Some reports have adblocking penetration at anywhere between 10% and 40%. Some publishers are blocking content from the adblockers. Others are making the ads unskippable with ad block. Broken systems are interesting, aren’t they? The system of advertising is broken. Here’s the best that I can explain it from as many perspectives as I can rally. Advertising in the early days, radio, was incredibly lucrative. The development of a consumer economy in the roaring 20’s and consumerism in general was huge. A marketer could spend $1 on advertising and got $4 back. Paid media was crazy effective. The same went for television. And then there was a sort of grand bargain, a big deal, struck between creatives, those that create[…]
Author: Christopher Berry
This WSJ piece “Has the world lost faith in Capitalism” had this infographic: And prompted Marc Andreessen @pmarca to remark on Twitter: “The inevitable result of 15 years of slow economic growth.” His tweet prompted me to think about the relationship between economic growth and the gini coefficient (a measure of income inequality). And there’s a lot to it. I don’t think it’s a straight line causal model between economic growth and inequality. (And I’m not suggesting that Marc thinks it is, it is, after all, Twitter). The core representation of a causal model is depicted below: In very short terms, when we decided in 80’s that we were going to go for a service based economy, the linkage between wage growth and productivity[…]
Let’s start with a story. Daan did a traditional fast follow. He calls it Netherflix. His story was: “It’s like Netflix…for The Netherlands!”. At first, he buys rights on the cheap, pays for digital subtitling, and has a successful kickoff. He gets through to 10% household penetration, or roughly 700,000 subscribers, with an annualized gross revenue of about 60 million Euros. The strength of the Euro lets him raid the Anglosphere and he can stock 10,000 hours of content reliably [1]. He gets through the struggle of getting his stack to deliver content and minimize churn. He’s able to host and deliver 10,000 hours reliably, in spite of supporting video players across 11 different front end platforms, and the costs associated with hosting,[…]
A score serves as an ultimate abstraction or summary. That’s especially true in sport. “Who won?” “The Blue Jays. 11 to 5.” The Blue Jays won because they moved men more often across one specific plate more often than the other team. This is all very American. A brief period of action. Collect statistics about that brief period. ???. Profit. And it’s easy. Baseball is nice for the 1 to 1 correspondence of points to a single event. American football and basketball are spicier. Cricket, with all due respect to my antipodean friends, is ridiculous. There’s so much more to the performance of The Blue Jays or the Australian National Cricket Team. But the score is the ultimate summary. There’s[…]
That title, ‘morphing the lean startup’, may be technical jargon. But it is literal. And brief. I have a few thoughts to share about them both. Morphing There’s a very small sliver of research in the Marketing Science on morphing. Two papers, ‘website morphing‘, and its adtech successor, ‘morphing banner advertising‘, stand out as giants. This technology makes snap changes to a digital user experience. The ultimate reason why you’re not hearing more about morphing in adtech is because paid agencies can’t figure out how to scale the creative necessary to drive it. I’m convinced that morphing is the ultimate promise I bought into back in the mid-nineties – the perfect intersection of recsys and experience. It requires an extreme[…]
Reddit had a bruising week. If you’re out of the loop, you can read about it here. It highlights the untapped opportunities in how our collective experiences are managed and lists of recommended reading/viewing are assembled. Large areas of opportunity include regression shaving, state-management, and dog-whistle cancelling headphones. Regression Shaving In general, the bigger the audience, the smaller the media. In Regression to the Meme, I argued that a lot of redditors want high jolts per minute with easy to consume content. Why read a three paragraph joke when you can get the same amount of dopamine almost immediately with a six word image macro? Larger audiences congregate around easy-to-consume content. Go wide. Go LCD. Accept that younger people have[…]
Somebody, get this, created a fitbit…but for dogs. This is a real design pattern. Take any service that is starting to gain traction and just add “for dogs!” at the end of it. Tinder…for dogs. Airbnb…for dogs. It’s a laugh line. Facebook…for dogs. Those are all real things. Dogs do love to chase tail lights. That’s just taking the taillight/fast-follow strategy a little bit too far. Entrepreneurs are trying to reinvent things by making them smarter. This is well beyond the you know, “the data!”, style pitches you may have been subjected to. I’m really optimistic, and excited, for the 2.5% of companies that will thrive, not by slapping a dashboard on an product or attacking a niche market, but by[…]
Nash died this week, sadly, in a traffic collision. That’s isn’t how I’m going to remember him. My first introduction to Nash was from a book I found in a used book store titled “Game Theory and Canadian Politics”. There was a whole chapter on the Nash Equilibrium and the prisoner’s dilemma in there. This was the diving board for further exploration into game theory and, it was the gateway drug into the Garbage Can, Arrow, and the Genetic Algorithm. He offered up a thread of thought: this idea that collectively, as people, we are capable of creating such sub-optimal outcomes. I didn’t like that one bit. I spent time trying to disprove it. It was Arrow that would end[…]
Previously, I wrote about communication overhead in tech and the two cultures around it. Broadly, I perceive two broad camps: there are the shippers and there are the talkers. Shippers ship. Talkers talk, then ship. In this post I’ll describe three forms of written communication and how they link up with current cultural megatrends. There are those that can write instructions that a human can reliably compile and execute (management). There are those that can write instructions that an organization can reliably compile and execute (governance/policy). There are those that can write instructions that a computer can reliably compile and execute (development). There are instructions that can be typed that cause performance in people. Such parameters include the outcome, the instruction,[…]
Ask some what’s the key factor for success and they’ll say team. Ask others what’s the key factor for success and they’ll say code. In many circumstances, many problems can be solved by shipping code. Revenue down? Ship! Morale down? Ship. Customer sat down? Ship. Ship. An orientation to ship and Get Shhhhhhhet Done (TM) is valued in many cultures. An orientation towards team is valued in many others. It’s not pretty when the two cultures clash. To those that want to ship, meetings with others, talk, policy, and process is viewed as communication overhead that adds little value at best, and is catastrophic at worst. They have a deadline to hit. Stop talking about your feelings and your preferred[…]