Category: Rant

  • The Year of the Yin Wood Snake

    Image generated wtih Google ImageFX AI Happy Lunar New Year! Welcome to the year of the yin wood snake. Now, to be clear, even as a Korean by birth, Asian astrology is no more statistically valid than Western astrology. These systems were born of a time when people tried to make sense of the world…

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  • Mind Readings: Swimming in Idiotic Conspiracies

    The single biggest intellectual mistake of the last 50 years is the assumption that all opinions and points of view are valid and deserve attention. Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here. Listen to the audio here: Download the MP3 audio here. Machine-Generated Transcript What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain…

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  • You Do Have a Head for Analytics

    Last week in a conversation, Paul said, “When it comes to Google Analytics, I learned about as much as I could but I’m a Communications guy. I have an English degree. I don’t have the brains for analytics.” Okay, a bit of a rant here. There is no such thing as not having the brains…

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  • What Are Your Customers Telling You They Want?

    Here’s my question for all the apps begging users to re-enable ad tracking in iOS 14.5… What have you been doing all this time with the data we DO give you? Think about it for a moment. How much data do we voluntarily give different social network and content providers all the time? We share…

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  • Marketing Agnosticism

    One of the most dangerous habits we practice in marketing is holding strong convictions in beliefs not founded in data, in proof. We believe that X tactic is the best, that Y and Z things never work, that ABC only applies to other industries and not us. The reality is that we have very few…

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  • Vendors, bring your engineers to MarTech!

    Photo credit: David B. Thomas Almost every part of the #MarTech conference was impressive this year, a tribute to Scott Brinker’s leadership in the MarTech space. The show floor was packed with attendees. The presentations were lively and insightful. The WiFi more or less worked. There was only one broken part: the vendors. Specifically, the…

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  • Is it time to check out of the hotel?

    Let’s say you’re at a hotel and the breakfast cook refuses to make anything except scrambled eggs. Try though you might, he won’t make any other dish. Now, he’s very good at making scrambled eggs. His eggs are considered to be the best in the region. But you want waffles? He’ll make you scrambled eggs…

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  • Why NSA Spying in World of Warcraft is Ineffective

    A simple infographic illustrates the data quality issue: As always, all things Warcraft are trademarks of Blizzard Entertainment. Feel free to share, Warcraft fans.

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  • Bridges

    In this excellent read about why things feel more divided than ever, someone points out a number of important items. If you haven’t read the post yet, go do so. Welcome back. There’s an underlying subtlety that I think is worth pointing out. The nature of our relationships to large groups of people today has…

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  • Stop begging and start marketing

    I’ve gotten this email/Facebook post/tweet a gazillion times in this past week: I’m sure you have too. Folks, your business is not a lottery. Hoping and wishing for a magic fairy to grant you the chance at $250,000 is not a substitute for a business or marketing strategy. Think about all the things you’ve done…

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