aerosmile

Well said.

Yep: https://www.amazon.com/Google-Leaks-Whistleblowers-Expos%C3%...

I'll save you the read. A Google employee downloaded 100k documents from the company-wide available internal wiki, identified all the ones that seemed anywhere from highly-to-mildly offensive to anyone in the world, and then published it all as a book on Amazon. The book has been out for about a year and continues to sell well (not to mention the hundreds of paid media appearances for the author to speak in front of like-minded audiences).

Here's the fun part: Google considered suing, but recognized that this would trigger the Streisand Effect and let him off the hook. Obviously, this was a calculated risk this dude took and that paid off (at least from the legal perspective).

Did Google act ethically 100% of the time? God no! But did it hurt them to have everything out in the open? You betcha.

So clearly there's a market out there for juicy internal documents. I would still say the first step is not to do anything wrong, ever. But once you have enough people working for you and you can't be in every meeting at all times, shit is going to happen, and people are going to want to pay to find out about it.

EDIT: replaced "filtered out" with "identified"

That was an incredibly misleading article. If you check the links, you find the following:

1. P&G didn't turn off that spend, it shifted it to other marketing platforms.

2. Chase didn't change its marketing spend, it just concentrated it from 400k sites to 5k sites.

3. Uber found out that their agency was committing fraud and AFAIK the case is still being litigated.

I hate being that guy, but check the links. Those reporters really must have an agenda or something (or are just struggling to get the clicks, so they need to make a story out of nothing).

This comment is pure gold

The larger the budget, the more sophisticated the teams and the methodology. Also, more players eager to accuse marketing of poor performance (eg: sales and revenue teams). Not sure where you made that experience, but that marketing team would get fired within a quarter at any large scale company I am familiar with. Large companies are inefficient in many ways, but not in what pays the bills.

Now I am curious - what are the examples of unprofitable performance marketing campaigns at that scale conducted by public companies?

Rereading the post, I agree it came across as more personal than it should have been. I wish I was able to frame it more as a response to all the people advocating for alternative marketing ideas which frankly never work out. Instead, I brought in his own company into the narrative, which was below the belt. I know first hand how hard it is to get something to work, and how unlikely it is to happen time after time. I wish I could edit the comment, but HN won't let me at this point.

Thank you for sharing this. Facebook received a lot of criticism for how they lobbied publicly against iOS14. Their reputation is ruined, and anything they say will always be taking with a cynical afterthought. But as much as it pains me to say it, they are 100% right in saying that iOS14 is indirectly going to create a lot of damage for SMBs and companies trying to disrupt the status quo. There's more nuance to it, but think of it this way: if your marketing budget plans on reaching 100m Americans each year, then the negative impact on micro targeting is not quite as bad since you're going for the mainstream customer anyway. But if you're trying to reach only 1m people, then losing micro targeting is a matter of life or death.

It's fair to question credibility, but you have to realize that their results can be compared against 3rd parties, and it would lead to a lot of reputational damage (and also legal risk) to systematically defraud your advertisers. All it takes is one smart team to out the entire enterprise.

Scale brings both, headwinds and tailwinds. The outcome often hinges on how the balance of those two forces plays out.

Ecommerce example: every year the CPMs go up and your paid margin goes down. But every year you have a larger email list, so the balance of paid to unpaid shifts.

General example: every year you get more of the late-stage employees who care less and less about your company. But every year you can afford to pay for more layers of management, which will keep an eye on the underperformers.

This list goes on and on... The headwinds are driven by external forces, whereas the tailwinds end up working out based on your specific execution of the opportunities that present themselves to you. This is where an experienced operational team can make a huge difference.

> I think we've lost a bit of creativity in marketing.

You absolutely cannot rely on performance marketing forever. It's a shot in the arm until you have reached enough [fill in whatever you wnat] so that you can leverage that momentum to reach the escape velocity. So it's not good forever, but it's a great catalyst.

There are bad actors in every field. I would just be careful in using such anecdotes to distract from the overall message, which as you spelled it out in detail seems sound (with perhaps just a note that a 5X ROAS is not bad for most unbranded campaigns, but I get your point).

It would have made the post even longer. But I corrected that in the child post. Hopefully that clarifies it.

You linked to an article that offers no guidance on how to actually do it, which is more indicative of the article itself than of the methodology. One of the vendors in this space has a good amount of content on this topic, which you can find at the bottom of this page: https://www.measured.com/. Dislaimer: I have nothing to do with this vendor or the industry in general (apart from successfully spending money on performance channels).

- Brian's comments about Airbnb's approach to performance marketing are used to imply that Airbnb's lessons apply to other businesses. Very few businesses - especially those that start from small numbers and need to grow them - have 90% of their traffic mix come from repeat customers. Using Brian's comments helps fuel the narrative that brand marketing is a better investment than performance marketing, which is correct in some cases (Nike, Airbnb), and not in others (most startups). Also, as another member pointed out, Airbnb's performance marketing budget is still well over $200M/year, which no responsible/public company would spend if it wasn't returning a great ROAS. Finally, Airbnb is known for all sorts of marketing shenanigans in their early days, and they certainly can't take the credit for a pure brand play.

- Calling performance marketing platforms a scam (repeatedly, both in the title and in the narrative) doesn't explain how those same performance marketing platforms are carrying the majority of traffic acquisition in most of the B2C companies that went public this year (and practically all of the DTC ones). Calling into question the accuracy of measurement is one thing. Calling it a scam is wrong and designed to rank on HN rather than to be reflective of the true value of those platforms.

- As I pointed out in my original post, all you have to do is use incrementality studies and 98% of the criticism instantly goes away. Rand implies that you have to do your own studies (by eg, following Avinash Kaushik's methodology) which is 100% wrong - Facebook will do them for you if you reach a certain spend limit, or 3rd parties will as well with no spend limits. Also, from experience, this really becomes an issue once you spend meaningful amounts on two platforms at the same time. His rant on this subject has an iota of truth and a whole lot of sensationalism mixed together, and overall leads to wrong conslusions.

- He conflates "paid search" with "all performance marketing platforms", including "paid social." It would have been helpful to point out that the challenges with branded terms are entirely isolated to paid search and have nothing to do with paid social.

- My favorite sensationalist tactic: frame a strong accusation as a question. This way you get the clicks, but you can still cover your ass by linking to resources that with enough research would allow the reader to answer the question with a "No." But in lieu of that research, the implication is that the answer is a "Yes." You'll see this tactic used by less reputative media sources, and I was disappointed to see Rand do the same.

I could go on but hopefully this will suffice.

I agree with the rant how Google introduced a tax that wouldn't have existed in a world without Google. And, technically speaking, it would have been possible for Google to not charge for that tax (but would you have done that in their shoes? It's not like their market share is suffering).

But if you are implying that brands should not invest in on-brand search campaigns, then this is a really bad advice. It's a known fact that targeting your competitors' branded terms is ROI positive, which definitionally means that the affected brand is unable to capture all the customers who were initially searching for it.

There are so many holes in these arguments that you could drive a truck through it. Which is so infuriating, because a big part of my professional career consisted of watching all of Rand's SEO videos and really appreciating them. I really thought he was a genius. But then over the past few years, he started sharing more general views on entrepreneurship, and those takeaways just didn't really make much sense. Basically, his own VC-funded company turned into a shit show and suddenly he started advocating against VC in general (as opposed to taking an honest look at the mistakes that his company made). So in the past few years, I tried to reconcile in my head: how can a genius make such imperfect conclusions? My initial takeaway was that he's blinded by his own mistakes and shifting the blame, which seems perfectly reasonable and understandable. Frankly, I would probably feel and act the same way.

But after reading this article, it finally dawned on me. He makes imperfect conclusions in everything he touches, it's just that in some fields those conclusions can be more easily proved to be wrong than in others. SEO is the perfect field where a polished presenter can get away with imperfect conclusions for years - trust me, I know, I made a living for years in this field, and I am very familiar with the nature of this work. Most of the time, you have no idea what the black box really does, and instead you're just trying to guess what might have happened. Most importantly, there are many ways to skin a cat in SEO, and just because your approach is net positive doesn't mean that you truly are delivering the global maximum (or that the net positive gain was ROI positive). In short, it's impossible to know who's right and who's wrong, and Rand's videos convinced me that he's right, but I am no longer sure. I just rewatched one of them, and can easily see how his conclusions are just... opinions.

While we may or may never find out if his SEO opinions were the global maximum, we can quantifiably demonstrate that his opinions on content marketing are not solid. This whole essay he wrote can be replaced with "hey performance marketers, don't trust the platform numbers and instead do your incrementality studies." Platforms like Facebook will give you those for free if you reach a certain spend level, and you can also get them from 3rd party providers like measured.com. In other words, if you're a performance marketer and you're not conducting incrementality studies, then you're very early in your career and are not following the best practices. Simple as that - no need to extrapolate from there and reach all sorts of additional conclusions (which is obviously a pattern in Rand's behavior) - calling into question a perfectly investable marketing channel, conflating the needs of a public company with everyone else's needs, using words like scam, etc.

I am really disappointed to have to write this, but you would have been better off not reading this article. If Rand is really advocating that the majority of entrepreneurs should follow his advice and focus on PR instead of performance marketing, then perhaps an honest thing to ask would be - how is that working out for his own company? AFAIK, SparkToro is nowhere close to replicating the growth of his previous company, which is honestly disappointing for someone with such a huge reach and name recognition.

Employers won't hold it against you for being against tactics that involve privacy and surveillance issues in general (eg: "I wouldn't want to work at a place that spies on every single Slack message I send to coworkers"), because they give you the benefit of doubt that from their bottom line perspective you will be a net-positive contributor. The minute you include the word U-N-I-O... (eg: I wouldn't want to work at a place that spies on unionization efforts), that benefit of doubt is lost, and now everyone is wondering why that topic is on your mind.

None of this is a reflection of the value of unions from the employees' perspective. But it's important to realize that unions are one of the instances where the employees' and employers' interests are not aligned. So, emailing a recruiter and mentioning unions has only one possible outcome - none.

To be fair, very few tech companies would hire someone who starts off by expressing their support for unionization. It's certainly a good "unsubscribe" tactic. For example, if you want to get rid of unwanted Linkedin outreach, just put into your title "Go unions!"

You are right - the market has shifted and developers can now work from home, far away from their office, and still get paid great salaries. This may also work for marketers, designers, and few other digital verticals. For the majority of regular people (teachers, bakers, warehouse workers, hospitality workers, waiters, medical workers, etc etc) this is going to stay a pipe dream with physical barriers in place that will never enable them to get something similar.

What an advantage in life to have chosen this career path over any of the above ones. And what a shame whenever we come across one of those "I am a developer and it's horrible!" type of posts.

I don't know why you're being downvoted. Let's put our political inclinations aside, and just marvel in the long list of contradictions and unintentional negative commentary that someone managed to produce by trying to voice the opposite. With a large enough microphone, this fellow HN member would bring to fall any political affiliation they decide to join and support.

Edit: sorry for the confusion, "PFM" was meant to say PMF (autocorrected and I didn't notice) - product market fit.

I've followed Ryan's writing over the years, especially since our careers were on a parallel path throughout most of his time as CEO. I've led a company that had a difficult time in achieving a PFM and as such everything else was painful. And I was also blessed to have a perfect PFM in another company. I think I've seen enough of the spectrum to be able to say that Ryan's writing is not reflective of the job itself, but more of his perception of it, which I am not even going to try to analyze. This is not meant as an attack at Ryan, but more as a data point for anyone else who is considering becoming a CEO and is feeling discouraged from reading too much of Ryan's stuff.

The job has its downsides, and the worst thing that can happen to you is 1) be a first-time CEO, 2) have no PFM, and 3) have no safety net. If you hit that trifecta, it's not going to be easy. But here's the deal - you'll get through it, and you'll come out on the other side with a much improved mental model that will allow you to be more successful in your next go around. You may or may not ever achieve market-level compensation, and you may even end up in debt. But it will get easier each time you try, it will come the closest to being your own boss, you will learn more than doing anything else, and most importantly, you won't turn 70 and think of yourself as having not taking enough chances in your life.

A founder-friendly term sheet is not necessarily an employee-friendly term sheet, but a founder-unfriendly term sheet is 100% of the time bad for employees as well (low valuations, liquidation preferences, etc). All things being equal, as an employee you want to be in the company where the founder is laughing all the way to the bank.

Gotcha, I misunderstood.

Even at FAANG, not enough people have the seniority for their base salary to turn them into buyers of $10m homes. I appreciate your point that RSUs are different from options, but I still think it's indicative that cash rarely comprises the majority of the wealthy people's income.

Some data to back up your argument would really help here. The VC market has never been more founder-friendly, and the amount of VC invested is at an almost all-time high. Additionally, last year was the 3rd highest in the last 20 years for the number of IPOs. So just because you found yourself in an overly negative HN thread shouldn't skew your view that the chances of doing well are higher now than ever before (which is not meant to imply that they are high on an absolute level, but certainly in comparison to prior years).

Because most of the shiny things in SF were paid for with equity. And there are plenty of shiny things in SF. I am not saying you should work for equity, but I think you should realize why the real estate is as expensive in SF as it is. There are plenty of times when people got screwed over, and there are also - fewer, but enough to move the market - people who didn't. So when you ask the question "how could you have been so incredibly stupid to believe that equity is not worth $0," you just have to look around yourself and ask "how come that zillow lists so many properties for over $10m?" You shouldn't count on your equity returning anything, but you also shouldn't listen to people who take an overly unhealthy view at the potential upside.

That's a straw man argument. If you had an interest of any kind in a company, and someone screwed you, you can sue. In today's environment, companies will settle even if they have a good case, let alone if they are likely to lose. Plenty of lawyers will take such a case and get paid in a contingent fee arrangement.

Facebook is like a mirror. If you want to learn about yourself, look at your feed. If you see a bunch of political stuff, then it turns out that you had a weakness for political content. If you see a bunch of kittens, then you were overindexing in how you interacted with that content compared to alternatives.

It's not too different from alcohol. Two different people start drinking a lot of beer in college. One grows out of it, the other becomes an alcoholic. All things being same, the latter person had a more addictive personality and should have been more careful with alcohol.

To extend the alcohol analogy - some people wanted to prohibit it, but ultimately it's still here and it's just heavily regulated. You're not allowed to have it when you're young or when you're driving. Your friends will think poorly of you if you have too much of it too frequently. I wouldn't be surprised if social networks end up in a similar place.

wow...