I’m talking out of ignorance her, so please educate me: if you take into account the black swan theory both kaplan meier and Lindy effect can’t say anything about anything, no?
The point of the black swan is you can't model it. You can't predict COVID-19. You can't predict Russia renouncing it's debt, leading to the collapse of LTCM. You can't predict Hurricane Katrina hitting just so as to push feet of water into Lake Pontchartrain. You can't predict the the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. You can know everything there is to know about epidemics, finance, weather, and seismology, and you still can't predict those events. So don't. Do you best to build robust systems, looks for places with excessive efficiencies, and plan mitigation strategies in advance.
Sure. It's a lot easier when I can swing open a Facebook/Google Ad (etc) account and show you the actual data. I have tried having this conversation online before and people literally say things like 'you're just a shill how can we trust anything you say', as if I would post this sort of thing in bad faith?
It's so weird. Anyway, let me have a go. Initial points:
- Lots of marketing is full of rubbish and smoke and mirrors. This does not mean that ALL marketing is full of rubbish and smoke and mirrors.
- Many companies have marketing 'as a function', but other companies have marketing as quite literally their only source of revenue. These companies would know that digital marketing doesn't work as they wouldn't have revenue. It is that simple.
- I have never worked for a CEO that has accepted smoke and mirrors as answers, and I would never work for a CEO like that. The CEO of my company has a Stanford PhD in Physics. He was one of those child geniuses you used to see in the newspaper, before you stopped reading newspapers. This guy is not an idiot.
Some marketing - a lot of marketing - cannot be directly attributed to revenue, but we know it works. How? Because we can, and do run isolated tests of that exact tactic and test if it works in isolation.
Take the example of banner ads. I have run them in isolation (ie - I have run campaigns where literally the ONLY way you could have known this information was to see a banner ad) and have achieved spectacular results despite noone ever clicking on the ad. (People emailed and called asking to take up the offer.)
I have also have achieved horrifically bad results. Same tactics, but everything else was different - audience, market, placement, product being sold etc.
Every product has a better or worse way of being marketed. It takes a TON of experience to learn how to adapt; many junior marketers think they're experts because they crush it in one job, and then go to the next job and have the exact same tactics fail. Why? Because business is hard. Marketing is about so much more than just running ads.
I run marketing right now for a very young startup. A year ago, we were adding around $5-15k in ARR each month (we only bill annually.) Now, we are adding around $80-100k in new ARR each month. Our marketing spend, inc salaries, is around $40k/m and our sales are growing wayy faster than our marketing spend. The results would be even better if I could convince my CEO to raise our prices.
(I can't complain - at least I got an unsolicited salary increase a few months ago.)
Marketing is the only form of lead generation for us. So much so that I had to plead with the CEO and head of sales to stop relying on my function and to go out and actually set up proper outbound sales processes.
Just because Uber's head of marketing was dropping - and wasting - hundreds of millions on programmatic advertising, doesn't make us all idiots.
/endrant.
(oh. One last thing. This is really the cherry on top: our market is devs. We're literally marketing to devs.)
Thank you for taking the time and attention to write this up. I find your insights valuable, and I tend to agree.
I think my hesitance towards the ad world is coming from my personal experience. I’ve worked at marketing agencies and as digital strategist for a company, so I saw both sides of the chain. My guess is there are a lot of companies that don’t know how to get the highest value out of online ads, and these can be fooled easily by marketing agencies or ad sellers (that a lot of time also don’t really know how to optimize).
You don’t have control over what phone your userbase uses.
I’ve built multiple pwa’s for companies and organisations, mainly for internal tools. It worked very well and we were happy we didn’t have to deploy to different app stores, while still being able to leverage the device’s api.
Can you explain why having more options to offer apps to users is a bad thing?
As someone who started working at an ad agency during the online metrics boom, then went to a national news organisation to work as digital strategist, I tend to agree.
But I would pinpoint it to the inflated value of impressions. My experience (but i can not back this up) tells me that ad sellers tend to over estimate the impact of an impression, which makes the value chain completely inflated, and skews the business model. If ads were worth less (and, according to me, closer to the real value), less money would go round, and creating value for the end user would become more a necessity.
You will have to define “news” first, or “politics”. As a former strategist for a big news room, I can tell you it’s not as easy as you make it out to be.
Would love to hear how you (and your cohort) would tackle these issues.
I just finished Jill Lepore's These Truths. Terrific. Tracks how our nation transformed from seekers of truth (for all our faults) to anti-truth.
The transition period from newspapers to mobile mediums as people's primary source of news is very interesting. Sure, everyone has been lamenting this ad nauseum. But somehow Lepore's explanation is just so tight and focused.
And yet. I haven't seen or heard any ideas or strategies for what's next.
I respect your position, and in general I agree. But your position on what political is, feels a bit unholistic. When more than one person is involved, everything is political, and very much so if you talk about contracts between people, which licenses are. A contract is a construct, it’s something that doesn’t exist, and has a lot of grey area. There is a system in place to debate whether specific actions are respecting the idea of the contract, in the case of licences, this can be a court of law.
Wanting to write better software is a good, and I would think quite common goal. But so is wanting to have a good life. It’s on the road to that goal, with a lot of other people wanting the same goal but having just a slightly different idea of how to get there, that it gets political.
I can advice you the Nokia Tough 800, I got it for exact the same reason. it’s a decent device that runs kaiOS, has maps, whatsapp and browser. The browser is so slow that it doesnt really become a time sink, (The bulk of websites are clearly not made for this screen size) so, I just check what i need to and that’s it. Maps works really nicely on it.
