2 quotes that seem contradictory but are complimentary.
One from Tyler:
So please develop a better sense of when to keep your mouths shut and work behind the scenes.
One from Seth:
The secret way you do the thing isn’t what keeps your clients coming back. It’s the part you do in public that matters.
There is a tendency to hype the things people don’t really care about and ignore talking about the stuff we find boring that others are interested in.
Is it performative or informative?
Semiconductorctor and data center infrastructure expert Dylan Patel shared this handy heuristic on which AI models when:
- Anthropic (Claude) for one off, non-reasoning uses
- Gemini for multimodal and uses that require a long context window
- OpenAI (ChatGPT) for all other reasoning question flows
I don’t understand this one
Google is testing a feature that allows the same advertiser to appear twice on a single search results page, which seemingly breaks Google’s own existing ad policies.
I can’t imagine advertisers would want to pay twice to show in the same search. But maybe there will be a bidding option for “all ad slots” or something. Pay for saturation and blocking out competitors.
Travel booking, real estate, and law are industries that come to mind where brands would pony up for this.
Google has added Brand Guidelines to Performance Max campaigns.
A fancy name for moving business name and logo asset entry to the campaign level instead of needing to do it in each asset group.
This update strengthens control over how your brand is represented in Performance Max campaigns. By centralizing BUSINESS_NAME, LOGO, and LANDSCAPE_LOGO at the campaign level, the new brand guidelines streamline asset management and ensure consistency across automated formats.
From David Perell:
This is the power of symbolism: with one strong, vivid image, you can communicate an entire message or, in this case, build a world
This is why logos and brands are sometimes conflated. The logos of strong brands become visual shorthand.
Humanity needs stories.
People lead their individual life as a story. One of the reasons you need lots of stories is that in every life, your story comes to an impasse.
A valuable nugget from Dana Gioia worth revisiting on one of the seminal story days of modern society.
“Get curious. Childlike curious.”
-Dan B. Nelken in A Self-Help Guide for Copywriters by Dan B Nelken 📚
Is modern Apple an innovation company or an iteration company?
From Bloomberg:
In typical Apple style, the company would be entering a space that’s well established but still ripe for reinvention. A Face ID-enabled doorbell and lock system would probably give Amazon Ring and Google Nest some genuine competition.
Kyla Scanlon on Social Video
Tyler Cowen asked Kyla Scanlon (economics communicator/educator) about TikTok, Reels, and social media in general. Her combination of digital publishing experience and economics knowledge makes her POV valuable.
What does the crystal ball say? 🔮
think that the scroll model will have to shift. I’m not sure what it’ll shift to, but I think that sort of motion is going to not be so enticing soon. But yes, I think it’ll definitely be much more interactive, and the user will be able to direct it much more than in the algorithm
Short-form video has eaten the world, which means another format will soon disrupt it.
On TikTok vs Reels:
What’s nice about Instagram as a platform is that you have stories and that you have posts and you have reels, versus TikTok does have stories, but when you scroll on TikTok, you don’t really scroll for a single person. Instagram — you’re able to curate more of a personality because there’s a profile page. It’s not as algorithmic. There’s more intentionality, I think, with the platform design, versus TikTok just wants to keep you scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. I think Instagram — it seems to be okay if you stray from the path awhile.
💡
It’s beginning to feel like two trends are converging in a way that will limit TikTok’s upside more than any ban.
The first is how the transition from school life to work life caps available media time, forcing an age out of sorts on The Trend Machine’s attention black hole effect.
The second is The Clock App’s Shop obsession:
TikTok really wants to make a lot of money, and they’re like, “If we sell commerce, if we sell goods to people, that’ll be the way that we make money.” Now, every other video for people is a face mask or a purse or clothes. You have users that are constantly being advertised to. I think more people view TikTok as an exhausting experience than one of connection, as it was in 2020.