It’s easy to snigger at that, and I certainly will, but Zuckerberg paints a picture and is worth listening to on the subject (and product design & shipping and Facebook / Meta culture) in this latest Acquired Podcast. There loads of good stuff in their back catalogue too.

I wouldn’t have described myself as a ‘fan’, but you can’t help but impressed by the energy, strength of conviction and ability to navigate every perceived threat twenty years on. We need entrepreneurs and risk takers and environments in which they can thrive, the perfect storm hitting China speaks to that - Zuckerberg wasn’t hauled in for “supervisory interviews” by the CCP like Jack Ma was..:

Algorithmically determined ticket pricing being in the news since Oasis announced a reunion had a few digital marketers nodding along awkwardly with their friends, frankly I’m not sure I can think of anything less worthy of government intervention than the price that people willingly paid to go to a gig.

Which is why I especially enjoyed Keir Starmer’s demands for a “return of the sausages”. Although it was a reminder of how far Twitter has fallen as a tool for marketers. A few short years ago this might have resulted in a cutesy brand pile-on with supermarkets bantering with farm shops and Greggs about which sausages to release. Thanks Elon.

Too much of anything in life is bad for you, so probably for the best that we’re past peak woke and can strike a bit of a balance. The ‘mentions on earnings calls’ jumped out to me here - even those at the top get swept up in the zeitgeist of the moment and what they think people want to hear:

Powerplay of the Week

If you feel you’re in a work based conversation that’s not going your way simply say “I feel like we’re conflating two different things”. Like it’s close relation “sorry, what are we solving for?” you’ll put yourself back to the top of the intellectual log, reminding the others that you’re a leader who likes to cut through the noise and can simplify what these mouth breathers can’t.

Go well!

AJ

Industry News

If authenticity is perhaps the key to Taylor Swift’s fan connection it’s playing out elsewhere too - supercharging political debates on TikTok, taking school debating club from the domain of the nerds to a wider audience through ‘live battles’ where someone is earning up to $7k an hour to talk Trump vs Harris...

TikTok for Business - it feels an odd way to view this as an online magazine, I’d somehow rather it was an irritating video. Interesting positioning however that TikTok is the antidote to the overwhelmed digital shopper.

Real world second order consequences: +1,600% increase in VPN downloads in Brazil after Xitter was ‘banned’. Regulation meets people meets global tech companies meets free speech absolutists.

Every week since I’ve been at Google we’ve had a weekly Trading meeting, running through customers, their growth rates and key metrics we keep an eye on. A running joke I’ve had is that people use the weather as a versatile excuse:

• sometimes the weather is good and so queries are up
• sometimes good weather means no one searches and queries are down
• sometimes it rains and people search more
• sometimes “you can’t expect people to search in these conditions”

We’ve reached an accommodation where they’re allowed to play the weather card once in the quarter and that’s it. I feel like the British Retail Consortium needs the same rule - picnics and BBQs drove sales in August. Well done everyone

Go well,

AJ

But it does raise an interesting question about surveys… The next time someone shows me a slide that says “57% of consumers agree that they spend 2 hours researching before buying” or “3 in 4 people agree that having a good website is important to purchase blah blah” I’m going to share this YouGov survey with them.

Fundamentally what people say is very often very different to what people actually do and it’s easy to over-rely on a proof point or two from ‘extensive surveys’. I’m more or less blind to 5 star ratings at this stage because they’re so ubiquitous as to be pointless. We should all use the old eye ball test far more than we do.

It comes down to positioning and whether what you’re really looking to achieve is winning an argument whilst pretending you’re trying to solve a problem. Winning arguments is easy - narrow the scope, create a fake laboratory environment in which the problems exists and find a surveyed proof point. Solving problems is harder but way more valuable because it’s about breadth, expansion and trial'n'error in order to find a solution.

With the UK riots this week having hopefully now subsided I came across the English Civil War Society who I imagine have had more website traffic than expected this week following Elon Musk weighing in. Social Media's role is driven by the belief that ‘legacy media’ can’t be trusted, but then the Libertarian 'real world’ argument falls down for me when 6% of people believe they could qualify for the 100m.

Industry things

Colin Huang is the founder of Temu and just became China’s richest person with a net worth of $48.6bn. I’d imagine he’s fairly pleased with how it’s going.

I tend to subscribe to the ‘Death of Culture’ argument that nothing is new, everything is re-make and a re-hash of the old. The LA Olympics handover ceremony being a case in point. Young upstarts Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg and The Red Hot Chili Peppers were the showpiece acts after Tom Cruise abseiled into Paris. Dr Dre is 59 years old and will be 15 months away from collecting his pension when the LA Olympics start. He’s 4 years older than Jacob Rees-Mogg (I have my doubts about his medical qualifications too).

I’m awaiting something I instinctively don’t, can’t and shouldn’t understand from a younger generation breaking out. Below is a screenshot I sent to a friends a few months ago given we’re hearing non-stop how Temu and Shein are coming to eat everyone’s lunch on fast fashion. I can’t vouch for my browsing history, but listening to a rugby podcast I got an Ad for a sex doll, a key ring saying 'big knickers' and a cocktail dress. Colin Huang is worth $48.6bn and is a walking advert for efficiently showing ads at scale.

Powerplay of the Week: In a client meeting recently at the conclusion someone said “let's keep the updates asynchronous”. I was taken aback and still don’t quite understand, but I think ‘asynchronous updates’ would mean ‘send updates when you have them rather than waiting for the next meeting’. Whatever it meant, I was powerplayed and firmly back in my place.

Is AI making anyone’s jobs easier? I think this all comes back to why, what and how we measure what we do. If you add a metric you’ve got to remove one too.

Chromecast was always one of my favourite Google products and a real ‘this is the future’ moment when it first came out. So nice to see it being rolled into an upgrade.

I don’t envy the teams who have to put these reports together for the European Commission. “High-risk AI systems include for example AI systems used for recruitment, or to assess whether somebody is entitled to get a loan, or to run autonomous robots”... easy as that.

Bacon Ice Cream sounds high risk, but then I also think may have been on the menu at a Heston Blumenthal restaurant 20 years ago. What was old becomes new.

Go well!

AJ

It comes down to value on both sides of the equation I suppose. Where, how and why we try to measure the things we do.

Years ago I used to lead meetings about measurement with a story about Jaap Stam and Paolo Maldini - the abridged version is that Man Utd sold Jaap Stam at the height of his powers in 1999 as they’d started using data which was telling them he was making fewer tackles per game. Thinking they’d spotted a trend indicating his decline ahead of the market-at-large they sold him to Lazio, but he went on to play for many more years including winning the Champions League again with AC Milan. Alex Ferguson later called it his biggest transfer error.

Maldini on the other hand played for AC Milan until he was 41, a key reason he could do this was how he was measured. In the last few years of his career he averaged 1 ‘effective tackle’ every other game - but he was measured on other metrics indicating he intercepted the ball more often than others and that the quality of his marking meant his opponents received fewer passes when he played. All of which meant less contact, fewer injuries and a far longer career than the average.

In the week Google announced a change to the planned deprecation of 3rd Party cookie tracking and the publication of the results that led to the decision, what you're measuring, why you're measuring it and not getting suckered in to the lowest common denominator just because it's easy and neat is the lesson to carry forward.

Go well!

AJ

19th July: Newsletter 04

Sound clever this week

In 1934 the penguins at London Zoo were given a new modernist penguin pool, but they didn’t like it. It hurt their feet and the pool was too shallow. Despite that, it took 70 years for them to be moved out. What immediately sprung to mind for me was the number of redundant processes, spreadsheets, tools, stuff and just ways of doing things that are wrong but look good and therefore are put up with for far longer than they should be. Penguins hate modernist architecture.

Timing is as important as quality. There’s a moment in the Beatles ‘Get Back’ documentary where George Harrison plays All Things Must Pass and My Sweet Lord to Lennon and McCartney and they just humour him for a minute or two before dismissing it and carrying on. George leaves in a strop and history continues with My Sweet Lord making it into the soundtrack for a Guardians of the Galaxy film. But the point here is that the timing of an idea is as important as it’s quality. I had no idea that Whatsapp lags so far behind in the US because TelCos in the US were far quicker to offer free messaging vs the rest of the world who continued charging for text messages for far longer into the 2010s:

The UK election strategy of the Liberal Democrats targeting constituencies with a Gail’s bakery was well covered. I like the description here that “There are 131 Gail’s in the UK and around half are in Lib Dem marginals. If you’ve never come across one, think spinach, feta and filo pastry for £6, sold by a stressed Spanish girl in Twickenham.”

Reform UK had a Wimpy burger bar strategy - there are 64 of them in the UK. Reform got 4 million votes, the LibDems 3.4 million.

Geography news. This website is amazing. https://brilliantmaps.com/best-selling-england/. I grew up right on the edge of Keane, The Cure, Joss Stone and Genesis.

Industry things!

More timing, and we’ll see whether it’s snapping up a bargain or not. Physical retail is dead, or dying, or back. Mike Ashley’s business empire always seems to be reported with some disdain and snobbery, his bank balance begs to differ and he’s been right more than he’s been wrong on retail.

The news cycle certainly isn’t screaming ‘strong, stable, consistent and predictable growth’ to me, but then lots of clever people seems to be making lots of clever money on the stock market, and marketing budgets are up.

‘Good data in equals good data out’ is the marketing AI cliche of the moment, but I think it’s more ‘good data in equals something remotely usable to help you determine if it’s a goer’. Getting to the point of clean data is so difficult and multi-faceted. That being said…

From Hype to How is nice framing with regards to use of AI in marketing, although I suppose you’d expect that from the Google Marketing team. For anyone using Google Ads, the data manager feature is a great and very usable ‘how’ to make it as clear as possible what data you’re connecting and how it’s fueling your advertising.

Meeting powerplay - via a friend of mine (hi Marc) shared a meeting opener he’s using at the moment which I loved: “what's your appetite for honesty?”. Lovely stuff. As with all good meeting powerplays it flirts with David Brent ("can I shock you?"), but even knowing this question was coming I'd still be disarmed.

Go Well!

AJ

9th July: Newsletter 03

Sound clever this week

A week of milestones:

• A new UK government

• 30 years of Amazon

• 1 year of Threads (no, I haven’t either)

• Koo was shut down (no, I didn’t either)

• Andy Murray played his last Wimbledon

• It was my birthday

• England won a penalty shootout

• Jimmy Anderson starts his final Test Match for England

• Joe Biden… nah he’s still there

Amazon is 30 years old and this nostalgic Jeff Bezos interview link is worth a look. I’d imagine he’s fairly happy with how things turned out. He also unwittingly created an excellent trend in fake Amazon reviews over the past 30 years too - Katie Price and Peter Andre’s cover of A Whole New World is the classic of the genre.

The death of pubs and “young people don’t drink anymore” is something I’ve heard a lot for a few years - Guinness is bouncing back thanks to a change in demographic (more women and younger people) as well as embracing ‘Fandom’ via ‘Guinnfluencers’, something which smacks you in the face from this YouTube report into Culture & Trends here.

“But can this be applicable to B2B?!” Yes.

The reality of the processing power required for AI is starting to hit home. Google’s environmental sustainability report showing the price that needs to be paid: LINK. +48% vs 2019 is the key stat here in terms of growth in emissions primarily driven by data centre consumption - but some of the advancements are incredible to a layperson like me, the flood prediction capabilities in particular.

The AI impact continues to be principally the pipework. Under the radar update this week on something that previously was long and laborious with lots of back and forth - now copyright claims on YouTube can be done in seconds. Link.

It’s the kind of update that makes me feel like there should be more effort in making data, privacy and some of the important-but-dry legal sides less dry and a bit more interesting. Data and privacy are going to underpin the future of the internet (and therefore everything) and, not sure about you, but I reckon the web is going to catch on.

But equally I get the same sense of eye roll ‘boring!’ as everyone else. Then I see the clumsy applications like stupid cookie banners popping up or get irritated by the fact I can't see Google Maps on desktop search results any more and am reminded why we should care and advocate for better.

I’d probably feel more positive if the EU’s State of the Digital Decade report, published this week, didn’t look like it was formatted using Windows 98.

I felt like some of the AI doom scenarios that were played out before the elections didn’t quite come true (partly due to platforms being far stricter in terms of what can be run as an ad now), then I saw that a Reform candidate was actually AI and got worried again. But it’s OK, turns out he’s real after all!

Go well!

AJ

2nd July: Newsletter 02

Sound clever this week

• Knowing that 10 million pints of beer were spilt during *that* 5 minute period of England’s ahem heroic and inspirational performance in the Last 16 of the Euros, our attention turns to the Wimbledon fortnight which started this week:
  • 1.92 million strawberries will be served over the two weeks, weighing 38 tonnes which is about one third of a Blue Whale or 5 and a half African Elephants

• The Carrie Bradshaw index is a thing and, well, you think you’ve got it tough… Ah right if you live in London or Dublin then yes. Yes you have. But it’s an interesting read and a top public policy challenge everywhere, although something I can’t really get my head around - the digitisation of everything should mean less dependence on cities, Netflix & Amazon work just as well in London and Dublin as they do in Penzance and Pembrokeshire.

• Powerplay of the week: when next in a meeting and presented with an average simply ask “is that the mean? What are the median and the mode?”. They’ll be flustered, you’ll secure your status as the alpha in the room and simultaneously reduce the standard deviation of thoughtless averages presented to you next time (or increase. Whichever one is better. I've no idea).

Industry things!

I’ve been at Google for 10 years this month - I can remember 7 or 8 years ago being presented with the AI breakthrough that got everyone hugely excited. Google’s AI could now successfully identify pictures of chihuahuas and differentiate them from chocolate muffins.

I assume my reaction was pretty standard for the non-engineers in the room, “Ah yeah. Nice one. Congratulations”.

But all those misunderstood milestones brought us to last week’s announcement that Google translate just rolled out new languages and now says “hello do you speak English?” in 243. It's proper in the wild, boxed off, no debate AI-is-amazing, this-is-the-future proof. Link here..

It’s an amazing consumer facing application of AI and something that is space age but re-bases expectations with regards to what is possible and in this case, most importantly, by who.

Concurrently it’s hard to escape the AI noise. I liked this article from the BBC this week on ‘AI Washing’ - everyone says they do it, every problem is positioned as AI-able, everything being done manually is just waiting to be AI’d so much so that the only incentive is to claim to be an AI leader whether you are or not as that’s the only way the pitch is going to land, “a 2019 study found that 40% of new tech firms that described themselves as "AI start-ups" in fact used virtually no AI at all”.

From a digital marketing perspective it feels like we’re at the good end of this spectrum - the end where there are clear and obvious efficiency gains in things like bidding, in content creation, reporting. But careful of the AI washing - it’s still right message, right place, right time to the right audience at the end of the day.

I can say with some certainty that the phrase 'things have never been more uncertain' will feature heavily in H2 kick offs and planning meetings in the next few weeks. It's not true, things were way more uncertain 2 years ago. This is the UK inflation rate as produced by the Office for National Statistics each month.

There's a great article here from Mark Ritson about this and how companies that were smart and capable enough to grow profits in this environment may now be vulnerable to new entrants. The Dollar Shave Club hipsters came for Gillette, and there could be a new wave of hipsters coming over the hill ready to undercut on price.

Go well!

AJ

28th June: Newsletter 01

I’ve decided to try writing a newsletter, welcome to the first one. Eesh.

My plan is to share a few things I thought were interesting and relevant to my professional network each week and a few things that I hope might make you sound clever (or at least a bit interesting) the next time you're somewhere interesting.

I’m just about to hit a decade at Google having worked in agency-land in London before that - I go to a lot of client meetings, I talk about marketing strategy, growth, managing teams and the tech industry a lot and spend a lot of dog walking time thinking of ways to make all of those things sound fresh and new and interesting. Hopefully I can spark some thoughts. Let’s see how it goes!

Sound clever this week

• Stat of the week comes from Aldi, estimating that nearly 5 million pints of beer are spilt every time England score a goal at the Euros. The analysis being based on an average of 1.5 goals a game is depressingly optimistic…

• The pop culture impact on the wider economy is always interesting - the UK will see about £1 billion of positive economic impact from Euro 24, which is about 3/4s of a Taylor Swift tour

  • Given the week that’s in it, here’s a graph confirming that the football is on and ‘buzzing’ more than previous tournaments.  Of course Google Trends needs to requisite pinch of salt, but interesting nonetheless

• Moving on to the other events of the moment - well visualised Spectator Data Hub: https://data.spectator.co.uk/. An interesting range of trends and analysis along with a bleak but perhaps reassuringly predictable path for Rishi…

• Economic bellwethers are not my speciality, and elections seem to bring hyperbolic ones at all points on the spectrum, but “subdued consumer spending on luxury swimming pools” might be bellwethery. Violins at the ready: construction down 20% for the year.

• I’ve shared this before, but Roger Martin and The Doctrine of Relentless Utility is worth a read and worth thinking about as you get to mid-year. It’s easy to over-intellectualise this stuff, but focusing on being relentlessly useful as opposed to the specific criteria of your job is a way more human approach - for most of us, our job is probably to make our boss’ job easier.

• I love a meeting power play - if you want to look clever in the next one you’re in, simply convert percentages into fractions. “66% of our audience are exposed to mid-funnel before converting”, don’t miss the opportunity to jump in and say “so, two thirds…” then write it down and bathe in the head nodding approval around you.

I’m not 100% sure which ‘industry’ I’m in, but here's some industry news!

I home built a garden office this year - essentially putting together a shed with a few tweaks. It involved some basic DIY and I had a few friends help with various bits. I’m very happy with it, but what’s amazing is the range and depth of opinions I got on the construction from people I know to have no idea what they’re talking about. In marketing land, Cannes is the starting gun for the season of vague opinions, and AI seems to have made the creation and scaling of these more efficient than ever…  It’s going to be important, but beware the snake oil!

• AI in action: Google Gemini analysing 8,000 videos to find the best practice. I’m always a little cautious about regression to the mean with these types of analysis, and I can hear the push back about “tying this back to conversions”… but it’s pretty impressive! As has been said by lots of clever people, AI is more like infinite interns than robots and these types of use case will help all business get 80% of the way there that much quicker than's been possible before
  • Showing my age and demographic profile, I continue to believe that Youtube ads peaked with Terrible Terry Tate and I don’t need AI to convince me otherwise

• So improving the pipework feels like the AI impact we’ll continue to feel but not see - I’ve seen a few demos of how AI can help do things like “plan a summer holiday”, which just feels like a stretch, asking AI to make a serendipitous discovery on your behalf..? Not for Jones. Hire a car, drive somewhere, see what you see, risk disappointment and family rows - now that’s a holiday

• Meta's AI plans for Whatsapp are worth a read but - maybe it's just me but WhastApp's more for sharing photos of the kids, screenshots of ridiculous things people have put on LinkedIn and live 'bantz' when the sports on.  I just can't see myself wanting to hear about Little Farm and the new jam they've got in.  That being said, the customer service use cases are obvious and we'll see and feel the impact here more and more

I'll share some things about regulation here, because I think they're important, will only become more so and we need to find ways to make this interesting and meaningful. Given the day job, I’ll do so without too much additional comment for hopefully obvious reasons:

• DMA in action: Apple accused of breaking competition rules

• https://x.com/ThierryBreton/status/1805138863091859564.  The comments are a tiny sample, but interesting. Lots of EU criticism, but regulation will come in shapes and forms everywhere and are probably going to matter a lot for you where you work

Go well!

AJ