curiousmarketersclub

[curiousmarketersclub]

The whole podcast linked to here is worth listening to, if only to hear a true infovore’s approach to information discovery and self-knowledge.

[curiousmarketersclub]

Tyler Cowen’s core principles of economics:

Incentives matter

There’s always an opportunity cost (aka no free lunch)

[curiousmarketersclub]

you create the conditions for people to do the things they’ve always wanted to do

Seth Godin on the status games aspect of strategy

[curiousmarketersclub]

Forrester has made its 2025 predictions 🔮

In: “Brand smart” Out: Brand safety

embracing new practices like swapping keyword exclusion lists with lists of publishers to include in their campaigns.

Out: TikTok ban in 2025 In (again): SEO-powered AI

Out: In-housing In: Agencies (out-housing? (depends on the agency, I guess))

[curiousmarketersclub]

Welcome to the totally predictable ad market circus

Rather than normalcy, we’re finding huge spikes of inefficiency as everybody scrambles to crunch ad campaigns in before the big BFCM weekend.

Most platform cost per metrics are up and brands are trying to make up for lost time.

Customer mindset is boomeranging post-election.

Enjoy some turkey today and slow down a bit.

[curiousmarketersclub]

Beware negative social proof. a.k.a. the “well, if everyone else is doing it…” effect

Definition = if you make an unwanted behaviour seem commonplace, more people will perform the unwanted behaviour.

Negativity is a downward spiral. And one hard to harness.

Be aspirational.

[curiousmarketersclub]

It’s easy to focus on winning but I think have to focus more on how not to lose than you do on how to win.

Because how not to lose is more controllable than how to win.

When you’re trying to win championships you can’t focus on winning championships. You have to focus on what goes into the process of winning but also how can you prevent losing by doing the things that are simplest to do under high duress.

-Boston Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla

[curiousmarketersclub]

It’s looking like inflation is back on the bingo card for 2025.

Using our rule of thumb that every 1 [percentage point] increase in the effective tariff rate would raise core [Personal Consumption Expenditures] prices by 0.1%, we estimate that the proposed tariff increases would boost core PCE prices by 0.9% if implemented

Jan Hatzius https://www.thedailyupside.com/economics/inflation-prices/trump-vows-tariffs-on-canada-mexico-and-china/

Disposal income might get further squeezed, meaning marketing efficiency will be ever more important.

[curiousmarketersclub]

Interesting to see Google continue to shift features into the third-party realm. This time, it’s ad creation tools for YouTube and Display.

Google will sunset Ads Creative Studio by the end of March 2025, shifting its focus to new growth areas and enhancing partnerships with creative agencies to deliver tailored campaigns at scale.

For YouTube-specific customizations, advertisers are encouraged to engage third-party partners.

[curiousmarketersclub]

Plenty of pixels have been spilled discussing the Jaguar rebrand, but this post is worth checking out.

If you’re going to rebrand:

Do it without alienating your core audience.

Make sure your product is at the heart of the story—not completely absent

[curiousmarketersclub]

Foursquare is open sourcing its locations database.

a foundational open data set, Foursquare Open Source Places (“FSQ OS Places”). This base layer of 100mm+ global places of interest (“POI”) includes 22 core attributes (see schema here) that will be updated monthly and available for commercial use under the Apache 2.0 license framework.

Maps will be a foundational OS of the future (haven’t they always been though?), so this data set could be a big deal (and could place Foursquare at the center of it).

Could this spark an ImageNet moment for geospatial computing?

[curiousmarketersclub]

You can no longer follow hashtags on Instagram. Which is not something I particularly care about, but I wanted to highlight this from the article:

Though it also feels like another step towards the death of the hashtag, which has slowly lost relevance as a connective option as algorithms have got better and better and understanding content, context, and user interest.

If AI can bring contextual “understanding” to platforms it means we can get back to creating for humans not for “X engine optimization.”

[curiousmarketersclub]

"What's ChatGPT's share of search?" Very tough to answer. But, if we assume: - Every LLM prompt is a "search" - Desktop + mobile web traffic, excluding apps, is close enough - Mixing data from multiple panels is kosher Here's what it looks like 👇👇👇 pic.twitter.com/aIzvvMIplf

— Rand Fishkin (follow @randderuiter on Threads) (@randfish) November 19, 2024

Some big ifs, but this means GPT is not an insignificant player.

Google won’t be overtaken by one player, but by all these other slices growing over time. Chipping away and taking more and more search share.

[curiousmarketersclub]

Reddit traffic is exploding thanks to its recent licensing deal with Google.

And some of those visitors are turning into users, adding 31 million daily actives in the last year.

“Reddit also says that its Weekly Active Unique user count (WAUq) averaged 365.4 million in the third quarter, an increase of 53% year-over-year. The amount of daily to weekly usage here is unusual for social apps, which usually see about 2.3x usage between daily and monthly actives. Reddit seemingly sees a lot more than this, which could point to the less consistent way in which visitors use the app.”

[curiousmarketersclub]

From Seth:

stories are the basic building block of culture

&

Stories that resonate are the ones that sit with the stories we already believe and value.

[curiousmarketersclub]

Why is Spotify a video platform now?

the reason why there's this big video push is because it's part of an anchor into the company's deeper push into advertising.

advertisers are more accustomed to buying video ad inventory than audio ad inventory. And if Spotify can get new advertisers on board through video, something that's familiar to them, maybe those advertisers will be more likely to spend on audio elsewhere in the surface.

Daniel Konstantinovic https://www.emarketer.com/content/podcast-daily-how-spotify-has-been-able-flirt-with-profitability-how-plans-take-on-youtube

Benjamins, baby

[curiousmarketersclub]

The headline:

OpenAI is thinking about making its own browser

Not a surprise. They’re also rumored to be working on a phone and more integrations with hardware makers.

“The New Google” is a pretty obvious avenue for them to pursue.

This is why regulator’s reasoning for forcing Big G to sell Chrome feels off.

Google is getting chipped away at from many angles as options proliferate. But a better option is the only thing that will knock the company synonymous with search out of its number 1 spot.