In our podcast, Ian and I are always reminding our listeners to ‘test and measure’ – that is, to continually test new things and check if they work. If they do, double down. If they don’t, testing something else. Here’s an example of Instagram making changes based on analysing results. You don’t need to understand the actual item in the Insta example, instead...
My friend Ewen (CADbloke) has been beavering away on tvCAD for many years now, polishing it into a successful software venture. It’s a niche piece of software, here’s the overview from his site: tvCAD makes cable schedules from your CAD wiring drawings, automatically and quickly and 100% accurately.tvCAD Very specific audience, very specific problem set, very specific solution. And it...
Wonderful initiative by James Clear to start cataloging (including transcribing) a range of famous speeches.
Looking through the list lead me to JK Rowling’s commencement address at Harvard in 2008. Wonderful stuff.
Brian Dean is back with another ripper, this time on video marketing.
Thanks to Kevin for bringing this to my attention: Nike never features their products on their Instagram.
Instead, they show people. Who use their products.
It’s a subtle difference. But once you see it, you can never not see it.
A good insight into how much your web and app activity is tracked by advertising and third party tools. Most marketing people will be aware of this, but if outside the industry you may be shocked. New sites were the worst: Among all the sites I visited, news sites, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, had the most tracking resources. This is partly because the sites serve more...
A good post from Scott Brinker, inspired by Tim Fishburne on what the expectations of a CMO are these days. From Scott’s post: The real challenge is that everything Tom listed in his strip is, indeed, what we now consider the responsibility — officially or unofficially — of marketing leadership:– Grow the business– Make customers happy– Deliver...
Such a wonderful interview with Matt Mullenweg by The Verge, discussing Automattic’s purchase of Tumblr. Put aside the riches to rags story of Tumblr (sold to Yahoo for $1.1B in 2013, sold to Automattic for $3M in 2019 – supposably) and instead focus on the well meaning intent of both Verizon and Automattic: Their top priority was not trying to maximize the purchase price. There might...
How many highly effective leaders do you know that manage their own social profiles? Working with marketing managers, we are increasingly seeing the marketing department managing the personal social profiles (eg LinkedIn) of their company leaders (eg CEO). And often, someone junior in the marketing team. They post on their behalf, engage, and even answer DMs on their behalf. And yes...
If you are frustrated with Facebook’s Ad Manager constantly changing and often crashing, you are far from alone. Ads Manager is crashing with regularity, according to interviews with numerous advertisers. The outages, which can last for hours at a time and make it impossible to start a new ad campaign or manage an existing one, seem to happen every month, they say. Yep, it’s a pretty...