Something I Learned Yesterday

If you look up “bathtub effect,” you’ll find quite an array of different ways the bathtub has been used as a mental model for one thing or another. 

Today I want to relate the bathtub effect to marketing attribution

Imagine you’re the marketing expert at a local law firm. You rent a booth at local events. You advertise in the local paper. You hand out flyers. You send emails. You ask your current clients to tell their friends about...

How do you know which part of your marketing is helping you? That’s an old problem, and over the years people have tried various methods for solving it. 

Let’s say you publish “Carrot weekly” – the ultimate guide for carrot farmers. You find several sites that should attract your target audience, and you run ads on those sites. Then you create a simple marketing funnel: views, clicks, purchases. 

At a simple level, you don’t know w...

Your attention determines what you'll learn in life.

I have a friend who quotes some ancient theologian to the effect that “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” 

What does that mean? 

I think I can illustrate it with a story about zucchini bread. 

When I was 17 or 18 I was driving a friend to college in Pennsylvania. This would have been at the end of the summer or in the early Fall. On the trip, she mentioned ...

Publishers spend a lot of time and money developing their own brand image, which can include typography, colors, logos, and stylized art. Think of the dot-matrix images in The Wall Street Journal, or the art on the cover of Mad Magazine. 

My friend Paul Gerbino posted an article about content licensing, which made me wonder if you lose those things when your content is licensed. More on that below, but that idea got me thinking abo...

One of the challenges of building a tech stack is that there are always overlaps in functionality. For example, your customer data platform and your email service provider might both be able to manage customer journeys, or you might be able to push data to your reporting tool from your data warehouse or from your CDP. 

From an efficiency standpoint, it seems that it would be nice to avoid such duplication in functions. I’m not on b...

Bo Sacks recently distributed an article titled, “A tech sector dedicated to boiling things down has raised temperatures in some quarters of the publishing world.” 

“Boiling things down” in this case means making summaries. 

Blinkest, Bookey, getAbstract, and other services make it easy to get the gist of the latest hot business book. You don’t have to read the 500 page monstrosity. 

It sounds like a great thing. My own experience ...

This is an off-brand show on some similarities between religion and business -- specifically, how a hierarchical society creates a chain of values that all point to the ultimate set of values.

In other words, if everyone in the society is only looking to their own tribe for moral values, you'll have a fractured society.

The same would be true for a business. You need to align the entire business towards a common goal.

Religi...

Here’s another quote from Amanda Landsaw’s talk at MACMA Industry Day. 

“Stay on top of inactivity in the database. If a known audience member has not visited in a certain number of days, send an email.” 

I’ve seen a surprising indifference to this sort of analysis. It’s surprising because everyone knows the old saying that it’s easier to keep a customer than get a customer, which means we should be spending a lot of effort on keep...

At MACMA Industry Day last week, Amanda Landsaw said “flyby visitors don’t create robust databases.” There’s a lot to unpack in that statement. Let’s start with these flyby visitors. Some people like to judge websites by traffic volume. Lots of traffic being a good thing. But most traffic at most websites is of the one and done variety. They happen upon your site for some random reason and they never, or at least very rarely, c...

How can I find the right laces and polish for my shoes? 

Have you ever measured the length of the laces in your shoes? They’re almost never the same length or weave or thickness as the replacement laces you can buy at the drugstore. 

Same with the polish. The color of your brown dress shoes is never the same as commercially available brown polishes. 

This is an opportunity for an enterprising shoe store. 

I used to work in a shoe s...

Imagine you’re in a movie theater watching Dune Part 2. Down in the bottom right quadrant of the screen is an ad for a different movie. The movie and the ad are vying for your attention. Your eyes keep flipping back and forth. You can’t follow either of them. 

Or imagine you’re watching Gilligan’s Island and there’s this weird floaty image of a bar of soap moving around the screen. It’s on the right, then it’s on the left, then it ...

Here’s a tricky thing about Customer Data Platforms. 

On the one hand, you want to import all your customer data. That’s the point, right? You want one place where you can have all your customer data – where you can clean things up, create activations, do analysis, run reports, and so on. 

On the other hand, CDPs are often tied very closely to website campaigns, and that can create a problem because some people have a hard time rem...

The connection between writing and design is one of the issues raised in “Lessons on Branding from the World’s Most Iconic Cold,” distributed last night by Bo Sacks. The cold in this case was one in Frank Sinatra’s nose. 

I can’t draw worth a darn, and I’m not much of a designer. I think this is because I can’t call up images in my mind as well as other people can. For example, I know what a horse looks like, but when I try to call...

I like the people vs. algorithms podcast. It’s an entertaining mix of insight and quirky personalities. The interactions between Alex, Troy and Brian are amusing. 

In today’s podcast I’m going to talk about two things from two recent episodes. 

One of the big conflicts in publishing today is what constitutes “fair use.” AI goes around slurping up everybody’s content on the assumption that they have the right to do that. 

In episode...

It is possible to get more balanced answers from AI, but you have to work at it 

In my morning email I saw that Bo Sacks distributed an article about getting AI to behave. I was hoping the author would address the behavior problem I see, but … alas not. 

There’s a serious problem with AI that doesn't get nearly enough attention. All the results you get from AI are filtered through a woke superego. That isn’t a surprise at all. ...

I’ve mentioned the Pareto principle before. It’s one of those odd quirks about life that sticks with you. It says that 20 percent of causes bring about 80 percent of effects. So 20 percent of your advertising brings in 80 percent of your ad revenue. 20 percent of basketball players score 80 percent of the points. 20 percent of authors sell 80 percent of the books. And on it goes. 

It immediately raises the question, “why not just d...

“Recommended for you” is a successful strategy for engagement and for sales. Amazon recommends products I might want. Spotify recommends music I might like. They both do a pretty good job. They find people who have similar buying or listening habits to me, and see what’s popular with that group.

Content websites do the same. I believe it started with “related articles.” You’d read an article and there would be a link at the b...

It’s very interesting that while Dune is making a killing in the box office, the very thing Dune warns against is happening all around us. The movie doesn’t do a good job of explaining the most important background to the Dune universe, which is the Butlerian Jihad, when humans rebelled against their computer overlords and created a strict prohibition against creating a thinking machine. 

There were no computers on Arrakis because ...

Magazines will occupy a shrinking place in the public’s reading habits, but there are still opportunities

Bo Sacks distributed an article about how magazines could thrive in the digital age, which got me thinking about that subject. I have some clients who publish magazines, so it’s relevant to me.

Let’s start with a definition of “magazine.” It’s a periodical publication that includes a collection of articles on a variety of top...