Reebz

I’m not sure either. Let’s add to that list: Best Buy, Target, Walmart...

I agree with you, but I made points A and B in my original comment that you replied to.

It’s a disappointing misunderstanding to see the blog post lead with design != marketing personas, and then try label psychographic and demographic usage against each, respectively.

Marketing is finding product market fit. Product is a sub-category of marketing. Design is a function that contributes to product.

This is how I use them too. Personas are the idea or target, you validate the persona against the data collected related to segments/cohorts, etc. Drift of cohorts from personas shows a change in behavior that needs to be understood.

Not marketing. That type of language comes from legal and the “never proactively admit fault“ mantra

It’s statistically safest to live on Mars to avoid bear attacks.... the data matters. There’s limited real world application, and that’s what matters most. Semantics and arguing definitions isn’t useful.

The author is using a tool designed for landing pages. The quality of the samples are going to be wildly different and that needs to be taken into account.

Linkedin calculates an ad impression (last I checked) as 50% of the ad is on screen for at least 300ms. I can be scrolling as fast as my thumb will flick down my LinkedIn newsfeed and it would probably count.

Then the KPI being used is clicks. I don't know of any business owner who would take that as valid. It should be some kind of conversion event (newsletter signup, contact request, or purchase, etc.)

If it were up to me, I'd want 4,400 clicks and a few dozen conversion events to do my calculations on statistically significant effectiveness. Especially since the author is paying CPC (cost-per-click)... who cares about impressions at all?

I did, and I think there's a lot of p-hacking going on. Leading with TV advertising is disingenuous at best.

The ebay example twists the concept of user acquisition (new customers) and purchases (new or old customers). It is a common tactic to buy advertisements defensively, for example, if you're a product manager, and have determined that some of your user base are more transactional rather than frequent.

Another pet peeve I have is how they conflate direct response advertising and marketing.

Across this and the other[0] highly active digital ads post, there's 3 interesting forces at play:

a) technologists screaming "ads are literally the worst societal cost, like ever" who don't want to understand the industry

b) advertising folks taking up arms to defend their shamanistic, money-printing machines without statistics (Reason No. 7 will SHOCK you)

c) A tiny, tiny group of Mandalorian-like voices who have a necessary statistics AND industry understanding who are being drowned out

(this is in jest, but I double-dare you to say it isn't at least directionally accurate)

Other commenters have mentioned it throughout this whole comment thread as "incrementality tests". Amongst other approaches, this is the way.

Freakonomics severely lack the industry understanding. Listening to the podcast was like hearing how HTML is a programming language from the kid in week 2 at code camp. Then too the article, all the issues with Uber was just doing a bad job of managing their ad spend and they can fall into group B, noted above.

The baseline of this work is a control group who see no ads and then you build your tests from there that factor in channels, cohorting, and other components to get a statistically significant outcome. Yes, this will get more challenging with upcoming privacy changes (IDFA removal, et al). However, the last 10 years this wasn't a problem and I'm sure the corporations in the identity resolution business will hand-shake on a bunch of 2nd party data deals that just move the deals done in broad daylight around identity tracking and audience creation to the alley. Further, any advertising that is tied to an already known customer is able to be backed into at an audience level with login and cookie data. Even Pi-hole users may not be exempt here.

To finish with some constructive advice:

1) Advertising is not a synonym for marketing. We're only talking about advertising in both HN threads.

2) Every industry has high and low quality. Pareto's principle should be aggressively applied to where one spends their budget in the cesspool that is the Internet.

3) If you're ever seeking an agency to provide advertising services and they don't have a qualified data science or statistics leader (10+ years work experience, degree in Stats/Math/Econ, an MBA, or similar), run. Run from those shiny-shoes gurus. Channel your inner Usain Bolt and run.

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25620707

Often you get the data in aggregate, bought and sold as an “audience”. It’s a Boolean flag if a person in the audience. Basically an array of IDs for people in the audience (true). Almost always the data seller masks the ID of people in the audience to the buyer. This then creates opportunity for third party “matching services” or “identity resolution” who can de-anonymize, link, and re-anonymize. Link audiences together, e.g. flies to Bahamas often AND lives in the US North East AND has a mortgage. Facebook and Google’s success relies heavily on simplifying huge amounts of the programmatic advertising backend, but the audience selling is still a huge part of the industry, like Acxiom et al.

Much of this buying and selling of data within the paid advertising industry hides in plain sight because it goes by so many names - contextual targeting, relevancy data, media enrichment, lead enhancement, blah blah blah...

Snoo. It is an expensive baby crib with smart features and an app. The Snoo has added a number of hours per week to our (parents!) sleep schedule and aided sleep tracking. This makes baby’s sleep schedule planning, and just about everything else in life, slightly easier to get through when you have a newborn.

Hi Peter, is it possible to self sponsor yourself with your own startup for a visa? For example, an E-3 and assume that the applicant is an Australian citizen.

Brian Balfour is a good resource for growth topics. I took his Reforge program many years ago, and it was useful and quickly applied.

Thanks for the reply. To clarify, I was referring to their Gradient Notebook specifically [1], which seem to have feature parity and have the additional benefit of vertical integration. https://gradient.paperspace.com/notebooks

Congratulations on the launch! Do you see Gradient (paperspace) as a competitor, how do you compare?

It is more commonly known as Astroturfing

Disciplined Entrepreneurship by Bill Aulet.

He’s actually had a couple of exits which can’t be said for most authors in the space.

If you reverse it: Effectively it’s the manufacturers outsourcing a sales funnel.

I am eager to try it, but are all these permissions necessary?

You agree that Discoverify will be able to: View your Spotify account data Your email The type of Spotify subscription you have, your account country and your settings for explicit content filtering Your name and username, your profile picture, how many followers you have on Spotify and your public playlists Take actions in Spotify on your behalf Create, edit, and follow private playlists Create, edit, and follow playlists

I’m excited to try this. Are there plans for notification snooze/focus assist (windows) activation and deactivation management via Session? For me, the biggest pain point when focusing are externalities, not so much me personally drifting into web browsing.

Anecdata caveat and all that, I agree with your views. If I think about how I've used HN in 2020, it is primarily the Octal iphone app and I default to the "Show HN" filter as a workaround.

I did this recently as I moved apartments, I think you were given incorrect info. You can easily open multiple policies under the 1 account (e.g. your move out date is June 1 and your move in date is May 15).

While I agree, it wasn’t just general public opinion. In NYC at least, it was widely stated in the media by government officials and doctors that masks were unnecessary if you’re healthy, and actually could be bad because people were 1) removing surgical/n95 masks from supply, 2) wearing a cloth mask improperly sanitized can make you sick with other things. I like how Jeremy’s site has directly addressed those original concerns.

This is extremely impressive. The value prop, the product, all of it. It resonates.

I was at a startup 5 or so years ago, and now am at a very large company. The world of pain you enter as a small shop when the Large Co. takes you through their third-party compliance and enterprise IT requirements are mind boggling. WorkOS seems to be that critical and much overdue on-ramp between startups and the FT500.

Rumor mill and Reddit comedians are having a field day that apparently this happened 4 years ago - their data feeds Abe order book can’t handle leap years and don’t fail gracefully. Take it with a grain of salt of course, but there are some alleged screenshots [1]

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/fck1tu/if_y...

Another theory that could place it in a loophole: It may be performing object detection without recording what we think of as normal video. Similar to self-driving technology and object recognition, useful data can be derived without actually recording the traditional thought of “HD video in color”.

Without passing comment on the contributors in this comment string, I think we will find more often either a jarring or nostalgic reaction to design elements depending on if your formative technology experiences were on Apple II’s, DOS, and Win3.1 or iPhones, iPads, and Alexa.

Site appears to be down 4pm EST with SSL errors, I can’t access it.

While I agree with you view it’s reflective only of the “western” market. I believe they’ll have a combination of cheap services for established markets and grow advertising for developing markets.

Google and Facebook will turn to developing countries with over 100M pop to bolster bottom line the next decade, and for the US, per your first point, continue to acquire more consumer eyeballs and fold them into the parent company (take special note of their recent rebranding) for top line gains.

Facebook aren’t oblivious to these challenges and are investing in new-media experiments (I.e. hardware). It’s important to view these as just other viewports for the social connectivity. Think back to the explosion (and then clamp down) of social FB Canvas gaming on Facebook, they’ll launch v2 of that in an improved fashion with Oculus and pair it with Portal, then push majorly of compute to the cloud - watch out Xbox and PlayStation (probably PS6, not next-gen).

All this to say: Facebook is now a holding company looking to scale across the digital consumer landscape and encourage opt-in data sharing. I think they’ll go through a tough period but aren’t in any immediate danger.

“[SoftBank] put into WeWork, an astounding total of more than $18.5 billion for a company it values at $8 billion.”

Wow. I think when they do end up writing that HBS case, this will also serve as a wonderful example of sunk cost fallacy.