davemel37

Consumers should be the ones building chatbots to talk to brands not vice versa. The brands can use NLP and AI to partially automate much of the conversation, but it needs to be consumer driven... too much of the promise of chatbots requires breaking down barriers and as long as brands control their own experience and every bot is siloed, the real pain of consumers and current ecommerce wont be solved...

Too much of technology today is focused on optimizing businesses and ends up the end users.

Online advertising is a protection racket where publishers steal and hold customers hostage and sell them to the highest bidder...all the middleware is optimized around grabbing your piece of the advertising pie without caring about the end users or the advertisers...in the meantime, its just driving up costs to deliver value...

We need a buyer driven market...we need long term visionaries who stop optimizing to business revenue and cost savings and optimize to GROWING THE OVERALL MARKET!!! optimize to what really serves customers and advertisers instead of these short aighted plays solving problems the previous startup created...

We wouldnt need facebook ads if our competitors werent reaching our customers on google and we wouldnt need content marketing if publishers actually tried to serve advertisers instead of just trying to drive up their costs...

These companies are thinking about everything backwards imho.

"Using experts in a variety of fields as test subjects, experimental psychologists have examined the relationship between the amount of information available to the experts, the accuracy of judgments they make based on this information, and the experts’ confidence in the accuracy of these judgments."

"Key findings from this research are: • Once an experienced analyst has the minimum information necessary to make an informed judgment, obtaining additional information generally does not improve the accuracy of his or her estimates. Additional information does, however, lead the analyst to become more confident in the judgment, to the point of overconfidence. • Experienced analysts have an imperfect understanding of what information they actually use in making judgments. They are unaware of the extent to which their judgments are determined by a few dominant factors, rather than by the systematic integration of all available information. Analysts actually use much less of the available information than they think they do."

That being said, I think the owners of sites will still feel the sting in their gut seeing or hearing their site is insecure or that browsers are scaring visitors away...so I think it will speed up adoption even further and I do agree that https will become the default.

Edit: There is an exception to your understanding of perception. Extreme convenience can overcome market perceptions...If someone found a way to make a search engine or solve discovery in a way that is extremely more convenient than using Google, they can unseat the brand.

Case in point, when was the last time you felt an Ad on Google was disruptive or predatory or spammy? They forced quality score to determine the cost to advertise...Adwords is one of the most effective ad channels out there and one of the most expensive and its all because they aligned their offering with what was best for advertisers.

As long as publishers sell ad space in a way that doesnt align with driving profitable ads for advertisers, youll get stuck with bad actors and deeply disruptive ads...

As long as publishers sell eyeballs, we all lose...once they start selling context and results, and truly care about driving value for advertisers, we are doomed to this ad blocking world...

The problem is not advertisers its publishers not aligning their offering with whats best for their users and advertisers long term

https://youtu.be/EAXCu1zeaaI

Maybe I am naive, but I feel like this creates a dynamic that hurts otherwise promising prospects.

If that is true, the problem will solve itself eventually.

As someone with more experience than most advertisers when it comes to native ads (i.e. outbrain, taboola, revcontent, etc...) I can assure you that clicks and impression costs are going up, not down. As people learn what works and the competition gets fiercer, the costs go up.

The race to the bottom you fear is actually, a race to the bottom of what advertisers can afford to continue advertising. Right now, Native ads are dominated by supplements, which is essentially snake oil salesmen, and also some casino, and other either mass appeal or shady enterprises. Most legit businesses are priced out of the game...Paid Search and Paid Social have done a good job keeping out these low quality advertisers...

Essentially, the race to the bottom of creating clickbait that you are pointing out, is actually a race to the top. A race to the highest margin, most mass appeal advertisers.

If you really think about publisher incentives, they are more likely to create clickbait when the value of clicks goes up, not goes down. At some point of time when prices drop, it becomes easier to make money in other areas...so why bother.

Edit: corrected spelling on a word

Brands are more than just a tool...they are a direct byproduct of how our brains perceive and recall things.

Human nature hasnt changed since the caveman days and never will. It can evolve and manifest itself in different ways, but our core drivers are fundamental to our existence.

Tenfold Traffic is a rapidly growing Digital Marketing Consultancy looking to scale into a full blown agency.

The business is currently a One person consultancy, leaning on 3 contractors to help service the accounts. We focus on Search, Native & Paid Social and offer some SEO and ABM. I am looking to make my first full-time hire and bring most of the outsourced work in-house.

The role requires a strong handle on SEM and Google Shopping best practices, with clarity about how to think about account structures and a unquenchable thirst for knowledge, experimentation and pushing the limits.

Initially, the role will require account management, client communication, report creation and account build outs, restructures and optimization.

I need someone very well rounded for this initial hire, but hope to build a team around and under them, so the role will become more defined and focused over time.

I need someone who excels at asking the right questions of clients to help develop a truly unique strategy for them.

Our main differentiator is deep targeting strategy. We consistently hear from our clients that they never heard ideas like ours from the other agencies they speak to. This is core to our offering. A deeper, more meaningful understanding of the clients, their goals, and their internal decision making processes and mapping that to the channels we are using to deliver a strategy that truly moves the specific needle that needs moving.

Must haves:

  • A clear understanding of all the available levers within Adwords and AdCenter.

  • Clear understanding of Google Shopping strategy, ideally with experience segmenting campaigns by search query intent.

  • Semi-Technical - Know enough to troubleshoot tracking problems, manipulate an XML data feed, tweak css, tweak adwords scripts (javascript, etc... The more technical the better, but a bare minimum of being able to google an issue and troubleshoot it on your own if necessary. 

  • Experience with Excel - Specifically, Index Match, Pivot Tables, Vlookups, etc... A HUGE plus is someone with VBA experience,and using tools like Supermetrics in Excel. 

  • Some knowledge of statistics is important. 

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  • The ability to tell a compelling story from data. 

  • Strong communication skills.

We should all stop playing into their games and arguing over the issues and focus on fixing the incentives thay drive our current political process...

Sure, the issues are important, thats why we get riled up...but im the mean time, the much bigger evil is smiling at us being too distracted to stop him.

Pretty much all the evils in todays ads are a byproduct of the sellers controlling the ecosystem and focusing on their needs over the buyers.(i.e. selling impressions, focusing on pageviews, not reporting on viewability, monetizing data, etc...) This does two terrible things...this makes your ad placements ineffective for 90% of the legit advertisers and only viable to the bad actors selling pills and other spammy/predatory products.

If you want to really fix ads, you need to put the average buyer in the driver seat, you need to make your monetization accountable to your advertisers bottom line, and you need to collaborate on creative design to be beautiful within your site...

As long as publishers and sellers control the marketplace, we are doomed to have clickbait, fake news, ridiculous cookie tracking, and irrelevant ads.

Most advertisers do track and measure actual revenue to them. I think your mistake is assuming junk traffic and bounced eyeballs dont convert or contribute to sales...They do. If you have a decent product with decent margins, each sale can pay for thousands of useless eyeballs.

If it didnt work, advertisers would stop.

But, This is exactly my point. His reason doesn't matter. Reasons aren't relevant to apologies.

When you are apologizing, you are admitting wrongdoing...defending yourself in the same breadth is essentially saying you didn't do anything wrong in the first place.

Every time I have to apologize I am tempted to throw in a reason/excuse and everytime I remind myself of that quote and stick with just "I'm sorry" I end up with a better result than when I tag on a reason...

That being said, if you read his post...he actually doesn't apologize at all. He even goes so far as to say he wont do it again (only) because it upset the community team, not because it was wrong to do. He also claims he fixed it. He might of changed back the comments...but he certainly didn't fix anything.

"Never Ruin an Apology With an Excuse."

I read Steve's apology and to be honest it was more dismissive and excusing than it was a real apology. So, it shouldn't surprise you that he isn't being cut the same slack you would expect after a sincere apology.

http://www.slashgear.com/pixel-phone-flipping-scheme-googles...

Looks like Google is reinstating accounts.

It's one thing if you are already here, a functioning and contributing member of society where relatives are citizens, etc... IN that case, I can appreciate policies that give a path to citizenship...

But, at some point we need to stop the flow of illegal immigrants. Not just to keep out the bad actors, but also to protect the integrity of our legal immigration process. Someone, somewhere has to be too late...

So, if you come across the border and we catch you and deport you, and you try to come across again, Jail sounds like a reasonable deterrent to encourage you to try the legal routes.

One thing that people don't seem to get is that some things are zero sum, and empathy with the little guy isn't always the right side. As individuals, we have the freedom to decide who we want to be, and how we feel about these sad stories...but as the American Government, they have a different value system and priorities that they need to filter these policies through.

Immigration is a tough issue. There is a sincerely held and reasonable position on both sides.

Do I think we should throw people whose only crime is illegal immigration into Jail? No. I am not even sure that Jail works and shouldn't just be completely abolished...But, we have to draw the line somewhere...

Trump is drawing that line at convicted criminals and people who aren't yet across the border. I think thats a fair stance that isn't unreasonable.

edit:spelling

Maybe you are right, but whats the alternative. The status quo of doing nothing?

I will almost always side with action vs. inaction. (not to say I'm right, just to say I would rather try and fail than not try because some random naysayers have more faith in the cartels than our ability to secure a border.)

Edit: I copied and pasted the wrong quote, so I fixed it.

He states very clearly he is only deporting the 2 million Criminals...not the 11 million Illegals.

I really think you are the one who misunderstood his intent.

Edit: I relooked at the contract and I see where we are both coming from. There are two sections that address illegal immigration. The first, which I was focusing on addresses WHO WE WILL DEPORT. The second section, discussing the wall, mentions jail penalties for people who are deported and re-enter.

In short, if we only deport the people trump says hell deport in this agreement, than I am right. If he deports all illegal immigrants, than you are right. Personally, I think the belief he will deport more than the dangerous criminals is not really reality based, despite his campaign rhetoric...(but, I've been wrong before.)

Here is the quote: " FOURTH, begin removing the more than two million criminal illegal immigrants from the country and cancel visas to foreign countries that won’t take them back."