Category Archives: Strategy

Fools rush in with AI: Brand safety edition

You’re a damn fool if you rely on the AI in Integral Ad Science or DoubleVerify to protect your ads from running on websites featuring racism, sexism, and far, far worse. See the recent Adalytics report linked below. Caution: There … Continue reading

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Building Marketing Tech Stacks? Forget Fast and Good; Look at Reliability and Schedule

The old engineering adage, “Good, Cheap, Fast. Pick any two,” is a familiar challenge. In reality, bosses often want all three, with “Cheap” meaning “Almost Free” and “Fast” meaning “Tomorrow.” Understanding the Cost/Reliability/Schedule model and its implications early on can help navigate trade-offs in building marketing technology systems. Continue reading

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Your Target Audience Just Got Bigger

So you’re increasing your advertising investment this year, right? Right? In many companies the bean counters are pushing back on marketing investment decisions, seeing it as wasteful spend by characters who struggle with basic arithmetic. While that’s sadly far too … Continue reading

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Sometimes

Sometimes we manage to get a little work done. Continue reading

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Creating a Narrative…

…to explain your numbers is a fool’s game. The story will usually suffer from logical holes that you’ll have to gloss over. (How many times have you heard “we’ll get to that later” to question about a story you’re being … Continue reading

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Know and Value Your Customer: A Forgotten Rule

One of the hardest things to teach marketers is that our customers are everything and that our brands are–in the minds and lives of our customers–tiny, inconsequential things. That level of humility can be hard to achieve, but it’s necessary … Continue reading

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Chumbox Your Users While Taboolaing Your Brand Equity

Avinash Kaushik created a (new to me) term the other day. In his email on Friday, he coined the term Taboolaing to refer to the use of the chumboxes offered by dreadful companies like Taboola to destroy one’s brand equity. … Continue reading

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Killing the Paywall

Tom Goodwin’s recent article, “Why making content on the internet free was our biggest mistake… and how to fix it” is required reading for all marketers in publishing. I’ve felt this way for a long time. Mr. Goodwin only wrote … Continue reading

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USPS 3685 and the State of Marketing

Sometimes reading the USPS-required Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation (form 3685) can reveal a lot about the state of one’s industry. As a direct marketing and postal junkie, I find USPS forms fascinating. (I don’t get out much.) I … Continue reading

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First Mile Problems

I was recently interviewed by Tim Furey, CEO of MarketBridge, on The Last Mile Podcast. Among our discussion of SAC, CAC, LTV, ROI, other three-letter acronyms, we also spent time on “first mile” marketing problems. As a practicing performance/direct response … Continue reading

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