Blog

Podcast thinking

Seth encourages you to start a podcast. Now is the time. Of his reasons, the third is the compelling one for me: A podcast helps you think more clearly. When you know you need to talk about something you care about, you’ll work to make your thinking more accessible and cogent–and because it’s spoken, not written, you may very well get past that block we were taught in third grade. When Ian...

Cockroach Branding wins

Would have loved to have been part of the discussion when Cockroach Labs were deciding on their name and brand positioning.

I get the whole ‘resilient’ angle. Very clever.

And they’ve just closed further funding. Sounds like their product is actually pretty good. But I wonder how employees feel about listing the name on their resumes…

There’s worse I guess.

Australia to create a special branch of the ACCC to scrutinise how Facebook and Google use algorithms to match ads to viewers

Sorry for the long headline, but it’s required in order to actually explain what is happening. Otherwise, from other sources (like Reuters and Fast Company), you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Australian Government was going to force Google to hand over their search algorithm (Spoiler alert: that is never, ever going to happen). Instead, the real story is they want to check how...

Alexa, Siri, Google allow opt out of human listening

Not before time (via Bloomberg): Amazon.com Inc. will let Alexa users opt out of human review of their voice recordings, a move that follows criticism that the program violated customers’ privacy. emphasis mine Apple has actioned this just recently, and Google has (in EU at least) as well. Still not right that people can opt out (ie they need to take the initiative) – this should be an...

Instagram by Facebook and WhatsApp by Facebook

Some branding changes ahead by Facebook, as discovered by The Information (via TechRadar) with Instagram being rebadged ‘Instagram by Facebook’ in the AppStore, and WhatsApp as ‘WhatsApp by Facebook’. Seems odd at first, but The Information links this with anti-trust scrutiny. Personally I like it – makes it a lot clearer for people who may not have otherwise...

AI copywriting beats human

Interesting, although probably not surprising, that AI written ads performed better than human written ads, in a test by Chase (the Bank) using an AI platform from Persado. Chase says that ads created by Persado’s machine learning performed better than ads written by humans, with a higher percent of consumers clicking on them—more than twice as many in some cases. The difference can be as...

The Ultimate List of Ultimate Guides

We all know HubSpot is a content machine – so impressive on so many levels.

Here’s an example of how they’re completely dominating the ‘ultimate guide’ space:

They are #crushingit (that one’s for you Daniel).

Better marketing forms

I really like this form on the Merkle Digital Marketing Report landing page: Which when selected in the form appears like this: This is a better user experience for everyone – the people downloading the report and for Merkle. I’m only interested in the report, so it saves them, and me, time. There’s no use them trying to follow me up if I’m not interested. Instead all...

Brave Marketing

Interesting analysis via Effie Worldwide on a study of 6000 marketing campaigns: Finally, we graded every winning submission from the past 50 years on bravery. Very conservative campaigns were given a score of 1, while very risky campaigns that put everything on the line were given a 5. The results were fascinating: It turns out that brands and agencies are better off being conservative than a...

Chrome 76 blocks Flash by default

Well this was a surprise to me.

Google today launched Chrome 76 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. The release includes Adobe Flash blocked by default, Incognito mode detection disabled, multiple PWA improvements, and more developer features.

I had no idea people were still using Flash.

Archives