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I’ve said it before, but here’s someone else saying it:

Boring is the worst thing your brand can be.

via Inc

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How do you maximize your ads’ ROI?

Better creative.

Creative quality is the primary lever we have left for targeting and the only aspect of advertising truly left within our control as marketers.

The magic doesn’t come from button pressing and knob twisting in an ads dashboard. It comes from great ads that are noticeable, memorable, and cause an emotional response that drives action.

Obsess about your brand’s creative.

via Demand Curve

Chart showing what factors multiply advertising profitability. Brand size has the biggest impact at 20x. Followed by Creative Quality at 12x and Budget Setting Across Geographies at 5x. Descending from there are budget setting across portfolios, multi-media, brand performance, budget setting across variants, cost / product seasonality, laydown / phasing, and target audience.
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Stanley is trying to dial back the drops frenzy by borrowing a page from the Taylor Swift playbook and getting people to sign up for the chance purchase a new product when it drops.

What goes into the screening process?

browser signals, location signals, fraud analysis, cohort signals and “assessing basically who looks like a real fan and who is using automation or otherwise to game the system,”
…
A red flag, for example, would be when the system detects that far too many people are entering from one IP address.

A lot of data science to sell an insulated straw cup.

via CNN

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Another Podcast’s episode Google Gemini and AI bias unpacks the weights and training data stuff I briefly mentioned yesterday.

Hidden patterns in data and models as bias amplifiers.

Also the excellent quote “the fake is in the caption,” because what is a prompt but a caption for a future image?

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I’m a big pedal steel fan, so when Jason Isbell started talking about it on the Broken Record podcast I took note.

The pedals are so small, and they’re so close together, that if you don’t wear the right kind of shoes you’ll accidentally hit more than one pedal at a time. So this is why pedal steel is a true cowboy instrument, because cowboy boots are what you wear in order to be able to hit just one pedal at a time.

Pedal steel (a key country music instrument) also has a learning curve.

What are the pedal steels and cowboy boots of what you’re trying to do? Are you using the right ones?

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From episode three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs:

Once you give a collection of things a name—the way people’s minds work—they start thinking because those things share a name, they’re the same kind of thing.

Names and genres and labels matter.

The human brain is designed to pattern match and categorize and bucket and metaphor to save on processing power.

(Neural networks are designed to do this for AI models via weights.)

In grocery aisles, “water company” usually means plastic bottles—it’s what shoppers expect. Liquid Death smashes that expectation, so it stands out.

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Finished reading: The Last Horse: Prologue by Aaron Tucker 📚

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Finished reading: John Constantine, Hellblazer Vol. 8: Rake at the Gates of Hell by Garth Ennis 📚

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The more you know 💫

Ada Lovelace, the daughter of poet Lord Byron, wrote the first algorithm created specifically for a machine.

-Tom Asacker

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In the section of a recent The Email Marketing Show episode titled “Don’t make the mistake of offering discounts upfront!”:

You got to really legitimize discounts and bonuses and things like that and you do that by really planting that seed and creating that familiarity.

Don’t introduce people to your brand via sales or promos (unless it’s a major shopping holiday where a sale is expected).