“Don’t hand out print-outs of your slides. They don’t work without you there.”Seth Godin
“Fred Wilson on the connection between public ridicule and the potential returns. The first paragraph accurately defines the different between amazing companies and me too companies. The second paragraph nails the difference between amazing investors and the rest of the herd.I saw Bill Gurley say that you can only make money by being right about something that most people think is wrong. His logic was that you can’t make money by being wrong. And you can’t make money by being right about something everyone else knows. So you have to be right about something that most people think is wrong.
[..]
So many folks in the venture capital business are sheep that just want to follow the herd. They are momentum investors purchasing highly illquid investments. That is a recipe for disaster. Momentum investing works in highly liquid markets (sometimes). From what I can tell, it almost never works in private markets.
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(via coffeeinthemountains)
“A great Quora answer from Cindy Alvaraez on getting quality feedback and insights during the “customer discovery” phase of customer development. Incidentally, the first 2/3 is also a near perfect script for the first meeting in any type of complex sales process.Start with an open-ended “Tell me about how you…” question. i.e. “Tell me about how you deal with lunch during the workweek”
Shut up for 60 seconds. This is a LONG, LONG time and it feels awkward. It also forces the person to go beyond the short (and probably useless) answer and go into detail.
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“The reason third-party data exists is so I can go find a person and buy them somewhere else cheaper.” Eliminate that, he explained, and the only way to reach an audience you want is to pay more to publishers where that audience lives.”
Jonathan Mendez of Yieldbot is smart as usual, in an unusually thoughtful piece in Digiday about the inevitable down fall of third party cookies.
In 5-10 years we will consider it insane that it was possible for rogue third parties to measure media consumption at an individual level, and on top of that resell that information with arbitrary, self-regulated level of “anonymization”.
Great Advertising aligns with Consumer wants, as well as Advertiser needs. The rest is noise.
“Amazon sells things to people at prices that seem impossible because it actually is impossible to make money that way.”Zing.
“Native advertising works. Our results show that CTRs typically are 20 percent higher than banner units. It is seamless, elegant and most of all not disruptive to the user.”
Amazing. So this “innovation” has increased clicks to 0.12% of all ads? YAY!
(from Digiday)
“Buying and Selling Holes in Pages is a Crappy Business. 2012 may be the year that on page display advertising jumped the shark and became fully commoditized. Everything now is going to move in one of two directions: programmatic/automated or premium/deeply integrated. Don’t get caught in between those two poles: it’s going to be a wasteland.”Doug Weaver
“Facebook said it is paying Datalogix for the data-matching. So far, the two companies have measured 45 campaigns and in 70 per cent of cases, for every dollar a marketer spent on Facebook it earned an additional $3 in incremental sales, Mr Smallwood said.”
The Financial Times reports on Facebook and online/offline attribution. Funny how the Facebook rep makes it sound like an investment yields a 3x return when in fact it’s insanely expensive.
Even most die hard brand marketers spend less than 10% in relation to their revenues. Most business’ can’t afford to pay more than 5%. And yet here Facebook touts 33% as some sort of success case. Slightly over simplifying things, one could argue that if marketers are in fact vastly over paying and if that if they had the same expectations on Facebook as any other advertising channel, they would slash 80% of their investments today.
If this doesn’t highlight exactly how much work the Facebook advertising product needs, I don’t know what does.
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