Welcome to the totally predictable ad market circus

Rather than normalcy, we’re finding huge spikes of inefficiency as everybody scrambles to crunch ad campaigns in before the big BFCM weekend.

Most platform cost per metrics are up and brands are trying to make up for lost time.

Customer mindset is boomeranging post-election.

Enjoy some turkey today and slow down a bit.

Beware negative social proof. a.k.a. the “well, if everyone else is doing it…” effect

Definition = if you make an unwanted behaviour seem commonplace, more people will perform the unwanted behaviour.

Negativity is a downward spiral. And one hard to harness.

Be aspirational.

It’s easy to focus on winning but I think have to focus more on how not to lose than you do on how to win.

Because how not to lose is more controllable than how to win.

When you’re trying to win championships you can’t focus on winning championships. You have to focus on what goes into the process of winning but also how can you prevent losing by doing the things that are simplest to do under high duress.

-Boston Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla

It’s looking like inflation is back on the bingo card for 2025.

Using our rule of thumb that every 1 [percentage point] increase in the effective tariff rate would raise core [Personal Consumption Expenditures] prices by 0.1%, we estimate that the proposed tariff increases would boost core PCE prices by 0.9% if implemented

Disposal income might get further squeezed, meaning marketing efficiency will be ever more important.

Plenty of pixels have been spilled discussing the Jaguar rebrand, but this post is worth checking out.

If you’re going to rebrand:

• Do it without alienating your core audience.
• Make sure your product is at the heart of the story—not completely absent

Foursquare is open sourcing its locations database.

a foundational open data set, Foursquare Open Source Places (“FSQ OS Places”). This base layer of 100mm+ global places of interest (“POI”) includes 22 core attributes (see schema here) that will be updated monthly and available for commercial use under the Apache 2.0 license framework.

Maps will be a foundational OS of the future (haven’t they always been though?), so this data set could be a big deal (and could place Foursquare at the center of it).

Could this spark an ImageNet moment for geospatial computing?

You can no longer follow hashtags on Instagram. Which is not something I particularly care about, but I wanted to highlight this from the article:

Though it also feels like another step towards the death of the hashtag, which has slowly lost relevance as a connective option as algorithms have got better and better and understanding content, context, and user interest.

If AI can bring contextual “understanding” to platforms it means we can get back to creating for humans not for “X engine optimization.”