On the perils of design by committee:
No one has ever not bought a product because of the font. Or the color of a website element.
These things are important, but we have a tendency to “overthink them to dramatic levels of irrationality.”
Perhaps the money is not to be made in the rivers themselves, but from the men working them.
-The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt 📚
Nvidia is the picks-and-shovels of the AI gold rush (and crypto).
AI skews towards decentralization and will prove to be a tool, not a platform (like search has become).
Models will be like Cloud 2.0, the real value creation is in the hardware and the apps built on top of it.
Software eats the world. Hardware enables the appetite.
Never forget that absolutely everything you do is for your customers. Make every decision — even decisions about whether to expand the business, raise money, or promote someone — according to what’s best for your customers.
It’s counterintuitive, but the way to grow your business is to focus entirely on your existing customers. Just thrill them, and they’ll tell everyone.
fromAnything You Want by Derek Sivers 📚
via James Clear
Google Search app could soon introduce a new Notes feature
SEO angle: less room for your page on the results page
Social angle: Google still wants a social network, what if search is it?
AI angle: what a handy way to get more training data for LLMs
Google angle: clear sign that search is no longer a platform or a moat but a tool or feature that exists within something larger
A nice guide from Search Engine Land for the GA4 crowd.
Setting up event parameters in GA4: Everything you need to know / Learn how to set up event parameters in Google Analytics 4 for a deeper understanding of user actions and effective data interpretation.
Rebrands: A Cautionary Tale
Changing Its Name Tanked X’s Downloads in App Store and Play Store
So if you don’t know that Twitter changed its name to X, and search for “Twitter”, the top result is a paid ad from a competitor (Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, etc.), and the result for X doesn’t look anything like Twitter. It doesn’t have the name, doesn’t say “formerly Twitter”, and isn’t even blue. It’s just the ugly X icon and the insipid slogan “Blaze your glory!”
It Doesn't Matter What You Mean
It matters what they think.
Once you put something out there—a brand, a campaign, a product—you no longer control it (hear that, JK Rowling?). It now belongs to the audience. An act of co-creation has begun.
And if you have to clarify what you meant in an attempt to reframe what people think, than your launch was a dud.
A great (and fictional) example is from the sci-fi podcast Ad Lucem. I'm going to try to do this without any spoilers. Here goes.
On the eve of a new product launch, a stakeholder in the company gets caught in a bad situation. Once that reflects poorly on the company and its product.
The founder/inventor wants to push ahead with the launch and she's arguing with a trusted employee of the company. He advocates for pushing back the launch because the messaging will play right into the controversy. She starts saying what the product is "meant" to do and he interrupts with:
It doesn't matter. It's what people think.
To which she responds:
I won't let them.
That's a futile argument.
You only control your side of the interaction. And you only get one chance to start it.
Everything after that is a dance.
This all makes a hell of a lot more sense in context, so if you don't mind spoilers jump ahead to about 18:35.
Now for something completely different.
Why Marketers Should Engage with Sci-Fi
I believe marketers do a better job if they are aware of the context their work is operating within.
We don't push campaigns out into a vacuum.
We tell stories to very human people that have a whole host of concerns beyond whether or not our newest product looks cool enough to 'gram.
We also have to think longer term than just the end of this next promo (or at least we should). Enter, sci-fi:
Sci-fi may not successfully predict the future (arguably, it is always about the present), but it can sure instigate thought experiments in advance of the future’s eventual — and in the case of Drake Prime, mundane if worrisome — arrival.
In general, fiction (and poetry) can be a great window into humanity and society. Along with a nice little brain break from all your marketing content consumption.
On-demand audio (paid streaming, podcasts, owned music, etc.) officially has more share of ear than linear (radio over the air, radio streams, Pandora’s free radio service, satellite radio, etc.).
Just another sign that mass culture is dead.
Further cementing the primacy of sports and other live events as the only remaining cultural moments where a critical mass of people are tuned into the same thing at the same time.
This is not a situation where on-demand will grow forever and someday linear will go to zero. Some people prefer linear listening, and even those who mostly prefer on-demand consume at least some linear content. But it is about as safe a bet as one can make that the trendlines in the graph above will continue well out into the future.
