborated Information Influence Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized conversational AI, but their probabilistic foundations and reliance on web-scale training data raise critical questions about susceptibility to search engine optimization (SEO) spam manipulation. This report analyzes how the statistical nature of LLM text […]
encoded: The Vulnerability of LLM-Based Chatbots to SEO Spam and Corroborated Information Influence Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized conversational AI, but their probabilistic foundations and reliance on web-scale training data raise critical questions about susceptibility to search engine optimization (SEO) spam manipulation. This report analyzes how the statistical nature of LLM text generation interacts with modern SEO tactics, particularly examining whether repeated information patterns across the web disproportionately influence chatbot outputs. Foundations of LLM Vulnerability to Content Manipulation Probabilistic Generation and SEO Spam Synergies LLMs generate responses by predicting token sequences based on learned statistical patterns from training data813. This mechanism creates inherent vulnerability to SEO spam techniques designed to dominate specific linguistic patterns across the web. When spam content saturates particular semantic spaces through keyword stuffing, topic clustering, and synthetic content generation, LLMs’ next-token prediction systems become statistically inclined to reproduce these patterns111. Google’s Webmaster Guidelines explicitly classify purely algorithmic content generation as spam19, but the decentralized nature of web content makes complete spam filtration impossible. A 2024 study demonstrated that duplicating just 0.1% of training data 100 times degraded model performance equivalent to halving model capacity8, suggesting even limited spam penetration could disproportionately influence outputs. This effect compounds when multiple spam operators target the same keywords or entities, creating artificial corroboration at web scale1113. Training Data Contamination Pathways Modern LLM training pipelines ingest trillions of tokens from web crawls, forum posts, and digital archives where SEO-optimized content prevalence exceeds 30% in commercial verticals911. Unlike traditional search algorithms that wei…

The duplicate content bonus
type: item
creator: kevin lee
date: 2025-02-09T20:55:22Z
subject: Marketing
subject: SEO
description: Since Google’s early algorithm changes made to fight SEO spam, the issue of duplicate content has been on the radar of content and SEO professionals. Re-posting ore re–syndication of the same or similar content had risks associated with it. Oddly, now naturally occurring duplicate content is informing LLMs about businesses and individuals and their specialties. […]
encoded: Since Google’s early algorithm changes made to fight SEO spam, the issue of duplicate content has been on the radar of content and SEO professionals. Re-posting ore re–syndication of the same or similar content had risks associated with it. Oddly, now naturally occurring duplicate content is informing LLMs about businesses and individuals and their specialties. Perhaps we are in an era of the duplicate content bonus.

Journalists who eclipse their employers
type: item
creator: kevin lee
date: 2025-02-04T06:07:59Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Below is a short list of well-known broadcast journalists who (at least on a major platform like Twitter) have built a larger personal following than the main account of the network or program that employs (or recently employed) them. Social media numbers, of course, change over time, so consider these snapshots rather than static facts. […]
encoded: Below is a short list of well-known broadcast journalists who (at least on a major platform like Twitter) have built a larger personal following than the main account of the network or program that employs (or recently employed) them. Social media numbers, of course, change over time, so consider these snapshots rather than static facts. 1. Rachel Maddow Employer: MSNBC Rachel Maddow’s Twitter: ~10+ million followers MSNBC’s Twitter: ~5–6 million followers Rachel Maddow, host of The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, has a notably larger Twitter following than MSNBC’s main Twitter account. 2. Piers Morgan Most Recent UK Employer: ITV (when hosting Good Morning Britain), currently with TalkTV in the UK Piers Morgan’s Twitter: ~8+ million followers Good Morning Britain’s Twitter: ~1 million followers TalkTV’s Twitter: ~150k–200k followers (approx.) While not always classified as a traditional “hard news” anchor, Piers Morgan has nonetheless been a high-profile broadcaster (CNN in the US, ITV in the UK, TalkTV) whose personal social media following outstrips that of the shows/networks that have employed him. 3. Jorge Ramos Employer: Univision Jorge Ramos’s Twitter: ~4+ million followers Univision’s Twitter: ~3+ million followers Jorge Ramos, a prominent Spanish-language news anchor, is arguably the face of Univision for many viewers—yet on Twitter, his personal account typically has a larger following than the main Univision handle. Why This Is Relatively Rare Major news networks (e.g., CNN, Fox News, ABC, NBC) tend to have tens of millions of followers across platforms, making it difficult for an individual journalist to surpass the overall corporate brand’s reach. It’s more common to see an individual journalist exceed the social media following of a specific show’s account or a local affiliate’s handle rather than the entire network. Examples of “close but not quite” cases: Anderson Cooper has 10+ million followers on Twitter, but CNN’s primary handle has over 60 million.…

Protected: Missed Opportunity, QRs for improved response & tracking
type: item
creator: kevin lee
date: 2025-01-07T06:41:59Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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That time I tried to buy Gawker.com out of bankruptcy
type: item
creator: kevin
date: 2020-01-04T22:48:00Z
subject: Cause Marketing
description: After generating over $8 million for nonprofits with We-Care.com’s cause marketing powered shopping I developed aa technology that would facilitate cause marketing powered content. So, I tried to buy Gawker.com out of the bankruptcy in January of 2018. Got a ton of press and almost got it. My winning bid was invalidated due to someone’s […]
encoded: After generating over $8 million for nonprofits with We-Care.com’s cause marketing powered shopping I developed aa technology that would facilitate cause marketing powered content. So, I tried to buy Gawker.com out of the bankruptcy in January of 2018. Got a ton of press and almost got it. My winning bid was invalidated due to someone’s tortious interference in the court’s eyes. The concept was that instead of content creators allowing ad revenue to flow to Zuckerberg, ByteDance, Google (YouTube) and Twitter (x) that revenue would flow to nonprofits.

PR, Create The Story, Share Your Stardom
type: item
creator: kevin lee
date: 2019-02-07T05:56:00Z
subject: Business
description: I really loved the Dunewood Fire Island oceanfront house that we built shortly after Sandy. Yet the time came in 2018 to put the house up for sale for a variety of reasons. Despite the house being a stunning architectural digest quality house, both my internal PR team at Didit, a long island marketing agency, […]
encoded: I really loved the Dunewood Fire Island oceanfront house that we built shortly after Sandy. Yet the time came in 2018 to put the house up for sale for a variety of reasons. Despite the house being a stunning architectural digest quality house, both my internal PR team at Didit, a long island marketing agency, and my good friend Peter Shankman educated me that I should pitch the larger story and have the house be part of the story. Even better, find myself a co-star in the story pitches, and tune the pitch to the periodical. So, rather than try to get the written about the house I looked at who I could pitch at the periodicals I wanted. Here’s how I did given my objective was to try to get press coverage for the house in the following periodicals NY Times – strike out NY Post – Tour the funkiest houses on Fire Island Wall Street Journal – A New York Weekend Island Retreat Gets Fancy Newsday – strike out Not bad, two out of four. And in both articles, I made the island itself, and my architect Eric Schiller the co-star in the story That’s how to do PR. <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" width="769" height="1024" src="https://kevinlee.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/post-fi-769x1024.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-108" srcset="https://kevinlee.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/post-fi-769x1024.jpg 769w, https://kevinlee.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/post-fi-225x300.jpg 225w, https://kevinlee.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/post-fi-768x1022.jpg 768w, https://kevinlee.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/post-fi.jpg 788w" sizes="(max-width: 769px) 100vw, 769px" />

The reason I invested in Boatbound which became Boatsetter
type: item
creator: kevin lee
date: 2016-06-12T20:52:00Z
subject: Marketing
description: I was pitched on the concept of Air BnB for boats. I saw in the Bay Shore marina that I was a heavy boat user, taking it back and forth to my Fire Island house in Dunewood. (since sold) The premise made sense especially given the umbrella insurance coverage that had been procured.
encoded: I was pitched on the concept of Air BnB for boats. I saw in the Bay Shore marina that I was a heavy boat user, taking it back and forth to my Fire Island house in Dunewood. (since sold) The premise made sense especially given the umbrella insurance coverage that had been procured. <img decoding="async" width="1024" height="768" src="https://kevinlee.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/20160616_202141-1024x768.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-151" srcset="https://kevinlee.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/20160616_202141-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https://kevinlee.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/20160616_202141-300x225.jpg 300w, https://kevinlee.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/20160616_202141-768x576.jpg 768w, https://kevinlee.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/20160616_202141-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://kevinlee.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/20160616_202141-2048x1536.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> <img decoding="async" width="768" height="1024" data-id="155" src="https://kevinlee.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/20181114_143151-768x1024.png" alt="" class="wp-image-155" srcset="https://kevinlee.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/20181114_143151-768x1023.png 768w, https://kevinlee.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/20181114_143151-225x300.png 225w, https://kevinlee.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/20181114_143151.png 800w" sizes="(max-width: 768px) 100vw, 768px" /> <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="768" height="1024" data-id="156" src="https://kevinlee.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/20181114_143238-768x1024.png" alt="" class="wp-image-156" srcset="https://kevinlee.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/20181114_143238-768x1023.png 768w, https://kevinlee.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/20181114_143238-225x300.png 225w, https://kevinlee.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/20181114_143238.png 800w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 768px) 100vw, 768px" /> <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="768" height="1024" data-id="157" src="https://kevinlee.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/20181114_14…

Hack the Eisenhower Decision Matrix with “Time”
type: item
creator: kevin lee
date: 2015-07-13T19:16:00Z
subject: Business
description: Steven Covey popularized the “Eisenhower Decision Matrix” to help people plan out their day and their projects. The EDM was derived from a famous remark made by General Eisenhower: “What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.” But the Eisenhower Decision Matrix is a great tool to use for prioritizing […]
encoded: Steven Covey popularized the “Eisenhower Decision Matrix” to help people plan out their day and their projects. The EDM was derived from a famous remark made by General Eisenhower: “What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.” But the Eisenhower Decision Matrix is a great tool to use for prioritizing resources in any marketing campaign you’re running, or even overall marketing tasks. It can keep your team on track and avoid the chaos that can appear when everyone is running around “putting out fires.” The Eisenhower Decision Matrix has four quadrants mapping the urgency of tasks against their overall importance to the business: Urgent tasks/Important tasks Non-urgent tasks/Important tasks Urgent tasks/Unimportant tasks Non-urgent tasks/Unimportant tasks I add time as the third Z dimension. I’ve even hacked the Eisenhower Decision Matrix by adding a third dimension within each quadrant, in particular the first quadrant. The additional dimension I like to use when deciding prioritization within quadrants is Difficulty/Ease or fast vs long projects. I’ll provide more on why that can be a helpful factor to consider later on. First let’s talk about each quadrant in detail: Quadrant 1: Urgent tasks/Important tasks Unfortunately Quadrant 1 is where many of us marketers spend too much of our time. An ad is broken, a site is down, a mail piece is misprinted, or a client is unhappy. The result is an “all hands-on-deck “full court press” effort to clear the emergency and get back to some semblance of normality. The costs of having yourself — or your staff – spending a lot of time in Quadrant 1 is burnout, turnover, and a work environment where everything is always at DEFCON 1. In project management, being in Quadrant 1 is known as “crashing the time” and it’s a state to be avoided at all costs because mistakes are so often made while in it. You and your team will inevitably have to spend a considerable amount of your time in Quadrant 1, because b…