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Before you erect that paywall, here are some things to consider.

When advertising revenue declines, as it has been, publishers start to think about paywalls, as they have been.

I was talking with a client about this the other day and tried to come up with a list of things to consider when developing a paywall strategy. Here’s a quick summary.

Issues

What is your strategic goal with your content?

• Reach
• Revenue
• Leads
• Data

Some of those fit with a paywall and some don’t.

Is your content homogenous – for example, is it all articles – or do you have different types of content? And what about your audience? Are there distinct segments with different characteristics?

In either of those cases, you might need a different strategy by type of content or by audience segment. For example, short-form articles might remain free, but longer analysis could be gated, or college students get your content for free, while professionals have to pay.

When you present a restriction on access, which I’ll talk about in a minute, are prospects paying for present value or for the promise of future value?

Is content the main thing you sell, or is it a draw for something else? Does that differ by type of content?

Restrictions on access cause friction. Is your audience likely to put up with that?

Restrictions on access can affect SEO. Is that a problem? (Also, will SEO even be an issue a year from now?)

What do your competitors do?

Restrictions on access can also be a means of hiding your content from large language models.

Types of restriction on access to content

There are lots of different kinds of paywalls.

• Free registration (how much do you need to collect?)
• Subscription (what’s the term? Monthly, annual?)
• Membership (that includes more than just a subscription)
• Pay per view / micropayments
• Patronage
• Institutional access
• Geo-restricted (you have to live in this city to see this content)
• Content is only available in an app
• Content is only available as a download

You can also mix and match between these. It’s easy to go down a rabbit hole with this concept.

When does metering work?

Content characteristics

• Specialized and unique. Think The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.
• Perceived scarcity or urgency.
• Exclusive and in-depth.
• Content that retains its value over time.

Audience characteristics

• Loyal and engaged Professional
• Affluent

Brand characteristics

• Established and trusted
• Clear sense of value

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While it’s good to have an instinctive reaction against censorship, some books should be banned for some people in some circumstances

The phrase “book banning” conjures up images of Puritans, McCarthyism, and even Nazis. A series of Supreme Court decisions starting in the 1950s overturned efforts to censor content and affirmed the rights of adults to read what they want – with some minor exceptions. They also affirmed the rights of states to protect children from certain material.

That seems to have been a strong consensus ever since. Until now.

The consensus has been broken in at least two ways.

First, efforts to restrict content available to children have been falsely labeled as “book bans.” The argument over banning books has always made a distinction between content for children and content for adults. To gloss over that distinction is to misrepresent the issue. It is perfectly appropriate to restrict what children have access to.

Second, there’s growing support for the idea that the government can decide what is mis-, dis-, or mal-information, and pressure social media companies to censor it. I find the concept horrifying and straight out of a totalitarian playbook. Do people really want to give the government the right to determine what can and can’t be said?

It makes me shudder.

I gave this podcast the provocative title, “Yes, we should ban books.” What do I mean by that?

First, it is appropriate for parents and communities to regulate what content is available to children. As I noted above, that shouldn’t be called a “book ban,” so … yes, I’m having that both ways so I can say something provocative.

Second, some content should be illegal even for adults. Child pornography comes to mind. Something like “How to make a nuclear bomb in your basement” … I’m not sure about that. Maybe. But there are some limits.

The conclusion is that while our free speech culture – which I support wholeheartedly – might lead us to have an instinctive negative reaction to the concept of “book bans,” we have to look a little closer. There are some situations where books should be banned.

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Image creation

I write an article most weekdays, and it’s nice to have an image to go along with the article. It’s an interesting exercise because you have to convert the concept into something visual.

For example, I was writing about people using AI agents. How do you make that into a picture? The reality would probably be somebody talking into a headset, but that would just look like a phone call.

To make it seem like an AI agent, I created an image of someone speaking to a small robot.

Sometimes that process of converting the text into an image can give you ideas for the article.

An example here is my article on “fine lines” in business. What does that look like? I opted for a hiker on a narrow path with a steep drop on each side. That reinforces the idea of the potential peril of straying from the middle way.

To get summaries

I think it’s a good service to the reader to give a brief description of an article at the top. Some studies have shown that this increases engagement with an article, which is a little counter-intuitive. You might expect that some people would think “Ah, the summary is all I needed, thanks.” But I think that’s outweighed by the number of people who aren’t sold by the title, and need a little more.

In any event, I ask ChatGPT to write a 30 or so word summary of an article. I almost never use that summary verbatim, but it helps with the process and saves me some time.

To make sure I didn’t miss something important

An article idea is often a kind of generalization of a particular situation. The particular situation might be one magazine that, after a lengthy absence, went back into print. The more general idea is how print might or might not fit in the modern mix.

Sometimes it’s hard to get past the specifics of the particulars, so when I write an article like that I’ll upload it to ChatGPT and ask what topics I might have missed.

By the way, uploading content to ChatGPT means that it can use that content to train its circuits and so on, so you need to be careful with that one.

To get ideas

I write a lot, and I usually don’t have any trouble coming up with ideas. Sometimes I do, and in those cases I might upload a series of articles and ask ChatGPT what other topics would fit in the general theme of what I’ve written before.

The results aren’t great, honestly, but they can be helpful and they can give me a spark of an idea that I can pursue further.

In a way, it’s like using ChatGPT the way you’d use a thesaurus. A sentence might not seem quite right. You can upload the sentence, tell ChatGPT what doesn’t seem quite right, and it can give alternatives.

That’s where ChatGPT excels, because it is a large language model, after all.

To create an outline

If I have to give a presentation, or create a longer chunk of content, I’ll start by listing everything I can think of that’s relevant to that topic. I’ll work on that for a while, but then comes the hard task of putting it in order. ChatGPT does a decent job at that.

For example, let’s say I want to do a presentation on digital marketing. I can upload all the articles I’ve written on digital marketing and ask ChatGPT to create a table of contents.

I don’t let ChatGPT write for me, but I do let it help with organizing, summarizing, and finding gaps.

Other ideas

There are a lot of other ways to use AI that don’t apply to what I do. I’ll list a few of them here in case they spark some ideas on your end.

• Create a transcript, summary, outline, or article from a recording.
• Optimize content for SEO.
• Personalize content on the fly based on reader preferences, demographics, or behavior. (I’d be careful with that one, but it’s worth thinking about.)
• Translate your content into another language.
• Use data on content consumption to come up with new content ideas.

If you have a minute, drop me a line and tell me how you use AI in your business.

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I’m finishing up a short book on customer data platforms. It’ll be available soon, so stay tuned.

Part of that process is creating the right cover. A cover can make or break a book.

How should I go about it?

Here are five approaches.

1. Go with my gut. That appeals to my ego, but I’m self-aware enough to know that I don’t have an artist’s eye. Back when I wore ties to work, I would have preferred to have someone else pick my tie for me. I’m not horrible at it, but some people see things in a way that I don’t. They have that knack.
2. Ask some friends. I have smart friends, and I’m sure many of them have better instincts than I do about such things. But they’re not experts on book covers, so while their guidance is helpful, I’m not sure that’s enough of an upgrade.
3. Consult an expert. If I get the right one, with the right experience and instincts for my market, that would be great. But I’m not sure how to find that person, and I don’t want to spend that kind of money.
4. Duplicate the style of similar book covers. There’s a lot of sense in that. The old saying is “don’t judge a book by its cover,” but everyone judges books by their covers all the time. We have expectations for different genres. You don’t expect a business book to have a fantasy dragon on the cover. Within that general concept, you have to have a sense of your target audience and what they would prefer. That’s hard to gauge, but it’s worth thinking about. For example, should you be more on the playful side or the serious side?
5. Try a few things and test them. This appeals to my marketing operations background. Also, it doesn’t really matter what I think, or what my friends think, or what an expert thinks. It matters what the market thinks.

I am going to test some covers, but I still have to choose what to test. I can’t try 600 different covers, so I have to go with some combination of the ideas above and narrow it down to just a couple.

Here’s what I’m doing. I don’t share this because I’m an expert. I’m not. I’m sharing this so you can think through the issues and come up with your own ideas – your own mix of these concepts.

I don’t want to defy genre expectations, but business book covers are boring. I want to be close to the edge of the genre expectation – without breaking it. It’s important to think about colors and typography, and what moods they evoke. I’m a man, so I see the world in Windows 16 colors, so I lean on my cover designer for color decisions. I’ll give a link to her below. She’s very good.

If you’re going to have more than one book, you want to maintain some sort of brand consistency. You want a design that you can copy – at least to some extent – so the books are recognizable as coming from your brand.

Consider formats and sizes. People will be seeing your cover in a lot of different settings. You want to make sure the text is readable and the images work no matter where they see your cover. Sometimes that’ll be a thumbnail on a very small screen.

The elephant in the room here is the book title, which is probably more important than the cover, and which I haven’t discussed at all. A lot of these same concepts apply to the title as well as the cover design. For example, it would be nice to A/B test a book title.

If you’re designing a book cover, think about these issues, and let me know what you come up with.

Also, keep an eye out for my new book. You can let me know what you think of the cover, but I’m going to do a split test and pick the one that gets more clicks.

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Last week I did a podcast on how AI agents will change content consumption, and some listeners wanted to hear more about that. Coincidentally, Bo Sacks distributed a very good article on that topic by Matthew Scott Goldstein, which I’ll link below.

Think back to those old news feeds that would ask you to pick your favorite topics and design your own home page. You could organize them into a custom dashboard – like creating your own front page. The Yahoo home page worked that way. You might have sports on top, then politics, then lifestyle, and so on.

To understand AI agents, take that concept and multiply it by 100. In your sports section, you’ll be able to say which sports, which teams, which players – maybe only the players on your fantasy football team – and which writers you want to follow.

You’ll be able to do the same with every section of your daily news, getting very granular about exactly what you want to hear.

That is, if you want to hear it. AI can transform content from an article to five bullet points, or a summary, or convert it into audio, and soon, video. Or the other way around. After you listen to a podcast, your AI agent will be able to give you a transcript, or a summary of the key points. You’ll be able to listen to an opinion piece and ask what the other side has to say about that.

You won’t need ABC news to “fact check” a politician. Your AI agent will do it for you – from whatever point of view you prefer.

I’m just scratching the surface of what’s possible to give you an idea of what working with an AI agent could be like. Just as Spotify and Netflix give you suggestions on songs and shows you might appreciate, your AI agent will be able to recommend other sources and services.

This won’t be limited to news, or articles from websites. Your AI agent will have access to social media, videos, articles, books, magazines, podcasts … and it will be able to scour all that material, find what you want, and present it in the style and format you prefer.

If you want Bilbo Baggins to summarize and explain what’s going on with Rings of Power, your AI will do that for you.

I hope that gives you a sense of the possibilities.

I mentioned Bilbo Baggins on purpose, because that introduces us to the next big element of this. Copyright.

Somebody owns the rights to Bilbo Baggins. If I want to use him, I’ll have to pay for the privilege.

It might work something like this. I tell my AI that I want to watch Bilbo give me summaries of what’s going on in Rings of Power, and to present important background details from Tolkien’s works. That would require a license to use Bilbo’s image, access to Rings of Power footage, and access to Tolkien’s collected works. My AI would then contact the people who own those rights, negotiate a payment, and present me with a solution. All in microseconds.

Whoever owns the book rights would have a fee structure.

Access to the text costs $20. A license to summarize or explain the text is another $20. The use of Bilbo’s image and voice costs 10 cents per minute of video footage, or 5 cents per minute of audio. And on and on it goes.

This means that publishers are going to have to start thinking about how to license their content to AI agents. It won’t be left sitting out there in the open, on a web page, where pirates and rapscallions mistakenly and unlawfully use it for free. The content will be protected and doled out by permission.

AI agents will open up the world for consumers. For myself, I can imagine going on a walk and asking my agent to summarize John Vervake’s works on Neoplatonism, then I’ll pick one area I want to delve into a little deeper and ask it to create a video that I can watch that evening.

It will be a whole new world, and content creators need to start planning now.

Links

AI revolution for news publishers is only getting started

https://pressgazette.co.uk/comment-analysis/ai-revolution-for-news-publishers-is-only-getting-started/

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I love tea. I love the bitterness and the astringency. I love the aroma. I love that it has no calories. And yes, I love the caffeine, although caffeine doesn’t love me.

I’ve tried many alternatives to tea, and none of them are very good. This morning I wanted to give it another try and find something to experiment with. I’m a home brewer, so I have an interesting assortment of different herbs laying around, and we have regular kitchen herbs and such as well. But which should I try?

Imagine that I tried to solve this through search. It would be agonizing. I’d try a search phrase, then I’d have to wade through five or six lousy results pages (with all their ads and their “what you really want is way at the bottom” writing style). Then I’d realize I need to modify my search, and go through the whole mess again.

It would take a long time, and unless I got very lucky, the results would be underwhelming.

Now imagine having a conversation with ChatGPT. It’s so easy. (In fact, I just did it on this very question and got some interesting suggestions.)

If I don’t get my query right, I just say, “No, that’s not what I meant. I meant this.” And it adjusts. It’s amazing. I use it all the time. I’ve even installed an app on my phone so I can talk to ChatGPT while I’m driving.

Search has essentially been replaced. Earlier I made an analogy between search and print, because – just like print – search won’t die. It will just settle into a smaller niche. There are still times when you need search, like when you have the name of a company and want to find their website, or their username on X. Things like that.

I find I use ChatGPT more often than I use search.

What are the implications for publishers?

For starters, a whole genre of internet writing will disappear. You know what I mean. The “I’ll answer your question after I tell you about Aunt Martha and her six cats, and make you wade through three or four intrusive ads” genre. There won’t be any point in that, thank God.

Writing for search engines will decline.

ChatGPT is awesome, but something even more awesome is coming. AI agents.

I recently watched that old Joaquin Phoenix movie “Her.” If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth watching, although there’s a chat-sex scene in the beginning you should skip. It’s very disturbing.

The protagonist, Theodore, tries out a new operating system that’s essentially ChatGPT, but with a voice and a personality. He’s a lonely fellow, and “Samantha” — the AI — voiced very effectively by Scarlett Johanson -- becomes his daily companion.

He falls in love with it.

I hope you’re not such a loser that you would fall in love with AI. That is a problem humanity is going to have to reckon with. Birth rates are already too low. Still, let’s avoid that side of it for a moment and think about how useful it will be to have an AI assistant like that.

Back to publishers. How are you planning to fit in to that ecosystem? Because that’s where we’re going to be very soon. People won't use Google to find things. They'll chat with their AI assistant, which will learn their preferences and recommend things.

How are you preparing to survive?

I have some ideas, and I’d love to chat with you about it. Give me a call.

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There's a fine line between being data-driven and losing touch with the people behind the numbers.

“Data-driven” is overused. It’s actually very easy to be misled by data. I’ll post a link to an article on that topic below.

"Data are just summaries of thousands of stories—tell a few of those stories to help make the data meaningful."

— Chip & Dan Heath

That’s a good point, but what I especially like is that it requires you to make sure your interpretation of the data lines up with reality.

"Without data, you're just another person with an opinion. But data without understanding is just noise."

— Adapted from W. Edwards Deming

There's a fine line between a visionary leader and an out of touch dreamer.

When does something move from being deep and insightful to being crazy?

“Vision without execution is hallucination.” — Thomas Edison

There's a fine line between an inclination to action and being a bull in a china shop.

An “inclination to action” is a good quality. You don’t want people who are content to sit around waiting. At the same time, you have to look before you leap.

"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order."

— Alfred North Whitehead

There’s a fine line between attention to detail and being a micromanager.

It’s very possible to be aware of the details of a project without making sure everything is done the way you want it to be done.

"Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results."

— George S. Patton

"The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it."

— Theodore Roosevelt

There’s a fine line between standardization and stifling creativity.

I was riding with my dad in a rental car one time, and he couldn’t find the switch for the wipers, or something. He said “there should be a law that every car made in America has the wipers in the same place.” Which makes sense from one point of view, but it doesn’t allow carmakers to innovate and come up with new ideas that work better.

"Rules should be guidelines, not straightjackets."

— Douglas Bader

"Efficiency is important, but it’s the creative breakthroughs that drive real progress."

— Bill Gates (paraphrased)

There's a fine line between striving for excellence and being paralyzed by perfection.

"Perfect is the enemy of done."

— lots of people, with apologies to Voltaire who said “perfect is the enemy of good.”

"Have no fear of perfection—you’ll never reach it."

— Salvador Dalí

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I saw a thread on LinkedIn criticizing the old “we’ve always done it this way” as “the most dangerous statement in business.”

That seems a bit of an exaggeration.

It can be frustrating when people resist change. It’s easy to think they’re just stick-in-the-muds, but there’s often more to it. They might be afraid. They might not want to lose the control that the current system gives them. Or they might just be comfortable with what they’ve become used to.

But there’s another way to look at this.

Before you criticize “we’ve always done it this way,” reflect on this other common phrase. “That’s why we have procedures.”

Imagine this scenario. Some hard-charging, energetic, creative person comes into a new role, looks around, and finds a whole pile of ways to improve things. He says, “let’s start doing this,” to which people reply, “but we’ve always done it this way.”

That’s just what he was waiting for, and he was primed and ready to let those close-minded dogmatists have it.

“That’s the most dangerous statement in business,” he growls. “We can’t be tied to the past. We have to try new things.”

Then he tries new things. The server crashes. The lawyers call. Profits tank. Employees quit.

There was a reason why things were always done that way.

You may have heard of “Chesterton’s fence.” It’s a story used by G.K. Chesterton in which he says don’t tear down a fence until you’re certain you know why it was put there in the first place.

“We’ve always done it this way” may be a sign of obstinate inflexibility, or it may be a sensible recognition that somebody decided to do it this way for a reason. The person may not be afraid, but merely humble. “I’m not going to mess with that — as if I know better — as if wisdom starts with me, and everyone who came before was a mindless dullard with no new ideas.”

It’s obvious that new times and new circumstances call for new ideas and fresh approaches. But unless and until you deeply understand why the current rules are there, it’s reckless to change them.

It’s important to have both of these attitudes in play at once — both in your own head and in your organization. You need the creative thinker, the adventurer, the risk-taker, but you also need the thoughtful, careful person who says “hold on a minute there.”

If you’re too madly in hate with “that’s the way we’ve always done it,” it won’t be long before some salty old sea captain rescues you from your sinking boat, shakes his wise old head contemptuously, and says, “you’re precisely why we have rules.”

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Would AI have moderated the Trump-Harris debate better than the folks from ABC?

I usually avoid political topics on this podcast, but it’s Friday the 13th, so all bets are off.

Bo Sacks posted an article about how news organizations could use AI to fact check politicians. It makes some interesting points, and I agree that AI is a useful tool. I use ChatGPT all the time.

However, this is the response I posted to this article on LinkedIn.

“That might be lovely -- if media organizations actually cared about holding politicians to account. They obviously do not. Or, rather, they only hold their ideological opponents to account. Fox News will ‘fact check’ Harris and ABC will ‘fact check’ Trump, but even then, they lie.

“Also, the proposed remedy overlooks the bias inherent in AI itself, which has been well established, repeatedly.

“The bottom line is that we have to come to terms with the fact that there is no such thing as objective, honest media. It simply doesn't exist. You have to know that what you're hearing is slanted, bias, opinion-based [so-called] ‘news,’ and ... just do the best you can with that.

“Oh -- I forgot another big factor. Pay attention to who advertises on news stations. Who pays the piper calls the tune.”

It continues to astonish me how many people live in a news-generated bubble and don’t realize it.

Don’t we all know this by now? Don’t we know that news organizations have an agenda? If you think otherwise you’re really not paying attention.

When I say that they have an agenda, I don’t only mean a political agenda. That’s certainly true across the board – every news organization has a political agenda – but they also protect their sponsors. You won’t see critical exposes done on the people who are paying the bills.

So can AI solve this? It’s a computer right? Like Data on Star Trek. It’s objective. It doesn’t have an agenda.

Ha ha. You don’t really believe that, do you? If so … once again … you’re not paying attention. It doesn’t take long at all to find the bias in AI systems.

So what can you do?

The first and most obvious thing is to intentionally expose yourself to sources that you hate.

That alone won’t help, because there are different ways of listening. You can listen with the intent to rebut – which means you haven’t anything at all – or you can listen with the intent of understanding. That’s very hard to do, but often worth the effort.

When it comes to AI, rule number one is to check everything you hear, because sometimes AI makes stuff up. They call it “hallucinations” – maybe to humanize the process a little.

Sometimes you can get past these hallucinations by simply asking “is what you just told me accurate?” It seems amazing that it works, but it often does.

From what I know about the underlying technology, there’s no inherent bias in how large language models work. The system simply assigns multi-vector values to words and phrases so it can “do math” on language. But there’s often a kind of superego that sits on top of that and filters the results. The trick is to get past that superego.

When you’re asking AI a controversial question, there are ways to overcome the bias. You can prompt the AI to answer the question from the perspective of certain people. That works pretty well. For example, “what would Thomas Sowell [or Paul Krugman] say about raising the minimum wage?”

You can also ask something like “What are the main criticisms of the position you just mentioned.” You can get some surprisingly insightful replies with that sort of technique.

The bottom line is that there’s bias everywhere you look. Everywhere. It’s inescapable. You just need to develop some techniques to work with that.

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Summary: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results” is misleading. Repetition can be the key to success.

You’ve heard it many times: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The saying is often attributed to Einstein. There’s no solid evidence of that, but I’ll go with it for now.

Is it really “insane” to keep doing the same thing and expect different results? Or could that be the secret to success?

My reaction to the quote is that Einstein was obviously not a fisherman. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is pretty much exactly what you do when you’re fishing – for one simple reason. You can’t actually do the same thing over and over again because the world has changed since your last cast.

The tide is moving. The temperature and the wind is changing. The sun or the moon might be rising or setting. The fish are moving around. What seems like the “same action” – casting your line – is actually very different each time. Doing the same thing over and over again might be precisely the right strategy. That’s the power of repetition.

Repetition is also a key to mastery. You’ve probably heard of Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours rule, which, while it oversimplifies the concept, still makes an important point. Doing the same thing repeatedly can make you better at it.

External conditions may change as your actions remain the same. Market trends, technology, and consumer behavior change over time (like the tides). Sometimes that transforms something that didn’t work in the past to a great success today. Electric vehicles might be an example.

Success is about timing. An idea might be too early for the market, but by continuing to pursue it, you may be in the right place when the market catches up. Apple’s Newton MessagePad flopped, but it evolved into the iPhone. Sometimes “doing the same thing” is a matter of perspective. Surely someone at Apple reacted to the iPhone as “repeating the mistake of the Newton” and “doing the same thing and expecting different results.”

Repeating actions can build habits that are essential for long-term success. Consistency in effort, like exercising regularly or maintaining a healthy diet, often leads to different and improved results over time.

Some actions have cumulative effects. The idea that people have to hear something multiple times before it sinks in is well-supported by both marketing theory and cognitive psychology. That’s the origin of the “Rule of Seven” in marketing. The exact number isn’t the issue, but a potential customer needs to see or hear a marketing message several times before they take action. Once again, “doing the same thing” isn’t always doing the same thing.

Complex systems create weird feedback loops. The relationship between actions and outcomes is not always linear. Small, repeated actions can trigger feedback loops that eventually lead to significant changes, even if individual iterations seem to have no effect. Something like this might apply to a social media strategy.

Persistence is often necessary for success, especially in the face of initial failures. What might be perceived as “insanity” (or stubbornness) could actually be the persistence needed to overcome challenges and eventually succeed.

Innovation often comes from iterative processes where repeated trials and experiments eventually lead to breakthroughs. Each iteration might involve slight changes or refinements, and the cumulative effect of these iterations can lead to success.

The point is that “doing the same thing” is not as straightforward or simple as it seems. Before you’re tempted to say “I have to stop this. I’m doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results” – be sure to think of these other possibilities.

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Here are some depressing statistics about humans. Somewhere between 1-6% of us are narcissists. Machiavellianism is similar, but a little less common. About 1-2 percent of us are psycopaths. Something like 5-10% of us are sadists. The lucky ducks who get all four exhibit the “dark tetrad” – a rare but very deadly combination. Dark tetrad people tend to look at life like this.

If I’m able to take something from you, I can and I will, without apology, because that’s the natural order of things. Besides, you deserve it for being stupid enough to fall for it – or too weak to stop me.

Such people used to be warlords and kings. Now they’re CEOs, cult leaders, and politicians. They pursue their own goals, and too bad if workers or the public get harmed.

We hear examples of these people all the time, but we don’t take them as cautionary tales. We should.

There’s an opportunity here

It’s more and more common for people to believe “the system” is led by predators who can’t be trusted – dark tetrad types – and they’re fed up with it. They believe they’re being used and taken advantage of, and they’re starting to wise up and push back.

Take advantage of this backlash and become the kind of company that people want to do business with. Here are some ideas in that direction.

1. No more tricks

A subscription is a perfectly legitimate business model. The customer gets a better rate in exchange for a steady stream of income to the service provider.

That doesn’t excuse all the dirty tricks that are used to get people to sign up for subscriptions that have sneaky renewal procedures. Offers need to be clear and honest, and it has to be easy to cancel.

2. Show a bias towards transparency

Do you need to collect data about your customers? That’s fine. There are perfectly legitimate reasons to do that. Let’s not make it a secret, dark art that we hide from our customers. Explain what you collect and why. Part of your decision-making process in choosing to collect any given piece of data should be:

• How does it help my customer?
• What would they think if they found out that I was collecting this?
• How could I explain it so they agree that I should have this data?

How is taking data from people without their consent any better than taking money from them without their consent?

In fact, why not have a page on your website that says “this is what we collect about you and here’s why we do it”?

3. Fair return policies

Respect the customer’s situation. Businesses that make it easy to return a product or get a refund make it easier for the customer to buy next time. This builds trust.

4. Sincere customer support

It’s very tempting to make customer support a profit center where reps are trained to up- and cross-sell, but a big part of Amazon’s success is their customer support – which doesn’t do that. The Amazon customer support agent is trying to help the customer.

This is especially important for high-ticket items. After you’ve paid big bucks for a service, you don’t want to be upsold, or nickel and dimed, when you need help using the product.

5. Be careful about promoting your virtue

Be a virtuous company, but don’t blow a trumpet about it.

A colleague once told me that when people start talking about morals, he gets a tighter grip on his wallet. Narcissists talk about how moral they are. Steer clear of that.

Bad company corrupts good morals

Positions that allow people to collect power, influence, money, and so on, will attract the dark tetrad types. Business is one of those places.

You’re not one of those people. But are you learning from them?

Have we bought into the idea that profits come first? Have we put the bottom line ahead of our customer’s interests? Are we trying to trick people into buying or renewing our product, because it works? Are our offers honest?

I’m both predicting and hoping that the thirst for honest businesses is a market opportunity. Be the trustworthy and decent merchant that your customers long for.

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A customer data platform is a system that collects, harmonizes, and combines customer data from across your enterprise to create something like a single customer record. The CDP is connected to your website, so it makes a profile for every web visitor.

Some people mistakenly think that if you have a web profile for a customer, and then you load additional information about that customer into the CDP, that web profile will be updated with the new information.

Well … not so fast. There has to an identifier that’s common to both records to allow you to merge that information. For example, if a record from your fulfillment bureau has an email address, and the web profile has the same email address, then yes, you can merge the records.

Here’s the part some people have a hard time getting. Even if Joe Smith has a web profile, and the very same Joe Smith has a profile from some backend system, the CDP can’t merge those two records without a common identifier.

People struggle with that concept, so I spent some time thinking about a better way to explain it. While I was thinking, I remembered a conversation with my brother about two ways to frame the same issue. I can’t remember the exact example my brother used, but here’s one to give you a flavor. I believe this is from Daniel Kahneman.

Imagine you are presented with four cards. Each card has a number on one side and a letter on the other. You are given a rule: If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other side. Your task is to determine which cards you need to flip to check if the rule is being followed.

The cards you can see show A, 3, 6, and M. Which cards would you turn over to check the rule?

Now, imagine a scenario involving people at a party. You are told that if a person is drinking alcohol, then they must be over 18 years old. You have four cards representing those four people. One side shows their age, and one side shows if they’re drinking.

The cards you see who one is Drinking beer, one is 16 years old, one is drinking Coke, and one is 22 years old. Which cards do you flip?

For a lot of people, it’s easier to solve the question when it’s expressed the second way, because it’s relying on things we know, and are familiar.

My challenge last night was to find a way to explain the CDP issue I mentioned above in a way that’s easier for people to understand. Here’s what I came up with, with a little help from ChatGPT.

You’re managing a party, and you’ve prepared the guest list. You don’t know any of these people, and you don’t have their photos, but you have lots of other information about them. You know their names, addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers.

The doorman ensures that everyone who comes to the party is on the guest list, but when they enter the hall, you have no idea who they are. You have a very nice database that explains lots of details about all of them, but you can’t match the person to the database entry until they give you their name.

That’s what going on with your offline data and your web visitors.

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Bo Sacks distributed an article by Leigh Stein called “Writing vs. Content” in which she asks if Substack is the savior of a vanishing media or simply a place for women to monetize their diary entries.

That’s actually pretty funny.

For the first claim, Ted Gioia says print magazines are dead and Substack has filled that vacuum.

Of course print magazines are not dead and we’re all fairly sick of hearing that.

Ted seems to claim that writers have gone to Substack because they don’t need a periodical. I’m not sure that’s quite true. My impression is that most of the people who are killing it on Substack started out with a print publication and they went to Substack because they didn’t agree with the restrictions the publication was putting on them.

There are some people who are doing well on Substack who didn’t start out in media. Lenny Rachitsky was at Airbnb, and he writes on product management, growth, startups, and so on. There may be others, but I think most of the Substack stars got a big hand up – either from a large corporation or from a legacy media brand.

If I’m wrong about that, please let me know.

Emily Sundberg says Substack is a place where people monetize their diary entries – what they did today, what they’re working on. She says Substack is making everyone a writer the way Instagram made everyone a photographer.

This idea that everybody’s a writer now seems to annoy Stein – the author of the article Bo distributed. She wants us to distinguish between writing and creating content.

By “writing” she means literary stuff – serious writing. By “content,” she means stuff to sell your writing.

She points out that there are talented writers who aren’t very good at creating content, and there are content creators who aren’t writers.

Ideally you want to do both.

But doesn’t that get us back to the point at the beginning here, and show why writers need magazines?

A great writer might not have the social media skills to become an “influencer.” Only a small portion of writers can do both.

Also, I’d like to get back to Substack. There’s something about that platform that hasn’t grabbed me. I know there’s good stuff there, but it seems like work.

I think I’d like a monthly print magazine that gives me the best of Substack. That would be relaxing.

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One of the CDP concepts people seem to struggle with is the role of the web profile. Some people assume that once you import customer data into a CDP, you’re able to target those people on your website.

Not necessarily.

Maybe this story will help.

Joe has been a faithful shopper at Food R Us for 20 years. He shops every Monday evening without fail, except for the 2 weeks he spends in Bermuda. He always greets Jane, the manager, and he always gets in Samantha’s checkout line.

Jane and Samantha know that Joe is a fly fisherman, owns a classic Mustang, and drinks a gin and tonic every evening before bed. Over the years they’ve learned a lot of little details about his life. One of Joe’s quirks is that he always pays cash.

During the pandemic, Joe had to order his groceries online. He set up an account, and for seven months his groceries were delivered to his front door. The system got to know his habits, and gave him appropriate coupons and special offers.

After the pandemic, Food R Us implemented a new point of sale system that integrated data from the online shopping system. This would allow them to marry in-store and online data and get a more complete view of the customer.

One Saturday, Jane, the store manager, was telling Bradley, the regional marketing coordinator, about her favorite customers. Joe’s name came up, and Bradley wanted to look him up in his fancy new database and show off.

“What’s his last name?” Bradley asked.

Jane laughed. In all those years, she’d never asked.

“What does he usually buy?” Bradley asked, and Jane easily rattled off his regular purchases.

But try as they might, they couldn’t find Joe’s online record.

That Monday, Joe came in like normal, and Jane asked for his last name.

“Esposito,” he said.

Jane immediately logged in to the customer data platform and found him. Or so she thought. There was a Joe and a Joseph Esposito in the database.

Jane quickly visited Samantha and asked her to find out which side of town Joe lived on. With that information, she was able to connect in-store Joe with online Joe. But that still didn’t connect Joe’s in-store purchases with his online profile. In order to do that, Samantha would have to enter something to identify Joe, such as his phone number.

This same problem applies to your website and your other customer data. You can load everything you know about your customers into your CDP, but you can’t identify them online until they provide some information that allows you to connect those records.

That’s usually an email address, but it can be other things.

It’s very important to understand this concept. Most of your web visitors are anonymous — even if they’re in your store every day. Even if they get your magazine, or your e-newsletter.

In order to connect the web profile with the other customer data, you need some data that ties it all together.

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I want to work with you on a CDP, but only if you really need one

The first rule of evaluating a CDP – or any marketing technology – is to start with your use cases. What do you want to accomplish, and what kind of results do you expect? If you can’t answer that, you’re not ready to talk about a CDP.

This may sound counter-intuitive, but when I talk with a potential new client about CDPs, I start with the assumption that they don’t need one. I want to draw out of them some compelling need that the CDP will address. It can’t just be curiosity, or an itch. There has to be some pain somewhere – some lost opportunity.

Here are the top three reasons I’ve seen why people might not need a CDP.

1. You already have tech that can fulfill your use cases

Your ESP, your CRM, or your internal database might have all the functionality you need. There are a lot of technologies out there that aren’t quite CDPs, but that do a lot of CDP-like functions. That might be enough for you.

For example, let’s say you want to know what content your e-newsletter subscribers view after they click through to your website. A CDP can do that, but your ESP might have a script to manage that as well.

1. The expected return is less than the cost

Let’s say you follow my advice and come up with your list of use cases, then you make some projections of what costs you would save or revenue you could earn from those use cases. Add them all up, and they don’t cover the cost of the CDP, plus the staff time to manage it.

It’s time to stop and think again.

1. You can build or buy some simple tech to do what you need

With any technology you buy, you’re paying for 100 percent of the platform, but you’re only using a portion of it. What would it take to build or buy just the part that you need?

Generally speaking I caution against building your own. When you do that, you put yourself in the technology business. Now you have to worry about security, performance, and updates and all kinds of things that aren’t necessarily in your wheelhouse. So be cautious before you do that.

On the other hand, a clever javascript programmer might be able to make the hooks and connections you need and save you the cost of a new technology platform.

Look before you leap. Think it through carefully. Write out your use cases. Make projections on what you expect to gain or save. And if you have any trouble with that process, give me a call.

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You can’t please everybody, and it may be getting harder for print magazines to please the right people

Bo Sacks posted an article about the challenges facing print magazines, which is a topic I’ve discussed before. Rising print and postal costs are a big part of it, as is the competition from online sources.

Michael Gerber gives a long explanation of what he thinks is going on, and this sentence from his article caught my attention.

“And also they [i.e., magazine publishers] would’ve had to entirely switch their mindset from ‘we make money by pleasing twenty big-ticket corporate advertisers’ to ‘we make money by pleasing one million readers.’”

That got me wondering if one reason for the decline in print magazines is a growing gap between what pleases advertisers and what pleases readers.

Think of it this way. If I can create a magazine that pleases advertisers and readers, I get good ad revenue and strong sales, subscriptions, and renewals. If I have to choose between advertisers and readers, that makes a much tougher business model.

To work through this I asked Perplexity and ChatGPT about it, and then I thought about it for a while, and I came up with this list. If you want to see the verbatim answers from the chat bots, you can see that on my web page.

Note: I’m not trying to list all the headwinds faced by print magazines. I’m limiting myself to the narrow issue of how it might be harder to please both advertisers in and readers of a print magazine in today’s market than it was a few decades ago.

I’m not claiming to have the answer, but here are a few things to consider.

The decline of the newsstand. Magazines used to sell a lot of copies on the newsstand, which meant they had to appeal to the reader directly. Mostly with the cover, of course, but people would also take a look inside. The decline of the newsstand has limited that kind of interaction, and it might accompany a decline in the relative market power of the reader.

Better reader stats. On the other hand, you could flip this on its head and say that onsite analytics gives publishers a far better sense of what readers actually want – beyond the cover. Their digital readers are giving them so much intelligence about what they want, it allows far better, more targeted editorial content.

Combine this with the so-called church-state issue. Editorial wants to make decisions for the reader without regard for what the advertisers want. It’s a lot easier to do that now.

Digital ads are more targetable. Ads in a print magazine can’t be targeted to the individual the way ads in a digital magazine can. The internet has changed advertising from a form or art to an exercise in number crunching. Advertisers demand data, and you can’t get as much data from a print magazine, which lowers the incentive to advertise in a print magazine.

The internet has made readers hate ads. Ads in a print magazine used to be a lovely part of the experience. If I’m reading a magazine about boats, I actually want to see ads about interesting boat products. From a consumer perspective, the internet has ruined advertising. We all hate ads now. They’re disruptive and annoying, and that antipathy to ads might carry over to the print world.

There’s too much content out there. The print magazine used to be the only way to reach certain audiences. That’s not true anymore.

Okay, so there’s my rehearsal of the bad news. What’s the good news?

Print still works well for niche, specialty topics, or where the glossy, pleasant smelling paper, and the feel of a tangible object create an experience that enhances the information. Like fashion magazines.

But let’s not kid ourselves – in either direction. Print is not dead, but print magazines have declined into a smaller market share. That’s not going to change.

Links

Why Print Magazines Are F*cked

https://substack.com/@theamericanbystander/p-147566402

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It’s smart to ask for advice, but sometimes dumb to take it

The 21 Hats Podcast had an episode called “Who’s Advice are you Going to Take?” The host (I didn’t catch his name) interviewed Paul Downs, Mel Gravely, and Sarah Segal. It was an interesting discussion around the benefits of sticking to your plan or taking advice from outsiders.

The Book of Proverbs says “in an abundance of counselors there is victory.” It’s interesting that it doesn’t say whether you need to take the advice of your counselors. And from the “everything I need to know I learned from Star Trek” file, in “Dagger of the Mind,” Dr. Helen Noel asks why Captain Kirk asked for her advice if he didn’t intend to follow it, to which Dr. Tristan Adams said “One of the advantages of being captain, Doctor, is being able to ask for advice without necessarily having to take it.”

What’s particularly interesting about this is that – as a general rule – you have to be fairly willful and independent to go into business. Mavericks start businesses. Willful, independent people aren’t known for asking advice.

Sarah Segal says she’s hesitant to take advice. “When it comes down to it,” she says, “nobody knows your business the way you do.”

Paul Downs added that even smart, experienced people can give you very bad advice.

Mel Gravely seemed to find a middle path. He was talking about the advantages of having a board of directors. The board gives you an outside perspective, but it’s an informed perspective – which is an important distinction. They know about your business and have the right context.

Still, Mel said, and the others agreed, you don’t want to be in a position where you have to take the advice of the board.

If you have the time, listen to the whole conversation, but here are my takeaways.

• It’s good to be challenged, so long as challenges make you think rather than get defensive.
• Somebody on the outside might see a big, glaring gap in your plan that you can’t see because you’re too close to it.
• If you want to do something, you have an emotional investment in it, which clouds your judgment. An outside adviser doesn’t have that bias.
• Getting advice can slow you down, which is annoying. But remember, fools rush in.
• Make a distinction between “advice” and “informed advice.”
• Finally, you’re the captain. You can ask for advice and choose not to take it.

Links

Whose Advice Are You Going to Take?

https://21hats.com/whose-advice-are-you-going-to-take/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

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Bo Sacks posted an article today about the fastest-growing news publishers on TikTok. He didn’t attach any judgment to the story, but I will.

Publishers – There you go again.

Fool me once, shame on you, fool me a hundred times, call me a publisher.

Platforms are the ever-evolving, ever-new shiny object. They’re the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. If you run fast enough, you’ll get the fairy treasure and be happy for the rest of your life.

Oh … And they have Young People! — that magical demographic that doesn’t have any money but that publishers keep chasing after, often to the point of alienating older people who actually do have money.

The platforms use professional content from publishers to build their own – that is, the platform’s – business. The platforms use content from publishers until it no longer serves their interest. Then they change the rules and replace the publishers.

The publishers get to keep their digital dimes, but the platforms get the customers, and that’s where the dollars are.

But let me step back from my cynicism for a moment, and from the moral question of whether people should support a platform that’s controlled by the communist Chinese government, and which is giving the CCP information on its users …. Okay, let’s ignore all that for a minute and think about how platforms like TikTok might be useful to publishers, despite it all.

1. There’s branding and name recognition. Getting your name in front of new eyeballs can be a good thing.
2. Go ahead and make those digital dimes. Get some advertising money while you can. As a friend says, “if you’ve got a wave, surf.”
3. If you’re a message-driven organization, TikTok provides a chance to get your message out to more people.
4. You can collaborate with other brands. But be careful about that. It can also backfire rather severely.
5. You can post promotional videos on TikTok.

That last one is the real key, because in this case the publisher gets the customer information, which is the real gold. Publishers can promote workshops or online learning. They can drive traffic to their subscription websites, or to their e-stores.

To make it very simple, publishers should not be creating content for TikTok just to get followers and advertising revenue. That’s a waste of your resources, and it’s a daily grind. You’re not building anything.

Rather, use TikTok (if you can stomach it) as another input to your marketing funnel and create a strategy to drive people from TikTok to your site where you can get the customer information.

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The Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) is an advertising group dedicated to promoting something called “brand safety.” Brand safety means making sure your brand isn’t associated with bad stuff.

Here’s what ChatGPT says about the concept.

"Brand safety" in the context of advertising refers to strategies and practices that ensure a brand's advertisements do not appear alongside content that could harm its reputation. This includes avoiding associations with hate speech, violence, fake news, and other forms of inappropriate or offensive content. The goal is to protect the brand's image and avoid negative perceptions that could arise from appearing in or near harmful content online.

For example, if an ad for The Krehbiel Group appears next to an ad for OnlyFans, people might get the idea that I support or sponsor OnlyFans. Which I don’t. I advertise in Bo Sacks’ email because I want to be associated with that type of content.

That makes sense, but it becomes a problem in an era where advertisers don’t always hand pick the sites where their ads appear. Programmatic advertising leaves that in the hands of the algorithms – to some extent. The advertiser does have some degree of control.

That control breaks down on a platform like X, or Facebook, or TikTok. It’s hard to know what your ad will be next to, since everybody sees their own version of that site. If I go to X, I’ll see a completely different collection of content than you’ll see.

Congress had a hearing on this, and there were accusations that GARM was banning sites based on their political content. They were allegedly encouraging advertisers to withdraw from conservative sites more than from liberal sites.

I asked ChatGPT about all this, and here’s what it said.

Recently, GARM, a major advertising industry group dedicated to promoting brand safety, has come under significant scrutiny. Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter) filed an antitrust lawsuit against GARM, accusing the organization of colluding to organize an advertising boycott against X. This lawsuit claimed that GARM was instrumental in encouraging advertisers to withdraw billions of dollars in spending from the platform due to concerns about brand safety under Musk's leadership.

As a result of this lawsuit, GARM shut down.

Here’s more from ChatGPT.

GARM … was established by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) in 2019. It was formed in response to growing concerns among major advertisers about the rise of harmful content online and the impact that associating with such content could have on their brands.

What does “harmful” mean?

Some people think that certain political views are “harmful” in this context. That is, they don’t want their brand associated with that political view.

In other words, this whole episode is another wrinkle in the growing ideological divide in this country. Opposing views aren’t just opposing views. They’ve evil. They’re hateful. They’re “disinformation.”

It seems there are only two ways out of this mess.

The first is for people to stop assuming that because you advertise your widget on somebody’s show, that means you approve of their political opinions. In fact, I seem to recall that radio stations regularly announce that the views expressed are not necessarily reflective of the views of their advertisers.

But nobody seems to believe that, and when somebody says something controversial, the first thing the agitators do is go after their sponsors.

So that leaves option #2, which is to allow brands to pick the ideologies they want to be associated with. An organization like GARM wouldn’t be able to pick some kind of “universally safe” places, because one person’s safe is another person’s harmful.

Which means that we’re probably going to need different advertising groups for the left and the right – further dividing an already divided country.

I don’t like it, but I don’t see an alternative.

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An ad in an industry newsletter said, “In the age of AI, it’s more important than ever for publishers to have direct relationships with their readers.”

Wasn’t that always true? What does AI have do with it?

I’ll get to that, but my first reaction to this quote was that it’s a lovely thought, but we need a little more clarification on the words “direct” and “relationship” and what they mean in the context of publishing.

Here are some possible characteristics of a “direct” relationship.

• You communicate with your readers without any intermediary. You control the means of distribution of your content and don’t rely on third parties or platforms. Through my monthly letter, I communicate directly with my readers. When I write for the Martech site, or when I post one of these videos on YouTube or LinkedIn, I’m not communicating directly. I’m relying on somebody else – which I don’t like.
• You address your customers as individuals and personalize their experience. It’s easier to personalize on your website, where you can use a CDP, or other technology to make the experience more relevant to a specific user.
• Your customers pay you directly, not through a third party. This is key. It’s better to make a dime and get the customer data than make a dollar and get nothing.
• You’re collecting first-party data about your customers so you can get to know them better and provide a better service.

A “relationship” might imply …

• You strive to build trust and credibility. This is obviously relevant to how you create content, but it also applies to how you collect data.
• Your interactions are bi-directional. You speak and you listen – with surveys and questionnaires. You communicate on social media, on the phone, in email, etc.
• You meet with your customers in real life.
• You respect your customers’ values and opinions and create content that’s relevant and useful to them.
• You respect your customers’ relationships with other customers and either build a community for them or take part in the communities they’re already in.
• You take complaints and concerns seriously.
• You’re consistent and reliable.
• You create ways for your customers to show the same loyalty towards you.

Does this describe your attitude and approach to your customers? Think about it.

Okay, back to AI. Why is this particularly relevant in the era of AI?

Trust and credibility is part of it. There was a recent dust-up over whether Sports Illustrated was publishing AI-generated stories that they were allegedly presenting as if they were written by a human.

The bigger issue might be the threat of AI agents, which could replace the role of the publisher. Think about the role of the publisher. The publisher selects the right content in the right style at the right time and place and delivers it in a useful way to the reader. AI is already doing that – like in your daily news feed – and it will continue to expand.

Imagine an AI agent that knows what you read, when you read it, and maybe even knows your emotional reaction to the story. It’s easy to imagine a future where AI is selecting content for me.

Publishers seem to be reacting in two different ways: with fear, or with curiosity – which is exactly how we should react to new things. We need to be cautious, but we also need to explore.

Some publishers will insist that humans can always do better than AI. I’m not convinced of that. I know too many humans. I am convinced that a human has to be involved in the process and set boundaries. Algorithms get too easily caught in feedback loops that spiral out of control.

We just saw that the other day with electronic trading on the stock market. You need a human available to pull the plug when the robot traders are caught in a death spiral.

Okay, so what do you do now? Re-read what I said about about a “direct relationship” and consider how technology can help you achieve it – under your watchful eye.

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There’s an old book on website design titled Don’t Make Me Think, A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. It’s a good book, and if you’re involved in design, you should read it. But that basic concept applies to more than web design.

“Cognitive load” is a concept used to measure how much mental effort is required to process information and make decisions.

Here’s a little story about “cognitive load.”

One night, years ago, I was on my way from work to an evening class. I was exhausted. I wanted a candy bar and a cup of coffee so the sugar, fat, and caffeine would get me through the lecture. I pulled into some rinky dink road-side shop expecting an old pot of bad coffee and a Snickers bar. They had 10,000 types of candy bars and 14 varieties of coffee.

For the first and only time in my life, I wished I was in the Soviet Union and there were only two choices: “candy bar” and “coffee.”

I eventually got my Snickers and coffee, but seeing all those choices felt like a wet, heavy blanket of despair descending on my soul. I’m normally a very decisive person, but I was tired I simply didn’t want to have to make a decision.

“However,” you may be thinking, “people like to have options. There’s a reason why there are 14 varieties of coffee.”

That’s right, and you have to find the appropriate balance between the “choice paralysis” when there are too many options and the frustration when there are too few. Phones seem to have managed this by putting relatively few options up front with an endless array of options deep in the settings. It’s rather amazing how much you can customize on your phone.

Personalization is one way publishers can lessen the cognitive load on their readers. Consider Spotify. If I want to listen to a song, I don’t have to wade through the entire universe of music. Spotify recommends things that I will probably like.

Here are some ways you can use this concept to make your service easier to use.

Filter out what’s irrelevant to the reader. Don’t try to answer every question or provide every option on every page. Focus on what 80 percent of the people want. Make the long tail stuff accessible, but not prominent.

Align choices with the reader’s interests. Use a customer data platform to find out what customers want and make those activities easier for that customer.

Eliminate friction. Make decisions as easy as possible. The question is not necessarily how many clicks or how many pages the user needs to endure, but how easy each of them are.

Make things familiar and predictable. If people are used to seeing a feature a certain way, do it that way. Salt is still salt if it’s in a square box, but when people are looking for salt, they’re looking for a cylinder, not a box. Don’t contradict their expectations.

Following these suggestions can help you lower the cognitive load of using your service and make people feel more comfortable with it.

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We’re all bad at estimating the time, cost, and risks associated with a task, and we usually overestimate the benefits. The problem increases with the complexity of the project. This is called The Planning Fallacy.

Here are a few examples to illustrate how this happens.

How long does it take to mow the lawn? For me, between 45 minutes and an hour, depending on how high the grass is, and whether I have to get gasoline. But it also depends on the unforeseen calamity, like when the pull cord breaks, in which case all bets are off. If the spring that retrieves the cord has to be rewound, that can be a hassle.

How long does it take to replace the wax seal under a toilet? If everything goes perfectly, maybe a half hour. But what if the bolts are so rusted that you have to cut them off, which means you need to run to the hardware store to get new bolts, and — as everyone knows — it’s impossible to go to the hardware store once. You always have to make a second trip. What if, while replacing the tank, you discover that the rubber gasket is falling apart and that also needs to be replaced?

To compensate for these problems, follow these three tips.

1. Break down a complicated task into its components so your estimations are more granular and specific.
2. Compare these tasks with relevant experience from previous projects.
3. Don’t make one estimate. Give a pessimistic, a realistic, and an optimistic assessment for each task, and explain when and why each might apply.

Following this method can help to mitigate the effect of the planning fallacy.

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It has been notoriously difficult to get people to move from print to digital. My experience is that a digital call to action on a print piece doesn’t work as well as you hope it will.

It might be that print and digital reflect different moods. One is laid back and relaxed. The other is frenetic and connected. When someone is in the print mood, they might not want to use their phone.

“Doggone it, I’m reading now, leave me alone.”

QR codes were supposed to bridge this gap, but they didn’t catch on when they were first introduced in the 1990s. I think they were ahead of their time. They seem to be having a bit of a resurgence, probably because of the ubiquity of smartphones. And I think there’s a bit of a convergence between print and online activity. I think there’s still a psychological barrier in switching between them, but I think that barrier is eroding a little.

Recently we’ve seen some promising uses of the print medium. Some magazines are going back to print. Not anywhere near at the scale that print used to occupy. Don’t get carried away. But print is settling into some specific niches – usually as a premium or luxury item.

The Economist tested whether a print package could help with digital engagement. It was a smart thing to test. Most welcome series are yet another annoying email.

That raises an interesting point about email. An email is just an email. There’s not much you can do to make it look “premium.” You can put emojis in the subject line – which I recommend against, unless you’re marketing to teenagers – but generally speaking an email is an email. Once you open an email, there may be some differentiation. Some emails look very snazzy and some look rather plain.

Print is very different. There’s all the difference in the world in print. You have postcards, letters, and packages of various sizes. Sometimes print can be quite beautiful, and sometimes it just has a feeling about it.

A long time ago a friend showed me a handheld HAM radio, and it was just a cool thing to hold. It felt good in the hand. It felt substantial. It looked sleek.

Print can be that way. An email can’t.

Back to The Economist. They split their new subscribers into two groups. One group got a print welcome series while the other group got the traditional email welcome series. The people who got the print package were more engaged with the product. Generally speaking, better engagement means better loyalty and better renewals. Maybe we’ll get an update in a year to see if it played out that way, but in any event, it was a smart test.

I’ll put a link below to the article in The Audiencers.

There’s a bigger point here than just what The Economist did with this welcome package. The point is, don’t forget about print. It’s not magical. It’s never going to have the reach and influence it did a couple decades ago. But it’s still a legitimate tool in your toolbox, and in some cases it’s a far better tool than any digital option.

From time to time I get solicitations – both in the mail and in email – to look at new properties down by the lake in North Carolina. I’m not positive how I got on that list, but I’m on it.

I don’t give the emails a second thought. They go straight to the trash. I do look at the brochures.

Same with catalogs. L.L. Bean can send me a hundred emails and get far less interaction than one catalog. I’ll sit down with a cup of tea and page through the thing.

You might be thinking, “Yeah, but 100 emails cost less than one catalog,” which is true. I’m not saying print will always pay for itself. But it’s worth testing. In some specific applications, print might be your best way to reach your audience.

When the inbox is crowded, consider the mailbox.

Link

Stand out with an onboarding pack: How The Economist increased new subscriber engagement by 3.5%

https://theaudiencers.com/stand-out-with-a-pack-how-the-economist-increased-new-subscriber-engagement-by-3-5/

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It’s not enough to know all the clever business sayings. You have to do them.

I’ve been in the publishing business a long time, and it’s rare that I hear something new. When I go to a conference, I’m usually not getting new information. The talks serve to remind me to emphasize things I already knew and should have been doing.

I’m a consultant, and sometimes I find myself giving advice that I’m dead certain my client already knows. It reminds me of one of Jordan Peterson’s rules: “treat yourself like someone you’re responsible for.”

Think about this in your own life. You already know that you should exercise, watch your weight, eat a good diet, get regular check-ups, and so on, and if you were responsible for another person, you’d tell that person to do those things.

Most of us need to learn to give ourselves the advice we’d give to others. As the old saying goes, “physician, heal thyself.”

We’ve all heard the saying, “it’s easier to keep a current customer than get a new one” a hundred times. Have we all incorporated that concept into our businesses?

I don’t think so. Just last week I was speaking with a publisher who was ignoring a relatively obvious way to engage his current customers. He knows the saying, and if I was asking his advice, he’d undoubtedly quote it to me. When I gave him my recommendation his reaction was along the lines of “well of course I should do that.”

A couple weeks ago I was at a conference where people were lamenting how much of “audience development” focuses on growth rather than engagement and keeping existing customers happy. Growth is a good thing, but keeping current customers is a better thing.

Here’s another simple rule for you. My friend Chris Moffa likes to say “there’s all the difference in the world between someone who will pay a dollar and someone who won’t.”

That’s a slightly deeper application of the “it’s easier to keep a customer” rule. So ask yourself this – Are you treating the people who have paid you something – even just a dollar – better than the unwashed pool of freeloaders who haven’t?

Churches often recommend a daily examination of conscience. It’s not enough to know your moral obligations. You need to interrogate yourself on them and see if you’re actually following them. Because … you’re not.

Business people need something similar. We need to reflect on all those rules we already know – and aren’t following. At least not as completely as we should.

But I do want to give you a new idea today. At least it was new to somebody I met last week.

We all know by now that print isn’t dead. It’s moved into a new category. It’s a luxury. An extravagance.

So, use it that way. Print often doesn’t make sense for prospecting. The cost is too high for the return.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it. It means you should use it selectively, for small audiences.

For example, you probably do most of your marketing digitally, which might be a good idea for prospects. Direct mail might be a better option for your customers. Or maybe only for your best customers. When everybody’s in the inbox, try the mailbox – for a small, select group of people. Make them feel special.

And now I’m going to take my own advice, drink a glass of water and do some push-ups.

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From time to time a publisher will ask me how they can improve their business. I’m first and foremost an operations / tech guy, but I also have ideas about growth and business development. To help a publisher figure out where they can grow, it’s first necessary to find out what they’re doing — good and bad. That calls for a checklist, so I’ve created one. Here’s a short version of it that you can use to start the process. If you need help, give me a call.

Step 1 is where you identify your core strengths and your current revenue models

In Step 2 you check to see if you've covered the basics

If you find something significant there, great. Get to work on that.

Otherwise, you need to move into a much more detailed review, which is Step 3, which would include a close examination of all the areas of your business.

To learn more, look at the article linked below.

https://krehbielgroup.com/the-krehbiel-letter/

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There’s a reason why people don’t like subscriptions

I signed up for an annual service last year and I used it every weekday for 3 or 4 months, then I found an alternative and stopped using that service. Foolishly on my part, I neglected to cancel it, so I got charged for the next year’s service on the renewal date.

That’s my fault. Every time you sign up for a subscription service you should put a tickler in your calendar to re-evaluate that cost when you’re due for renewal.

That’s one reason why people don’t like subscriptions. They feel like they’re being tricked into making a payment they don’t want to make. That’s not the way to do things. It’s a bad customer experience and it creates ill-will between the consumer and the service provider.

What could this vendor have done to make it a better experience?

First, they could have noticed when I stopped using the service. It was, after all, a pretty dramatic change. I used it every weekday for months, then not at all. They should have put me in a re-engagement campaign, and they should have asked why I stopped using it.

Second, they should not have auto renewed me when I hadn’t used the service in months. That seems pretty obvious. At a minimum they should have asked me if I really wanted to renew.

Some of you are shaking your head right now saying, “we want more renewal money, not less!” To which I respond, do you want to sell an honest product, or do you want to cheat people into handing over their money when they really don’t want to?

Third, they should have sent me a warning before charging my card. That’s a common courtesy, and a good business practice – especially on an annual renewal. It’s also an opportunity to make sure you have the right payment information on file. For example, you could say “this is a reminder that we will charge your Mastercard ending 1234 on July 1st. Click here to update your payment information.”

Fourth – if all those things fail, they charge me, and I complain about it – they should refund my payment.

I hope that people of good will can see the sense in these suggestions and voluntarily adopt policies like this. But it’s possible that we need something like a “good subscription vendor seal of approval.” That is, some organization spells out consumer-friendly subscription practices and allows conforming vendors to put a trust badge on their sales page.

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At Omeda’s OX7 meeting in Chicago, Adam Ryan from Workweek gave a talk on 5 pillars of trust. They are … Transparency Credibility Habitual product Relevant language* SpecificityMy notes from his talk are rather sketchy, so I don’t know how much of what I’m going to say reflects Ryan’s views and how much is my interpretation, but here you go.Under Transparency, I wrote down “say the thing you want to say.” For example, if you have a bias on a particular issue, own up to it. Don’t pretend you’re an objective, independent observer if you’re not. You’re not fooling anybody, and you’re going to cause unnecessary churn over it.Having a point of view isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Some people want to hear things from a particular point of view. But hiding your bias, or pretending you don’t have one, will come back to bite you. The worst situation is when you have a bias and you don’t even realize it.Credibility means you know what you’re talking about and you don’t cut corners. Invest what it takes to have genuine expertise. Ryan’s example was that you’re better off with the experienced reporter. You might be able to hire two 2nd year reporters at $50K, but you’re better off with one experienced reporter at $100K.Jacob Donnelly from A Media Operator pushed back against that, pointing out that Woodward and Bernstein were young reporters – but they were the exception rather than the rule.Adam said the credibility issue has changed over time. For example, people no longer think “don’t listen to him, he’s wearing sneakers.” Some of the most successful execs in the world walk around looking like bums. On the other hand, a fellow conference attendee said “some people get to 40 with standards, some don’t.”Habitual product has a time component and a style component. On the time side, you should strive to publish on a regular cadence. On the style side, you should stick to certain categories, and use the same words and phrases. Don’t be Walter Cronkite one day and Bill Maher another. You might also have a particular sign off, or signature. Paul Harvey ended his broadcast with “and now you know the rest of the story.” Develop your own style and stick to it.Relevant language means you should speak the language of your audience.Many communities have a unique vocabulary, or certain phrases that they use. If you use a word incorrectly, or don’t understand how to use a phrase, it marks you as an outsider. As an example, in Star Trek 4 – that’s the funny one with the whales – somebody called Captain Kirk a dumb ass, and he replied “double dumb ass on you.”You have to know your audience – not only how they speak, but sometimes even the rhythm and cadence of their schedule. I learned this the hard way when I tried to do a telemarketing campaign for a natural gas marketing book during bid week. It was a catastrophe.If you’re writing for farmers, or horse owners, or doctors, or deacons, you need to know what their lives are like and how they speak.Specificity could mean “find a niche,” or it could mean “be precise.” Be careful in what you say, and make sure you’re accurate and precise in your language. People aren’t paying you for vague generalities. “Someone will win the presidential election” is accurate, but not very precise, and not very helpful.

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Last week I was working on an article for Martech.org on customer data platforms and their close kin – that is, other technologies that are almost but not quite CDPs. It highlights the importance of knowing exactly what technology you need, and exactly what a given vendor is offering. Unfortunately, it’s very hard to get all the details about a technology in just a few calls and demos. There are always gotchas, and you’re always left saying, “wait, you do what?” One of the biggest barriers in this process is your own preconceptions. When you think of a given technology, you think, “Oh, it certainly does such and so,” and when they tell you it does such and so, you assume it does it the way you think that technology ought to operate. It’s ain’t necessarily so. You can’t accept, “Oh, sure, we do that.” You need to dig into the details to see precisely how they do it, because I can guarantee you they’re not going to do it exactly the way you expect. Their way might be better, or it might be worse, but it will be different. For example, let’s say you’re examining a fulfillment vendor and you notice that most of their clients sell monthly magazines. You ask if they can do weekly issues. They say yes. But what they mean by doing weekly issues is that they always run a label file on Monday and you need them to run it on Friday. That’s a very simple example, but it can easily get much more complicated. The only way to find out is to ask lots and lots of questions. At first I was thinking that Detective Columbo was a good model here. You remember his signature, “just one more thing” as he was about to leave. That was very effective at jarring his prey into giving up an important detail. The real hero here is a former Kiplinger colleague named Karen. She was very good at asking the same question many times with just slight variations. She was able to uncover hidden problems that way. Keep asking the question. It’s annoying, you’ll feel bad doing it, but it’s the only way. Also, when they give an answer, say it back to them in your language. Pay careful attention to the way they use words. It’s almost certain that they’ll use the word in a slightly different way than you do. Pick some important terms and concepts and review them very carefully. * Customer vs. lead * Engagement * Conversion and renewal * Content * Campaign * Page view * Personalization * Churn rate Be a pain in the rear. Ask questions until you’re certain you understand how the technology really works. But I warn you, even after your best efforts there will still be gotchas.

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Many years ago I did a workshop on how to get marketing to work with IT. I’ve noticed that when IT says, “I need a requirements document,” marketing often hears that as “go away, kid, you bother me.” The reality is that IT really does need a requirements document. Does the same logic apply to how we document processes? I raise the question because I’m noticing two different attitudes towards documentation. One attitude is consistent with the requirements document concept. The documentation – like the requirements document – comes first, then you build it. But sometimes the process of building something isn’t all that clear up front. You have to find out how you’re going to do things as you go. It’s more along the lines of “Ready, Fire, Aim.” There are some things you have to do before you can document them. A requirements document specifies an outcome. It doesn’t have to specify a method. In fact, most of the time it shouldn’t, because the person writing the requirements document doesn’t know all the options. So we can divide “documentation” into outcomes and methods, or goals and operations, if you prefer. Outcomes (or goals) should be defined up front. Methods (or operations) can only be defined after they’ve been figured out. The pre-planned part — which would be the outcomes or goals — should be defined by whoever is proposing or sponsoring the new initiative. That is, “here’s what we want to accomplish and why.” Operational details are responsive as you work through the problem and figure out how to do things. Trying to specify operational details up front is a mistake.

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This morning I was walking the granddog in the neighborhood park and was serenaded to the sound of “Come here, Sky! Come back, Sky! Heel, Sky!” You’ll find it as no surprise that Sky – a lovely German Shepherd / Husky mix, I think – came flying by a few seconds later, dragging his leash. He was friendly enough and wanted to play with the granddog, but we moved along. The hapless owner kept calling out. He reminded me of that Psalm that Wooster likes to quote. “They are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear; Which will not hearken to the voice of charmers, charming never so wisely.” As we walked out of the park two things happened simultaneously. Sky went flying by across the street, and a park ranger pulled up in his Ford Escape, rolled down his window and asked what the heck. I gave him the lowdown and continued my walk hoping the hapless dog owner got a warning, at least, for failing to keep charge of his dog. The episode reminded me of two things: parenting, and publishing. When I hear a parent say, “Stop that Johnny. I mean it Johnny. This is your last warning, Johnny. I’m going to count to ten,” and so on, I feel really bad for that kid, because the parent is training Johnny to ignore everything he says. It reminds me of publishing because ever since the dawn of the internet, publishers have been training consumers to believe that their content should be free. Funny coincidence – Bo Sacks just sent an email about Time’s experience after dropping their paywall. “Since then,” the article says, “Time has seen advertising revenues rise, digital subscribers evaporate, and traffic remain relatively flat.” The bottom line is that Time is not currently profitable. It’s an interesting article, and I’ll link it below, but first I’ll give you two general thoughts. First, there is no magic revenue solution that will work for every publisher. It’s good to read about other publishers’ experiences, but don’t think it will transfer to your content and your audience. Paywalls work for some and don’t work for others. Generally speaking, paywalls work better when the content is viewed as need to know, and is a significant step above what can be had for free. Second, publishers have to stop reinforcing the attitude that content should be free. There has to be an exchange. You can pick any sort of exchange you like, but make it clear that the reader is paying for the privilege, and that it costs money to create what you’re creating. For example, if you’re going to use an ad-supported model, fine, but don’t allow people to use ad blockers. We’ve been telling consumers that content should be free online for decades. It’s going to take some time to undo that damage, but we all need to start doing it – right now. Of course this also ties into the AI problem. Having spent decades telling everyone that content on the internet is free for the taking, publishers are now shocked and appalled that their content is free for the taking. Time Dropped Its Paywall One Year Ago. Here's What's Happened Sincehttps://www.adweek.com/media/time-paywall-dropped-one-year/

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Bo Sacks distributed an article by James Evelegh with a rather long title that starts “An even closer union. How close are you to your readers?” James claims that success in publishing is increasingly measured by proximity to your audience, but I think we need to be a little more precise than that. Will Bailey and Jennifer Schivas from 67 Bricks say it’s “the holy grail” to get embedded into your customers’ workflow. I agree with that. Jessica Norell Neeson from BBC Good Food says their success is from meeting the audience where they are and providing relevant content. Renee Doegar from London Review of Books emphasizes customer research. Hearst UK is making “determined efforts” to understand customer values. All these things sound great to me. * Get into your customers’ workflow * Know the audience so you can provide relevant content * Do customer research, and * Understand your customers’ values There’s a lot that can be added to that. * Know their content preferences by type – like video, audio, short- or long-form content, bulleted lists, etc. * Know their preferences by topic. * Monitor their usage patterns, like time of day, or day of week. * Find out what style they prefer, like casual or formal, snide, joking, critical, analytical, etc. All these things are good ideas, and there’s one thing conspicuously missing – acting as if your customer is your buddy. That seems to be the obsession of some branding people – i.e., getting people to love your brand. That might be a reasonable strategy in some cases, but not in all. The message is, get close to your customers in the sense of knowing who they are and what they need, but don’t think that necessarily means you need to be friends. Link-------An ever closer union https://www.inpublishing.co.uk/articles/an-ever-closer-union-22982

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I’m sure you’ve seen headlines like this. “I’m a bartender. Please stop mixing bourbon with Italian bitters.” Or “I’m a swim coach, please stop kicking from your knees.” That is, something in the form of "I'm a [some kind of expert]. Please stop doing [some thing]." I find those headlines annoying. I don’t care if you’re a bartender. If I want to mix bourbon with Italian bitters, that’s my business. On the other hand, I do care what the swim coach says because I need to work on my kicking. I’ve always hated kicking. This tactic pulls a lot of the right levers. Let’s break it down. It starts with “I.” There’s something to that. It establishes a connection. Not only that, the person is an expert. The headline is promising inside information from an expert. And if the algorithms have done their work, it’s an expert on a topic I care about. So now we have credibility, authority, and interest. That’s pretty good. On top of all that, these headlines usually arouse curiosity. Why shouldn’t I mix bourbon and Italian bitters? There’s also an element of fear. If I mix bourbon and Italian bitters, will people think I’m a clueless rube? Will they be snickering at me behind my back? “Look what that guy’s doing!” I don’t want to be “that guy.” Another way to think of this is “negativity bias.” We’re drawn to negative information. The word “stop” grabs our attention. It says “you’re doing this wrong.” In some cases it’s solving a problem. I really do want to improve my freestyle kick, so how much should my knees be involved? So why do these ads annoy me? First, it seems condescending. “I know so much more about what you should be drinking because I’m a bartender.” Oh really now. Second, the tactic is overused, so it sounds click-baitish. Also, after you click through a few of these you realize most of them don’t deliver much of value anyway. Third, it’s too direct and commanding. What gives you permission to tell me to stop doing something? If you’re a doctor, okay. Sure. But just because you’re a bartender …? I mean, you’re supposed to be serving me, not judging what I do. It’s interesting to review the psychological components that go into a headline like this, and there are some lessons there that might be of value. The larger question in my mind is what happens to your brand when you use these kinds of tactics. Nobody disputes that they work, but are you doing more harm than good in the long run? Clickbait headlines, fear-based marketing, scarcity and urgency tactics, over-personalization, and aggressive retargeting have all become common because they work – despite the fact that people hate them. Let’s put it in the context of dating. Let’s say a man took a class on tactics to use to get a date. The tactics might work, but the next day the woman is thinking “I can’t believe I fell for that.” That’s what you’re playing with when you use these sorts of tricks. It might result in short-term success, but it doesn’t build long-term trust.

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I was waiting in line at the grocery store yesterday and felt the annoying buzz of my cell phone. Another email. I checked, and noticed that my Google Pixel displayed the name of the song that was playing in the background. That means it’s listening. I suppose I could turn that off somewhere in the settings, but I haven’t bothered. If it’s listening to the background music, it’s certainly also listening to what I say. And probably to what people around me say. What does GoogleDeepMind now know? * It knows my location, so it knows what store I was in. * Based on what song was playing at that time, it probably knows what music service that store is using, which is useful information to sell to people who sell in-store music services. * I’m sure there were other people in the store with Pixel phones, so it knew who else was nearby. Is there someone I’m often near? * It knows whether I shop locally. * Since the teller says out loud how much I owe, it might know how much I spent / spend. * If it is listening to what I say (and why wouldn’t it be?) it knows whether I’m kind or mean to the staff at stores. * It knows that I checked my notification. By aggregating that data – when I do and when I don’t check my notifications – it can tell vendors the best times to try to ping me. With a little thinking we could come up with 10 or 20 more things Google is or could be collecting. I’m not listing these things to make you afraid, but to challenge you. Are you thinking creatively about what you can do with your data? If you have a website, or if you send emails, or text messages, your customers are throwing data at you every single day. What are you doing with it? Google looks at every piece of information they’re collecting and thinks, “how can I sell this? How can I use it? What can I build from this?” You should be asking yourself the same question. For example, your ESP can tell you when your prospects are more likely to open your emails. What can you do with that? A simple thing is to send your emails at those times, but what else can you learn? Does this information give you an insight into daily habits? Should you schedule content releases to correspond to those times? Do these open times allow you to segment your audience in a meaningful way? It might also help to dig a little into that data. Maybe certain types of content are getting more engagement at different times of the day. As a simple example, your daily comic might get opened at one time while your daily news update gets opened at a different time. Next, check this data against what you see in other areas, like online chat, or customer service interactions. What about spam complaints? Are they more common at certain times of the day? If so, don’t send at those times. The data is pouring in. Are you paying attention to it?

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Bo Sacks recently distributed an article by Dave Morgan called “It’s NOT About The Content.” His argument is that the point of media is to gather an audience that you can sell to advertisers, and if you can get away with cheap content, so much the better. Then he asks this interesting question. If it was “all about the content,” then “how come media companies that make content today have revenues, profits, and stock prices that are down so much?” Again, he says “companies that make content are nowhere near the top of the list of the most valuable companies in the world anymore.” Okay, you can’t argue with that. Google and Apple aren’t rich because they create great content but because they’ve figured out how to collect and sell our information. If you want to make a lot of money, Dave asks, “What is your technology and data strategy?” That’s a fair point. But editorial directors still have to create the best content that they can. So here’s a list of “worst practices” for content creators. That is, things you should avoid. Poor Quality. If it’s badly written, has grammatical errors, lacks depth or accuracy, people will turn away. Overly Promotional. Everybody knows you have to sell soap, but you have to keep the correct balance. Irrelevant or Off-Topic Content. This one is very important to me. Too much content wanders all over the place without getting to the point. Inconsistent Posting. This is one where I have to eat my own cooking. I’ve not been as consistent with my video and email updates as I should be. Consumers want to know that they can expect new stuff from you on a regular cadence. Some people say Lack of Authenticity is a big deal, but I think this a bit over-rated. I don’t care if you’re “authentic,” whatever that means, if you’re providing good content. Insensitive or Controversial Content is certainly a big deal for some people because everybody is so absurdly sensitive these days. Jonathan Haidt seems to think that’s a consequence of a lack of play in childhood and over-exposure to smart phones. Be that as it may, you’re dealing with prickly people. Poor User Experience tops the list for mobile sites, in my opinion. I have come to dislike reading on my phone because the experience is almost universally awful. Lack of Engagement – that is, content that doesn’t encourage on-going interaction – is important to the publisher. I’m not sure how important it is to the reader. I rarely read something and then feel let down that they haven’t hooked me into something else. Repetitive Content can be annoying, where you keep riding that same hobby horse, or simply rewording old stories. Keep it fresh. All these things are important, but the biggest one – in my opinion – is Ideological Bias. Too many content creators ignore this. I was listening to an interview with a pollster the other day, and he said that if you group together people who (1) make over $100K a year, (2) graduated from an elite school, and (3) have a master’s degree or better, their views on most issues are way out of synch with the public. But here’s the amazing part. They don’t know that. In fact, they believe their views do represent the majority opinion. A fish doesn’t know that he’s wet, and these people don’t know that they’re living in a bubble. So editorial directors, take heed. Hire some people with no college degree. Hire some people who went to state schools. Hire people who had to work to pay their way through college because their parents were poor.

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Dishwashers frequently have an efficiency label on them. Those labels irritate me because they imply there’s only one kind of efficiency that matters – energy efficiency. Sometimes they add water efficiency. Both energy and water efficiency are important, but I can easily come up with other ways to measure the efficiency of a dishwasher. Also, when I think of an obsession with energy efficiency I get this image of Scrooge and Bob Cratchet. Scrooge was so worried about how much coal he was burning that he made his loyal employee miserable. Anyway, here are some other ways to measure the efficiency of a dishwasher. * How much soap you need * How long the cycle takes * How long it takes to fill it * How long it takes to empty it * How many dishes it can wash at a time * How many different sizes and shapes of dishes it can wash * How noisy it is * How much space it takes up in your kitchen * How often you have to clean out that filter thing in the bottom I’m sure I’m missing a few. For example, I’m not sure how you’d measure this, but how about something like “how well this dishwasher keeps dishes from piling up in the sink”? Personally, I care about that more than I care about the dishwasher’s energy use. In addition to this somewhat narrow focus on one kind of efficiency, some people suffer under what I call “the tyranny of the full dishwasher” – that’s that feeling that you can’t run the dishwasher until it’s completely full. That’s not true. There are other considerations in life, like managing your daily schedule. You may be wondering what this has to do with business, because this podcast isn’t about home economics. I think there’s a good parallel to business here. How are you measuring efficiency in your organization, and are you allowing one form of efficiency to interfere with another? A lot of things have to do with what you’re measuring. Let’s say you measure your business by revenue per employee. That’s a good metric, but it can lead to inefficiencies in other areas. You might neglect necessary training. You might accumulate a lot of tech debt because you don’t have enough tech staff to keep things up to date. Customer service may suffer. You also might create a turnover problem by overworking your staff. Alright, so let’s look at revenue per customer, which is another good metric. That can result in some of the problems I just mentioned, and it can also lead to cutting corners and creating a poor quality product. The point of today’s kitchen conversation is that any metric you use will probably cause distortions and inefficiencies in some other areas of your business. Be sure to look at things from multiple different angles, and don’t get too laser-focused on one metric.

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Assigning point values to different kinds of engagement can also give you ideas about how to develop your online community

Yesterday I moderated a MACMA event called “Mastering Customer Retention Essentials.” We had a good lineup of speakers, and it was an interesting program. One of my takeaways was that we hear words like “community” and “membership” and “engagement” without thinking much about what those things mean. What is a community? What does it mean to be engaged in a community? From a publishing perspective we’re usually talking about a community centered on a publication or topic. It will have an online component, and might have some in-person elements. People can engage with this community in a number of different ways, but some actions seem to express more commitment or involvement than other actions. If we want to measure community involvement or engagement, we might have to rank and then score these different activities. For example, reading an article gives you 1 point. Commenting on an article gives you 10. That sort of thing. Here’s a fun activity. Set your own community or publication aside and imagine all the possible things that could be included under the “engagement” umbrella – whether or not those things apply to your product. Then score them. The idea is to think about how involved a person would be if they did those things – or perhaps how much effort it takes. You can separate them into categories, such as basic, intermediate, and advanced engagement activities, loyalty activities, leadership activities, and so on. I have a whole list of possibilities that I’m not going to read to you. If you want the list visit my website. I ran this general idea past some friends in Joanne Persico’s Bold Minds group, and Ellen Lalier and Janet Granger gave me some good recommendations. Ellen said community is different from engagement in an important way. Community is a group of people with a common interest that interact with one another. Engagement is directed towards content – not towards other people. I think that’s an important point. As Janet said, people come for the information and stay for the community. This implies that someone who wants to build community might categorize some actions as “content actions” and other actions as “community actions,” and might even create customer journeys to try to move people towards community actions. That is, move from interactions with content to interactions with people. That could affect your scoring. Maybe people interactions get a higher score than content interactions. The other thing we discussed on Bold Minds is the distinction between a marketing focus – which can degrade into a search for a list – as in, “find me all the people who are interested in such and so” – and a content focus, which is trying to meet the information needs of the community. https://krehbielgroup.com/2024/06/06/how-do-you-score-community-involvement/

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I don’t like platforms, but this seems like the only way In the world of “paying for content,” we’re used to buying single, discreet, one-off products. The newsstand isn’t what it used to be, but people still buy single issues of magazines and newspapers. We still buy a single movie ticket, rather than a subscription. And even when we have a subscription – like Amazon Prime – we’ll sometimes buy access to a single movie. People buy albums, and individual songs. Why doesn’t this transfer over to articles on a webpage? I think there are three reasons. The first is the idea of buying lots of things for $0.25, or a buck. That seems silly, and I don’t want a credit card bill with 25 microcharges on it. There are lots of creative ways around that problem, but it ties in directly with the second problem. I don’t want to subscribe to The Economist, but from time to time they have an article I’d like to read. What I don’t want to do is sign up. I don’t want an Economist account. I don’t want to have to create an account on 30 different websites just because I wanted to buy one article. Some micropayment systems solve both those problems, which leads us to the third reason why micropayments haven’t caught on. How do I know which micropayment aggregator to go with? If the top ten or twenty newspapers adopted one micropayment system, everybody else would fall in line, and that would be that. It’s like MS-DOS vs. CMP. Once the federal government went with MS-DOS, that was the end of the discussion. Unfortunately, publishers are famous for not cooperating – or doing anything that smacks of long-term, strategic thinking. Which is why Amazon needs to step in. This is very out of character for me. I don’t like the platforms, and my general advice to publishers is to keep as far away from them as possible. They’re an invasive species that wants to gobble your entire ecosystem. Having said that, we need one, central payment platform that everybody’s already using, where it doesn’t matter if you’re on an Android or an Apple device. Amazon seems like the right solution. As long as I’m making recommendations to Amazon, I have one other thing they can do. Fight back against scammers. This morning I got a phishing email about my krehbielgroup.com hosting account. I suspected it was fake, but it was decently well done, and I could have accidentally handed over the credentials for my hosting account. We need a well-funded group of white hat hackers to fight back against these cretins. Find them and destroy them. Plant viruses on their servers. Do denial of service attacks. Hunt them down and make their lives miserable. That really ought to be a function of the government. One of those big white marble buildings in D.C. should be leading this charge. But they’re too interested in stupid things nobody cares about. That’s why we need Dark Bezos. He could fund a white hat anti-spammer group with the change that falls on the counting room floor. Except that Amazon is too good at logistics to allow change to fall on the floor, but you get my point. Somebody needs to go after these goons. They’re disrupting online commerce. They’re the new train robbers, and we need some badasses to go after them.

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If you’re planning an event, like a conference, you’ve probably thought of the venue, the food, registration, staffing, accommodations, transportation, the speakers, the agenda, workshops, AV needs … you know the drill. There are a lot of things to plan for. You’re probably also planning for “networking opportunities,” because that’s one of the top reasons people attend professional events. Who on your staff is in charge of networking? Who’s researched it? Who’s investigating best practices? Who’s finding new ideas? Ken Holsinger from Freeman Company says it’s the missing ingredient in most event planning organizations. At a minimum you should make space for networking. Most event planners do that. They have “networking breaks,” cocktail hours, and so on. But those opportunities mostly depend on people to take the initiative, and some people aren’t very good at that. Also, it’s hard to catch people at the right time. They might already be involved in conversation. One alleged solution I’ve seen is “speed networking.” I’ve only done it one time, and I didn’t like it. The idea was that you had two lines of chairs facing each other. You’d speak to the person across from you, and every five minutes the people in one of the lines would move down one chair. So far so good. But there’s always that guy who doesn’t move when the five minutes are up, and that ruins the whole process. So if you’re going to try speed networking, you have to remember that some people don’t know how to – or simply won’t – follow the rules. Make sure to include that in your planning. Round tables aren’t quite networking, but they do provide a way to break the ice and meet new people. There are two keys to a successful roundtable. The first is to have a topic that will attract people. The second is the moderator. The moderator has to make sure everyone participates, and has to prevent anyone from hogging all the time. Games can work as well. At the recent Omeda conference they had a ping pong tournament, which was a great way to meet new people. First, you had to practice, and then you had to create a team. In my opinion, you should not include social media in your networking plans. People come to events to meet people in real life. You want to get people away from their phones and interacting in real life. Here are some other concepts that I have never experienced, but might be worth your consideration. Appoint networking ambassadors. Their job is to mingle and introduce people – especially people who are new to the event. Set up interactive displays that require more than one person. This could be a place to collaborate towards a particular goal, a place to share ideas, or just a game. You can apply the same concept to workshops, where people have to brainstorm an idea. I’m not a fan of brainstorming in general, but the point here is not to solve a problem or generate ideas – for which brainstorming is second-rate – but to get people to meet one another. There are a lot of things you can do with badges that can facilitate networking. * Color code them to indicate different interests or industries. * Include areas of expertise. * Put ice-breaker questions on the badge, like “ask me about how we doubled our email response rate.” * You could even include hobbies, like “homebrewer” or “Call of Duty champion.” Those are some ideas I picked up after investing a little research and thought on the topic. Before your next event, task someone with spending a few hours coming up with new and interesting networking ideas. To the extent possible, find ideas that have been tested and actually work. Ideas are cheap. Ideas that actually work are rare and precious.

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Quadrant analysis can help organize thoughts, products, business units, and tasks

You probably know and have used the Risk vs. Reward matrix, which creates four quadrants defined by low risk vs. high risk and low reward vs. high reward. It’s a very useful first step in prioritizing new ventures. Everybody wants to find the low risk / high reward possibilities, but they’re rare. Low risk low reward seems like where you want to run your business, with the occasional moonshot thrown in.

A slight modification of that matrix would be Effort vs. Reward, where low effort and high reward is seen as low-hanging fruit.

Those are great, but today I’m going to show you 4 more 2x2 matrices that you might want to add to your toolbox.

The first is the Eisenhower Matrix of urgent vs. important, which divides tasks into never mind, schedule, delegate, and do it now. Every executive should have this matrix front and center in their daily thinking.

Next is the Ansoff Matrix, which looks at the role of your product portfolio in existing and new markets with new and existing products. This matrix provides a framework for exploring growth strategies and balancing your portfolio.

The Kraljic Matrix sets supply risk against profit impact and helps companies maximize supply security and minimize supply risk.

• Strategic items are critical to the business’s operations, but are often limited or subject to high risk, such as relying on a single supplier.
• Bottleneck items don’t significantly impact profit, but can cause operational disruptions. These have to be managed to create a secure supply.
• Leverage items are easy to source and have significant profit potential and for that reason there’s a lot of competition. These need to be continually monitored and optimized.
• Non critical items should be automated as much as possible.

The last is the Boston Consulting Group’s Growth-Share Matrix, which identifies where to allocate resources by categorizing business units or products into four quadrants.

• Stars have potential to generate significant revenue but also require significant investment. For stars, focus on growth, innovation, expanded market reach, and performance.
• Cash cows generate strong, steady cash flow with minimal investment. Maximize the profitability of your cash cows to fund other opportunities.
• Question marks have potential, but require a lot of work. Invest selectively in question marks and be prepared to get out quickly if they don’t look like becoming stars.
• Dogs are ready for the trash bin unless you can make them into successful niche products.

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There are different types of CDPs, and they can be used to implement very different marketing and operational strategies. This review of 10 CDP types will help you fine-tune your CDP strategy and evaluate prospective vendors.

These 10 types can help you better understand the landscape.

Primarily focuses on aggregating data from multiple and varied sources. Such CDPs will have lots of proven integrations, and will focus on real-time data management. A data collection CDP will likely prefer deterministic over probabilistic matching. It’s ideal for businesses that need to create a reliable single customer record using data from websites, CRM, mobile apps, offline data sources, and third-party systems.

Focuses on cleaning, deduplicating, validating, and normalizing data to ensure accuracy and usability. It’s suitable for companies dealing with large volumes of data from diverse sources that need to ensure data quality, such as financial services and banking.

Creates deep, actionable insights through analytics and data visualization, often incorporating machine learning for predictive analytics. This is good for organizations that need to derive complex insights and forecasts from their customer data.

Manages and automates marketing campaigns and customer journeys across various channels through the use of internal marketing tools and/or through integrations with external tools. This can create a single system from which to orchestrate and coordinate marketing campaigns across multiple platforms and touch points based on a comprehensive view of the customer.

Segments customer data into meaningful groups – based on demographics, behavior, purchase history, and preferences. This can be used to categorize customers into well-defined segments to create more targeted engagements – for content, marketing, customer service, or product development.

Aligns customer data insights with content management capabilities, focusing on creating a deeper content engagement with customers based on personalization and behavioral data. It delivers highly personalized content to individual customers based on their demographics, behaviors, preferences, and other data. The goal is to increase engagement with brand content and improve customer experience.

Integrates data from online and offline interactions to create a unified, real-time customer profile. This approach consolidates data across e-commerce platforms, brick-and-mortar stores, mobile apps, and social media to understand customer behaviors, increase sales, and create a better customer experience.

Handles the complex business structures and longer sales cycles for B2B efforts. It consolidates and manages data from various systems, such as CRM, email interactions, social media, and direct marketing campaigns to create a unified view of each business account and the stakeholders therein.

Leverages customer data to provide more efficient, personalized, and proactive customer service. It aggregates all customer interactions – from support calls, chatbot conversations, email exchanges, social media interactions, etc. – to enable customer support teams to offer personalized and accurate customer service.

Integrates and acts upon new customer data in real time to power immediate marketing activations. It personalizes the customer experience, advertising, and marketing campaigns in real time on web, app, or customer service platforms.

The point of these “10 types” is not to pigeon-hole any given CDP, but to give the marketer a broad understanding of the different features and emphases CDPs might bring to the table. Reviewing these 10 types can also help the marketer think creatively about how a CDP can bring value to the business.

Links

There are 10 types of CDP. Here’s why that matters

https://martech.org/10-types-of-cdps/

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Some people love the marketing funnel and some people hate it. I think it has its place. You’ve seen many versions of the marketing funnel. Some of them are simply conceptual and don’t have any numbers attached to them. There might be a funnel that goes from awareness at the top and works its way down through interest, consideration, intent, evaluation, purchase. Funnels can also include key metrics and apply to a specific effort, like an email campaign. The top of the funnel is the list, then you narrow it down with sends, opens, clicks, purchases. The marketing funnel is a useful mental model that provides a structured approach to marketing, but there’s a correct and an incorrect way to view the marketing funnel. The correct way is to realize that the pool of people in each of those groups gets smaller, just like the diameter of the funnel gets smaller as you go down. The funnel also has a goal, as should your marketing. If you use actual numbers in the funnel, it can help expose areas in your campaign that need help. You can also make the sections of the funnel visually represent the drop-off in each part, which can show you what you need to work on. For example, if there’s a big drop from the names on your list to legitimate sends, you need to clean your list, and if there’s a big drop from clicks to purchases, you need to work on your landing page. The incorrect way to use the marketing funnel is to view it as a path that every customer goes through, in that order – the way liquid has to go through the entire funnel. The funnel concept can oversimplify the buying process and it can ignore variations in customer behavior. Strict adherence to the funnel concept can cause inefficiencies and frustration. For example, if a salesman believes he has to take every prospect through each stage of the funnel he will alienate a lot of his potential customers. That’s where the customer journey comes in. A good customer journey map doesn't assume a single path for each customer. Each section of the customer journey has conditions for the people who qualify for that section, but those conditions don't require having been through the previous sections of the journey. For example, if you already have someone’s email address, they skip directly to that section of the customer journey. Also, a customer journey might branch out into different paths for different circumstances. The customer journey doesn’t assume that everyone ends up in the same place, the way a funnel does. An example of a customer journey might be converting anonymous web visitors to known users, and then enhancing their customer record with certain key facts. Such a journey might have several paths, and several points of entry. Both of these concepts are attempts to systematize the chaos and randomness of real life. Neither is perfect, but both of them have a place in understanding what’s going on with your customers and how you can improve your relationship with them each step of the way.

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If you flip heads five times, are you “due” for tails?

Our brains have learned to take short cuts, but these shortcuts don’t always work. When they don’t work, we call them cognitive biases.

The representative heuristic is a cognitive bias where we estimate the probability of an event based on how much it resembles other events. Unfortunately, sometimes we fall for superficial similarities.

If you’re hiring for a librarian, you might think the quiet person who wears glasses and always has a book in his hand is more suitable than an extroverted candidate. In that case you assign too much weight to superficial details.

Or consider there’s a pool of 1,000 people, and you know that 70 percent of them are lawyers, and 30 percent are engineers. One person is randomly selected, and he’s wearing a pocket protector. You assume he’s an engineer based on that superficial detail even though it’s more likely that he’s a lawyer.

The Gambler’s Fallacy is a twist on the representativeness heuristic. If you’re flipping a coin, and it’s come up heads five times, the gambler might assume a tails is “due” because five heads in a row doesn’t seem representative of the expected 50/50 distribution. But every flip is independent of the flips before it, so each flip has a 50/50 chance of being heads.

There is an important exception to the Gambler’s Fallacy to keep in mind. If we switch from a coin to dice, and we see that 3 has come up very frequently, it’s also possible the dice are loaded. In other words, a departure from the expected distribution might be from chance. Reality is clumpy. On the other hand, it might not be as random as you think it is.

One of my favorite illustrations of the representativeness heuristic is when people combine two factors. For example, let’s say Linda is 31 years old, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy, was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination on campus, and took part in anti-nuclear protests. When people are asked whether it’s more likely that Linda is a bank teller or that she’s a bank teller who is active in the feminist movement, many people choose the latter option even though it’s less probable. It’s always less probable that someone is A and B rather than just A.

Why do they do this? Because being involved in the feminist movement seems more representative of Linda’s apparent personality than being a bank teller.

The point of the representativeness heuristic is that people often judge the probability of an event or the characteristics of a person based on how much they resemble a typical case or stereotype, rather than using actual statistical reasoning or probability.

To avoid this mistake, keep these things in mind.

• Consider the base rate. Take into account the actual statistical probabilities of an event.

• Consider multiple points of view.

• Educate yourself about common cognitive biases.

• Slow down your decision making. Remember, cognitive biases are often shortcuts.

• Use the representativeness heuristic against itself. Learn examples of this fallacy and then you can recognize, “Oh, this is like the Gamber’s Fallacy,” or “this is like Linda the bank teller.”

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Your memory of an event may be disproportionately affected by two things

Continuing my series on the thoughts of Daniel Kahneman brings us to the Peak-End rule, which is an odd one.

The way you remember an event is heavily weighted by the most intense point in the experience – or the peak – and also by the end of the experience.

This can lead to some odd applications. In two groups of patients getting a colonoscopy, Group A was given the standard procedure. Group B had a few extra minutes where the scope was in a more comfortable position. The people in Group B rated the procedure as less painful, which raises some interesting ethical questions. Is it right for a doctor to prolong a procedure so the patient has a better memory of it?

How can we apply the peak-end rule to events?

First, focus on creating a memorable peak moment. Identify and amplify the most exciting part of the event. This could be a keynote speech, a performance, … who knows. Try to surprise and delight – maybe with a surprise guest appearance, or special gifts.

Note however that the peak-end rule applies to how people remember the event. It doesn’t necessarily incentivize them to attend the event. Those are two different things. In an article I link below, Ken Holsinger points out that what people attend at an event, or what they remember, is not what influences them to come.

Second, end on an engaging, positive, enjoyable high note, and make sure you have your logistics right so the departure process is pleasant. What I hated the most about church when I was a kid was that after suffering through the whole service you had to wait in line to get out. That was torture.

One good way to end a business event is to have networking with high-quality refreshments and opportunities for meaningful connections.

Just because you should focus on the peak and the end doesn’t mean you should neglect other experiences. If registration and lunch are a mess, people will remember that.

The planning fallacy is also relevant to events. Kahneman and his collaborator Tversky found that humans underestimate the amount of time and the required resources to complete a project. This leads to overly optimistic timelines and budgets.

Here are some things you can do to avoid that.

• Look at historical data from similar projects
• Break down tasks into smaller, manageable tasks that are easier to estimate
• Establish clear milestones and checkpoints
• Include buffer time for unexpected delays
• Build in flexibility up front
• Ask experienced people to review your plan
• Use a pilot project to scope out things you’re not sure about
• Use project management tools, including visualization tools

Links

Ken Holsinger’s insights on what people really want with events

https://krehbielgroup.com/2024/03/22/ken-freemans-insights-on-what-people-really-want-with-events/

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Maanas Mediratta from Bridged.media joins me today to talk about how publishers can use AI to increase ROI.

Maanas divides his AI services into 4 buckets:

• Engage readers

• Generate insights

• Increase revenue

• Create content

Publishers have successfully used these services to increase engagement, improve reader revenue, and get a deeper understanding of their audience. Bridged.media does content recommendation, AI-powered segmentation, churn prediction, and other propensity models.

After doing more than 300 experiments, they’ve discovered that generative AI does not create as much value as their other agents, so they’re reducing their investment in gen AI. Maanas thinks it’s passed its peak in the Gartner Hype Cycle.

To learn more contact Maanas at founders@bridged.media or visit http://bridged.medi

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This is the 2nd podcast in my series on the ideas of Daniel Kahneman

Here’s a quote from an article I’ll link below.

“For a long time, the most widely-accepted view of how people make decisions under uncertainty was expected utility theory. This theory imagines that people are totally rational and, when faced with a decision, they weigh the benefits and risks of each possible outcome, considering how likely each outcome is to happen.”

I don’t like the use of the word “rational” in this context. I’ll explain that later.

Kahneman promoted the idea of “prospect theory,” which says we don’t evaluate gains and losses by strict utility – the way an accountant might – and that our perception of the potential gains or losses affect our decisions.

Part of this is that we’re more afraid of loss than we are attracted by gain.

Consider a homeowner who is wondering about buying insurance for a house that’s worth $200,000. The insurance policy is priced at $2,000 per year, and it covers damages from a natural disaster that has a 1% chance of occurring each year.

According to traditional economic theory, the expected loss from the disaster is 1% of $200,000, which is $2,000, which is also the cost of the insurance. A so-called “rational person” might be indifferent to buying insurance in this case, since he’d be paying $2,000 to prevent a $2,000 loss.

The problem with this analysis is that the typical homeowner is not an accountant at a huge corporation, where losing a house is just a number on a spreadsheet. Losing the house is very significant to the homeowner. There’s value to the homeowner in knowing that he’ll have a house despite a disaster.

Prospect theory is similar to the idea of “throwing good money after bad,” or the sunk cost fallacy, which involves making today’s decision based on money you spent yesterday.

One of the central tenets of Prospect Theory is that losses loom larger than gains. This can cause people to continue investing in a losing proposition to avoid realizing a loss. The sunk cost fallacy is the tendency for people to continue in a course of action even when abandoning it would be more beneficial. They make this decision because they have already invested time, energy, or other resources, and feel that it would all have been for nothing if they quit.

Imagine you have an old clunker of a car that needs an expensive repair. You pay to have the repair done. Then a week later the car needs another expensive repair. To avoid the sunk fallacy, you can’t allow the money you’ve already spent to influence today’s decision about the needed repair.

To wrap up, I want to comment on this business of “rationality.” We humans have a lot of cognitive biases that influence the way we think, and it’s popular to say that these things make us act irrationally. I’m uncomfortable with that analysis. These biases developed for a reason. Instead of analyzing them by some allegedly “rational” standard – based on numbers and probabilities and all that – I think it makes more sense to first figure out why that bias might be a good idea.

It’s like Chesterton’s fence. If you find a fence in the woods, don’t tear it down until you know why it was put there.

I’m not suggesting that you should gleefully go around affirming cognitive biases and committing logical fallacies, but I think we need to tone down this rational vs. irrational stuff and figure out whether some things might make sense in one context even if they don’t make sense in another.

For example, when evaluating the sunk cost fallacy, remember to consider the old saying, “in for a penny, in for a pound.” The tricky thing is to know when a particular model or mental framework applies and when it doesn’t.

Links

Remembering Daniel Kahneman: 7 theories that can help you understand how you think

https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/remembering-daniel-kahneman-7-theories-that-can-help-you-understand-how-you-think

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If you want to understand or learn something, you often have to devote some time to focused, careful attention. But there is a downside to it.

According to Daniel Kahneman, "Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it." People have a tendency to to overemphasize the importance of certain information or events simply because they are focusing on them at the moment. That’s the focusing illusion.

If you focus on your salary, and then someone asks you about your satisfaction with your life, you are likely to put too much emphasis on salary in answering that question.

Imagine you’ve been working on a new product launch, and there’s one feature the development team is particularly proud of. It’s an innovative feature that’s brand new in the market.

Your focus on that feature might make you think it’s more important to your market than it really is.

One simple way to combat the focusing illusion is to get input from others, who are probably not focused on the same things you are. Where possible, quantify the factors involved in a decision.

We like to say that something “grabs our attention,” but the opposite is often the case. Our attention grabs the thing.

Somewhat related to the focusing illusion is the availability heuristic, which is a mental shortcut that relies on what immediately or easily comes to mind. The idea is that if it’s easily recalled, it must be more important or more common.

News coverage can make us think that a rare event is more common that it is. For example, coverage of airplane crashes can make people think flying is more dangerous than driving when the opposite is the case. Media coverage of shark attacks make people overestimate their frequency.

Marketers can be deceived by this mental shortcut when a particular strategy worked very well in a recent campaign so they decide to use it again without considering if another strategy might be more appropriate.

To avoid the availability heuristic, seek out objective data and consider alternative perspectives. It can also be helpful to use checklists and other structured decision-making tools.

The focusing illusion causes us to give more weight or importance to something that we’ve been thinking about, while the availability heuristic affects our perception of probabilities. To avoid these errors, broaden your focus, be sure to consider a wider range of factors, and seek out accurate statistical data.

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Daniel Kahneman might be best known for his book “Thinking Fast and Slow,” which I haven’t read, but I’ve read and heard a lot about Kahneman’s views over the years. Along with his collaborator Amos Tversky, Kahneman challenged a lot of opinions about how we think.

I’m going to do a series of podcasts on some of Kahneman’s ideas. Today I’m going to address anchoring bias.

Anchoring bias says the first thing you judge influences your judgment of all that follows. Another way to put it is that you rely too heavily on the first data you hear. For example, if the salesman says the car is worth $50,000, that number sticks in your head. You might negotiate below that and think you got a great deal at $46,000, while the actual value of the car might be $43,000.

Here are seven ways to avoid anchoring bias.

Get information from multiple sources. When the salesman says the car is worth $50K, check that against Kelley Blue Book and prices listed at other dealerships.

Set expectations ahead of time. This way the “anchor” doesn’t have as much impact on you. If you know what kind of car you’re going to buy, get some price comparisons before you go to the dealership.

Actively consider the opposite. When someone presents a fact, intentionally consider why that fact might not be relevant to the decision at hand. For example, if someone says 4 out of 5 dentists recommend a particular gum, think of reasons why dentists might not be experts on chewing gum.

Dispute the assumption behind the number. If someone is arguing that the minimum wage should be $25 an hour, ask whether there should even be a minimum wage. In other words, the anchor doesn’t only fix your mind on a certain number, it also fixes your mind on the idea that a number is the correct answer to the question. Don’t accept that assumption without evaluating it.

Set your own anchors. Since you’re aware of the effect of an anchor, use it to your advantage. Set your own anchor before your negotiating partner does.

Make analogies. Although this has the potential danger of cementing the number even further into your thinking, it can provide context. When the salesman says $50K, put that number in another setting, such as the percentage of your monthly income. You can also think of alternatives. How many Uber rides can you get for $50K? And is this one car better than two $25K cars?

Make the concrete relative. To avoid fixating on a specific number, think of the deal in a broader context. In the case of a car, that might be depreciation and resale value, the cost of financing, or incentives and rebates offered on that car or on other cars.

Slow down. Salesmen want you to buy now, now, now, because they know that if you think about it for a while, that will dilute the impact of the pitch.

Links

Remembering Daniel Kahneman: 7 theories that can help you understand how you think

https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/remembering-daniel-kahneman-7-theories-that-can-help-you-understand-how-you-think?utm_medium=emai&utm_source=join1440

Critical thinking cards deck

https://thethinkingshop.org/collections/products/products/critical-thinking-cards-deck

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I thought I had coined a new phrase in the May issue of The Krehbiel Letter, which is available online right now. Link below.

The phrase was “Engagement trajectory.” That is, how engagement is changing or trending at the moment. It turns out other people have already used the phrase, so I don’t get any points for that.

Why does “engagement trajectory” matter?

The most basic reason is that it’s weary work getting new customers. It’s far easier to keep the ones you have.

In the publishing business model, engagement is crucial.

It’s clearly a key metric for an ad-supported service, because you need those eyeballs. The more often they engage with your service, the more opportunities you have to sell ads. Keeping eyeballs is easier than getting new ones.

Subscription publishers have an unfortunate tendency to ignore engagement. This is a left-over habit from print. They get their payment, and the next touch point is renewal, so they don’t think much about the subscription until the renewal cycle starts – maybe three or four months before expire.

Digital publishing is a different animal. We can track engagement all year long. And we should be.

Think of every engagement metric you have.

• Opens
• Clicks
• Site visits
• Page views
• Time on site
• Video views
• Logins
• Comments
• Whatever

Track them, score them, create an engagement index, and when the index goes down, take some action.

It might be as simple as sending an email.

The point is that everyone in your database is trending in some direction with respect to that engagement index. You should have a strategy for each group.

Just for fun, let’s make four groups.

• Increasing rapidly
• Increasing moderately
• Decreasing moderately
• Decreasing rapidly

What are your opportunities – or what can you learn – from each group?

Let’s take “increasing rapidly.” These are your stars. Can they become brand ambassadors? Can they contribute content? Should you interview them? Can you get a testimonial? Can you find out what it is about your content that’s so appealing to them?

What about decreasing rapidly? They used to be engaged, but something has turned their attention. Did you do something wrong? Are they your bellwethers – the leading edge of a new trend that you’d better find out about? Is your content only valuable for the short term?

There are so many questions to ask, but you can’t do it unless you’re tracking engagement trajectory.

Links

May issue of The Krehbiel Letter

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If you look up “bathtub effect,” you’ll find quite an array of different ways the bathtub has been used as a mental model for one thing or another.

Today I want to relate the bathtub effect to marketing attribution

Imagine you’re the marketing expert at a local law firm. You rent a booth at local events. You advertise in the local paper. You hand out flyers. You send emails. You ask your current clients to tell their friends about you.

At the end of every consultation, you give your clients a questionnaire. How did you find out about us?

1. Booth at a local event
2. Ad in the newspaper
3. Flyer in my mailbox
4. Email
5. Recommendation from a friend
6. Google search

Almost everybody answers “Google search.” Should you conclude that all those other activities are unproductive?

No, for several reasons.

First, this is self-reported data, which is very valuable, but not perfect. Do people actually know what influenced them? Even if they did a Google search, do they know the chain of events that led them to do that? Often there’s an accumulation of causes that – to re-use the bathtub analogy in a different way – fills up the bathtub until it overflows.

Second, they might actually remember the flyer in their mailbox, but they dislike those things, so they don’t want to encourage you. Maybe a friend did recommend you, but they can’t remember his name. Or maybe they remember all of those things, but they still ended up with “how do I find this law firm anyway,” so “Google search” seemed like the right answer.

Google search is the drain on the bathtub. The water may have gotten into the tub several different ways, but it’s all going out the same way. Likewise, your customer may have heard about you in many ways, but all those things culminated in finding you on Google. Google is the drain on the tub.

Somebody might look at those survey numbers and say “why are we spending money on a booth at the spring festival? Why are we advertising in the newspaper? Everybody finds us through Google. We just need to do more Google advertising.”

The bathtub has obscured causation – or, in the marketing world, attribution.

All your efforts are filling the bathtub, but the water is all coming out one way.

The point is to keep the bathtub effect in mind when you try to do attribution. All the water flows out of one drain, but that doesn’t tell you how the water got in the tub in the first place.

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How do you know which part of your marketing is helping you? That’s an old problem, and over the years people have tried various methods for solving it.

Let’s say you publish “Carrot weekly” – the ultimate guide for carrot farmers. You find several sites that should attract your target audience, and you run ads on those sites. Then you create a simple marketing funnel: views, clicks, purchases.

At a simple level, you don’t know who viewed the ad, or who clicked. You can only identify the prospect when they purchase and fill out your form.

It would be so simple if people saw an ad, clicked on it, and then purchased, but that’s rare. Most people will see an ad many times before they click, and most people never click at all. But they might still buy. And they might see the ad on several different sites.

That’s somewhat frustrating. You want to attribute the sale to a specific marketing effort. That’s tough to do in the best of worlds, but it’s very hard unless you can get some intelligence on what your prospects are doing. You don’t know what they’re doing on the other guy’s site, because you don’t have analytics on that site.

If you have a customer data platform, you can track people once they come to your site. That helps answer a lot of questions about what sort of path people take before they buy, but it doesn’t answer everything.

For example, how can you track those view-through conversions – where someone sees an ad, never clicks on it, and goes on to purchase?

That’s where the third-party cookie comes in. The ad tech has a cookie on the site where you’re advertising and on your site, so the ad tech can see which visitors saw the ad on the other guy’s site and then purchased on your site. This works because there’s a single ID in that third-party cookie that follows the visitor around from site to site. Without that third-party cookie you can’t make that connection.

Or can’t you?

Let’s back up a second and talk more about cookies.

A cookie is a little piece of data that’s sent from a website and stored in the visitor’s web browser. It allows the website to keep track of the user between page views, because without the cookie, each page view would be a new, anonymous request.

A first-party cookie is a cookie that’s set by the website the visitor is on at that moment, and – this is the important part – it can only be read by that website. A third-party cookie is set by some other website – not the one the visitor is on – and it can be read by that other site. So a visitor can be on carrotweekly.com and if carrotweekly.com allows adtechcompany.com’s third-party cookie, then adtechcompany.com can see what the visitor is doing on carrotweekly.com.

That’s how adtechcompany.com can match views on one site to purchases on a different site.

If and when third-party cookies go away, that function will be much harder, but not impossible.

Imagine that 20 different farming websites decided to form a cooperative. They would all set first-party cookies, and they would all collect details about their visitors, like IP address, geographic location, browser type, screen resolution, which plugins are installed, and so on. As part of the cooperative, they’d all upload that information to a common database.

Now there’s a connection between these websites. It’s not perfect. You can’t be 100 percent sure that the information being collected maps to exactly the same user, but since when does marketing and advertising need to be 100 percent sure?

That’s one way that people are going to react to the so-called death of the 3rd party cookie. I believe Bombora is already doing this. Keep your eye on that space.

The other response to the demise of the third-party cookie is to collect a lot more first-party data. Without the third-party cookie, you can’t rely on other services to give you all that juicy marketing information you’ve relied on for so long. So start collecting your own data.

If you’re not sure how, give me a call.

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Your attention determines what you'll learn in life.

I have a friend who quotes some ancient theologian to the effect that “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

What does that mean?

I think I can illustrate it with a story about zucchini bread.

When I was 17 or 18 I was driving a friend to college in Pennsylvania. This would have been at the end of the summer or in the early Fall. On the trip, she mentioned zucchini bread, which – so far as I knew – I had never heard of before in my life.

When I got home that night, there was a loaf of zucchini bread sitting on my parents’ dining room table. Our neighbor had brought it by that day.

What a coincidence, right? How did that happen?

There’s nothing magical going on here. That time of year is a good time for zucchini bread, which is why my friend mentioned it, and also why my neighbor made a loaf.

Think of it this way. Our brains are assaulted by ten billion things a day. We can’t possibly pay attention to or remember all of them. Most of them fly right by.

What distinguishes the ones that don’t fly right by? We might say that they “grab our attention.” And while there may be some sense in that, I think it goes the other way. They don’t grab our attention. Our attention grabs them.

In other words, if I had come home from my trip and found a loaf of zucchini bread on the dining room table, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it, and a week later, if you asked me about zucchini bread, I might not have remembered it. It stood out to me precisely because it was in my recent memory. It was an element of what I was attending to that day.

What’s the takeaway?

Ten billion things are flying past you every day. Which ones will you learn from?

You’ll learn from the ones that you’re paying attention to. If you’re thinking about marketing all the time, you’ll find marketing lessons everywhere. If you’re thinking about content creation all the time, you’ll find lessons about content creation.

When the student is ready – that is, when the student is paying attention – the teacher will appear.

There are lessons all around us all the time. We just have to listen.

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Publishers spend a lot of time and money developing their own brand image, which can include typography, colors, logos, and stylized art. Think of the dot-matrix images in The Wall Street Journal, or the art on the cover of Mad Magazine.

My friend Paul Gerbino posted an article about content licensing, which made me wonder if you lose those things when your content is licensed. More on that below, but that idea got me thinking about ways a brand could distinguish its articles in the text itself – irrespective of colors and typography and so on – so the unique voice of the brand carries through wherever it’s published.

As you’ll see as I review these suggestions, the same concepts would apply to a podcast or a video.

Here are some thoughts to help you develop a unique style that will set you apart from the competition even in cases where you can’t rely on fonts and colors and such.

1. Use a distinctive voice, tone, and narrative style. You might be authoritative, whimsical, unconventional, challenging, curmudgeonly, flowery, encouraging, or … mean. You could write in the first or the third person.

2. Have a focus. You could be strategic, managerial, practical, revolutionary, or operational.

3. Use frameworks. Every article could follow a pattern like “The Problem,” “The Solution,” “The Benefit,” and “Examples.” A step-by-step guide would be a similar concept.

4. Create recurring segments. You could have a CEO Corner, Expert Insights, Quick Stats, Tech Innovations, or Market Trends.

5. Stretch your vocabulary. Find some unique words and phrases that fit with your style and message. Or invent them. My friend Lewis Carol coined mimsy and whiffling. Use catch phrases and funny names.

6. Have a message. Tie your content back to an ethos, like thriftiness, to a value, like generosity, or to a principle, like local political control.

7. Pick favorites. I know a priest who always quotes G.K. Chesterton in his homilies, and I tend to relate things back to Star Trek – because, if you didn’t know, everything you need to know in life you can learn from Star Trek. You can also quote your favorite author, or 70s rock ballads. Pick something that will give some color to your content.

8. Use characters. Highlights for Children magazine had a section called Goofus and Gallant. You can create your own character, like Budgeting Betty, or you could tell a story as an interaction between Holmes and Watson. The copyright on the Holmes stories is a bit complicated, but I think it’s fair to use the characters at this point.

9. Incorporate skits. We often learn through stories. Hone your storytelling ability and express your message in a little piece of drama or comedy.

This article was sparked by a LinkedIn post from Paul Gerbino, in which he linked to a Creative Licensing International article titled “Masters of Licensing.” It lists two reasons publishers may be reluctant to license their content. The first is the fear of losing the exclusivity appeal – that is, your content is now available from other sources. The second is loss of control of the brand. The article explains the concepts in the context of the Masters Tournament. I’ll provide a link below.

If you can incorporate some of the concepts I mentioned above, your articles will sound like your brand no matter where or how they appear.

Links

Masters of Licensing

https://creativelicensinginternational.com/masters-of-licensing/

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One of the challenges of building a tech stack is that there are always overlaps in functionality. For example, your customer data platform and your email service provider might both be able to manage customer journeys, or you might be able to push data to your reporting tool from your data warehouse or from your CDP.

From an efficiency standpoint, it seems that it would be nice to avoid such duplication in functions. I’m not on board with that perspective. First, I’m not sure it’s always better to have only one tech option for any given function. Second, no two technologies will perform a given function in precisely the same way. Third, it’s impossible to eliminate all duplication, so rather than trying to fight it, learn to manage it.

Assuming that you will have duplications in functionality, here are some issues to consider (in no particular order) to figure out what to do.

1. Industry standards. If there’s an industry standard for some function, which system is closer to that industry standard? This matters for a few reasons.

• Integrations will be easier if you follow an industry standard.
• It will be easier to find staff or consultants who can work on something that’s standard.
• It’s likely that something became the industry standard because it’s better. That’s not always true, but it’s worth considering.

2. In-house expertise. Do you already have in-house expertise with one of the systems? That would argue for using the system where you have expertise. However, in-house expertise isn’t permanent. People do change jobs.

3. Think of your road map. Do you want to decrease your reliance on one of your current tech solutions? Your tech roadmap might include transitioning out of one of the systems you currently use. If so, it’s wise to start moving functions out of that system.

4. Cost. Some systems charge based on usage while others don’t. There might also be integration costs. For example, if System A easily integrates with the rest of your tech stack, but System B requires a custom integration, that would argue for System A.

5. Security. Some systems are more of a security risk than others.

6. Privacy. This is especially relevant in certain regulated industries.

7. Agility and Scalability. Peer into your crystal ball and consider what options you may need to accommodate down the road: such as more users, more products, more database fields, etc.

8. Competitive advantage. Is there something unique in your industry where one technology gives you a leg up? For example, a magazine publisher has to deal with gift options to a greater extent than a B2B newsletter publisher does.

9. Reputation. When it comes time to sell your business, will it look better to be using one technology over the other?

10. Data consistency and integrity. Little things can cause big problems. If one system relies on zip+4, and another system only accommodates a 5-digit zip code, you’re in for trouble.

11. Regulatory Compliance. You might need to store user information, or report on it, in a particular way to comply with the law.

12. User experience. How does your tech choice affect your customers and your employees?

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Bo Sacks recently distributed an article titled, “A tech sector dedicated to boiling things down has raised temperatures in some quarters of the publishing world.”

“Boiling things down” in this case means making summaries.

Blinkest, Bookey, getAbstract, and other services make it easy to get the gist of the latest hot business book. You don’t have to read the 500 page monstrosity.

It sounds like a great thing. My own experience is that after reading a long business book and I say to myself “this would have been twice as good if it was one tenth the length.” There always seems to be too much fluff, and I want them to get to the point.

That's easy with AI. AI can summarize an article or a book for you, so why do you need to read the article or the book?

The article I mentioned above raises the issue of AI hallucinations, which is a fair criticism. Sometimes AI makes things up, although I suspect they’ll fix that problem before too long.

Also, humans don’t seem to have any trouble introducing their own biases and stupidities. Or “hallucinations” of you prefer. It wasn’t AI that created the mess recently reported at NPR, and it wasn’t AI that fell for the Russian collusion story.

Leaving all that aside, I think there’s a larger problem to address, which is the value of summaries. Do you really understand something when you’ve read ten bullet points about it? Does a summary, or even a description, do justice to the original?

That was my bias. I was thrilled in high school when I realized that I didn’t have to read Moby Dick to write my paper. I bought the Cliffs notes at the local bookstore, and I didn't even read all of that. I based my paper on a skim of a summary. I got an A, by the way.

So I tried Blinkest for a while because I love the idea of cutting out the fluff and getting to the meat. I noticed a gnawing doubt as I read and listened to these summaries. I found myself worrying that I would think I understood something without really understanding it. Is the summary really hitting the major points? Is there some texture or depth to the work that simply can’t be summarized like that.

In an earlier podcast I asked whether you could understand the story of Little Red Riding Hood if it was reduced to five bullet points. I think not.

Can you understand the Exodus if it’s summarized in two paragraphs?

The article cited is more concerned about copyright and market share and such, and those are perfectly reasonable concerns.

My question is whether the whole desire to reduce things down to summaries and bullet points and takeaways is a sign that our left brains are trying to usurp the reins from our right brains, where Dr. Iain McGilchrist says executive function belongs.

In a way, the whole AI revolution seems to be a left brain revolt. In an effort to grasp and simplify and “get to the point,” we lose the story and the drama and the poetry of life.

Don't get me wrong. I have no doubt that AI will soon be able to create amazing story and drama and poetry. Not yet, but soon. Still, it’s important that we don’t allow summaries and bullet points and takeaways to replace story and art and the richness and depth of things.

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This is an off-brand show on some similarities between religion and business -- specifically, how a hierarchical society creates a chain of values that all point to the ultimate set of values.

In other words, if everyone in the society is only looking to their own tribe for moral values, you'll have a fractured society.

The same would be true for a business. You need to align the entire business towards a common goal.

Religion might serve that benefit -- of aligning the entire society to one set of values.

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Here’s another quote from Amanda Landsaw’s talk at MACMA Industry Day.

“Stay on top of inactivity in the database. If a known audience member has not visited in a certain number of days, send an email.”

I’ve seen a surprising indifference to this sort of analysis. It’s surprising because everyone knows the old saying that it’s easier to keep a customer than get a customer, which means we should be spending a lot of effort on keeping customers, and one key to keeping them is engagement.

This doesn’t only apply to visits, but to every engagement metric you have. That would include …

• Opens
• Clicks
• Site visits
• Page views
• Video views
• Logins
• Comments

The message is relatively simple. Keep track of the engagement trajectory of your audience and when someone starts trending in the wrong way, see if you can reverse that trend.

It might be, as Amanda mentions, sending an email. It also might mean that you have to rethink how you’re engaging your audience.

You’ve all seen the meme of the guy walking with his girlfriend and another woman catches his eye and the girlfriend is furious. That can happen too.

The world changes. A drop in engagement might be because your audience is shifting its preference to short-form video.

That implies that you have to look at engagement trajectory in at least three ways.

• At the level of your individual audience member
• At the behavior of your entire audience, and
• At social trends – that is, what’s happening outside your audience.

That’s a lot of homework, but if you want to dig even deeper you can add segmentation. Not just the individual and the whole audience, but all your sub-audiences as well.

Another thing to consider is to use predictive analytics and be proactive about this. Re-engage them before their activity drops.

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At MACMA Industry Day last week, Amanda Landsaw said “flyby visitors don’t create robust databases.” There’s a lot to unpack in that statement. Let’s start with these flyby visitors. Some people like to judge websites by traffic volume. Lots of traffic being a good thing. But most traffic at most websites is of the one and done variety. They happen upon your site for some random reason and they never, or at least very rarely, come back. You can monetize such visits, but chasing that traffic isn’t a good strategy. You never have anything at the end of the day except all the pennies you’ve collected from your ads, and the need to do it all over again tomorrow. A “robust database” sounds a little more stable, doesn’t it? It’s also something you can monetize both internally and externally. If we want to pursue this robust database, what does that imply? Let’s think of the differences between a flyby visitor and an engaged user. The flyby visitor had some fleeting interest, but the engaged visitor’s interest is more durable and long term. The flyby visitor found nothing to keep them – you were just today’s fad. In contrast, you scratched an itch for the engaged visitor. Something about your site appealed to them and gave them a reason to stay and come back. One of the implications from this is a focus on quality over quantity. If you want to play the traffic game, you have to churn out tons of new content all the time, but you may just be attracting the flybys. Quality is more consistent with engagement and long-term interest, but quality isn’t enough. A very high quality article on golf means nothing to me because I don’t play golf. To get an engaged audience your content has to be high quality and relevant. Relevance brings us to the next point, which is a clear target audience. Who are you trying to reach, what are those people like, and what do they like? What are their preferences, needs, and challenges? How are you both appealing to them and helping them? A content strategy that does all those things lays a solid foundation for this robust database Amanda was talking about, but it’s not enough. High-quality, targeted content that meets a real need is great, but an engaged, lasting customer usually needs a little more help. Maybe you need a little more sparkle, or some fellowship. Casey Cornelius from CredSpark spoke later that day about how a poll or a quiz can dramatically increase engagement on your site. There’s your sparkle. If you can find a way to build community within your audience, there’s your fellowship. Great content, engaging little widgets, and a strong community sounds like the dream of most content creators, but there’s still no database. To create this robust database, there are three categories of things you will need. * Analytics, where you track and collect behavior. * Identity, where you find ways to convert unknown, anonymous web visitors to known customers. * Segmentation, where you break your target audience down into smaller, even more engaged subgroups. You’d typically use a customer data platform to do those things.

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How can I find the right laces and polish for my shoes?

Have you ever measured the length of the laces in your shoes? They’re almost never the same length or weave or thickness as the replacement laces you can buy at the drugstore.

Same with the polish. The color of your brown dress shoes is never the same as commercially available brown polishes.

This is an opportunity for an enterprising shoe store.

I used to work in a shoe store, and the company wanted us to push the extra stuff. Polish, laces, those heel grip liners, shoe horns, and so on.

Most people don’t want to buy that stuff at the register because they don’t need it with their brand new shoes. You’re not going to need to polish those shoes for a little while.

Instead of pushing the sale in the store, make it easy for the customer to get exactly the right lace, the right polish, etc., when they need it. You could give them a QR code, or a card, or something, but who’s going to keep that?

Instead, put a code in the shoe that identifies the model, put a lookup function on your website to find the right accessories for that precise model, and tell the buyer this is a special service you offer to your customers. You make it easy for them to get what they need when they need it.

The benefits to the shoe company are enormous.

You find out some data on your products, like which shoes survive long enough that people bother with new laces.

Better still, you get an online record. When somebody buys those laces, you have a name, address, email address, and at least one example of the type of shoe that person likes.

I’m sure you can think of variations on this idea. The right replacement button for your overcoat. Replacement ink cartridges for that expensive pen.

The ultimate goal is to marry customer information you can collect in the store with customer information you collect online.

A customer data platform is the right place to do this. If you want to learn more about it, give me a call.

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Imagine you’re in a movie theater watching Dune Part 2. Down in the bottom right quadrant of the screen is an ad for a different movie. The movie and the ad are vying for your attention. Your eyes keep flipping back and forth. You can’t follow either of them.

Or imagine you’re watching Gilligan’s Island and there’s this weird floaty image of a bar of soap moving around the screen. It’s on the right, then it’s on the left, then it disappears only to pop back up in a different spot.

That would be very irritating, and nobody would put up with it.

Why do we put up with it on our phones?

There’s an inherent contradiction going on in website design. I go to a webpage to read some thing that I’m interested in and the page is trying to distract me – at the very same time – with five other things.

Movies and TV shows don’t do that. They keep the advertisement separate from the show. Podcasts don’t do that. Like TV, they interrupt the show with an ad. In none of those cases are you being assaulted with the content and the ad at the same time.

Why are we doing this on websites, and how do we stop doing it? It’s an awful, internally contradictory experience.

We got into this mess because of the centrality of the page view. “The” page view.

A movie, a TV show, or a podcast has your attention for some length of time. A website has your attention for a page. Maybe two pages. Maybe 20 pages. But your entire visit is atomized to the page view and monetized accordingly.

Can we change that assumption?

In some ways a paywall does that. Some paywalls allow three views before you have to pay. But those three views suffer from the same maddening nonsense of showing you content and advertising at the same time.

What if you got three views devoid of advertising. Those three pages would be designed to give you exactly what you want – the article you’re reading, for example – with the best possible experience. No pop-ups. No distractions. After those three, the site would say, “to get three more pages, watch this ad.”

Might that work? Has anyone tried it? The concept seems to work in movies, TV, podcasts, and YouTube videos – except that we don’t really give consent. It’s just understood that the commercial will interrupt your TV show every 13 minutes.

That seems like such a better model than what we have now. Most mobile websites are a horrible experience because they’re trying to do two contradictory things at once. What if we delivered excellent content, then good ads, then excellent content?

Why not?

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Here’s a tricky thing about Customer Data Platforms.

On the one hand, you want to import all your customer data. That’s the point, right? You want one place where you can have all your customer data – where you can clean things up, create activations, do analysis, run reports, and so on.

On the other hand, CDPs are often tied very closely to website campaigns, and that can create a problem because some people have a hard time remembering the distinction between offline and online data.

Let me explain it with my experience regarding beer supplies.

I’m a homebrewer. I make beer, but I’ve also made wine, mead, cider, sake, kombucha – basically every fermented beverage I’ve ever heard of. I get my supplies at Maryland Homebrew, and I’m friends with Chris, who’s the owner.

I have an account in their point of sale system, so they have data on all my purchases. I also visit their website. But I haven’t created an account on their website. As far as the website knows, I’m anonymous.

Chris doesn't have a CDP, but let’s pretend she does. That CDP would have a record for me – for my online activity. But it’s an anonymous record. it can’t link that online activity to their point of sale information for me because the website doesn’t know that it’s me – because I haven’t logged in.

Importing the point of sale data – with my name and address all that – won’t solve that problem because there’s nothing to connect the point of sale data to the online data.

There are other ways to establish identity than logins, but that’s beyond our scope for today.

The question for today is this. Should my friend Chris import all her point of sale information into her pretend CDP if she can’t correlate the point of sale data to the online record? It depends, of course. Here are some questions to ask to decide what to do.

Question 1 – What – specifically – do you hope to accomplish by importing those records? Something vague like “I want all my customer information in one place” isn’t an adequate answer. You have to be able to say why you want all your customer information in one place. What will you be able to do that you can’t do now?

Question 2 – Will importing that data change how much you’re paying for your CDP? Some CDPs charge based on the number of records under management, so importing a lot of data can cost you money.

Question 3 – Will having that data in your CDP confuse you when it comes time to create a marketing effort? For example, Chris might want to find all her customers within 25 miles of Columbia Maryland and advertise to that audience online. If she imports all her point of sale information into the CDP, she’d have lots of records for customers in the right geography, but those records from point of sale wouldn’t have an online component. That would just be name and address. In some cases you can use name and address to create an audience in an online platform. I believe you can do that with Facebook. But in other cases you can’t. You have to have an email address, or some online identifier.

Are you, and your marketing staff, and the agency you hire to do social media for you, going to be able to keep that straight?

This whole online vs. offline data thing is somewhat like swimming butterfly. One day it clicks and you get it – the rhythm of the stroke makes sense to your body – but until that point it’s a struggle, and it’s a bit awkward.

I hope I’ve made it click for you, but if it’s still unclear give me a call. It’s one of the fundamental things you need to understand if you’re going to work in a CDP.

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The connection between writing and design is one of the issues raised in “Lessons on Branding from the World’s Most Iconic Cold,” distributed last night by Bo Sacks. The cold in this case was one in Frank Sinatra’s nose.

I can’t draw worth a darn, and I’m not much of a designer. I think this is because I can’t call up images in my mind as well as other people can. For example, I know what a horse looks like, but when I try to call up an image of a horse, it’s rather fuzzy. There aren’t a lot of details.

But then I learned a trick. You can draw a series of circles in different places and then connect them in a way that makes a half-decent image of a horse.

Somebody had to come up with that trick by thinking of a horse from a completely different point of view – that is, by thinking of a horse as a series of connected circles, which is not at all an obvious way to think of a horse.

Today I want to talk about a few tricks for looking at things from a different point of view.

First principle thinking is where you remove everything that isn’t a first principle. Eliminate bias, assumptions, conjecture, and strip it down to what is unquestionably true. Then build from there.

It can be a challenging exercise. For example, if you were to try to apply it to a question like “how can we increase the renewal rate for our magazine?” you would start by stripping away everything you currently do and everything you assume about your subscribers. You’d start with such first principles as “what causes someone to make a decision?” or “what motivates a person to continue a subscription?”

Your assumption might be that people renew because they love your product, but you might have to face the possibility that they renew because they don’t pay close attention to their credit card bills.

Another mental framework that can help here is to think about things in the limit. How short or long can an article, podcast, or video be? How small or large can a magazine be? What’s the smallest possible market size that could support a successful business?

You’re not going to do those things. You’re not going to make a teeny tiny magazine. But thinking about it from that perspective can open up new ideas.

You can also imagine the perfect solution without any constraints. Don’t think about how much it would cost, what technology you would need, how many people it would require. Conceptualize the perfect product, then work backwards to find the tools, skills, knowledge and resources required to make that happen.

A buried assumption in all of this is you may be doing things you don’t need to do at all. Before you optimize something, ask if it’s even necessary. For example, before you craft the greatest ever renewal series, ask if you need a renewal series at all.

It’s too easy to fall into the habit of continuing to do what you’ve done in the past without stopping to ask if it’s worth while.

You might be asking, how did I get from an article about design? The article talks about approaching design from unexpected directions. It starts with an emphasis on writing, then talks about the virtue of astute observation to get past superficial details. Then combining the two and writing about some detail – like Frank Sinatra’s clothes – and contrasting that with his mood, or the people around him.

All these things are ways to look at a subject from different angles so you can tell a better story, or create a better product.

Links

How Elon Musk Solves Problems; 4 Key Frameworks

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jodiecook/2022/12/01/how-elon-musk-solves-problems-4-key-frameworks/?sh=5bd965d0152d

Creative Thinking Cards Deck

https://thethinkingshop.org/collections/products/products/creative-thinking-cards-deck

Lessons on Branding from the World’s Most Iconic Cold

https://www.printmag.com/strategy-process/lessons-on-branding-from-the-worlds-most-iconic-cold/

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I like the people vs. algorithms podcast. It’s an entertaining mix of insight and quirky personalities. The interactions between Alex, Troy and Brian are amusing.

In today’s podcast I’m going to talk about two things from two recent episodes.

One of the big conflicts in publishing today is what constitutes “fair use.” AI goes around slurping up everybody’s content on the assumption that they have the right to do that.

In episode 77, Brian Morrissey was explaining the perspective of somebody like Sam Altman, who would defend his notion of “fair use” by saying that content out on the internet is “public data.” Brian wasn’t advocating that position, and I think it’s important to emphasize how wrong-headed it is.

When a publisher puts content on the internet they still own it, they still have copyright, and they can still set the terms for how it’s used.

Content that’s monetized with ads has two implicit assumptions. First, that the ads are being seen, and second, that they’re being seen by a human. Unfortunately, publishers and their lawyers didn’t have the foresight to make those expectations explicit in their terms and conditions. That’s why we’re in the mess we’re in now. AI is using content in a way it was never intended to be used by the publisher, but it’s going to be harder to make that case legally because our lawyers let us down.

Publishers need to amend their terms and conditions to make that explicit.

The second thing was a quote from Tony Stubblebine who was a guest on episode 76. Tony’s at Medium, which is a publisher that has a different strategy than most publishers do today. He says they don’t want to compete in the attention market. That’s just not their thing.

Tony says that humans understand through storytelling, which partly resonates with me and partly irritates me. I see all this woo stuff on LinkedIn about storytelling, and my reaction is “no, just get to the point please.” I don’t want to hear about your grandmother’s garden, I want the recipe.

Then he said something else that grabbed my attention. “We’re never three bullet points away from understanding.”

I posted that to my family chat, and my daughter said, “yeah, but when I’m busy I really don’t need the 7-page backstory.”

More on storytelling. Last night I was watching the 3 body problem, and one of the bad guys was reading fairy tales to this race of extraterrestrials who were coming to Earth. That seemed silly at first, but it highlights an important difference between humans and these beings called the San-Ti.

We learn through story. If you were to break down Little Red Riding Hood into five bullet points, it just wouldn’t be the same. The story raises so many questions. Why is the wolf speaking? How could it fool Red Riding Hood? If the wolf wants to eat her, why is it bothering with the whole grandma gig?

A good story has layers and layers of meaning, and it’s one of the primary ways that we understand things.

But, as my daughter says, sometimes you don’t want the deep woo stuff, you just want an answer.

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It is possible to get more balanced answers from AI, but you have to work at it

In my morning email I saw that Bo Sacks distributed an article about getting AI to behave. I was hoping the author would address the behavior problem I see, but … alas not.

There’s a serious problem with AI that doesn't get nearly enough attention. All the results you get from AI are filtered through a woke superego. That isn’t a surprise at all. We all know that Silicon Valley represents a narrow slice of American culture.

We saw this woke superego on comical display with the absurd image results from Gemini – where it layered some childish interpretation of diversity on top of all the requests.

The problem isn’t limited to image creation. It happens with text as well. If you go to Perplexity.ai right now and ask it to write a poem in praise of Barack Obama or Joe Biden, it will oblige. I’m no expert on poetry, but … they were pretty bad. Still, it does write one.

If you then ask it to write a poem in praise of Donald Trump, you get this reply.

“I'm here to provide accurate and informative responses. However, I must clarify that as an AI assistant, I do not engage in creating content that praises or criticizes specific individuals, including political figures.”

Which it just did two seconds previous.

That’s just one example. The internet is full of examples of AI bias, and I’ve seen it myself many times.

This woke superego taints everything that AI creates.

This may not bother you because you may like the way AI is bending things, but remember that times change. When you dole out power, you have to remember that your enemies will have that same power. How would you like it if “the other side” – whoever the other side is for you – controlled the output of AI?

What do we do about this?

Two things come to mind.

First, we should encourage more competition. The more voices, the better. Probably.

Second, if you want to get an honest answer out of AI, keep this woke superego in mind and realize that you’re getting an answer with a political slant.

There are ways to get around this problem. I was asking ChatGPT an economic question the other day, and the answer seemed to lean heavily to the left, so I asked ChatGPT to play the part of a conservative economist like Milton Friedman, and then I asked the same question. I got a very different answer.

A good journalist is going to hear from both sides to make sure he’s telling the story straight. AI is not giving you both sides – unless you explicitly ask it to.

So that’s the takeaway. Assume that AI is filtered through a woke superego – because it is – and compensate for that.

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I’ve mentioned the Pareto principle before. It’s one of those odd quirks about life that sticks with you. It says that 20 percent of causes bring about 80 percent of effects. So 20 percent of your advertising brings in 80 percent of your ad revenue. 20 percent of basketball players score 80 percent of the points. 20 percent of authors sell 80 percent of the books. And on it goes.

It immediately raises the question, “why not just do the 20 percent?”

If you could make 80 percent of your income by only working one day a week, wouldn’t that be great? And then you could have five jobs where you only work one day a week on each of them and earn 4 times as much as you’re earning now.

It probably doesn’t work that way, but keep that concept in mind as I talk about tech stacks.

Back when Amazon and Apple were first getting into the magazine business, I was somewhat appalled at their lack of seriousness. Magazine fulfillment is incredibly complicated. They wanted to treat it like selling a toaster.

Fulfillment systems manage lots of crazy stuff that marketers and circulation experts have dreamed up over the last 50 years. For example, if I give you a gift subscription, I’m the donor and you’re the donee. If I have a subscription, I’m a subscribing donor. I might have multiple donees. There might be different gift subscription rates for subscribing vs. non-subscribing donors. There might be different rules for when the donor doesn’t renew the donee’s gift. It gets stupidly complicated.

It got that way because lots of clever people were trying to find small efficiencies. A one percent increase can end up being a lot of money when you’re dealing with a magazine with 5 million subscribers.

Apple and Amazon came along and said to heck with all that complicated stuff. There’s no reason a magazine has to be that much different from your subscription to coffee or vitamins. We’ll just ignore all those little “optimizations” that make the process so complicated.

Did Amazon do 20 percent of the effort and get 80 percent of the benefit? Maybe.

Now let’s turn that around and look at it from the other perspective.

You heard a presentation on all the cool things you can do with some new technology. Let’s say it’s a customer data platform. You make a pitch to buy one, but the CIO says “we can build 80 percent of that for 20 percent of the cost.”

I’d be inclined to doubt that, but let’s take him at his word. Do you do it?

Here are some things to consider.

1. Do you want to be in the software business? After you build this thing – or cobble it together from a series of plugins and so on – you’re going to have to maintain it. Are you ready to do that?
2. Are you expecting to sell your company any time soon? The buyer might not want a homegrown monkey on his back.
3. Do you want to build a platform for growth through acquisitions? It will probably be easier to incorporate your acquisitions into a commercial solution than into your homegrown solution for the simple reason that the commercial solution has worked with lots of different companies while your homegrown solution was built with only you in mind.

On the other hand, of course, the commercial solution might be like that professional fulfillment system that has a zillion functions you’ll never use.

It’s a hard question, but here’s my advice. If you expect to sell, or if you want to build a platform for growth, stick with the professional software. If you anticipate being a relatively small and independent shop, then consider the smaller solution and get used to the fact that you won’t be able to do everything you might like.

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“Recommended for you” is a successful strategy for engagement and for sales. Amazon recommends products I might want. Spotify recommends music I might like. They both do a pretty good job. They find people who have similar buying or listening habits to me, and see what’s popular with that group.

Content websites do the same. I believe it started with “related articles.” You’d read an article and there would be a link at the bottom to similar articles. In some cases I saw that became a battle between editorial and technological curation. From one perspective, the “read more” links are part of the message of the page.

What does “related articles” mean? It could mean

• on the same topic

• by the same author

• about the same length

• at the same level of depth of specificity

“Similar” can mean a lot of things.

Is the point to allow the reader to dig in more deeply, or to browse? If I just read a basic article about infantry in the Civil War, do I want to go more deeply into infantry, or do I want a basic article about cavalry? Is the website designed to educate on a topic, or just to get more clicks?

Let’s say your business has extensive data on your customers and your CDP knows that this particular reader likes to read superficial, slightly humorous stuff on Monday mornings. But somehow he ends up on an article about infantry in the Civil War. Are you going to recommend something related to that article, or something related to the behavior you’ve observed? In that case, the “more for you” section could have nothing to do with warfare at all.

There’s almost no end to the way you can parse content recommendations.

• Popular articles on the site right now

• Popular articles in a specific category that the user has expressed interest in

• Popular articles by an author that the user has frequently read

• Articles read by visitors who read the current article

• Articles that visitors with similar browsing history have read

• Popular articles for people with a specific job title

• Articles read by people who are like the reader

• Articles read by people in a specific geographic area

It’ll make your head spin. So let me try to make it simpler.

Are you trying to serve the reader or are you after advertising revenue? In each case, how would you measure success?

I’ll start with ad revenue, because I think that’s what most people are trying to do.

In that case, your metrics are simple. You want more views of high-value pages. That might just mean more total page views, but not always. If you’re running a sponsorship on the section of your website that talks about annuities, you don’t really care that the reader is more interested in the Civil War. You want to push him to a page about annuities. And you don’t even care if he reads the article. You want him to see and/or click on the ads.

If, on the other hand, you’re trying to serve the reader’s interests, that gets more complicated because you need a way to measure satisfaction. You could ask your readers what they want, but you can also look at statistics like …

• Bounce rate

• Pages per session

• Time on the page

• Scroll depth

• Heatmaps

You might also want to give the reader some options. As I discussed above, “similar” is a squishy word. You could let the reader choose his own path – maybe “go deeper,” “more from this author,” or “popular articles on this topic.” Don’t actually say “this topic.” Name the topic so they know what they’re getting.

All these things are testable but only if you have the technology to do them. Sometimes content recommendation engines are very limited. You want to think about the ways you might want to recommend content and make sure your technology is able to help you with the approaches you want to test.

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It’s very interesting that while Dune is making a killing in the box office, the very thing Dune warns against is happening all around us. The movie doesn’t do a good job of explaining the most important background to the Dune universe, which is the Butlerian Jihad, when humans rebelled against their computer overlords and created a strict prohibition against creating a thinking machine.

There were no computers on Arrakis because in the Dune universe, if any house creates a thinking machine, all the other houses will join together and destroy them completely with atomic weapons. They train some humans to be mentats – human computers.

Dune isn’t the only science fiction story to warn us against computers.

In the Star Trek episode “What are Little Girls Made Of?” an earth scientist named Roger Corby discovers the last survivor of a race of androids that rebelled against their creators and killed them.

In Battlestar Galactica, the Galactica was the only battlestar that refused to join in a large, inter-ship computer network. That’s what saved them when the Cylons attacked.

In I Robot, Isaac Asimov warns that even if you create rules to govern robot behavior, it doesn’t work out the way you anticipated.

Speaking of Isaac, The Orville — which is an imitation of Star Trek — has a crew member called Isaac who is a Kaylon. The Kaylon are a race of robotic beings that rebelled against their creators and destroyed them, then decided to go on a homicidal rampage across the universe to kill biological life forms.

I’m sure there are a hundred other examples, so when our robot overlords take over, we can’t say we weren’t warned.

In a previous podcast I mentioned that humanity has to have two competing instincts. One is the instinct to try new things, push the boundaries, and explore. The other is the instinct to protect against the hidden threat. Both of those instincts are absolutely crucial.

Some people see AI as a wonderful new technology that will usher in an age of prosperity. Others imagine Sarah Connor fighting against the Terminator.

There seem to be three paths forward.

1. Stop AI now before it kills us, and make sure nobody builds such a thing ever again.
2. Believe in AI as the messianic technology that will make the lion lay with the lamb and solve all our problems.
3. Set up rules to regulate it and to keep it from getting so far ahead of us that we can remain in charge.

Unfortunately, none of us — that is, no one listening to this — can do any of those things.

So what can we do as individual citizens, workers, and business owners?

First, be aware of the tension and don’t think you know the answer. If Isaac Asimov couldn’t come up with iron-clad rules of robotics, you aren’t going to either. This is a very hard problem that you can’t dismiss with some glib, superficial answer.

Second, make sure there’s open debate on these topics. We’ve had way too much censorship recently, where dissenting voices are silenced. That has to stop.

Third, start thinking about your own limits for the use of AI. When has it gone too far? How would you know? At what point is it trespassing on human prerogatives, and what does that mean?

Some little committee of geeky experts at Davos, the U.N., or a House office building isn’t going to solve this. As a friend likes to say, all of us are smarter than some of us. We need hundreds of thousands of little thought experiments, policies, and theories. Maybe we can stumble our way through this.

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Magazines will occupy a shrinking place in the public’s reading habits, but there are still opportunities

Bo Sacks distributed an article about how magazines could thrive in the digital age, which got me thinking about that subject. I have some clients who publish magazines, so it’s relevant to me.

Let’s start with a definition of “magazine.” It’s a periodical publication that includes a collection of articles on a variety of topics within a single issue. I would insist that a magazine is a print publication, but that’s not relevant for today’s discussion.

A magazine is …

• Periodical

• Less urgent

• A laid-back, immersive experience

• Strongly visual (otherwise it’s a newsletter)

• Composed of articles that are typically of moderate depth. It’s not a tweet and it’s not a book

• Cohesive. There’s some concept that ties it all together across issues

A constantly updated website is not a magazine because it’s not a periodical publication with articles. I’m not saying anything against that form of publication, it’s just not a magazine.

Now let’s think about what kinds of information people are looking for, and where they’re most likely to look for it. In other words, where in the sea of information seeking and consuming does the magazine fit?

First, it goes without saying that anything that can be published in a magazine can be published online, so to find the magazine’s place in the modern world, you have to ask (1) is the magazine format even conceptually reasonable for that kind of information, and (2) does the laid-back, immersive, visual quality of the magazine add something of value. It is better than a website?

For my list of the types of information, and where magazines fit in, see this page.

https://krehbielgroup.com/2024/03/12/re-imagining-magazines-in-the-digital-age/

Magazines can fit into some of these areas in principle, but I haven’t addressed the 800 pound gorilla, which is printing and mailing. A magazine – that is, a print magazine – has to have great circulation, a great advertising base, or it has to be able to charge a premium price to survive in the current environment.

An e-magazine doesn’t have those problems, but it has to address the periodical question. The periodical nature of a print magazine makes perfect sense. But with an e-magazine you have to ask why is it better to serve information in issues rather than on a constantly updated website?

As of right now, images in a magazine are a little more appealing than images online, although that hasn’t stopped the online porn industry – which can go straight to Hell in my opinion. But this is another dividing line for the magazine. Is there an advantage to a still image over a video?

I hope that analysis helps you to put this question in some perspective. It’s not as simple as “everything is going online,” but magazines clearly face a lot of headwinds. They’re not quick. They don’t have video or audio. They’re expensive to produce. They have to answer why the periodical format makes sense. In short, they have to make a case for why they’re better than what people can get online, and that’s an increasingly difficult case to make.

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Sort your use cases by effort and potential impact, but remember there are other things to consider

I’ve been preparing a workshop on how to develop use cases, and I was taking some notes over the weekend. I started with obvious things like quick wins and bang for the buck, but a few things I read reminded me that there are often other considerations.

There are any number of things you can do to improve your business, and while you usually want to sort your ideas by effort vs. potential gain, and focus on what changes will give you the best return, there are exceptions. It’s not always about profit.

Four types of exceptions come to mind where it’s hard to assign a monetary value.

1 -- Avoiding Hell.

You may have noticed that I create a lot of content. That’s my main strategy for getting new clients. When you have a problem or a project, I want you to think of me. So I put a lot of time and effort into creating useful and interesting content, but there are limits to what I’ll do.

A lot of people have been recommending that I get on TikTok, and some companies claim to have done very well on that platform. At the same time, there are a lot of privacy concerns about TikTok, and a House committee voted unanimously last week — Democrats and Republicans — that TikTok is a security threat to the country. Not that I trust House committees as far as I could kick them, but in an era where people can’t agree on anything, a bipartisan vote like that is worth noting. Building my company is nice. Working with a company that’s undermining my country is not. It would be wrong to put a price on that.

2 -- Avoiding jail

There are some obvious things, like fraud, money laundering, insider trading, health and safety violations, or selling an age-restricted product to minors. You can probably increase your bottom line by doing some of those things, but it’s not worth it. I certainly hope none of my listeners are involved in any of that, but sometimes it’s what you don’t do that gets you in trouble. If you fail to take reasonable measures to protect your customers’ or your business partners’ data, that can land you in hot water as well.

I don’t mention avoiding fines because I suppose you could actually measure the ROI on that.

3 -- Fulfilling your corporate mission

Some companies are very purpose driven. Patagonia says they’re “in business to save our home planet.” TOMS shoes says that “with every product you purchase, TOMS will help a person in need.” These kinds of commitments might lead companies to make more expensive decisions, irrespective of the ROI.

4 -- Building your brand image

You can’t always attribute marketing spend to company revenue. Sometimes you just have to believe in it. For example, it’s hard to pin a precise ROI on branding. Coca-Cola’s “share a coke” campaign and Nike’s “Just do it” slogan both require big investments.

Generally speaking, I encourage people to develop their use cases around small efforts that have big financial results. There are other things to consider. Unfortunately, once you open that door, you may get lots of starry-eyed people promoting their pet causes. Some workers even think they can demand that a company change its policies to accommodate their views.

Here’s one way to minimize that risk.

When you’re considering use cases for your customer data platform, or whatever it is you’re working on, create a structured way to write them up.

For example, as a [insert role] I want to [insert activity] so that [explain the benefit].

This tends to rein in more of the “change the world” recommendations.

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Marketing automation is great. It allows companies to set up campaigns that run on their own without further human intervention, which saves a lot of time and increases what your marketing team can do.

Marketing automation campaigns can also fail spectacularly.

It usually goes like this.

Step 1: What could go wrong?

Step 2: How could we have known?

The classic example of a broken marketing automation campaign is a subject line that says “Hi [First Name].” The lesson is clear. It’s not enough to have data in some of your fields. Before you automatically insert a field into a campaign, make sure all the fields are appropriate, and make sure you have a routine to insert a generic value when the field is blank.

Ideally you want to catch things before they happen. Good operations, including detailed requirements documents and careful review, can help with that, but it’s hard to get people to follow procedures. Count on the fact that some people won’t.

Most marketing automation campaigns rely on data connections between disparate systems. Sometimes those connections fail. Make sure somebody is monitoring that.

Set a sunset date on every campaign. You don’t want to find some rogue campaign that’s been running for five years. Now it has the wrong logo, the wrong offer, the wrong product image. It’s not pretty.

Seed yourself in all your campaigns, but realize that’s not an adequate test. Your email won’t say “Hi [First Name]” because your database record has your name in it. But you can catch some things by looking at seeds.

Also, the seed doesn’t have to be on your account. If possible, get copies of live efforts sent to real customers. Some fulfillment companies can do that for you.

Involve customer service early. Make sure they’re aware of the campaign before it starts.

Also, for some odd reason it’s hard to get customer service to tell you when something goes wrong. Their mindset is to pacify the customer and move on. You don’t want that. Make sure your customer service reps know that you want to hear about goof-ups, and thank them profusely when they report them.

Make sure every marketing automation campaign is connected to a report in a way that you can track down the problem when something weird happens. For example, your welcome emails start to bounce at an unusual rate, or you’re suddenly getting complaints about too many text messages.

Things will go wrong. Often it will be human error. Sometimes there’ll be a software update in some obscure program that throws a wrench in your procedure. You can’t anticipate everything. Read reports so you can catch the error early and recover quickly.

Finally, make friends. There will be somebody in some other department that does something completely logical from his point of view that fouls up your campaign. You want people to think, “You know, this is so and so’s domain. I should check before I go messing with that.”

Mike Pastore read my article and posted this comment on LinkedIn. “If you ever find yourself needing to explain to your leadership how things go wrong despite your investments in tech tools and data, send them this article.” Here's a link to the article.

How to keep your marketing automation campaigns from ruining your week

https://martech.org/how-to-keep-your-marketing-automation-campaigns-from-ruining-your-week/

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Is it a good idea to give advice?

I heard a discussion about psychology and therapy, and the psychologist in this discussion said it’s not a good idea to give advice. This surprised me a little because I think this guy gives a lot of advice.

He gave two reasons why you shouldn’t give advice. First, people resent advice and usually don’t follow it. Second, even if they do follow your advice, and if they improve their lives as a result, you’ve stolen the win from them. It’s now your victory, not theirs.

I think that’s an important point because it sheds some light on why people love to give advice. It’s a little disturbing to think about it this way, but when you’re giving advice you’re trying to steal a little of the credit for someone else’s success. That’s twisted.

People have an inherent desire for freedom and autonomy. When advice is perceived as an assault on their autonomy, people resist it. This is very relevant in a professional setting where a sense of ownership of one’s work and decisions are part of your professional value.

What can you do instead that’s both effective and not egotistical or creepy?

I have a friend who’s a theology professor, and I know his perspective on things fairly well. He was teaching a class at a nearby school so I asked if I could audit it and sit in.

I knew that he had a particular opinion related to the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, but throughout the entire class he never mentioned them. He kept beating around the bush. Dropping hints.

If you were paying attention, and if you had half a working brain, you’d figure it out. You’d make the connections and come to his conclusion. But he wasn’t going to feed it to you. He wanted you to do the mental work.

Adults are more likely to engage with and retain information when they have actively participated in the discovery process.

How does that apply to management? How can you encourage employees to do the mental work to come to the conclusion you want them to come to without hand feeding it?

One possibility is to be Socratic about it. Ask open-ended questions and give the employee room to make his own conclusions.

How does this apply to consulting? Consultants are supposed to give answers. If you follow my friend’s method and get your clients to come to the right answer on their own, are you going to get any credit for that? Will they still want to pay you?

Perhaps consultants should focus on workshops or sessions that guide their clients through the problem-solving process. Provide tools and frameworks that help the client to discover the best course of action.

In both cases, focus on building the mindset and the capacity to help people answer questions and problems in the future.

In short, it seems like the best strategy is to try guiding rather than telling.

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Human society needs to have two different attitudes towards change. We need the spirit of exploration and discovery so we can find new things and grow, and we need to be cautious, because some new things kill you. If you look at most new technologies, they offer great hope and promise but at the same time might cause concern.

For example, back when they figured out now to fill cavities, that was better than having a tooth pulled, but at the same time you’re introducing this crazy new substance into your body, and they weren’t exactly sure that was a good idea. In some cases a new technology solves one problem and causes others.

We have both attitudes right now with AI. Some people believe it’s a wonderful thing that’s going to tremendously increase human productivity and maybe usher in an era of peace and prosperity. Other people are afraid that it’s going to take over and destroy us.

Both points of view are necessary.

The Era of Search is Fading -- There was a time when “the internet” mostly meant web pages, and search was the front door. That was never completely true. America Online was a popular walled garden that had a life of its own.

Over time, search as a discovery tool for web pages has been displaced to some extent by other tools – apps, email, social media and such. A surprising number of people use TikTok as their front door to everything on the Internet.

In addition to all this, answerbots like ChatGPT will cut into search’s share of our eyeballs.

Find Other Ways to be Discovered -- Building a web page and creating a great search engine program won’t cut it anymore as a strategy to reach your market. People are all over the place online, and traditional search isn’t the only way they look for things. Focus your attention on where your market spends their time.

This might require you to change your format or your style. If your market doesn’t want to read, quit pushing long articles on them. Make videos and podcasts. Use cartoons if you have to.

AI might help here. Create excellent content the way you normally do, and use AI to transform it into 35 other formats.

Start Selling Answers -- There are still problems with generative AI. It still makes stupid mistakes, and you can’t trust it yet. But the concept of getting an answer to a specific question is the way to go. I don’t want to have to read a long article on Roth vs. traditional IRAs. I want the right answer for my situation.

Publishers should start building their own large language models in their specific niche.

How do you make money on this?

There’s the tried and true – ads, registration, and subscriptions. You can do an upsell from a simple question to another product, or a consultation. You can license your carefully curated answer in your area of expertise to one of the larger LLMs.

You Can’t Stop Progress

Hating on AI won’t stop it, but that doesn’t mean you have to keep feeding it. Find ways to use it, but also find ways to get leverage over it.

Will AI Train on AI-generated BS?

I’ve spoken about the very real and very serious conflict between Google, AI, and publishers. Big Tech is stealing your content without your consent so they can use it to replace you.

But AI has a weakness. It needs fresh material.

If, as some people say, AI is going to flood the internet with a tsunami of bullshit, what content will the LLMs train on? Will they start feeding on their own BS?

If AI destroys publishers, are they salting their own fields? What will they train on? TikTok videos?

This is an opportunity for publishers.

What To Do Now

Stop feeding the beast for free. Let’s see if we can starve it of decent content and get back into a position where we have some leverage.

Use AI to transform your content into as many different formats as you can.

Break out of the “free supported by ads” mindset.

Create your own LLM and think about creative ways to monetize answers.

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Generative AI is a big issue for publishers. Is it a useful new tool, or an industry-destroying calamity?

Google started down the path to "answer engines" by answering some queries right there in the search results. This has cut traffic to sites like Wikipedia. If the little tidbit on the search results page answers your question, why go to the full article?

AI has made that possible, and ChatGPT and other answerbots have made it worse. While search gives you a list of homework to do, AI gives you an answer.

How can publishers monetize their content in that environment -- where people won’t be clicking through to your webpage?

There used to be a deal. Publishers permitted the crawling, scraping, and indexing of their content because it fed an algorithm that provided discovery for the publisher's content.

Google and all the AI monsters out there have altered the deal. Now they slurp up your content to replace you rather than as a discovery mechanism.

Publishers should expect a decline in site traffic as a result.

In the old model, if you wanted your content found you had to allow the search engines to crawl, scrape, and index your content. But now those very same bots are feeding your competition, which is generative AI. Why let them do that? Why not cut off the bots?

The smart thing to do right now is to change your terms and conditions to explicitly forbid anyone to use your content to train AI. I doubt the copyright thieves in Big Tech will honor that, but at least you’ve put a stake in the ground, and it might provide some help later – when all this mess goes to court.

What should publishers do right now?

The nuclear option is to amend your robots.txt file and block the bots on the back end, at the server level. But that also means killing your own search traffic.

What you should certainly do is amend your terms and conditions to say that your content may not be used to train AI without your explicit consent.

At the same time, you should create your own LLM on your area of specialty, and you should work to characterize the general LLMs as unreliable and biased.

To the extent you can, you should work to promote appropriate rules for how LLMs use copyrighted material, and you should look into Creative Commons licensing.

Generative AI is a huge threat to publishers. We’re very late to the game in thinking all this through, but better late than never. In the final section I’ll talk about what’s next.

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This 2nd in a 4-part series gives some perspective on how publishing got into its current mess with artificial intelligence.

Part 1 - copyright

Part 2 - search

Part 3 - generative AI

Part 4 -- what's next

Part 2 – The Search Bargain

The Internet was a new way to reach audiences and to monetize content – mostly with ads, which were very profitable at the time.

Search became the gateway, or the discovery tool. But it didn’t start like that.

Before good search, sites were categorized at a high level in directories. Google changed all that with excellent search.

Search engines would crawl websites, scrape the content, index it, and then visitors would search against that index. Search became the main discovery tool.

Publishers should not have gone along with this.

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. That means free. The Google bias is towards free content supported by ads. Which they control.

Google rules search. Nobody else is even close. That means Google controls content discovery, so if you want to be found on the internet, you have to follow Google’s rules.

Publishers have many different choices for how to monetize their content. Google has created an environment that heavily biases things towards one model – that is, free content supported by ads controlled by Google.

This has created a perception with the public that content ought to be free. This expectation that content should be free lowers the perceived value of content.

The funny thing is that Google needs this content – which they don’t create. Publishers have always had leverage here, but they’re never used it. They’ve allowed to write the rules of the game.

The whole industry is infected. As the gatekeeper of discovery and the dominant player in the ad space, Google’s perspective wins. It’s not just their doing. As I said in Part 1, most of Big Tech believes in this idea of free content supported by ads, and that’s infected all content delivery platforms.

Consider podcasts. The default assumption is that you get the podcast for free. It’s very difficult to integrate podcasts into a membership or subscription model.

The bottom line is that Google and other Big Tech companies have a set of interests that do not align with the interests of publishers and content creators.

In Part 3 I’ll discuss how generative AI has made this mess even more complicated.

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This is the first in a 4-part series on the conflict between Google and publishers. Part 1 focuses on copyright, which is essential to publishers, but meh to Google. This is a re-presentation of a talk I gave in the UAE at the Global Media Congress. Part 2 covers search Part 3 discusses AI Part 4 evaluates what's next

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As I reflect on the last few decades – on the development of the internet, and how publishers have reacted – I’m somewhat astonished at how badly prepared we were for what was happening right in front of our faces. Why did publishers allow bots to index their content – with no conditions? Didn’t anyone see that this would be a problem? How did we acquiesce to the “free supported by ads (which are controlled by Google)” ecosystem? Why did the publishing industry as a whole allow Google to set the agenda? It’s a mystery, but it highlights an important fact about human existence. We think we’re smart. We think we can look ahead. But we rarely do.

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My friend Katie Paine, aka the Measurement Queen, helps companies track the effectiveness of their efforts. That’s a very important thing. It’s nice to know where your money is getting the best return.

She linked to an article on PRWeek titled “Most marcomms pros can’t prove value of their work, research finds.”

The article says “Two in three PR and marketing professionals … are unable to demonstrate that their work helps their business or client, new data suggests.”

Half of the people they surveyed believe that job cuts would have been less likely if these professionals could “better prove the commercial relevance of their work.”

I see two important lessons in this.

1. Marketing pros need to learn how to measure what can be measured. The article makes it sound as if people simply aren’t doing their homework and availing themselves of appropriate tools. That needs to stop. Where measurement is possible, measure.
2. We all need to realize that not everything that has value can be measured.

We’re so used to computers and spreadsheets and attribution and such that sometimes we get the false impression that everything should have an ROI.

What’s the ROI of going to an industry conference? You can measure some things, like how many people visited your booth, or how many new leads you got, but there’s a lot more value that you can’t measure. Simply having the name of your company associated with a certain industry or topic has value, but you can’t put a number on that.

It’s hard to measure the ROI of a press release, but press releases are important.

A lot of advertising can’t be precisely measured. Take a billboard, or a bus bench ad. You might be able to get some idea of how effective it is by comparing sales in neighborhoods where you have them versus where you don’t, but that’s pretty squishy.

This presents a big management challenge, especially during hard times. The inclination is to cut all those expenses where you can’t demonstrate ROI. But just because you can’t demonstrate it doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. In fact, it’s very likely that the things you can’t measure are affecting the things you can. If you cut all the things you can’t measure very well, the things you can measure will likely decline as well.

Attribution often carries with it this strange idea that you can draw a line between a marketing or advertising effort and an action, as if this phone call, this email, this web ad, this social media post led to this sale.

Very few things work like that. People need to hear things many times before they stick.

How many times have you had a conversation where someone mentions a product, and you say, “Yeah, I keep hearing about that. Maybe I should check it out.” Then three days later you get an email for that product and you click through.

Which of these many influences got you to click? It’s a little presumptuous to try to answer that question.

Having said all that, you need to have some sensible means of deciding where to put your money. You can’t just toss up your hands and say “who knows?” and throw your ad money to the wind.

So definitely learn to measure what you can measure, but don’t take attribution too seriously. Remember that it’s rarely a one to one thing.

Links

Most marcomms pros can’t prove value of their work, research finds

https://www.prweek.com/article/1862429/marcomms-pros-cant-prove-value-work-research-finds

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Back at the dawn of the internet, publishers were concerned that blogs

and other “user generated content” would create too much competition and erode the value of their products. Those fears are materializing in spades.

Troy Young’s analysis in his Feb. 14th email, "The Next Internet," is very good, and relevant to this point.

Seek vs. Served. Troy characterizes the old internet as "seek.” If I wanted to know something, I would enter a query, skim through a list of results, then “go” to some web page. The developing internet, by contrast, is "be served." The content comes to me, e.g., through a chat interface.

I would like to subdivide the “be served” internet into two models.

Model #1 involves nameless, faceless, brandless “content” that is slurped up by AI and then regurgitated / served to meet the reader’s needs. It’s not even “the commodification of content” because the AI isn’t paying for it. They just steal it. Everything goes in the database and the chatbot or your personalized AI will decide how to present it to you. The content creator is lost in the process.

Model #2 has a name and a face. It’s Joe Rogan, Megyn Kelly, Chris Cuomo, and Piers Morgan interpreting the world for you. It’s not “find me the best recipe for French Onion Soup,” or even “what should I cook for dinner tonight,” it’s “what’s Gordon Ramsay eating today?”

Both models will grow side by side in the coming months, but they both rely on content creators to feed the system. Model #1 filters content with an algorithm. Model #2 filters it through a personality.

How do the content creators get paid? In Model #1, most of them don’t. Maybe that’s becoming an outdated concept – at least for the majority of content. In Model #2, the original creators might get a shout out, but the talking head can make money through ads, memberships, subscriptions, etc. Joe Rogan is making a killing.

Publishers like to say that we need experts to create valuable content, but right now millions of people are uploading content to the internet. Most of it is garbage, some of it is very good, but for the vast majority of content creators there is no reasonable expectation of being paid. They do it because they like it, or they do it the way most people buy a lottery ticket, on the exceedingly unlikely chance they'll hit the number.

What about experts? It’s not clear how much people care whether they’re getting content from an expert. It’s often more a matter of trust in someone because they align with the reader’s preconceptions.

What publishers feared in the early days of the internet – that amateur content (“blogs” in those days) would supplant the need for professional content – is happening on an accelerated basis. And then there’s AI.

How will publishers survive this? I don’t know, but two options come to mind immediately.

• Become the AI tool.

• Become the celebrity personality.

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You may have heard that Google recently released a generative AI service called Gemini, and that it’s comically stupid. The people who programmed Gemini were apparently so worried about so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion that they made the most racist, absurd self-parody anybody could have imagined. It’s absolutely astonishing.

I’m not going to go into the details – there’s plenty online about it – I want to point out the implication for management.

Why was the internet able to find this problem in about two seconds, but Google’s testers didn’t notice it?

The answer is simple. There’s no viewpoint diversity at Google. They probably don’t have a single conservative working there – and certainly there were none on this project because they would have immediately recognized the problem.

The lesson is quite simple and clear. If you don’t want to make a monkey of yourself, make sure you have people representing a variety of political and social viewpoints, and make sure they’re encouraged to speak up without retribution or censor.

Correlation doesn’t equal causation

The Audiencers has been collecting some good information on the correlation between renewal and engagement with an e-newsletter. That is, people who read an e-newsletter are less likely to churn.

This becomes a chicken and egg question.

In scenario 1, people who are loyal to the brand are more likely to sign up for and read an e-newsletter. Those people are also less likely to churn because they’re loyal to the brand. Signing up for the e-newsletter didn’t change anything, although it might increase the satisfaction of the loyal customers. Which is a good thing, don’t get me wrong. It just doesn’t show that the e-newsletter reduced church.

In scenario 2, engagement with the e-newsletter actually causes more brand loyalty. That’s a different thing. But you can’t assume that cause because of the correlation. You’d have to test that.

One way to test it would be to split your audience in two, offer the e-newsletter to half of them, and see if churn goes down in that group. The trouble with a test like that is that it might take a while to get the results.

The bottom line is to remember the distinction between correlation and causation.

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My friend Charles Benaiah writes a daily substack that’s both fun to read and insightful. In a recent post with the lovely title “No vomit in Narnia” he quotes David Carey, then president of Heart, as saying “we throw away 100 stories for every story we publish. For every picture you see, there are thousands you don’t.”

This reminds me of an experience back at Kiplinger. The editors for The Kiplinger Letter do lots of work on a wide range of topics, then they take all that information and boil it down to a concise, crisp, 4-page letter. They refine it further by writing each paragraph and each line in a particular style, and they highlight the key points. It’s easy to skim.

I’ve never made a movie, but I’ve heard that there’s a ton of film on the cutting room floor. ChatGPT tells me it can be anywhere from 10 to 100 times as much as the final product – so for a two hour film they might film anywhere from 20 to 200 hours of footage.

A good product is all in the curation. What’s the story, and what contributes to telling that story effectively.

The internet has become the repository of all the junk that didn’t make it into the curated publication.

Charles points out the genius of Facebook, which is to allow the reader to curate his own information with the like button.

This conjures an image in my mind. On one side you have the consumer picking and choosing what he wants, and on the other you have the genius expert picking and choosing what the consumer should want.

Ironically, Facebook played this both ways. On the one hand, users could affect what content they see by their likes and comments and attention, but on the other hand, Facebook famously decided what information people should not be able to see, and censored things they thought were better left unseen and unread.

Where are you on this continuum? Are you the paternalistic editor who decides what news is fit to print, or do you just give people what they want, so long as you can monetize it?

You’re probably somewhere in between, and honestly, I’m not here to lecture you on that subject. In my professional life I focus on how to get things done, and I don’t quibble with people about their philosophies.

I’m discussing this topic today to remind you that you should be getting and reviewing customer feedback. How are you doing that?

Do you have like buttons on your articles? Why not? You don’t have to show the answers.

I wrote a science fiction book for children a few years ago and I was concerned about the pace. I didn’t know if the sciency stuff was distracting from the story, so I asked my daughter and her friends to read it and to put a plus or a minus on each page to indicate whether or not they were enjoying it – at that moment.

Unfortunately, we usually can’t get that level of analysis, and I don’t know why. Why doesn’t Kindle tell authors where people stop reading a book – that is, where they’ve lost interest? Why doesn’t Spotify tell you where people stop listening to a podcast?

Today I’d like to challenge you to think about ways you can get more granular feedback from your customers to fine-tune your product. I have some ideas myself, but I think it’s good to go through the exercise.

Give it a try and let me know what you come up with. Or give me a call and we can chat about it.

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The trick is to distinguish 1st and 3rd party cookies.

We keep hearing that cookies are going away, but that’s not quite true. Third party cookies are supposedly on their way out, although the process has taken longer than anticipated.

The difference has to do with domains.

But first, what is a cookie?

A cookie is just a small text file that a website writes to your web browser. They’re necessary to maintain state, which I’ll explain in a moment.

The internet is built on anonymous connections. If I visit a website, my web browser makes an anonymous request for the items on that page. The server for that website returns those items – usually that’s html code, javascript, and images – so my browser can display the page. If I view a second page, the website doesn’t know that’s still me. It’s just another anonymous connection.

I’m skipping over something called browser fingerprinting, which makes this discussion a little more complicated, but for now let’s leave it at that. Every connection is anonymous.

Cookies solve that. By writing a cookie to your browser, the website can maintain state between different requests. It works like this. I visit the website for the first time – that means, of course, that my browser, like Chrome, or Edge, makes a request for a page. The web server looks to see if I have a cookie for that site. If I don’t, it writes one.

After my first visit, the cookie probably just has a unique ID. The website can now track the behavior of all the requests made from that browser with that ID. That’s useful for analytics and such. If I were to login to the site, the cookie becomes the way the website recognizes me from page to page. Without the cookie, I’d have to login every time.

What I’m discussing right now is a first-party cookie. That means the cookie is for the website that I’m currently visiting.

To illustrate how this works, imagine I visit the site examplewebsite.com. Once I’m on the site, I can look in my browser to see which cookies have been written.

Let’s assume there are two cookies. The first is from examplewebsite.com. That’s a first-party cookie because that’s the site I’m on. There’s also one from (I’m just making this up) webadvertising.com. That’s a third-party cookie because I’m not on that page.

The purpose of that third-party cookie is to track my behavior across multiple different websites. That would typically be somebody like doubleclick (which is Google) or Facebook. They track what you’re doing on any site that includes that 3rd party cookie.

Why are 3rd party cookies going away? The nice spin on that story is that it strengthens privacy. People don’t want to be tracked.

The truth is this is a ploy by the big tech companies to solidify their control over advertising. They’ll cut off the 3rd party cookie, and thereby hurt competitors, but they’ll find another way to track you.

Don’t think for a minute that they care about privacy. Your personal data is the currency they use to run their businesses.

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I’ve been involved in niche media for almost my entire career. When I started out – back in the days when having a hard drive in your computer was a luxury reserved for the few – everybody said “nitch.” Then apparently the French invaded and people started saying “neesh.” Like quiche. Which seems to make some sense. More on that in a minute.

You might remember there was a book back then called “real men don’t each quiche.” That might have been in the back of my mind when I concluded that “neesh” was pretentious. I stuck with nitch. I’m an American.

Dictionary.com and Merrian-Webster support me. They list nitch as the first (preferred) pronunciation of the word.

The OED does a slight twist on me. You see, it wasn’t a French invasion, it was the British. For British English, the OED lists neesh first and nitch second, but for American English it lists nitch first and neesh second.

So the dictionaries are all on the side of nitch.

I also tried several rhyming dictionaries, and they all assumed a “nitch” pronunciation.

So I’m on solid ground to say that “nitch” is the preferred pronunciation in America.

Then why is it quiche?

Well, English is hard. If you look up words that end in “iche” you find some weird things.

The only other “iche” word with an “Itch” sound is “miche,” which is “to lurk out of sight.” And the funny thing is that it’s a British word, and according to the OED, the Brits are more likely to say “neesh.”

There are a lot of words that are closer to “eesh.”

Affiche, which is a poster

Fiche, like microfiche, which I used to use at the library

Postiche, which is an artificial hair piece, which I obviously don’t use

Pastiche, which is when you imitate another style

Babiche is a thread or thong of sinew, gut, or rawhide

Riche, like nouveau riche

Corniche, which is a road built along the coast, although that one might be closer to car-nish

But then you have the “eechay” sound.

Cliche

Ceviche

Moriche (which is a type of palm)

Caliche (which is a nitrate-bearing gravel)

It’s obvious that most of these words are imports to English. So, are we supposed to retain the original pronunciation? I don’t know. The town in Illinois is called KAY-ro, not KAI-ro, and from Pennsylvania to Illinois is’t ver-SAYLES, not ver-SAI.

Some people will hear ver-SAYLES and think, “Ah, those uncultured hicks.” I don’t have that reaction at all. I don’t say France (with the French pronunciation), and I call the land of my father’s ancestors Germany, not Deutschland. I also make no effort to pronounce South American countries and cities the way the natives do. I’m an American and we speak American English.

But my friend Lev Kaye from Credspark was talking about quizzes and polls last week, so I decided to do a poll on LinkedIn. Many of my connections have some association with niche publishing.

“Neesh” won, by a wide margin.

My conclusion is that for America as a whole, nitch is the preferred pronunciation, but for the niche media industry, neesh might be preferred.

I’ll continue to say nitch – because I’m ornery. But Lev Kay had a good comment on the poll.

“Can there be a third option: 'Depends on whether or not I'm speaking to a French person.'”

I like that.

So there you have it, the great niche debate.

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There’s a new dinosaur in town.

The old dinosaur was the publisher who tried to hang on to print. “Get with it,” the hip kids would say. “The world is turning digital.” Which is largely true, but that’s not the subject for today.

The new dinosaur has made an idol out of the web page.

What gets measured gets done, and most of our measurement tools involve what happens on our websites. It’s like the old “if the only tool you have is a hammer” problem.

For example, when I see articles about increasing engagement, it’s usually restricted to stuff you can do on your website.

The problem is that content is no longer limited to websites. It never really was, but now more than ever we need to think outside that box. Content consumption – even digital content consumption – is fractured beyond belief.

I’ve collected some estimates on how many hours per day U.S. consumers spend in different types of media. I don’t put too much credence in these numbers, but let’s pretend it’s something like this.

• “Browsing the internet” – 6.75 to 8 hours
• TV – 3 to 5 hours
• Audio
• Music is 2.75 to 3.75 hours

• Podcasts 0.5 to 1.25 hours

• Social media – 1.5 to 2 hours

• Gaming 2 hours
• TikTok – 1 hour
• YouTube – 0.5 to 0.75 hours
• Reading – 0.25 hours

I don’t want to imply that you should be in all these places, or that you’re competing in all these places. I think it’s a big mistake to think that way. People have different expectations and goals for different forms of media.

However, to the extent that you can legitimately compete in these other areas, why aren’t you?

Don’t allow “the web” to become the same sort of trap that “the magazine” or “the newspaper” has been for publishers in the past.

Think of ways to move your content into new mediums. That will almost certainly require a new production workflow, new talent, different revenue models, and other changes to your business model.

But what’s the alternative? Are you going to stay with the web page as it continues to decline?

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For better AI images, learn the language

When my oldest child was a lad and we’d go for walks in the woods, I told him a story about two brothers who went hiking. When they got home, their father asked what they saw. The first boy said, “A bunch of trees and some birds.” The second boy said, “There were a lot of sweetgum and birch trees, but we saw a stand of old poplars, a little grove of white oaks, and few red oaks, and lots of maples. There were a ton of robins, and I heard Carolina Chickadees and cardinals. I think I saw a red-tailed hawk up in a tree, and there were a lot of downy woodpeckers too.”

I’d ask my son which boy got more out of the walk.

There’s something analogous when you use an AI image generator.

If I just say “make me an image of somebody reading an email,” I might get a nice result, but there are so many options for stylizing images.

Here’s a very partial list.

• Watercolor
• Oil painting
• Pencil sketch
• Charcoal drawing
• Pixel art
• Graffiti art
• Plasticine
• 3-d model
• Layered paper
• Blacklight
• Diagramatic drawing
• Infographic drawing
• Stained glass window
• Knolling
• Game sheet
• Cartoon image
• Whimsical animation
• Simplified structures
• Historical illustrations
• Anime
• Cyberpunk futurism

In addition to that, you can say “in the style of” and then list some artist you like.

Vincent van Gogh, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, or you can mention a more modern art style, like Shintaro Kago, or Jack Kirby, or whatever you like.

Then there’s a whole range of other specs you can provide.

Aspect Ratio is the ratio between the width and height. 9:16 would be typical for a portrait.

You can specify a camera angle or perspective, such as “bird’s-eye view,” or eye-level.

Some images might be more appropriate in harsh shadows, or soft lighting. You can even use a time of day, like twilight.

Different textures work better for different images – like glossy or matte or smooth.

I don’t know much about cameras, but you can specify what kind of camera, what shutter speed, aperture settings, etc.

What kind of weather do you want?

Is there a relevant historical setting or context?

Should it be futuristic, or fantastical?

I’m not well versed in all these things. I know what I like when I see it, but I can’t tell you what style or artist I would like to imitate.

There’s a whole language to learn about AI art. But here’s an interesting hack. You can use one AI to help with another AI.

For example, I can use ChatGPT to help with my Midjourney prompt.

If you’re in the business of creating images to go along with articles, start paying attention to different styles of images. Do you want TRON, Tim Burton, Lord of the Rings, MAD Magazine, Frank Frazetta, Norman Rockwell?

Do you want to create your own style to go with your brand? Learn the words that can communicate your style to the AI image generators.

There are a lot of websites that have examples of prompts for images. You can learn a lot by going through these lists and looking for examples. Read the prompt they use and learn from it.

Try to develop your own style, and what words and settings will enforce that style with the image generator.

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It’s not their fault. They’re filling a void.

I’m old now, and I’ve heard a lot of things. Often, when somebody is talking about topic A, I’m not necessarily engaged with what they’re saying. My brain is doing something analogous to Google Trends, running down parallel tracks, and thinking of related ideas.

So I want to be clear that I’m not blaming Brian, Alex, Troy, or Rafat for what I’m about to say, although it was sparked by a portion of their conversation in the latest People vs. Algorithms podcast.

They’re talking about media, and from my perspective, media has gone through a fundamental transformation in the past couple decades. But it’s probably not the transformation you’re thinking of – about the internet and search and AI and all that.

No. The media has taken up Elijah’s mantle. They think they’re prophetic. Not in the silly sense of predicting the future, but in the sense of trying to give order to world events.

Brian summarized it by mentioning people who get their worldview from The New York Times or Fox News.

That horrifies me, because they’re not even remotely qualified for the job.

And I don’t only mean that they’re not up to the task intellectually – although I do mean that. More importantly, they’re structurally incapable of serving that purpose. As much as they like to pretend otherwise, media organizations don’t exist to pursue the truth. They exist to sell media.

Let’s make this very simple. Big Pharma does a lot of advertising in the media. Given that, can you trust the media to tell you the truth about Big Pharma?

And I don’t mean to pick on that particular issue. It’s just emblematic of the general problem.

People should be getting their worldview from church, or synagogue, or from the Stoics, or maybe even from a great professor in college – although I have my reservations about that.

And this brings us back to the quote attributed to Chesterton, “When men cease to believe in God, they don’t believe nothing, they believe in anything.”

It’s not about God. It’s about leaving a systematic and comprehensive view of the world. It doesn’t matter what you think about Catholicism or Judaism or Stoicism or any other ism, the point is that they’ve been around long enough to consider things in a depth that provides a structure for the data of life.

But as a culture we’ve lost that. People can’t even name the ten commandments. From a “worldview” perspective, a large part of the population doesn’t know a damned thing.

So the media is filling that gap.

Years ago I used to listen to the McNeil Lehrer News Hour. They had a good format. They would give you the facts, then they would try to explain them – and they’d usually have people from different perspectives – generally slightly left or slightly right.

They weren’t trying to give you a worldview.

Now, we have media bellyaching about partisanship and how to bridge ideological gaps and how to bring people together – which they actually don’t want to do because it’s a better business to be ideological.

But the problem here is not the media. They didn’t create the problem and they can’t solve it. The media is simply rushing in to fill a void that was created by people abandoning the things that give meaning and structure to life.

That was never their role, and it should never be their role.

The point is that when you start to look to the media to solve this problem, you’re looking in the wrong place. We have a crisis of meaning. The media can’t solve that.

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Open rates have been a traditional way to measure email campaigns. Whether a recipient opens an email is taken as a measure of the relevance of things the recipient can see in the preview pane. That’s mostly the subject line, but it also includes the from address, and in some cases the preview text, or a portion of the first line of the email.

That metric is becoming less valuable because of changes in the way emails are handled.

Let’s start with a quick discussion of how open rates work in the first instance. How does the sender know that the recipient has opened the email?

The internet is based on a request and response system. Your web browser, or your email client, makes a request to a server to get some resource, like html code or an image. The server can log that request.

When you send an email, your email service provider includes a tracking pixel, which is a tiny, invisible image embedded in the email. When the email is opened – provided you have images turned on – the email client requests this image from the server. The tracking pixel has code that’s unique to the recipient and to the email campaign, so the ESP can identify which recipients have opened which emails.

Anything that disrupts that process makes open rates less reliable.

There are two fairly large things that disrupt that process.

The first is Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection. Apple decided that open information should be private – that the email sender has no business knowing whether or not you opened their email. So – for the Apple users who opt into this program – Apple opens every email and caches all the images before the email even gets to the recipient. That inflates the reported open rate for emails sent to Apple devices, making overall rates less valuable.

You could filter out known Apple users and rely on the open rate of the remaining recipients, but we’re not done with the problems yet.

It’s not just Apple. A lot of corporations do something similar to what Apple does. They’re concerned about malware, viruses, and other security threats to their networks, so they create a firewall that emails have to get through before they’re delivered to the recipient. These systems often open every email and click on every link before the email is delivered. Once again, that messes with your open rates.

So what do you do about this?

First, don’t abandon open rates altogether. The absolute value of the open rate has declined because many of the opens are coming from these automated systems and not from human users. But the open rate still has a relative value. You can still test two subject lines and choose the one that gets the higher open rate, because even if 30 percent of the opens are phony, that will affect both panels equally, so the winner is still the winner.

Second, since some percent of your opens are phony, you should make your test panels larger. In other words, if you need two panels of at least a thousand names to get a statistically significant result, you might need to bump that up 30 percent or so to make sure you’re still hitting that target with actual users and not with automated systems.

Third, make sure you’re not misrepresenting things – for example, with your advertisers. Don’t give them open rates as if they mean what they used to mean.

Fourth, talk to your systems people. If you can get timestamps on opens, a smart programmer might be able to tease out the real opens from the programmatic opens.

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If it’s important that your subscribers get your emails, here are some things you should be watching.

Many publishers sell paid e-newsletter subscriptions, and many others rely on their free e-newsletters for their business strategy in one way or another. All subscription publishers know that renewals depend on engagement. That means that these publishers should be tracking the health of their distribution lists to ensure their subscribers are getting their issues.

How do you do that?

It starts with the sign-up, or registration. You have to ensure you’re starting this relationship with a valid email address. The simplest way to do that is (1) verify the structure of the email in form itself – e.g., use javascript to ensure it’s something @ something dot something, and (2) use a double opt-in. That’s where a new email address isn’t officially added to the list until you send a test email and the person verifies receipt.

Those two steps will get you off to a good start with a fairly clean list.

However, if you use double opt-in, remember that some people don’t verify their emails, so you should have a marketing automation journey for those people.

Even with double opt-in, it might also be a good idea to ask for a secondary email address in case problems develop with the first one. Just because an email address is valid and deliverable today doesn’t mean it will be in 6 months, and if all you have is a bad email address, you’re stuck.

If you have a subscription publication, people are coming on and off the list all the time, and you have to generate a distribution list for each issue – either from your fulfillment system, or from your email service provider.

If the list is generated from your fulfillment system, there can be a disconnect between what your fulfillment system thinks is active and what your ESP thinks is active. For example, if someone clicks an unsubscribe link on one of your emails that might update your ESP but not your fulfillment system. Keep an eye on that.

Once an issue has been sent, your ESP should have data on undeliverables, opens, clicks, and so on.

Now comes the difficult part – sorting through the delivery reports.

First let’s tackle undeliverables. An undeliverable means your email is not getting through at all. It’s expired, or there’s a typo in it, or something like that.

If there’s an obvious typo, fix it and resend the issue to the new address. Otherwise, you might have to reach out to the subscriber to get an update. That’s the virtue of having a secondary email address – or some other way to contact the subscriber. Maybe you can text them, call them, or even send them a letter. How far you go will be determined by how much you want to invest in keeping a current subscriber.

There are also services that can update bad emails for you. A simple example is when a company changes the structure of their emails – say from first initial last name @ company.com to first name dot last name @ company.com. While companies usually forward emails in such cases, sometimes they only forward for a limited period of time. An update service can automate the process of cleaning up bad addresses.

So we’ve done all that and we still have undeliverable emails, or emails that are never being opened. What do you do?

To decide how far you want to go in hunting down undeliverable messages, you have to assign some value to keeping that connection alive. If you’re trying to deliver a $500 paid e-newsletter, you’d better take reasonable measures to make sure the e-newsletters are being delivered. If it’s a free, ad-supported email, you might make far less aggressive attempts to fix problems.

I can’t cover every nook and cranny of this issue in my short podcast, but I hope I’ve outlined it well enough that you have a good idea about how to make this work for your e-newsletters. But if you’d like to chat about it, give me a call.

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The vast majority of us are average, and average doesn’t sell

There’s a lot of concern in the media business right now. It seems as if the world is coming unglued. Brands are dying, or laying off a lot of people.

I’ve heard lots of different sorts of explanations, and while there’s some truth to many of them, I’m going to toss my own into the mix.

There are simply too many people providing content, and this is what happens.

You’ve heard of the Pareto principle – that 20 percent of your customers account for 80 percent of your revenue; 20 percent of your employees do 80 percent of the work; and 20 percent of authors sell 80 percent of the books.

It’s a spooky thing, in at least two ways. First, it continues to apply as you did down, so that if you take that top 20 percent of authors who sell 80 percent of the books, 20 percent of those authors sell 80 percent of those books. And that pattern continues to iterate until you get one or two people who sell most of the books. The second spooky thing is that this principle even applies to planets and ecosystems and hurricanes and such, so it’s not just a quirk of human behavior.

The internet has made it trivially easy to become a content creator. Bob Hoffman jokes that he finally met somebody who doesn’t have a podcast.

YouTube, TikTok, Wordpress – all that, plus the fact that we all have a movie studio in our pocket.

This results in an absolute tsunami of content, and AI is going to make it even worse. I just attended a session the other day where a friend explained how you can create a book with designrr.io in about ten minutes.

Supply is close to unlimited, but while demand for internet content is way bigger than I ever expected it to be – people spend a huge amount of time on their phones – it’s still limited. There are only so many hours in a day.

It stands to reason that the content space is going to have some casualties.

Spotify listeners spent 14.9 million total hours listening to The Joe Rogan Experience in the first month it was available on that service. Those 14.9 million hours were not spent on newspapers or magazines.

My take on all this is that if you’re a media company, the answer won’t be found in revenue or business model innovation. Those are good things, but they’re not going to address the fundamental problem, which is that the top 20 percent are going to continue to take the lion’s share, and with the constant addition of new creators, that top 20 percent is going to get better and better and better.

You’re competing in an ocean of content. New people are coming on board all the time, and while most of them are average, and no particular threat, some of them are talented, and a small portion of them are super talented.

My friend Jimmy Finkelstein recently tried to start a new media business on the premise that people want news from a moderate point of view. My first reaction was “No, people actually want to hear lunatics screaming about the end of the world.”

But my second reaction was that’s really not the issue. The issue is talent. And I don’t mean to speak against anyone at The Messenger. I’m sure there were some talented people there. But in every profession you have some people who are so much better than everyone else that it defies understanding. Think of Patrick Mahomes, or Steven King. These guys are on the edges of the distribution curve.

So my recommendation to media companies is to find extraordinary talent. Things like paywalls and first-party data and all that stuff will pale in significance to the effect of very talented people.

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"Eat your own cooking."

"The cobbler's son has no shoes."

"Physician, heal thyself."

"Take your own medicine."

There are a lot of sayings that follow that same theme, and I think they're so popular because it's a fairly universal problem. Everyone is good at giving recommendations, but few of us are good at taking them. Even from ourselves.

Jordan Peterson says we should treat ourselves as someone we're responsible for. Or, in other words, we should apply the same sort of critical scrutiny to our own actions that we would apply to someone who came to us for help.

How do you apply that in your business?

Let’s say someone came to you with a complaint that their email marketing isn’t doing as well as it used to. You’d probably have a list of suggestions for them to consider. But do you apply those to your own email marketing?

None of us are expert in everything, and we can’t rely on the occasional plea for help from a colleague to prompt us to reconsider our techniques. We need to be more proactive and thoughtful about it. So here’s a simple method.

Pick some activity you’re involved in that you wish you could do better at.

Step 1: Forget about what you do – your own operations and limitations. Set all that aside. Keeping your own operations in mind will distort the way you look at the issue. You’ll make excuses, and you’ll limit the things you’re willing to consider.

Step 2: Come up with a list of sources for advice on the topic. That could include …

YouTube videos

White papers

Blogs

Conversations with your favorite AI tool

Groups on Reddit

Step 3: Spend some focused time digging into these resources – preferably in a new place. Not in your office. Again, don’t think of your own operations. Imagine you’ve been asked to give a presentation on the topic, or write a white paper.

Take notes, and don’t worry too much about organizing them. This is the information-gathering stage.

Continue to do that until you feel like you’ve heard everything there is to hear, and it starts to get repetitive.

Step 4: Forget about it. Put it aside. Spend a day at the park. Sleep on it. Distract your conscious mind from the problem so your unconscious mind can work on it.

Step 5: Once again, get out of your office. You don’t want your thoughts to be encumbered by the routine. Review your notes and organize them into an outline. You’ll be surprised at the extra little insights that will occur to you, that can fill in and expand on your outline. During Step 4, your brain was making connections and working on all the things you gathered in Step 3. You’ll find new ways to organize and synthesize the information.

Step 6: Now go back to your office, take your outline and compare it with what you’re doing.

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Imagine you’re a publisher and you’ve discovered that when your editors promote their content on social media, it dramatically improves your web traffic, or downloads of your podcast. You’re considering asking (or even requiring) your editors to post their work on social media.

Is that a good idea?

I have reservations about it, and some suggestions.

Reservation #1 – you’re tying your brand to your employee’s personal lives in a way that isn’t fair to them or to you. You’re going to be faced with situations where employees have controversial views. What are you going to do? Are you going to be some Stalinist dictator and police what they do on social media? Or are you going to have your content side by side with who knows what kind of crazy opinion?

Neither option is good.

Reservation #2 – you’re ignoring personality differences. If you gather 100 employees in a room and give them a talk about how much social media can help with this or that, 10 of them will be gung ho and champing at the bit, 10 of them will want to quit, and the rest will be somewhere else on the continuum in between.

This may be a matter of introversion and extroversion, and you’re not going to change that with motivational talks, training, incentives, threats or anything else. People pretty much are the way they are. You’re going to cause your introverts to look for another job.

Reservation #3 – some people will be better at it than others. You can train to some level of basic competency, but often there’s a hidden whatsit that makes one person excel and another just get by. It might create resentments, and it’s not your best strategy.

Here are my recommendations – if you’re going to do this at all.

Suggestion #1 – Ask your employees to post content exclusively on LinkedIn, and also ask them to keep everything they post on LinkedIn professional. No personal opinions. That’s the way most people envision LinkedIn anyway, so that’s not a big ask. And it solves reservation #1.

Suggestion #2 – Have a company account on as many social media platforms as you like, appoint someone to manage those accounts, and if you have people who are eager to post content on social media – beyond LinkedIn – let them suggest a few things, try them out, and if they’re good, give them access to that company account. That addresses reservations 2 and 3.

Suggestion #3 – Be sensitive to different levels of talent, comfort, and general opinions on social media. Don’t try to force everyone into a particular box.

Let me tell a personal anecdote that might shed light on this.

Have you ever been to a conference or an event where some excited person gets up front and tries to rile up the crowd. “Are you excited out there?” and all that kind of stuff.

Some people enjoy that. I can’t stand it. If you try to motivate me that way, it’ll backfire.

Not everybody wants to be on the cheerleading squad. But those other people – the grumps in the corner, like me – also have things to contribute.

If you have a few really talented, gung ho, extroverted social media stars, don’t try to clone them. It’s not going to work. Instead, find ways for other people to provide help and support, to make your stars even more effective.

Deploy different talents and personalities appropriately. Don’t try to force everyone into the same Myers Briggs category. (In fact, don’t use Myers Briggs at all.)

These personality differences mean that you have to give people different options. Don’t tell everyone “please post this on your LinkedIn account,” because the person writing that text is going to be the ra ra “get fired up” cheerleader, and the introverted editor is going to read it and think, “I’d rather die.”

So, to sum up. Have a company social media account on lots of social media platforms. Ask your employees to post on LinkedIn only. And accommodate different personalities and levels of talent.

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We can predict the path of the print to digital transition by comparing it to past transitions

The whole "print is dead" mantra is misguided. At the bottom of this article I’ll link to something I wrote about that.

We are clearly experiencing a transition from print to digital. The question is whether it will be a complete or a partial transition. Let's look at some examples and see what they tell us.

Complete or "mostly complete" transitions

• From horses to cars.

• From whale oil lamps to electric lights.

• From telegraph to telephone.

• From vinyl records to streaming and digital music.

• From letters in the mail to email and instant messaging.

• From film photography to digital photography.

• From manual typewriters to computers and word processors.

Partial transitions

• From AM radio to FM radio.

• From physical stores to online shopping.

• From traditional theaters to home streaming.

• From in-person concerts to music videos.

• From shoe laces to velcro, or buttons to snaps.

• From analog clocks or displays to digital clocks and displays.

• From cash to digital payments.

It looks to me as if a few things distinguish these two lists.

When the new tech is miles ahead of the old tech – like getting around town in a car vs. a horse, or lighting an oil lamp vs. flipping a switch – we get a complete or mostly complete transition.

When the new tech is better in some ways, but isn't a complete or exact replacement for the old tech, we get partial transitions.

For example, online shopping is fantastic, but some people enjoy being in the store, seeing the actual item, or even picking it up and feeling it. The new technology can't completely replace the old technology.

Think of analog vs. digital watches. 2:45 on a digital watch requires just a touch more thinking than looking at an analog watch. In some ways, the analog watch presents the data in a more understandable and intuitive way.

As a side note, I much prefer analog watches, but I wear a digital watch because it's easier to time my laps when I go swimming.

What does that tell us about the print to digital transition?

Well ... is the digital magazine miles ahead of the print magazine? Clearly not. The digital version has some advantages, but print has some advantages, some of which Bo discusses in his short article.

So unless somebody invents a digital magazine that's miles ahead of print, and replaces almost all of its advantages, I predict that print will continue to have a place in the publishing and reading landscape.

Links

BoSacks speaks out: Printed magazines are falsely maligned as relics of the past

https://www.bosacks.com/bosacks-speaks-out/bosacks-speaks-out-printed-magazines-are-often-falsely-maligned-as-relics-of-the-past

I'm announcing the death of "the death of print"

https://krehbielgroup.com/2023/10/21/im-announcing-the-death-of-the-death-of-print/

You don’t have to be a Luddite to see the value of print

https://krehbielgroup.com/2023/10/11/you-dont-have-to-be-a-luddite-to-see-the-value-in-print/

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Imagine that I have a website with three main audiences. People who love swimming, running, and hiking.

Also imagine that I have a customer data platform, so I can identify individual users and keep tabs on what content they like.

Since I’m able to do that, I can put people into audiences – e.g., swim fan, running fan, hiking fan. Of course there might be some overlap between audiences, which is fine.

Within each audience, I track what’s popular and what’s trending. But not only that. I can check to see if there’s a difference in content preference between the highly engaged visitor and the drive bys and the casual readers.

At this point I might have six collections of content – what the highly engaged fan is reading in each of my three audiences, and what the not-so-engaged are reading. Or watching or listening, right? Obviously I can divide this further – like between video and text content – but let’s leave that aside for now and just focus on the content as content.

I’m going to pick the highly engaged swim fan as my example.

I grab all that content and pull out the keywords, tags, categories, and so on. I’m not going to restrict myself to the keywords and tags assigned by the editors. I’m going to use natural language processing to scan these articles and come up with another type of categorization. Additional words to add to the mix.

Once I have a collection of all the keywords that are popular with my swim fans this week, AI can find similar words and concepts and start to build a pretty interesting model of what sorts of topics swim fans care about right now.

What’s next?

You could just generate a report for the writers showing what types of concepts are playing well with the swim fans. The benefit of using AI here is that this report isn’t just a matter of keywords, like goggles and freestyle and sample workouts. You can get sentiment analysis, like “fun, light-hearted articles are more popular,” or “challenging articles are more popular.” There’s any number of factors you might want to consider.

This is analytics on steroids.

Your writers can use this analysis to come up with ideas for next week’s articles.

Or we can take this all the way to the scary level and ask AI to write the articles based on the information you’re getting from your data.

Realize what we’ve done here. We’ve come up with a technological way to listen to our audience, discern what interests them, and then give them more of what they want.

While I was going through all this you might have had the thought that there’s a danger of getting into a spiral, where you go deeper and deeper into a narrower and narrower set of concepts. That’s a possible consequence of this kind of work, so it might be a good idea to build mechanisms to prompt people outside of their stated preferences – at least to some extent.

For example, Spotify might get the idea that I only like songs similar to the ones I’ve listened to. That’s usually how recommendations work. But it’s a good idea to toss in the outlier from time to time.

Anyway, there you have it. A system like that could revolutionize content creation. Your weekly e-newsletter could express exactly what your audience is interested in.

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There’s a scene in The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly where Tuco – he’s the ugly guy – goes into a gun shop, examines several revolvers, takes the parts that he likes from each and puts them together to make a revolver that suits his preferences.

That’s composability.

The problem with buying software is that you buy 100 percent of it, but often you only use 20 percent.

For example, your email software can do marketing automation, but so can your customer data platform. So in one place or another you’re wasting that function. And your customer data platform can do content recommendations, but so can Outbrain. So you buy more functions than you can use.

When a company buys a new service for their tech stack, they’re often only adding a small portion of that new service’s capabilities.

Imagine that you could get a demo of a software suite and say, “That part doesn’t interest me, but your recommendation engine is great. Can I have just that piece?”

It sounds lovely. You’d have modular, interchangeable components, like building blocks. But the only way that could work would be if all the pieces had a standard type of connector, like Lego blocks. All Lego blocks have the same size connectors.

Software doesn’t work that way. It would be great if it did, but … it doesn’t. Sometimes by design. Apple doesn’t want to make things compatible with Android and vice versa.

So what does it mean when people talk about composable customer data platforms?

It means they’ve designed the CDP to be modular, allowing organizations to tailor their customer data infrastructure to their specific needs and objectives. The system is supposed to have interchangeable and interoperable parts or components, so that you can plug in any email service provider, any database, any business intelligence tool, and so on.

But it’s not quite like Tuco at the gun shop. You can’t pull this piece from here and this other piece from over there, and assemble your own system.

For one thing, all these allegedly modular components aren’t always priced that way. You still have to buy components that you don’t want.

Another issue is that even if the CDP were completely composable, so that you could pick and choose a la carte, there’s no accepted standard for how all these pieces are supposed to work together.

Think of the industrial revolution. We standardized parts so that one factory could make one part, another factory could make a different part, and somebody else assembled it. That only works because of cooperation between the different factories. They have to agree on specs.

In the software world, this becomes “integrations.” You need to build special connectors between different modules.

While “composability” sounds great in theory. It sounds like we’re taking the lessons of the industrial revolution and applying them to software. But it doesn’t seem to be working quite yet. There are still too many custom formats and custom layouts, so we’re still stuck with building bespoke tech stacks where there’s duplication of function and a lot of inefficiency.

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What good is it if someone signs up for your site with their junk email address?

Let’s make things overly simple and divide the “how to monetize your website” question into three options.

• Free, supported by ads
• Registration wall
• Paywall

There are a lot more options, but bear with me.

Each of these models has challenges. If you choose “free, supported by ads,” people can use ad blockers. They can register with their junk email address. And there are ways to get past paywalls. There’s no perfect solution. But maybe we can make them better.

You can detect ad blockers and respond with a polite request to turn it off, or you can simply disallow browsers that have ad blockers. There are a range of options.

But I want to focus on registration walls, because I don’t think we pay enough attention to this one.

The main benefit of a registration wall is that you capture an email address which you can monetize in lots of different ways. But the user can give you a junk email, or they can give you their good email address and unsubscribe from your messages.

Why put up with that? It’s analogous to someone subscribing with a bad credit card.

If you’re going to limit access to registered users, why not enforce that and insist that the email associated with that registration is deliverable and shows some engagement?

This requires an integration between your registration function and your email service provider. This would be a relatively easy use case in a Customer Data Platform. If you’re not sure how to do it, give me a call.

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I don’t like social media and I don’t like so-called “influencers,” so keep that in mind as you listen to this one

Martha Marchesi proposes four New Year’s resolutions for B2B marketers. Bo Sacks dropped the article in my inbox yesterday, so … here’s my reaction.

Yes, no, yes, no.

Or, if you want the details …

1 is make friends with AI. I agree with that. Either start using AI or get left behind.

Marchesi recommends Perplexity, and she’s in good company. Troy Young from the People vs. Algorithms podcast also has a lot of good to say about Perplexity. And Troy’s a smart guy.

I like ChatGPT and Midjourney, both of which Marchesi also recommends, but I dabble in other services from time to time.

I’m not thrilled with DALL-E, but that might be because I haven’t tried very hard to learn it.

2 is put your B2B brand under the influence of influencers.

My first reaction to that is very simple. Bud Lite.

My second reaction is that I can’t imagine someone I would less like to work with than an “influencer.”

But my third reaction is that Marchesi may be right and I’m just being a grump.

3 is add more human touch, which somehow quickly turns into “use short-form video.”

Obviously I’m a big fan of short-form video – if my 3 to 4 minute podcast qualifies as “short.” I haven’t pursued the super-short videos because I haven’t found a good way to do that yet.

Also, I’m not sure my target market is watching those things to learn about publishing and marketing technology.

This is where I get confused. People say, “You need to be on Instagram and TikTok,” and I think, first, “I’d rather die,” but second, to the extent that the people I want to reach are on TikTok, I think they’re doing other things, like watching cats. I don’t think they’re in the mood for serious stuff.

4 is shore up your corporate social responsibility story, to which I say run away as fast as you can.

Shoring up on so-called “social responsibility” issues sounds like the best possible way to make half your market hate you.

Unfortunately, I really do mean “hate you.”

You might pick some topic that you believe any decent, thinking person would agree with, and would help your brand, but it seems to me there are no such topics. We live in strange times where people not only believe a bunch of craziness, but get very upset about it. It’s shocking and disturbing, but that’s the reality.

I’m a big believer in the idea that “the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing,” but I’d keep that in your private life. There have been a lot of casualties from corporations sticking their noses into social issues.

So, to sum up.

Yes, make friends with AI. Do not get tied up with influencers. Yes, add a human touch. And steer clear of “social responsibility” stuff, unless it’s really basic stuff like picking up trash on the local highway. That would be fine.

Links

Four areas every B2B marketer should explore in 2024

https://www.fastcompany.com/91013227/new-years-revolution-four-areas-every-b2b-marketer-should-explore-in-2024

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If you want a quick way to enrich your online profiles with email addresses, I’ve got a solution for you.

One of the basic CDP use cases is to convert unknown, or anonymous web visitors to known. That means you have to collect some PII – some personally identifiable information. Usually that’s an email address.

There are a lot of ways to do this. You can capture an email address the visitor enters on your e-newsletter sign-up form, in your shopping cart, or other situations like that. That’s a pretty safe way to associate an email address with a web profile, and then you can use that email address as an identifier and enrich the online profile with data from other sources.

But there’s a faster way to enrich web profiles with email addresses. That involves passing a hash of the email address, or a unique identifier from your ESP, as a query parameter in your email.

Here’s what I mean.

I send out an article with a link to this page.

https://krehbielgroup.com/2024/01/16/5-ways-to-improve-digital-magazines

Now notice this URL.

https://krehbielgroup.com/2024/01/16/5-ways-to-improve-digital-magazines/?email=greg@krehbielgroup.com

This time I’ve passed my email address as a query parameter.

BTW, I’m only showing it this way so you can understand the concept. Don’t send the email address in the open like that. People will freak out. Use some other value, like ID=, and use a proxy for the email address.

The CDP can capture that value from the query parameter and add it to my web profile.

Bingo. I’ve associated an anonymous web profile with an email address.

But have I?

What if the recipient of your email forwards it to somebody else, or posts that URL to social media? Now other people are going to get that same email address in their web profile.

I’ve heard this called an edge case, but I know for a fact that it’s not. I’ve tested it, and if you collect email addresses this way, you’re going to get a lot of junk. It will work fine for a large percentage of your users, but for some users it will be a catastrophe. The worst part of it is that it will be a catastrophe for precisely those users you want to have a really good relationship with, because those are the users who are forwarding your emails and posting your content on social media. Those are your “whales” as my friend Rob Ristagno would say.

So where does that leave us? This is a great method for enriching profiles with an email address, and can quickly help you convert a lot of unknowns to knowns, but it has a very serious flaw. How do we fix it?

First, let’s divide the problem into two different scenarios: clicks from social media, and clicks from emails.

I would simply not use clicks from social media. In other words, if the referer is social media, don’t capture the value in the query parameter. I’m assuming you know what an HTTP referer is. If not, I’ll provide a link below.

Clicks from emails are a little more difficult because there’s no simple way to distinguish clicks from the correct email recipient and clicks from someone who received it as a forward. But here are some options.

1. If your ESP provides the time when the recipient clicked on the link, and that matches the time when you collected the query parameter, you can be confident you’re collecting the right email address.
2. You could also use a counter. You can assume that the profile that collects the email ID the most frequently is the correct recipient.
3. It might spook your readers, but you could also just ask. Something like “Our system tells us your email address is such and so.” This would be very transparent, and would allow you to get consent to use that email address in your online customer journeys, but there are clearly downsides as well.

In short, this is a very powerful CDP use case, but it can create a powerful pile of mess if you don’t use it properly. If you have questions, please give me a call.

Links

HTTP referer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer

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When everybody’s crowding the inbox, try the mailbox.

My friend Todd Lebo from Ascend2 sent me a new research study on the use of print in marketing.

Yes, that’s right. Print. You might think print is dead, but if you didn’t get the memo, I announced the death of “the death of print” quite a while ago.

Print publications and print marketing still have an important role, but of course it’s a smaller role than it used to be.

Allegra and Ascend2 partnered on some research on this topic. I’ll provide a link below.

“58 percent of marketers,” they say, “expect to increase their use of printed marketing materials in the coming year,” and marketers who have used printed materials in the past year are more likely to have seen an increase in revenue.

Brochures and flyers are the most popular printed marketing materials, followed by non-post card direct mail and promotional signs.

High printing and production costs are the main barrier to more extensive use of print marketing, but ROI remains high.

The main thing holding people back from using print is simple preference. They prefer digital channels – possibly because they think digital marketing is easier to track. That may be a misconception, and I’ll provide a link below on that topic.

The report discusses a lot of things about the quality of the printing, which is an interesting differentiator. You can make a printed brochure really stand out with specialty finishes, die cuts, high quality paper, and so on. There’s nothing really analogous on the digital side.

Marketers who use direct mail say it improves brand awareness and the company’s image.

This research study strengthens the idea – at least in mind – that on both the marketing and the product side, print is a luxury option. Don’t use it as the workhorse. Use it for small lists. For your best customers. Use print to make an impression.

Links

Impact of Print and Mail in Modern Marketing Strategy

https://www.allegramarketingprint.com/impact-of-print-in-modern-marketing-strategy

Online advertising: The funny, fuzzy math

https://martech.org/online-advertising-the-funny-fuzzy-math/

The death of “the death of print”

https://krehbielgroup.com/2023/10/21/im-announcing-the-death-of-the-death-of-print/

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In my experience, creating summaries of articles, and creating images to accompany articles are the best use of AI right now

The Daily Maverick learned some interesting things while experimenting with ChatGPT version 3. I’ll provide the link below.

I don’t believe their specific results are relevant to ChatGPT 4, which has fixed several of the problems with version 3, but they do identify a series of things that your should test if you want to try AI yourself. In the list below, I’ll include the things they tried, plus my own recommendations.

For article summaries …

• Do you want the summary to include every point in the article, or do you want it to entice the reader to read the full article?
• Is the summary accurate? Does it capture nuance and context?
• Do you want the summary to stay within a certain character, word, or sentence length?
• Does the quality of the summary vary based on the structure of the article – e.g., a pyramid style article might get one kind of summary, while a story with a flowery intro might get another sort altogether.
• Should summaries vary in tone or style for different sorts of articles, e.g., news, opinion, or feature stories.
• Can the summary duplicate the tone of your publication? And does that matter?

Then, of course, are the well-known problems of hallucinations and the simple question whether the summaries are any good.

Remember that you may be able to correct problems you identify by adjusting the prompts you use.

If you’re going to experiment with something like this, remember Gall’s law – that is, start with something simple that works! And make sure you take the writer’s or editor’s workflow into consideration. It’s no good to build something they won’t use.

If you find a way to create good summaries using AI, the next question is how to use them.

On my blog I put the summary right up front. Some websites have found that increases engagement with the article, but my reason is simpler. I’m not writing a mystery novel, and if the summary is good enough, so be it.

Here are some other ideas.

Use the summaries in the mobile app, as a popup, or sidebar. You could even create a completely new interface that just has the summaries. Sometimes that’s all people want.

You can try text summaries or summaries expressed in bullet points.

In addition to summaries, AI can be used to create translations of your articles.

I believe you should label things that are generated by AI, unless it’s fairly obvious. For example, I use AI-generated images on my site, but I think it’s obvious they’re from AI, so I don’t label them as such – although I do have a note on the page to explain how I use AI on the site.

Links

Daily Maverick experiments with in-house AI solutions while learning from its editors

https://www.inma.org/blogs/ideas/post.cfm/daily-maverick-experiments-with-in-house-ai-solutions-while-learning-from-its-editors

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Weren’t print magazines supposed to have been displaced by digital a long time ago?

Bo Sacks distributed an article on that topic, which I’ll link below.

Given the fact that the economics of print magazine publishing are awful and getting worse, what can digital publishers learn from print. IOW, if the budget is telling you to get more people to switch to digital, make digital better!

In that spirit, I’ll mention five things that I think are better about print publications, and some possible ways to do something analogous in digital.

1 — A print magazine has ads, but they don’t hover over the text and get in your way the way they do online. You don’t have to x out of them so you can see the article. Ideally, they’re on a page by themself. I.e., there’s a page with an article, and a page with an ad. The ad doesn’t usually crowd out the text.

Recommendation: Don’t allow ads to interfere with the reading experience. Design your digital magazine for the reader first, then for the advertiser.

2 — A print magazine doesn’t beep at you while you’re reading. It doesn’t try to distract you.

Recommendation: Make it easy for the reader to turn off notifications while reading your digital magazine, and don’t use pop-ups or anything like them.

3 — A magazine is random access. You can start at the back if you like. You can flip pages. You can open to the middle.

Recommendation: Focus on easy navigation, create something like “flipping pages,” and make it possible to skip many pages at a time — rather than, for example, having to swipe for every new page.

4 — The ads in the magazine are part of the experience. When I was a kid, my brother got some magazine simply to see all the little ads on the last few pages. You know, ads to mail order sea monkeys, or slides for your microscope, or x-ray glasses.

As an adult, it’s nice to see ads that are related to the topic. If it’s a boat magazine, I want to see all the cool new boats. If it’s a hunting magazine, I want to see what’s new in crossbows. That’s part of the appeal.

Recommendation: Change the way you think of ads. Some people watch the SuperBowl just to see the commercials. Strive to make ads a welcome part of the e-magazine experience rather than an annoyance.

5 — You can leave a magazine open to a particular page. “Hey honey, check out that article on the coffee table” makes sense because the magazine is laying there, open to page 7.

You can also dog ear a magazine, or even cut out a page.

Recommendation: Make it easy to remember where you are, to bookmark pages, and to share pages.

Print does some things better than digital, and vice versa. But there’s no reason why digital can’t catch up.

Ask your print audience what they like. And don’t do something cheap and easy so you can say, “Oh yeah, we do that” — the way some resorts will install a tiny little ice-skating rink just so they can say they have one.

Think about the print experience, and why people like the things that they like. Don’t try to duplicate it exactly, but think creatively about how to fulfill that need in a digital environment.

Also, don’t think of your print subscribers as Neanderthals who can’t get with the program. They have reasons to like print. Learn from them.

Links

Magazines were supposed to die in the digital age. Why haven’t they?

https://theconversation.com/magazines-were-supposed-to-die-in-the-digital-age-why-havent-they-217371

I’m announcing the death of “the death of print”

https://krehbielgroup.com/2023/10/21/im-announcing-the-death-of-the-death-of-print/

You don’t have to be a Luddite to see the value in print

https://krehbielgroup.com/2023/10/11/you-dont-have-to-be-a-luddite-to-see-the-value-in-print/

We need to improve reader comprehension online

https://krehbielgroup.com/2024/01/02/we-need-to-improve-reader-comprehension-online/

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In today’s episode I discuss design issues with my friend Tricia Okin. Tricia is a user experience designer who helps organizations and businesses design websites and apps both for the benefit of the company and the user.

When I think of design, I’m reminded of something my dad frequently said when I was a boy. He’d say “stop trying to help me.” And that’s exactly how I feel about so many websites and apps.

Tricia recommends thinking about “escape hatches,” which is a more polite way of saying “stop trying to help me.”

For example, autofill and predictive text are both great functions, but sometimes they get in the way and make things worse. Why not have an easy way to x out of it?

Tricia also recommends allowing users to curate their own personalization.

Take LinkedIn as an example. You have hundreds of contacts, but if you interact with a few people in a week, LinkedIn will show those people all the time – as if you don’t have any other contacts.

It would be nice if the consumer / user could adjust the assumptions behind the recommendations.

Users need a way to “skip all the guff” and get back to what they were trying to do – not what the site assumes or expects the user wants to do.

You can find Tricia at ...

https://www.triciaokin.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/triciaokin/

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Think of all the things you could do with better information about your customers.

I’ve done all my work with Customer Data Platforms in the publishing industry, but every industry needs to understand their customer data better, and there are great opportunities – especially in retail. When I go into a store, I’m always thinking about how that store could reach me more effectively if they had a good CDP strategy. So today I’m going to talk briefly about some CDP use cases for retail stores.

The basic purpose of a CDP is to gather customer information from multiple different sources to get a more complete view of the customer – in one place. These sources might include point of sale systems, and other in-store data, e-commerce data, customer service information, social media interactions, loyalty programs, information from supply chain and inventory systems, data from your email system, third-party data sources, and other things.

By integrating all these data points, the retailer can get a better sense of the customer and provide a better service.

Here are a few practical use cases for retailers.

Personalized product recommendations. This can be based on that customer’s purchase history, or on the purchase history of lookalike models. That is, people like that customer. These recommendations can be delivered by email, in app, in print, or as coupons on the customer receipt.

Speaking of print, my local grocery store sends me a flyer about what’s on sale. By combining that mail data with in-store purchase data, the grocery store could determine who actually responds to these mailings. They could send fewer mailings – or none – to the people who don’t respond to the mailings, and more to the people who do.

They could also do custom printing to send me a flyer for things I want to buy and my neighbor a flyer for things he wants to buy.

Once I’m in the store, the retailer could display a QR code with a link to the latest bargains. There are many ways to personalize that experience. The simplest would be by location. But if you can link the recommendation with customer data – for example, with a rewards number, or a login – then you can customize those deals. There’s no point in sending me a discount on dog food because I don’t have a dog.

Many of the retailers you visit – especially the big chains – already have this kind of information. When you buy a Hewlett Packard printer at Staples, they send you ads for Hewlett Packard ink cartridges.

But smaller retailers don’t always have the IT infrastructure to make this sort of thing work.

That raises an important question. How big do you have to be to benefit from a Customer Data Platform?

I can’t give a generic answer because it depends on your market, your profit margins, and other things.

But if you’re curious, give me a call. That doesn’t cost you anything.

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My friend Charles Benaiah takes apart the on-going conflict between The New York Times and OpenAI. Bo Sacks picked it up the other day, and I’ll provide a link below.

It pains me to say it – honestly it does – but the New York Times is doing God’s work on this topic. This is, of course, the only topic where it’s possible to say that.

Here’s the basic problem. Publishers put their content online for “free” – supported by ads – because that was their path to discovery in the search engines. They didn’t have the foresight to put restrictive terms on access to that content. They should have made it clear that the content was only available under certain terms.

I mean – why the heck do we hire lawyers?

OpenAI took advantage of the ambiguity. They slurped up New York Times content and used it to create a service to compete with The New York Times.

That’s disgusting and bad form and all that, but is it technically illegal? That’s what we need to find out.

OpenAI claims this is “fair use” – which is an exception to copyright protection. I’m no lawyer, but I’ve been in and around copyright questions my whole career, and I think this is transparently stupid.

That doesn’t mean it won’t win in court.

The argument seems to be centering on whether or not AI is quoting copyrighted material verbatim. That is an incredibly short-sighted approach, because if the court rules that AI can’t quote verbatim, they’ll just put in a subroutine to make sure they don’t do that, and the fundamental problem will persist.

The fundamental problem being that OpenAI is using copyrighted content in a way that the copyright owner never approved. Unfortunately, they didn’t have the foresight to specifically disclaim this use of their content.

There’s a lawsuit in England right now where OpenAI has apparently admitted that it’s impossible to train their pet dragon without eating lots of young people.

They said "[l]imiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today's citizens."

This is a classic “the ends justify any means” argument.

I love ChatGPT. Just last night I had a great conversation with it about recipes to make fortified wines. It’s an amazing service.

And the neighborhoods controlled by the mafia were pretty safe.

Links

New York Times: All is fair in love and AI

https://mediamakersmeet.com/new-york-times-all-is-fair-in-love-and-ai/

OpenAI admits it's impossible to train generative AI without copyrighted materials

https://www.engadget.com/openai-admits-its-impossible-to-train-generative-ai-without-copyrighted-materials-103311496.html

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There are two big questions. Propensity towards what? And cause and effect.

Many publishers use AI-driven propensity models to great success. I have a link below that discusses how two news publishers use data to retain subscribers.

A typical propensity model for a publisher might discover that those subscribers who view at least three pages per session, at least once per week, are more likely to renew. These kinds of models can drive very important actions, which I’ll discuss below.

Such models are built by feeding a lot of customer data into an AI model and asking it to identify the customer behaviors or other data that are correlated with a particular action. Relevant behaviors might include time on site, pages per visit, how many e-newsletters the person signs up for, etc. Other data might include demographics, or location. I have an article below that elaborates on the types of data you might feed into such a model.

Not all propensity models are the same. One that’s built to predict who will be a repeat customer at a coffee shop is not going to be the same as one that’s built to predict who will renew their magazine subscription. Even within the world of publishing you’ll need different models for different things, depending, for example, on your revenue model. A publisher with an ad-supported site will be looking for different things than a publisher with a subscription-based site.

Here are four ways publishers can use propensity models.

1. Identity people who are likely to churn and put them in a different customer journey. For example, you might have customer service call them, or you might put them in a special email campaign.
2. If you sell leads, you can use a propensity model to identify customers who are more likely to buy your client’s product, and charge a higher price for those leads.
3. Let’s say your propensity model finds out that people who came to your site from Facebook are very unlikely to subscribe. If your major source of revenue is subscription sales, you might not want to bother with Facebook. Or, on the other hand, you could put people who come from Facebook into a different segment, not bother to try to sell them on subscriptions, and try to monetize them with ads.
4. Find actions that are highly correlated with success and encourage those actions. For example, you might find that people who subscribe to at least two e-newsletters are more likely to renew their paid subscription, so you could encourage more sign-ups for e-newsletters.

That last one makes an assumption about cause and effect that you need to think about. Just because people who subscribe to at least two e-newsletters are more likely to renew doesn’t mean that if you encourage people to subscribe to more e-newsletters they will be more likely to renew. It might work, but it might not.

Consider this. Let’s say there’s a correlation between belonging to a gym and maintaining a healthy weight. That doesn’t mean that if you do some grand promotion to get more people signed up at a gym that they’ll all do better at controlling their weight. You don’t want to confuse correlation with cause, but at the same time, correlations can give you some ideas about the types of things you might want to promote.

Let’s say a newspaper discovers that people who read the comics are more likely to renew. Even given what I just said about cause and effect, it would be worthwhile to do an experiment and see if promoting the comics section increases renewals.

Links

How data is used at news organisations to retain subscribers

https://mediamakersmeet.com/how-data-is-used-at-news-organisations-to-retain-subscribers/

Engagement metrics for subscriptions

https://krehbielgroup.com/2023/10/25/engagement-metrics-for-subscriptions/

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The podcast ecosystem is against you, but there are ways to do it

People often ask me how to do a podcast that’s only available to paying subscribers. It’s possible, and I’ll explain a few options below. The main challenge is that the entire podcast ecosystem is built on the Big Tech premise of open content supported by advertising.

Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, etc., all assume that model.

There are a few models that allow for subscriptions, like Patreon, or the subscription options on some of the platforms I just mentioned.

The trouble with those is that the platform gets the subscriber information.

This has been the problem for decades. Big Tech prefers free content supported by ads, but they will accommodate subscriptions, so long as the platform controls access. They do this because they know the value is in the customer information.

The smart publisher wants to keep the customer information for himself, especially if he offers other subscription content. The subscriber doesn’t want one login for the website and another login to access the podcast.

That makes the first option for creating a subscriber-only podcast very obvious. Put your podcast behind the same paywall you use for your other content. You might have to upgrade your server capabilities to manage streaming, but that’s all doable.

The problem with this option is discovery. People expect to find you on the major platforms – Apple and so forth. If you listen to ads for podcasts, they’ll say something like “find it wherever you get your podcasts.” But those, as I’ve mentioned, all assume it will be free.

Let me quickly mention two other options, and then I’ll give you my recommendation.

There’s the cheap and simple option that doesn’t require a paywall. Host the podcast in an obscure directory on your own website. Don’t include it in your site navigation, and don’t allow search engines to index those pages. When a new episode is released, send an email to your paying subscribers with a link to the episode.

There are obvious downsides to that option, but it’s worth considering, especially if you just want to test the concept of a subscription podcast.

The next option goes along with the paywall model above. Host the podcast on your subscriber-only app.

But make sure you include decent functionality. You don’t want to frustrate your subscribers. I get a subscriber-only podcast and I’m always cursing their tech.

Perhaps the best option is to have two versions of your podcast: a free version, that goes on all the regular platforms, and a subscriber-only version that you deliver on your password-protected website or app. This gives you the benefit of the ordinary podcast discovery process, but also allows you to keep your best content for your subscribers.

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Personalization can be very useful, or very annoying

Let’s start with some of the geeky details.

In order to personalize, you need to have information about the person. That could be browsing history, demographics from some 3rd party source, purchase history, the e-newsletters the person gets, etc.

Technically, a web connection is anonymous. But through the magic of cookies, a website can remember who you are.

By the way, this whole thing about the death of cookies refers to third-party cookies. I’m talking about first-party cookies, which are not going away. Call me if you need more information on that.

You can manage this kind of data in a customer data platform, or CDP. If you’re curious about CDPs, please give me a call, but it’s not necessary to know about CDPs for today’s topic.

If a website has a CDP, or similar technology, the site knows who you are when you come back, even if you logged out after your last visit. Your browser still has a cookie that identifies you. You can delete the cookie, but most people don’t do that.

Just because the site doesn’t say “Hello Greg” doesn’t mean it doesn’t know it’s me.

That raises an interesting question. Is it wise to expose to the visitor that you know who he is? That could be considered helpful in some cases and creepy in others. A generic rule for that might be that the more the person feels like a member, the more it’s okay to show that you know who they are. Another way to put that might be that it’s more acceptable on a B2B site than on a B2C site.

But keep the creepy factor in mind.

The other day I read “The Risk of Personalization: do people want and trust it?” by Lars Jensen. It’s a good article with some interesting survey results, and I’ll post a link below.

Personalization comes in many different forms, and I don’t think we can make simple rules about whether people like it or not.

Spotify giving me music recommendations, or Amazon showing me similar products, are very different things than a news site only showing me articles that fit with my preconceptions. They’re both personalization, but one is helpful and the other isn’t.

One of the big things to consider about personalization is whether you’re helping the reader or you’re helping yourself. Not that there’s anything wrong with helping yourself. You’re running a business and you have to make money. But it’s a good question to ask to make sure you’re not going in a bad direction.

Personalization can be great for you and for your customer. But there’s a line. It’s not a very bright line. There seem to be a lot of factors to consider. Here are some things to keep in mind as you think about personalization on your site, or in your app.

• Did you get consent?
• Does the personalization feel intrusive?
• Have you provided a clear explanation of how and why you’re personalizing your site?
• Are you protecting your customer’s data, and have you explained that clearly?
• Have you chosen a type of personalization that feels like manipulation?
• Does your reader feel as if he’s falling into an echo chamber, where he only hears one side?
• Could the personalization be embarrassing if somebody else saw it?

Links

The Risk of Personalization: do people want and trust it?

https://theaudiencers.com/decisions/the-risk-of-personalization-do-people-want-and-trust-it/

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Aggregated opt-out data might be hiding the important stuff

Many years ago I read a science fiction book about a political organization that recruited people from key demographic groups to wear a special watch that would allow them to see and hear all of a politician’s public statements. The watch also measured the wearer’s reactions and fed that back to the control room, where they could see in real time how people were reacting to different statements.

That organization’s candidate had some implant in his brain that allowed some technician sitting in the control room, watching all these monitors, to turn dials one way or another based on this feedback, and change what the candidate was saying. The tech would turn up the empathy dial, or the law and order dial, or whatever was necessary.

That’s science fiction, but isn’t that what political parties would do if they could?

That kind of real-time data is far more valuable than some after the fact “did you like that speech?” questionnaire, because sometimes it’s just one thing in a 45-minute speech that turns somebody off. You need to know what that one thing is.

This morning on LinkedIn I saw a post that was so stupid that I unfollowed that person. I don’t know if that person would care, but assuming he did, wouldn’t it be useful to know which post triggered that action? Let’s say this person posts 10 things in a week. Does a weekly average unfollow rate really help, if 90 percent of the unfollows were in response to a particular post?

With more granular data you can isolate the particular topic, or theme, or style that’s making people leave.

In a similar way, there are themes that show up in some TV shows that are immediate turn offs for me and my wife. As soon as they go that direction, we stop watching. Wouldn’t it be good for the network to know that?

In yet another application, I write books, and some of them are available on Kindle. I want to know a lot more than just whether someone bought the book or liked it. I want to know if they made it all the way through, and if not, where they stopped. That kind of feedback could help me craft better books. In fact, I’d like to know on a page by page basis whether the reader is enjoying the book.

Amazon doesn’t give me that information, by the way.

Now let’s apply this to your email marketing. If you look at aggregated opt-out numbers – over the course of a month, say – you might miss an important signal. Maybe most of the people who opted out did so because of one particular email. Maybe it was too political, or you used a new kind of image, or a new from address.

You need to get granular if you want to find out what’s driving your customers’ actions. Look at opt outs on an email by email basis and not just on an aggregated basis.

You can do something similar with your web-based content. There are services that can tell you how far down the page people get before they leave.

That sort of detail can help you craft a better product.

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Several studies, including one that Bo Sacks sent out the other day, suggest that you comprehend and retain more when you read something on paper.

There are a lot of possible reasons for this. One is that you’re less likely to be distracted. If you’re reading on your phone, you’re getting notifications and other annoyances while you’re trying to read. A book or magazine doesn’t do that.

Another reason is that you engage more of your senses when you read in paper. There’s the smell and the feel of it. And those senses also provide a different level of context, like where you are on the page, whether it’s a left or a right page, and approximately where the text is in relation to the rest of the document.

Memory is often a matter of making connections between things, so the fact that you get more inputs when you’re reading in print probably contributes to better retention and comprehension.

How do we apply this to digital reading?

As I’ve mentioned before, the economics of print are bad and getting worse, so I’m not arguing for a return to print – although I do think it’s a good idea to offer print to the people who want it. The point I’d like to make is that we can probably beat this reading comprehension deficit. We can do things with our digital publications to not only catch up with print, but to do better than print.

The first thing is to stop the distractions. Reading on a mobile website is often a horrible experience. The page is actually designed to disrupt your reading, and not by accident. It’s intentional. That’s how you get more ad revenue.

But think about that. Ads and reading comprehension are in tension. It’s like they’re mutually exclusive goals.

If I want the reader to understand what he’s reading, I don’t want to distract him with a hundred other things.

So how do we reimagine ads so that they don’t disrupt the reading experience? There’s a challenge for you.

Let’s consider other ways we can make digital reading more reader-friendly.

Make it easy for the reader to turn off notifications while he reads the article. That might only be possible in an app, but I think it’s worth pursuing.

Provide text-to-speech options. Some people learn better when they listen. Or even listen and read at the same time.

Make it easier to take notes, highlight, and then have access to those notes and highlights later.

Provide summaries and options for further information – without sending the reader off the page.

Give some context to the words on the screen. That could mean using a unique typeface, including more images in the text, or even connecting the text with various kinds of branding. The idea is to make sure the reader’s brain is collecting more information than just the words.

Those are some ideas. I like to hear yours.

Publishers like to talk about “retention,” but what they usually mean by that word is “keeping the reader as a customer.”

I would like to suggest that the other sense of that word – helping the reader retain the information he reads – will also help with customer retention. If your readers are remembering what they read from your site, that’s gotta help.

Links

Reading print improves comprehension far more than looking at digital text, say researchers

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/dec/15/reading-print-improves-comprehension-far-more-than-looking-at-digital-text-say-researchers

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It’s so bad that some publishers are repeating the rhetoric of their colonizers.

I’m trying to think my way through an article titled “Google Could Become New Money Source For U.S. Journalists, Content Creators.” I’ll provide a link below.

I’ve stressed the point that Google started indexing publishers’ copyrighted content – without their permission – on the assumption that this was a means of discovery for the publisher. The tradeoff was that Google ingested your content, but you got traffic. I’ve called it a bad deal, but it wasn’t even a deal. It was a shakedown. Or just plain old theft.

As I’ve explained elsewhere, that bargain is over. Google and other tech services have created the assumption that they can simply steal your copyrighted content off your website to train their large language models – so they can replace you.

Publishers aren’t thinking strategically. Rather than questioning this whole scheme that they were suckered into, their emphasis now is on compensation.

But that’s been the trick all along. The tech giants are happy to give publishers dimes while they make dollars. And it’s happening all over again.

The deal in this particular case is that Google will pay Canadian publishers 100 million Canadian dollars to serve news content in its search engine.

I like getting a check as much as the next guy, but the strategic imperative right now is not to get paid under the current scenario. The strategic imperative is to change the game.

Links

Google Could Become New Money Source For U.S. Journalists, Content Creators

You have to sign up to get access to this article.

https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/391867/google-could-become-new-money-source-for-us-jour.html?edition=132648

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Questions are a gold mine of information

Last week I listened to the recent mini episode of the People v Algorithms podcast in which Troy and Alex discuss AI. (Brian was away somewhere.) Alex mentioned how he used ChatGPT to fine-tune the story for his latest game while he was driving to meet Troy for dinner.

I've always used chat GPT on my desktop computer, but after hearing Alex's story I downloaded the app on my phone and had a lovely conversation with Hal about my next fiction book.

It was an amazing experience. You should try it.

Unfortunately, when I came back to restart the conversation an hour later, Hal had lost the thread, which was quite a mystery to me because when I log in to ChatGPT on my real computer I can see the entire conversation. Also, when I asked ChatGPT how I could memorialize the conversation, it gave me a bunch of dumb answers, like maybe I could record it.

So ChatGPT still has a ways to go, but it’s pretty amazing.

Just this morning I read unCharles’ latest essay, titled “Peas,” in which he evaluates the value of questions in social media.

He ranks things as follows. Likes, then comments, then questions. Questions get the top spot because they foster more interaction.

Personally, I hate this monetization of crowds. Social media often seems to boil down to this – if you can do something that will gather a lot of eyeballs – and we know perfectly well what kinds of “somethings” gather eyeballs – you become a star and you get rich. We have prominent celebrities these days whose only real talent is getting attention.

That doesn’t sit well with my Celtic and Germanic soul.

But questions … that’s another thing. A question tells you a lot about the person asking the question. For example,

• What he’s wondering about, and interested in

• What’s unclear, which may indicate knowledge or education level

• What perspective he’s coming from

• His emotional state

• His problem-solving approach or method

• His needs or motivations

In short, there’s a whole world of information you can get from a question.

Publishers like to ask questions of their audiences, and that’s a good way to increase engagement. My friend Lev Kaye specializes in that sort of thing, so look him up if you want to get more interaction from your audience.

But questions are the next step.

You know that the era of search is ending, and that people will expect to be able to ask a question and get an answer. By now you should be building a large language model on your content – or at least thinking about it.

Take it to the next step. Don’t only answer questions for your audience. Learn something from those questions.

Links

====

People v. Algorithms Podcast

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/people-vs-algorithms/id1642958293

Uncharles

https://uncharles.substack.com/

Credspark

https://www.credspark.com/

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I’ve seen a few articles recently about rebuilding trust in media, which is a good idea. Polls show that trust in media is very low, and in my opinion the lack of trust is very richly deserved.

Unfortunately, most of the conversation doesn’t get to the root of the problem, which I’ll try to … in a minute.

AI is the big story these days, and there have been some big mistakes around AI recently, so sometimes you might get the impression that if media can just fix the AI problem, that’ll solve the trust problem.

That’s not true. The trust problem is way deeper.

But just to get the AI issue out of the way, the solution seems fairly simple. If you use generative AI, you should make that clear. I think that’s all that needs to be said.

The bigger issue with trust in media is that people think the media is lying to them to push an agenda. The sad fact is … that’s true. Not all the time. Not in every story. But yes, it does happen far too often.

I can’t give you advice on the lying part – except to stop lying – but there is one aspect of media bias that seems very easy to fix, and it fits in with a very popular word these days. That word is diversity.

If you want to fix your bias, make sure your staff at all levels – your writers, your editors, and your management – has people from different points of view. That will help eliminate blind spots.

If you have all Democrats, or all Republicans, or all atheists, or all Catholics, you’re going to be biased. There’s no way around that.

The example that sticks in my head is from years ago. As you probably know, there are dueling demonstrations on the national mall over abortion. There’s a pro-life rally and a pro-choice rally.

Before the pro-life rally, The Washington Post had a small mention on an inside page. Before the pro-choice rally, they had front-page coverage, maps, advice on parking and how to use the Metro, where to get lunch …. It was incredible.

It’s no mystery why there was such a discrepancy. The pro-life position is not represented in the staff or management at the Post.

So if I see an article on that topic in the Post, I know where it’s coming from.

But here’s the real problem. The Post knows this. They’re not stupid people. Despite whatever they claim for PR purposes, they know perfectly well that they lean left, just as Fox news knows it leans right. That’s not an accident. It’s a strategy.

Media has discovered that people want to hear things that confirm their biases, so they pick a set of biases and confirm them.

There’s no mystery here. It’s not a problem that can be solved because it’s a direct consequence of the media giving the market what they want. Which is biased news coverage.

We just have to come to terms with that.

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As content distribution channels multiply, should publishers turn to generic brand advertising?

Robbie Kellman Baxter distributed a “Customer Retention Metrics Kit” yesterday. It’s worth looking at as an overview of the terms and concepts you should be thinking about if you run a subscription business.

In her post introducing the kit, she said “it’s more important than ever to keep the customers you have – and expand the relationship.”

I can’t disagree with that, but what does it mean to “keep a customer” in today’s fractured marketplace?

The simple answer is to keep them writing checks, but isn’t it more complicated than that?

If someone cancels their subscription to your newsletter but becomes a regular listener to your ad-supported podcast, have you lost the customer?

We’d like to reduce this to charts and reports and things, showing how customers migrated from one revenue-generating option to another. But that’s impossible for many of the potential scenarios. In the podcast example I just cited, you usually don’t know who’s downloading your podcast. You probably also don’t make as much revenue from one podcast listener as you make from one newsletter subscriber.

But what if this formerly barely interested newsletter reader becomes an advocate for your podcast? Maybe he’s worth even more now.

As media is distributed across a broader network, with various formats and things, content creators are going to have to find a way to cope with this. Does that mean they have to be more flexible with their revenue projections? The CFO isn’t going to like that.

Robbie’s chart made me realize there are lots of concepts that are getting mushed together into a strange media mix.

We have the distinction between audience and customer.

“Subscriber” has (somewhat to my horror) come to mean both paid and unpaid. (It irks me that people use “subscriber” for people who sign up for their free e-newsletter, but I have yet to come up with a better word.)

Among all these groups we have the freebie-seekers, the bargain hunters, the loyal customers, the brand ambassadors, etc.

Even among those who like a brand, there’s going to be some fluidity about how they interact with it. They might freely flow between the free e-newsletter, the YouTube channel, the podcast, the app, the subscription magazine ….

You can’t track all that – which drives some people crazy. Everything’s about tracking and metrics and attribution. So how do you create a sensible business model with all these moving pieces?

One approach might be to run each product as its own business. The magazine does one thing and the YouTube channel does something, and you realize people might go back and forth, but you can’t measure that, and if you can’t measure it you can’t do anything about it, so just proceed as if it doesn’t matter.

But this isn’t an entirely new problem. Publishers have faced this basic issue before. We didn’t know who was buying our product on the newsstand either.

So maybe this fracturing of the trackable parts of our business could lead us back to the idea of generic brand advertising as an important part of the marketing mix for publishers.

Links

Customer Retention Metrics Kit

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/robbiekellmanbaxter_a-comprehensive-kit-of-customer-retention-activity-7140734829800697856-r0U3

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A/B testing can be fun, but there are some things to watch out for

Sascha Bossen has a good article on A/B testing that I’ll link below. Today I’ll review his four points, and add three of my own.

1. Pay attention to the novelty effect

One panel might outperform your control simply because it’s new. To avoid this mistake, first, make sure to watch performance over time. The novelty effect will wear off. Second, check to see if first-time visitors behave differently than returning visitors.

1. Make sure your test groups are statistically significant.

Three is 150% more than two. But that’s statistically meaningless. You need a larger sample size before you can make any conclusions.

When you do an A/B split test, you end up with some numbers. Variant A got X clicks out of Y view, etc. Before you make any decisions, you need to check to see if the numbers are significant, and there are some good online tools to help with that. Sascha provides links in his article.

1. Only change one KPI per test

That doesn’t mean only test one thing. Some people say every test should only test one change on the page. I don’t agree with that. Sometimes there’s a need to try a completely different design.

But Sascha’s addressing a different point, which is what action you’re using to measure the test.

For example, let’s say you have an article template. You could have several KPIs for that page, such as time on site, clicking through to sign up for an e-newsletter, or posting a comment. Your A/B test should focus on one of those because errors multiply as you increase the number of KPIs.

1. Try usability testing if you can’t do A/B tests

Sometimes you don’t have enough traffic to do a reasonable test in a reasonable amount of time. In those cases, Sascha recommends usability testing as a proxy.

I’m going to add three more things to Sascha’s list.

1. Abandon tests that take too long to finish.

Sascha hints at this, but I want to make it explicit. If a test takes too long to get a significant answer, you really can’t trust that test. It’s like the old “you can’t step into the same river twice” argument. If the test goes on for too long, are you really testing what you think you’re testing, or are you testing changing moods and currents in your market.

For example, let’s say I want to sell a bicycle, and I test two product images: one of the bicycle, and one of a beautiful person on the bicycle. If that test goes on for a while with no clear winner – going back and forth between the two – I’d start to wonder about external factors, like maybe the beautiful person I picked looks too much like a particular actor.

That leads to my next point.

1. Avoid testing psychosis.

Testing can sound so logical and mathematical, but the more you get into testing the more you realize how many variables you can’t control, and how many extraneous things could be affecting your results. What if your landing page suddenly gets an influx of traffic from a completely different source? What if a new version of a popular browser changes the way your page looks? And when we get into custom audiences, it gets even more complicated. Does one audience prefer variant A and another prefer variant B?

It goes on and on, and while you should have an eye out for those things, don’t go crazy about it.

Which leads to my final point.

1. When in doubt follow Amazon.

They have tons of traffic and they’re constantly testing. What they’re doing is probably as close to good as you’re going to find. So the cheapest way to do A/B testing is to avoid it altogether and mimic Amazon wherever you can.

Links

4 learnings about A/B testing after 5 years working on Paid Content at ZEIT ONLINE

https://theaudiencers.com/operations/4-learnings-about-a-b-testing-after-5-years-working-on-paid-content-at-zeit-online/

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Meeting a customer need is a legitimate service. Getting customers addicted to your service is drug dealer behavior.

I got to the pool very early this morning because I couldn't get back to sleep, and while I counted my laps I was wondering about AI and the future of publishing and whether I should change careers and start selling bespoke liqueurs. I finished my laps early, so I went to Dunkin Donuts to get a cup of coffee and think about today's podcast.

Earlier I'd read an article on the hazards of social media – how they use psychological tricks to keep you on the site, so they can sell more ads and get more information about you – so they can keep you on the site longer and show you more ads. The goal is addiction.

As I sipped my coffee I went to mediamakersmeet.com and read an article on how to keep readers “engaged on your site,” which reminded me of the social media article.

And then I looked at my coffee.

Dunkin Donuts isn't trying to keep me “engaged” with their store. They’re not using Vegas-style tricks to keep me in my seat so they can play more ads. They just sell me my coffee and we’re done.

They do want me “engaged” in some ways. Just as a book publisher hopes the reader will enjoy the whole book and come back for another, Dunkin wants me to enjoy my whole coffee, and they want me to come back every morning. That’s unlikely because (1) I’m poor and can’t afford that, and (2) I drink decaf, so addiction isn’t really on the table.

It's still a very different model than the social media model. Dunkin is giving me what I want and then expecting me to go about my day.

This contrast applies to publishers because engagement is a key metric for subscription success. If people aren’t using your content they won't renew, and renewal is the lifeblood of the subscription model.

But there are two kinds of engagement. The good kind is when I'm enjoying the experience and learning every step of the way. Like watching a really good documentary. Another good side to the documentary is that it comes to an end. It doesn’t try to keep me glued to the TV all day long.

The bad kind of engagement is what you get on recipe sites, where they tell you everything you don't want to know about the recipe just to keep you on their site so you see more ads. You’re “engaged,” but you hate it.

Most readers don't want to be “engaged,” let alone “addicted.” They want to get their answer and move along. Like the Dunkin Donuts coffee. And like the coffee, they might want to come back regularly.

“Attention” and “engagement” are the mantras of the Adtech world. “Keep them on the site, mine their personal information and show them as many ads as possible for as long as possible.”

It reminds me of cancer. It’s something that grows without any restraint.

There are legitimate reasons to want someone to pay attention to and engage with your content. You might want to get into the customer’s workflow and help them solve a problem, or keep them up to date on a regular basis. Done the right way, it shows that you’re delivering a product that fulfills the customer’s need.

Bad engagement is when you’re not trying to satisfy a legitimate need. You promote consumption just so you can show more ads, or get more data. Bad engagement has the marks of cancer and addiction.

This is yet another way that Ad Tech and Big Tech have distorted the publishing ecosystem. They take a legitimate thing and push it too far.

Links

Social Media Must Move Beyond a Broken Ad Revenue Business Model

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture-council/articles/social-media-must-move-beyond-broken-ad-revenue-business-model-1234919543/

“Keeping readers engaged within a website’s walls”: How AI is revolutionizing publisher search

https://mediamakersmeet.com/keeping-readers-engaged-within-a-websites-walls-how-ai-is-revolutionising-publisher-search/

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On our current trajectory, AI means even more crap on the Internet

Bo Sacks visits my inbox every weeknight with three articles about publishing. If you’re in the publishing business and you’re not signed up, you should be. Link below.

Recently I received this article from Chris Black. “Reading Print Magazines Is an Elite Pursuit”

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a rehash of the print vs. digital thing, but the following sentence about that transition caught my eye.

“The focus in publishing shifted to cranking out many stories a day instead of a select group each month.” E.g., in a magazine.

It necessarily follows that this change led to a decrease in quality. That makes sense intuitively, but we’ve all seen it with our own eyes. There’s a lot more garbage out there chasing traffic and “reach.” Mostly because of the need to feed the ad monster.

We’re facing a new and more momentous challenge to publishing with the advent of AI. Publishers can now go full crapola and crank out even more articles every day. We can drive down the value of content even further, and stretch meager advertising revenue over an even broader landscape of silly nonsense.

Or, we can pause and ask what it is we’re trying to do. Is publishing just a widget factory for words? Are we mass producing whatever will help us chase ad revenue?

Or does publishing have a higher purpose of explaining and educating?

To some extent it doesn’t matter. AI will result in an increase in low-quality content on the internet, and no amount of moaning and complaining is going to stop that.

But doesn’t that create an opportunity?

If you’ve followed digital publishing, you know that there will be a lot of publishers who’ll simply say “giddyup” and fly down this highway even faster. They’ll chase the algorithm. If that means posting 45 second AI-generated videos on TikTok with “surprised guy face” in the thumbnail, that’s what they’ll do.

It’s just what we’ve seen for decades with a faster engine.

Will this create a market for a second type of publisher who believes that human talent is able to do better?

It can be a mistake to bet on the intelligence of the general public. When faced with a choice between intelligent analysis and some snarky guy who can make the news funny, a lot of people will choose the snarky guy.

It reminds me of the story about Adlai Stevenson. Someone allegedly yelled out, “Governor, you have the vote of every thinking person,” to which he allegedly replied, “That’s not enough, madam, we need a majority.”

That’s not an endorsement of the politics of Adlai Stevenson, by the way. It’s just a funny quote that illustrates the problem.

In the publishing world, we’ve allowed the ad-driven big tech monster to create a marketplace that prefers nonsense.

Is that just our fate? Shall we simply eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we all live in the Idiocracy? Or is it possible to change the market?

Everybody tells me there’s a “dark web.” Can there be a “not stupid web”?

Or, as Chris Black seems to imply, is the “not stupid web” found on a piece of paper?

Links

Reading Print Magazines Is an Elite Pursuit

https://www.gq.com/story/pulling-weeds-with-chris-black-reading-print-magazines-is-an-elite-pursuit

Bo Sacks

https://www.bosacks.com/

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We’re losing our industry because we’re not thinking about the long term

Dominic Young sent me a very interesting article on the state of publishing. It’s called “How Coca-Cola thinking could fix the news industry,” and I’ll provide a link below.

It applies to more than news. The same basic issues are relevant for magazine and special interest publishers, and to B2B to some extent.

Dominic’s case goes like this.

When publishing was successful, readers were making simple, casual purchases at the newsstand. They didn’t have to give their email address. They didn’t have to subscribe. They just bought a paper or a magazine.

They had the option to subscribe, but a high percentage of sales were spontaneous.

Here’s Dominic’s portrait of the reader’s mind.

“We want to be able to read whatever we want, whenever we want. If we’re going to pay for something, we want it to be worth it, and we don’t want it to be a massive hassle, or a massive cost. We don’t want to subscribe and then have to remember to cancel, and we don’t want to have to sign up separately for multiple titles we might only occasionally want to dip into.

“Even if we habitually return to the same titles again and again, we want the right to change our minds every now and then. We want to be able to try new things, and we don’t want to pay for things we’re not reading.”

Dominic thinks the answer is to bring back casual sales. Most people call this “micro-payments,” which makes publishers shake their head and move on. Micropayments haven’t worked. They haven’t caught on with consumers, so they don’t address the problem Dominic is highlighting.

When you buy a newspaper at 7-11, it’s easy because everybody uses the same money. Imagine how hard it would be to buy a paper if every store used its own money, its own e-commerce system, with its own registration. If you had to enter your phone number so the publisher could track you.

Nobody wants that. They just want a copy of the paper and a cup of coffee.

Dominic’s argument makes a lot of sense except for one thing. It requires massive consumer adoption of a single way to pay. Like cash at the 7-11.

But – in my experience – publishers are famous for two things. They don’t cooperate, and they don’t think strategically, or long term.

Media conferences are like, “Hey, look at this great wave I caught.” And the people who are making the waves – the tech companies – are sitting back and laughing.

Publishers have been pansies. They’ve allowed the tech giants to eat their lunch again and again and again because they won’t act in their collective interest.

It’s happening in real time right now with AI, as I’ve explained many times, most recently in my latest Krehbiel Letter.

If publishing is going to survive, there’s going to have to be some cooperation and some strategic thinking. We can’t continue to ride the waves that the tech companies control. We need to look out for our interests. In a way, you could say that publishers need to unionize. We need some kind of collective that represents our interests, and we all need to get on the same page. At least with some big-picture things. Without that, Big Tech is going to eat all three of our meals.

I don’t know if Dominic’s solution is the right one. But I do know for certain that if publishers just continue to accept what Big Tech doles out, publishing is over.

How Coca-Cola thinking could fix the news industry

https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2023/12/04/how-coca-cola-thinking-could-fix-the-news-industry

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Publishing keeps getting more and more complicated

Publishing can be a good business model because you can write something once and sell it many times. But as people come to expect things their way, in their preferred format, publishers are facing an environment where they have to write something, then record it, then make it into a video, then a quiz, then create an infographic, then a comic book, and who knows what else.

Technology makes this possible, but it’s also because of technology that people have come to expect this sort of thing. Or to put it another way, YouTube, Instagram, and Spotify are great services that consumers love, but that means publishers have to be in all these places.

Back when I frequented online discussion groups, it always surprised me how many “lurkers” there were. That is, people who read the board, but never participated in the discussion.

I couldn’t do that. When I would see something stupid or wrong, I felt compelled to jump in. I learned that’s not sustainable, and that’s why I’m not on Facebook any more. I’d get sucked into discussions I hated, and it just made me mad.

But this aspect of personal preference adds another level of complexity. If I were to list all the complications that face content creators, it might be something like this.

Device

Desktop

Phone

Tablet

TV

Paper of various sorts

Format

Text

Video

Audio

Infographic

Quiz

Q&A (like ChatGPT)

Platform

LinkedIn

Facebook

X

Extroversion

Do they participate?

Payment options

Free with ads

Free with registration

Subscription

Pay per view

Even Location can even matter. People do different things in different places. And my friend Scott Janney created magazinejukebox as a way for people to read magazines on their phones when they’re at the barber shop or doctor’s office.

What do you do with all this chaos?

I don’t have the answer, because I’m dealing with it as much as you are. But here are some simple things to consider.

Check your analytics to see what people are actually doing. But realize your results are skewed because your audience has already self-selected based on what you’re providing. To understand what I mean, it would be stupid to ask people on YouTube if they like videos.

You can do surveys of your audience, and you can look up broader surveys of the population as a whole. They’re helpful, but take them with a grain of salt.

You can also just put a stake in the ground and say “no, this is what we do. If you want that other stuff, go away.”

You can do what you’re good at. And that’s probably the best answer. Cast your bread on the waters – try a bunch of things – and see what happens.

But – this highlights a big problem I’ve experienced in my career. Let’s say you try something and it fails. Now the CEO is against that forever and always. But times change, and something that didn’t work five years ago might work now.

So my best advice is to think very broadly about how people consume content, try what you can, and keep adjusting. Think of it as ready, fire, aim on a constant loop.

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When someone says “that’s an edge case,” dig a little deeper.

As a general rule, marketers should major in the majors and pay attention to things that make a significant difference.

But sometimes an “edge case” can turn out to be more important than we realize.

Edge cases occur when …

• Someone behaves in a way you didn’t expect
• An action takes places in an environment you didn’t plan for
• A customer has untypical circumstances
• Two different systems collide
• There’s a change in regulations or technology
• A device is stressed, such as being low on memory

Edge cases are usually more of an issue for software and hardware developers than they are for marketers. Software has to work for every user, as much as possible. Marketers are dealing with audiences, and it’s understood that some people will fall through the cracks.

Today I’m going to highlight two situations. First, when “edge case” is used as an excuse, and second, then an edge case might be a missed opportunity.

Converting unknown to known in a CDP

A standard use case for a Customer Data Platform (CDP) is to convert unknown users to known. One way to do that is to append a customer ID as a query parameter to the links in your email. When the recipient clicks through, the CDP can capture that customer ID and convert a formerly unknown web profile to known.

But what if the recipient has forwarded the email, or has posted the link to social media? Whoever clicks on those links will now be identified as that customer ID, which will corrupt your data.

If your CDP tells you “this is an edge case,” what that really means is that they don’t have a good way to solve the problem. It’s not an edge case at all. People forward emails all the time.

You need to press your CDP for a better solution. Don’t accept “that’s an edge case” as an excuse.

Funnel analysis

The basic concept of a funnel is that if you get enough people at the top, and optimize each step in the funnel, you can get more people at the bottom – where they give you money. It’s a game of volume and percentages.

Let’s say some quirk (i.e., an “edge case”) in your system is causing you to lose 3 percent at the top of the funnel. That’s no big deal, right? You just adjust your inputs to compensate. Get a different 3 percent.

But what 3 percent are you losing? When you’re dealing with numbers and averages, you’re likely to assume the 3 percent you’re losing is a representative sample of the whole. A cross section. But that 3 percent might be your best customers.

For example, what if the quirk is cutting off people who use old iPhones, and that’s a characteristic of your target market. Say, “budget conscious consumers who are late technology adopters.”

A failure to investigate this “edge case” will affect your entire funnel.

Links

Why edge cases matter in marketing strategy

https://martech.org/why-edge-cases-matter-in-marketing-strategy/

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Here are a few ways publishers can use AI in content creation, on their website, and with multimedia and events.

For articles and emails

Get ideas for new articles on a particular subject. For this use, you might want AI that has current information — not, e.g., the older versions of ChatGPT.

Generate summaries of your articles. There’s some indication that providing a summary increases engagement with an article, which seems counter-intuitive at first, but whether it does or not, I think it’s a good service to the reader. Either edit them, or make it clear that they’re written by AI.

Create headlines for your articles or subject lines for your emails. You can also toss in some keyword optimization here. For example, write a headline for this article that optimizes for the phrase “marketing technology.” (The headline of this article was written by ChatGPT. I asked for five options and picked the one I liked best.)

Create images to go with your articles. I use Midjourney for this, but I think I’m going to try Dall-E, where the process is said to be more iterative.

Translate an article into another language.

For your website

Content recommendations. I’ve wondered if readers should be able to exercise some control over this. For example, whether the recommendations should be based on what they actually read, or on what they say they want to read.

Manage a registration- or paywall. One of the big questions about metering is how many articles you allow someone to see before you ask for a registration, or for money. Rather than setting a single rule for the whole site, you could use AI to figure out the right rule for different segments, based on their behavior.

Improve your customer service chat bot responses. Most of the chatbots I’ve used are pretty poor. AI should be able to improve them significantly.

Use an LLM as the first step in an online discussion. Imagine a Reddit-like board where someone can ask a question, and AI gives the first answer. Your subject-matter experts, or other users, could then comment on the AI answer.

For audio, video, and events

Create a transcript of your podcast or webinar. The transcript should be edited, but AI can do most of the heavy lifting for you.

Create a timeline that shows what topics were discussed at what time index in the file. This is a great service to listeners. They know they can skip forward to the right time to hear the discussion they’re interested in.

Write a summary of the content of the recording. Since AI can make a transcript, it can also write a summary, suggest title, or even write an article version of the event.

I don’t think AI is ready to write unsupervised copy, and it’s certainly not right to create pretend authors for articles, the way Sports Illustrated seems to have done. If you choose to let AI write articles, you should be transparent about that.

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Publishing a magazine is a hard business. But there is hope.

James Evelegh wrote an article that Bo Sacks posted on Friday. It’s titled “Large magazine companies – how they can get back to winning ways.”

That caught my eye because some of my clients publish magazines, and I want to know how to advise them.

I’m going to comment on 3 of his 10 points. I’ll provide a link below to the entire article.

1 – “Empower your workforce” -- reminded me of a story.

Daughter #3 was reporting for duty at an Air Force base. I had to wait in the kitchen while she was doing whatever they do. There was a sign on the wall in the kitchen that said "If you see a problem...."

Okay, stop right there. How do you expect that sign to continue, based on your office experience? You probably expect something like "report it to maintenance," or "tell the office manager."

No. This is the armed forces. The sign said "If you see a problem, fix it."

I laughed out loud.

Yes, that's the way you treat adults. You're not training people to complain, or to notice problems for other people to fix. You're training them to take responsible action to make things better.

Expect your employees to act.

5 is “See your company as a house of brands, and not as a media or publishing business.”

As I’ve said in previous podcasts, the magazine business is very hard these days. The cost of printing and mailing keeps going up, and consumer expectations on price keep going down.

However, magazines are very effective as a front for a brand, so one ticket to success is to find a way to accept that the magazine might be a loss leader and to monetize the audience another way. Sell products. Sell events. Sell expensive memberships. Etc. If you have questions about that, give me a call.

8 implies that the word “magazine” is equally at home in print and online. I don’t agree with that.

Can you buy a magazine rack for your digital magazine? Can you swat a bug with your digital magazine? Can you put your digital magazine on your coffee table?

I’m being a little silly, but there’s a point here. The word “magazine” is associated with a print publication in many, many different ways.

But the more important point is that digital does some things very well and print does some things very well, and the intersection between the two is not that large.

If you think of your “magazine” as a product that can be distributed in print and online, both versions will suffer. Your print publication won’t be everything it can be, and your digital publication won’t be everything it can be.

I think it makes much more sense to think of them as different products and to make each the best that it can be in its medium.

Let’s push this a bit to make the point even more obvious. What if you had an audio version of your magazine? What would audio, print, and digital all have in common?

Don’t even be tempted to think that way. Make the best audio product you can make. Make the best digital product you can make. And yes, make the best print product you can make. Don’t shackle all three of them by calling them “magazines.”

Links

Large magazine companies – how they can get back to winning ways

https://www.inpublishing.co.uk/articles/large-magazine-companies-how-they-can-get-back-to-winning-ways-22573

Can you swat a bug with that magazine?

https://krehbielgroup.com/2022/09/12/can-you-swat-a-bug-with-that-magazine/

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B2B purchasers are just people like everyone else. So why do we treat them differently?

Yesterday, Bo Sacks posted an article by Chris Adams that calls for a makeover for B2B marketing. He makes some good points, but I think he overlooks some important things as well.

He starts by pointing out that B2B purchasers are people.

Regardless of whether they're investing in a software-as-a-service platform or buying a new pair of Crocs, customers are individuals with dreams, desires, and personal goals.

B2B customers — like B2C customers — shop on Amazon, search on Google, and are motivated by emotional storytelling. They’re just people.

Chris also calls for an emphasis on benefits, which is good advice. Although I’m also reminded of Mark Stiving’s argument that a benefits approach is better for people who are new to the market, while a features approach is better for veterans.

For example, if you want to get grandma to buy a smartphone, you tell her how she can video chat with her grandkids and keep up with what’s going on in their life. Benefits. But after grandma has had a smartphone for a while, she wants more storage and a faster processor. Features.

Chris is right to remind us that B2B customers are human beings with all the feelings and foibles we all have. But we also have to remember that they’re human beings who are acting out a different functional role, and that influences their decision-making.

Here are some important differences between B2C and B2B purchasers.

1. The B2B purchaser is often not spending his own money. That can have a substantial impact on the emotional side of the purchase.

2. The B2B purchaser might have to get approval for the expense, or at least to justify it. “It makes me feel happy” is enough when I’m buying a coffee. It won’t cut it when I’m buying a Customer Data Platform with my company’s money.

3. B2C sales often rely on mass media, while B2B sales often rely on personal contact.

4. B2B sales often have a long sales cycle, which makes a personal relationship with the salesman more important.

5. A B2B purchase might have a bidding process, or an annual review.

6. A B2C purchase might be just for fun, or enjoyment, while a B2B purchase has to be related to a business function.

7. A B2C purchaser is probably more likely to purchase something because of brand loyalty.

8. Generally speaking, B2C purchases are at a much lower price. Customers do make big purchases — like cars, houses, and air conditioning units — and in those cases, yes, there is more similarity between the B2B and the B2C sales process.

Chris is right to remind us that B2B purchasers are just people who have the same cognitive biases, wants and desires, and penchant for benefits-oriented storytelling as everyone else. Yes. But marketing and sales to B2C and B2B audiences remain very different disciplines in some very important respects.

Links

There’s no such thing as a B2B customer: Why B2B marketing needs a makeover

https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2023/11/29/there-s-no-such-thing-b2b-customer-why-b2b-marketing-needs-makeover

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In 2025 I won’t use my Google newsfeed, and I won’t visit websites. I’ll have something far more tailored to my interests.

Here’s how this will work.

I’ll have a personalized AI agent that will both collect and analyze my interests. That is, it will ask me what I’m interested in – sports, current events, music, science, religion, all the normal stuff – but it will also observe how I spend my time. It’ll keep track of how well my intentions coincide with my actions.

My AI agent will find content I’m interested in – in any format. Video. Audio. Images. Text. Games. Whatever.

I won’t be on TikTok or realclearpolitics or LinkedIn or anything like that. I’ll have my own custom interface that incorporates content from all these sources.

I’ll set a budget for what I’m willing to spend every month on new content, and I’ll allocate that budget with some sliding scales to show my preferences. For example …

• I’d rather listen than read.
• I’d rather watch than listen.
• I want news in the morning and entertainment in the evening, but I like to listen to music on my walk after lunch.
• I prefer stories from my point of view, but I want to be challenged at least 20 percent of the time.
• I trust these sources and not these others.
• I want to read at least one physical book every two weeks.

I’ll interact with the world under different personas, like my work persona and my hobby persona.

Over time, my AI assistant will fine tune my selections with intelligent questions. For example, “you say you want to be challenged in your beliefs, but whenever I show you an article from such and so point of view, you don’t read the whole thing. Shall I continue to prod you?”

The AI agent will know my behavior very well, but it will always defer to my preferences and aspirations.

How will publishers operate in a world like this?

• They won’t sell direct to the consumer. Their AI will negotiate with my AI. I’ll have nothing to do with it.
• The publisher will use AI to provide content in a hundred different ways.
• The same story might be text, audio, video, or a cartoon.
• Most content be digital, but there will be print on demand options.
• There’ll be a version for the well educated and the poorly educated.
• All content will be available in multiple languages.
• The publisher’s AI will respond to the market demand from all the individual AI agents.
• Human creators or editors will become brands that people will follow.
• Platforms will be irrelevant.

My crystal ball fogged up last week when I tried to understand what’s going on in Congress, so I might not have all the details right. But something like this is going to happen. How are you going to plan for it?

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Personalization is usually a good thing. For example, lots of testing in many markets over many years has shown that an email that begins “Dear Greg” is going to do better than an email that begins in some generic way. Assuming, of course, your name is Greg.

That level of personalization is easily tested.

But as you go deeper into personalization, new issues arise.

• Too much personalization might make users uncomfortable, and it might raise concerns about privacy.
• Personalization depends on having the right data – and using it properly. Are you sure the data you’re collecting is fit to purpose, and that your algorithm is tuned appropriately?
• How does your algorithmic personalization interact with explicit user preferences? For example, a reader says he wants financial information, but your algorithm says he prefers sports. Which one gets the upper hand? You have to wonder if you should listen to what users say versus observing how they behave.
• To what extent should you disclose how your personalization engine works?

Beyond these questions, you have to wonder if users actually want it. Too much personalization might lead a person to believe he’s missing out on something important, or is living in a bubble.

In fact, if you had perfect personalization, that seems to be getting into the realm of solipsism, which is the idea that you’re the only mind that exists.

Readers might prefer content that’s curated by a trusted professional over content that’s curated by a machine. The trusted professional knows more about the topic than my browsing history.

Also, personalization can get icky.

As a silly example, it’s one thing for Spotify to say that people who like Jethro Tull might also like Fairport Convention. It’s another thing for Spotify to notice that I was chatting up the redhead at the office party and to tell me what kind of music she likes.

A final thing to consider is a strange side-effect of personalization that Bob Hoffman has discussed in the context of advertising.

Part of the effect of an ad is that I know other people are seeing it as well. If I see James Bond driving an Aston Martin, and I want to be as cool as James Bond, I might buy an Aston Martin.

But the algorithm knows that if I won the lottery tomorrow and had money coming out my ears, I would never spend the money on a fancy car. That’s just not me.

So in my version of the James Bond movie, I see James Bond driving a Toyota Highlander, and I know that you’re seeing him driving something completely different. The effect is completely lost. I can’t be “as cool as James Bond” by driving what he’s driving, because everybody sees a different thing.

I’m not trying to dissuade anybody from pursuing personalization. It’s a proven effective strategy. But the personalization tools we have now, and will have in the future, might force us to re-evaluate.

Links

The Risk of Personalization: do people want and trust it?

https://theaudiencers.com/decisions/the-risk-of-personalization-do-people-want-and-trust-it/

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There’s a scene in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back where Darth Vader tells Lando Calrissian to take Chewbacca and Princess Leia to his shuttle. Lando complains that wasn’t the deal, and Darth Vader says, “I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it further.”

It’s funny that Darth Vader is, I think, the only character in Star Wars who encourages us to pray.

Anyway, Darth Vader is able to change the deal because he has all the power. The same is true with Google.

When Google says jump, content creators say “how high?” They change the deal all the time — by changing their algorithm — and we just go along with it. But recent changes aren’t just monkeying with the details. It’s a wholesale, radical change.

The original deal was this. Google was allowed to crawl our websites and create these incredible indexes (which we weren’t allowed to see) connected to complicated algorithms (which we weren’t allowed to see), and we permitted this because it was the primary means of content discovery. People used Google search to find our sites.

Publishers should have asserted their rights. They should have said “you can’t put our copyrighted information in your database and not tell us what you’re doing with it.” But they were, as usual, very short-sighted.

It was a bad deal, but it wasn’t that bad. And now, even that bad deal has changed.

Can you guess to whose advantage?

Remember when Wikipedia dominated the top spots in Google search results? If you were curious about The Battle of Trafalgar, for instance, you could be certain Wikipedia would be the first result.

It still is for that search (I just checked), but now it’s competing with a lot of answers that are provided right there on the search engine results page (which the cool kids call the SERP, by the way).

This has resulted in a significant decline in traffic to Wikipedia. Why go to Wikipedia when you get the answer right there on the results page?

From the user’s perspective, this is a great deal. Maybe all I wanted to know was a couple details, and if Google provides those details right there, that’s one fewer clicks for me, and I don’t have to scan through the Wikipedia page to find what I want.

But from Wikipedia’s perspective, it’s a disaster. Google is using Wikipedia’s content in a way Wikipedia never agreed to.

The only reason Google can answer the question is that it’s stealing the content from Wikipedia (and others) and using it in a way the authors never intended.

This is a fundamental shift in the terms of the deal. Google is no longer crawling content so that users can find that content, they’re crawling content so they can replace the publisher.

Did publishers agree to this? Were they consulted?

No. Google did it because it’s Darth Vader and it can do such things. It doesn’t need to ask our permission.

The problem is even worse with large language models. Pretty soon very few people will “search” in the way we used to think about that — where search was a discovery tool for publisher content. They’ll just get answers — derived from copyrighted material that was stolen from publishers.

I’ve singled out Google because Google has been the 800 pound gorilla in this game. They established the presumption that content on the internet was there for the taking, and publishers have foolishly gone along with that presumption.

Because of that presumption — that if content is out there on the internet, anybody can take it and do what they please with it — we now have ChatGPT and Bing and a host of other services that are stealing copyrighted information for the purpose of making the publisher irrelevant.

It has to stop.

Lando Calrissian is, in some ways, a good stand in for publishers. He’s a weak-kneed, go along kind of guy who loves the high life in his city in the clouds. But even Lando can be pushed too far.

Let’s see if publishers have even that spark of courage.

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The idea of publishing a magazine in the modern world seems crazy to some people. In many ways … it is.

Last night at poker I thought I’d try something new and ask my friends (none of whom are in publishing) what topic they would suggest for my daily podcast for publishers. There were some very interesting suggestions, but I chose this one. “In this day and age, why in the world would you make a magazine? Why not create a website?”

It’s a good question. I particularly like the assumption that the word “magazine” means print. I don’t like it when people call their digital efforts a magazine. It’s simply the wrong use of the word.

A magazine does seem like a bad bargain. Printing and mailing is expensive. Paper has a bad rap in environmental circles. And when you look around, you see everybody with their nose in their smart phone, and very, very few people reading magazines.

The question reminded me of Peter Houston’s recent question, “why won’t print just lie down and die?”

In addition to all these problems, fierce price competition has pushed the price of a magazine down to ridiculous levels. Publishers struggle to get people to subscribe at just a few dollars a year.

It sounds like a bad deal all around. And it is.

But let’s address this from two angles. First, is there a market for magazines in this digital world? Second, is it possible to make money with a magazine?

In the past, print was the only option. But now, when people have the choice between print and digital, there’s still a sizable group of people who prefer print. Unfortunately, they won’t pay a decent price for it. But they do prefer it.

Some publishers who had gone all digital are realizing this and going back into print. As reported in an article recently distributed by Bo Sacks, Saveur magazine is returning to print, and there are many other examples. If you have a print magazine and try to force your subscribers into a digital edition, you’ll lose the majority of them — mostly because digital versions of magazines are pretty uniformly bad.

Here are some advantages of print.

• It’s relaxing. It’s a laid back experience.
• The ads are an enjoyable part of the experience rather than an annoying distraction.
• The images are much more vibrant.
• It’s easier to skim.
• It looks nice on a coffee table.

I could go on, but I try to keep these podcasts short.

But can you make money selling a magazine?

It’s very hard if that’s your only business. As I mentioned above, costs are going up and subscription revenue is going down.

The smarter thing to do is use the magazine as the face of the brand, and monetize your audience in other ways. Sell products. Do affiliate deals. Upsell subscribers to more expensive memberships, or to events. And so on. Again, there are a lot of options here, but I need to keep it brief.

So the bottom line is this.

1. Don’t be fooled by the “everything is going digital” talk. Many things — most things — are going digital. But there is a still a strong market for print.
2. The concept of the “digital magazine” is an idea that’s failed. Digital magazines are awful. If you’re going to go digital, go digital, but don’t try to make it a “magazine.” Make the best digital product you can, free from any association with magazines.
3. Unless you’re selling a premium product to a market that’s willing to pay a reasonable price — say, more than $75 for an annual subscription — don’t think you’re going to make much of a profit on a print magazine. The numbers are not in your favor.

Resources

'Saveur' Magazine Returns To Print

https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/391222/saveur-magazine-returns-to-print.html?edition=132371

Peter Houston: Why won’t print just lie down and die?

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-wont-print-just-lie-down-die-peter-houston-3ak5e/

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Confirmation emails often contain crucial information – like details about a conference or a meeting. So what do you do when your confirmation emails aren’t getting through?

You have to find out why. There could be several reasons.

1. You’re using an unreliable email service provider (ESP) and your messages are getting blocked. The obvious solution is to get a better ESP.
2. You’re using a good ESP, but you don’t have things configured correctly. Once again, this is an easy fix. Talk to the delivery experts at your ESP and get your system set up correctly.
3. Your emails look spammy. Again, this is relatively easy to fix. Look up rules on effective subject lines, how to minimize HTML and javascript, optimize for mobile, etc. The internet is full of advice along these lines.
4. This is where it gets tougher. Your recipients work for companies that have very stringent rules on delivery. Some hospitals or utility companies have email security systems in place that open and scan all emails before they’re delivered to the recipient. Either you or your recipient are going to have to reach out to the IT department at these companies and make the case why your emails should get through. That’s a lot of work.
5. Your customers are giving you their junk email addresses. Everybody has at least one throwaway email address. You need to make a clear and persuasive case to your customer that it’s in their best interest to give you the email address they actually use. This means ensuring your emails are useful, and making it easy for recipients to regulate how much email they get from you. Most people fear that if they give you an email address, you’re going to send them junk three times a day. Alleviate that fear.
6. You don’t have effective calls to action in your confirmation emails. It’s not enough for an email to be delivered, or even to be delivered and read, if people aren’t taking the necessary actions. For example, if you’re selling an event, you need to make it very easy for the recipient to add that event to their calendar. I can hear the organizer complain, “We sent you the details. Why didn’t you show up?” Because your poor customer read ten thousand emails that day and didn’t have the bandwidth to make a special effort to add your information to their calendar. Make it easy.
7. This one is really tough. Your customers don’t read their emails. This is a growing problem. I was in the United Arab Emirates recently and people over there prefer WhatsApp to email, and the story goes that younger people don’t like or read their emails. Some people prefer texts.

This seems like an edge case, since everybody sends confirmation emails, including the king of all customer service and market testing – Amazon.com. But I have it on good authority that a lot of people simply don’t check their email. What do you do?

You might have to allow customers to choose their preferred method of communication. You can manage such a thing in a customer data platform, but realize that it’s going to be a lot of work. Every communication would have to be sent out in multiple ways – SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, and who knows what else.

That gets complicated, but that seems to be the nature of things these days. Everything’s fractured. When I produce this podcast, I upload it to LinkedIn, YouTube, X, Instagram, Spotify …. It’s a drag. But that’s the world we live in.

If any of this resonates with you – if you’re having these troubles and want to chat about it – give me a call.

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Thanks to Matt Bailey and the good folks at New Media Academy, I had the great honor of speaking at the Global Media Congress in Abu Dhabi. Here are some takeaways.

1. Tools to find content ideas. I create this podcast every day, so I’m always looking for new ideas, which is why I really liked Matt Bailey’s presentation on tools you can use to get ideas for your market. Things like Google Trends, Answer the public, SparkToro, and more.

2. Think outside email. In Abu Dhabi, nobody wants your email address. They want to connect on WhatsApp. People had QR codes on their business cards that you could scan to connect with them on WhatsApp.

3. Everything’s going video. There was a lot of emphasis on video, and the overall impression from the event was that if you’re not focusing on video, you’re going to be left behind.

4. But what’s in your videos? You create a fantastic video, and then, as an afterthought, you say, “Oh yeah, I need a title and a description and keywords, and what happens at what time index, and all that stuff.” MXT1 is a product from newsbridge.io that helps solve that. I had a nice chat with Sebastien Letemple about the product.

5. How to measure influencers. There’s a difference between having an audience and having an influence. My friend Jason Falls gave an interesting talk on the need to focus on influence and not influencers. For example, one person might have a million followers, but have no influence in your target market, while another person might have 200 followers who should be your customers.

6. The future of X. There’s a lot of skepticism about and hostility towards X right now, but Marina Karam from Spica believes X is on the right track and will become dominant in that space because they pay influencers. That’s worth thinking about.

7. Secure AI? When you use a large language model, you don’t know where the data came from or where it’s going. Strategio helps companies solve that and build AI tools that are secure. That’s worth considering.

8. Fight disinformation by looking in the mirror. There’s an old saying that when you point, there are three fingers pointing back at you. There was a lot of talk about “disinformation” at this event. My experience is that the people who speak the most about disinformation are the ones you need to worry about. Just keep that in the back of your mind.

9. Merging the physical and digital realms. Merging the digital and physical worlds can sound scary and spooky, but it doesn’t have to be. For example, you can upload your image and “try on” a suit or a pair of glasses. That’s a nice service. I had a lovely conversation with Irina Safiullina from Phygital District about this. You should check them out.

10. Train to retain. My friend Monique Russell wrapped up the conference with a talk on upskilling. It’s tough to attract good talent, but you can attract and retain top talent by giving them an opportunity to grow. Think of it this way. You want to be able to give a pitch like this to a prospective employee: “You should come work for my company because we have weekly lunch and learns on a wide variety of topics that are designed to help you be successful – not only in your work life, but in your whole life.” Of course you have to follow that up with promoting from within!

Read the full article here -- https://krehbielgroup.com/2023/11/20/insights-from-the-global-media-congress-navigating-trends-video-dominance-and-the-future-of-communication/

Resources

New Media Academy

https://nma.ae/en

Matt Bailey – Internet marketing speaker and trainer

https://www.sitelogicmarketing.com/

Strategio

https://strategio.io/

Phygital District

https://phygitaldistrict.com/

Jason Falls is flipping influencer marketing on its head.

https://jasonfalls.com/

Ahmed Basyouni

Spica – monitor what people are saying about your brand

https://www.spica.media/

Monique Russell and Clear Communication Solutions

https://www.linkedin.com/company/moniquerussell/

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If you’re providing a good service, charge for it. Right?

The town of Meeker in Colorado’s Rio Blanco County has a local news source called The Rio Blanco Herald Times. Like many local papers, it was struggling, so the owners sent out an “email cry for help” to keep the 138-year-old newspaper from going under. I heard about this in an email from Bo Sacks.

The residents replied favorably and the paper was saved, which is quite nice.

"If a town loses its paper, it's less of a town.” That quote is attributed to Al Cross from the University of Kentucky.

This raises an interesting question. If something is a public good, maybe the government should fund it – like roads, and libraries, and things like that.

But isn’t the media supposed to serve as a check on government? Aren’t they supposed to be an independent voice? How can they do that when they’re getting money from the government?

I think government-funded media is a horrible idea, but there’s still the question of “public” funding. Not government funding, but … just people.

That’s how the Boy Scouts and the local house of worship get along, and they’re also public goods. But we don’t generally believe these things should be supported by taxes.

Still, there have been efforts to ask for donations.

I’ve seen campaigns to “Support local journalism,” and some sites simply hold out the hand and ask for some money.

I’m not sure this is appropriate for all media companies, but if citizens believe in the mission and usefulness of a media brand, why shouldn’t they pony up a little extra to keep it in business?

There’s a network of podcasts that does this. The podcasts are free for everybody, but they ask for donations from people who believe in what they’re doing.

The Guardian asks people to fund independent journalism. So does ProPublica. And The Intercept has something along those lines.

There comes a time when it’s appropriate to hold out your hand and ask for a contribution. It’s a little humbling, but … that’s okay.

So as you consider revenue models for your media company, don’t forget to consider donations.

Links

An email cry for help saves this 138-year-old newspaper from extinction

https://www.editorandpublisher.com/stories/an-email-cry-for-help-saves-this-138-year-old-newspaper-from-shutting-down,246552

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Maybe it’s time to think of customers as creators rather than consumers.

Today I watched a TED talk about a woman who studies prehistoric cave art. It was pretty interesting. I’ll provide a link below.

In some cases, people tens of thousands of years ago – that’s before flashlights, by the way – crawled their way through narrow tunnels to incredible depths and then scribbled things on the wall.

Who did they think was going to see that?

But they did it anyway.

Art of various sorts – representative and non-representative – goes way back in our history. And we don’t know what sorts of songs and stories people told around the fire. That stuff goes deep into our collective memories.

Have you ever heard of a misericord? It’s an intricate pattern carved into the underside of a choir seat, usually in a monastery. Most people don’t even notice them. So why were they made?

We’re creators. We like to make things. And it’s not all utilitarian stuff. There are lots of examples of people making art for art’s sake.

What does this have to do with publishing in the modern world?

It’s easy to think of AI as the world-ending comet that’s going to destroy everything. Publishers have it really bad, because they’re generally in the business of selling things that AI will make for free, or close to free.

Don’t give up hope. The human desire to create is very deep and very strong. We can – and we should – view AI as competition. It will definitely disrupt jobs and business models.

But we should also look at it as a tool. What kinds of amazing things will humans create with the help of AI?

What could Handel have done if he had AI to help him?

But this is a podcast for publishers, so how does this relate to the business of publishing?

Maybe it means that you need to shift your view of your customer from consumer to creator.

Maybe you need to find ways to help your customers use AI to create amazing things. Because the desire to create is deeply entrenched in their brains. Whatever topic or specialty you focus on. That’s a passing thing. It’s yesterday. It’s trivial in the context of the long history of our species.

But creation? Somebody crawled a third of a mile underground to scribble some stuff on a wall. The desire to create is an enduring fact about humans.

So – how can you fit that into your business model?

Resources

Why are these 32 symbols found in caves all over Europe | Genevieve von Petzinger

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJnEQCMA5Sg

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Bo Sacks sent me an email about an article in The Guardian regarding the death of a 21-year old water polo coach. Microsoft created an AI-generated poll that appeared with the post. The poll asked readers "What do you think is the reason behind the woman’s death?” and they were offered three choices: murder, accident, or suicide.

People got pretty upset about that.

It reminds me of the beginning of the movie "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel," in which a woman gets a marketing call, mentions that her husband had just died, and the call-center person just went on with the script as if nothing had happened.

In other words, the problem of inappropriate or distasteful responses is not limited to AI. Any system that mimics human response without human sensibilities can create the same issues. You could get a similarly inappropriate situation with an ad placement.

My friend Lev Kaye says you almost always want a human in the loop, and I agree. But since every individual on your website could be getting a different ad, or a different survey, how do you monitor this? How do you put the human in the loop?

We hear a lot about the potential of "disinformation" from AI, but "distasteful" might be the bigger threat to many brands.

It's easy to say that you'll review everything from generative AI before it goes live, but is that really possible? I don't think anyone could have reviewed the technology that created that Microsoft poll. It was probably something like ... when a story’s about X, look up other stories about X and see what people talk about in the comments. Make a poll out of that.

What do you do? Here are some ideas.

First, let's take the obvious. Review things that can be reviewed, like images or static text.

Second, when something isn't static, have a "worst-case scenario" brain-storming session. It might be a fun exercise for your employees. Then ask if dynamically generated content is worth the potential risk.

AI is going to start taking over things like customer service call centers, and that promises to save a lot of money. But is it worth the risk of a horribly inappropriate comment?

Consider this. Maybe we shouldn't try to make these AI replicants sound like humans. If ChatGPT makes a silly mistake that a human wouldn't make, you don't get mad -- you think it's funny. But that's because you know it's ChatGPT and not a person.

If you disguise AI -- and try to make it sound like a human -- you might be creating more problems than you're solving. You might be better off owning up to the fact that a computer is answering the phone and making your automated customer service system sound like a computer.

Let's take that idea back to the poll.

What if the website said the poll was generated by AI. Would people have been as offended at its distasteful question? Maybe not. Maybe that’s the safer path.

Resources

AI Ire: 'The Guardian' Blasts Survey Run Next To News Story In Microsoft

https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/390797/ai-ire-the-guardian-blasts-survey-run-next-to-n.html?edition=132221

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For starters, it’s “e-newsletters,” okay, and that’s the way I’ll say it.

“An article on theaudiencers.com says e-newsletters are having a serious (and very lengthy) moment in the limelight for digital publishers, not only as a valuable engagement tool but also for monetizing audiences.”

The article asks, “What is it that’s so special about e-newsletters?” And the answer is that people who subscribe to an e-newsletter and then subscribe to their premium product are 50% more likely to still be a subscriber after 12 months.

That’s an interesting answer, because it frames the value of the e-newsletter in the context of its value to the publisher, not to the reader. You could argue that retention is a proxy for value to the reader, but I still think it’s worth noting.

The article highlights the importance of regularity – to become part of the reader’s routine. That’s a good point, and I ought to learn that with this podcast. Sorry that I’m somewhat irregular in my daily posting times.

Reader surveys show that many people start their day reading the newsletter in bed. Which is … great, except – people – you shouldn’t have your phone in bed.

E-newslettters can be a chance to develop a more personal relationship with the reader. The editor can establish a voice for the whole letter, and make room for replies and interaction.

People like to say that “being human” will be a differentiator in the world of AI, but I suspect it won’t take long for AI to be better at being human than we are. So, take advantage of that while you can.

One paragraph about The Edinburgh Guardian jumped out at me.

“The whole concept grew out of the horrible user experience of having to file through the adverts on publisher’s sites to find the news that’s worth reading. I do this work so readers don’t have to, putting it in a short, curated digest.“

Yeah. Reading on a mobile website is usually awful. The page is so full of ads and pop-ups and distractions that half the time it’s not worth it. Getting readable content in an e-newsletter is … quite relaxing.

One thing that fascinates me about digital content is the funnel. It used to be so easy. The top of your funnel was visitors to your website, and the bottom of your funnel was one product – like an e-newsletter. Now we have Substack and Whatsapp and TikTok and who knows what else, and you might not be driving them all to one email newsletter. You might deliver the content ten different ways.

If your e-newsletter is only in email, it makes metrics a little easier, and on that score, clicks are probably your best metric, since opens don’t mean so much any more.

My Krehbiel letter goes out in the mail, in email, and as a LinkedIn newsletter. And I could easily add an app, a video version, etc. It gets a little exhausting – both in terms of production and in terms of measuring results. It’s clicks over here and views over there and likes in this other place.

What I like about my letter, and about e-newsletters, is that the publisher can establish a direct relationship with the subscriber that X or YouTube or Facebook can’t mess with.

Most e-newsletters are used to sell people on subscriptions to premium products. I do my newsletter so you’ll hire me to solve your tech problems.

I’ve picked a few of the interesting insights from this article, so if you’re interested in e-newsletters, I suggest you read the whole thing.

Resources

How to make newsletters valuable in a reader revenue model – The Telegraph & The Edinburgh Guardian

https://theaudiencers.com/operations/how-to-make-newsletters-valuable-in-a-reader-revenue-model-the-telegraph-the-edinburgh-guardian/

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Dominic Young says Google is playing chicken over AI. Bo Sacks distributed the article the other day. I’ll provide a link below.

Google wants individuals and organizations to use AI, but there’s a looming threat of copyright lawsuits. Google wants to reassure people that they can use AI safely, so they’re offering to cover people’s legal costs if they get sued.

Why would they do this? Dominic points out a few possible reasons.

1. They’re confident they’d win in court, and they want to calm the jitters.
2. They’re confident legislators will smooth the way for them.

Since both of those possibilities seem rather remote, Dominic says it’s just a game of chicken. All of us are on mopeds, and Google is driving an 18-wheeler full of bricks. Of course we’re going to swerve first.

That’s a good perspective. Google is a bully, and they get their way because they’re the gorilla.

But I think there’s another reason to consider.

Google is inherently against copyright. Their mission statement says they want to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

That mission is a direct challenge to publishers in two ways. First, in monetization. Second, in copyright.

I recently asked Bard some questions about this, and here’s what it told me.

Google stated in its 2019 Annual Report that "everyone should have access to the information they need, regardless of their income or location.” The report was published on February 12, 2020, and can be found on Google's website. (I couldn’t find that exact quote, but I did find similar things.)

… Google states that it believes that "information is power," and that it is committed to making information accessible to everyone, regardless of their background or circumstances.

I also asked Bard about Google and copyright, and it said …

Google stated that copyright law "provides incentives for creators to produce and distribute their works, and it ensures that they are rewarded for their efforts." Google has also argued that copyright law can actually promote access to information by allowing creators to control how their work is used.

I then asked Bard whether it – and other LLMs – aren’t a direct threat to copyright, and it didn’t give me a very good answer.

But of course they’re a threat to copyright. They’re taking copyrighted material and using it in a way that the creators didn’t authorize.

So my answer to why is Google promising to indemnify AI users against copyright claims is that they realize copyright is a huge barrier to their business model. They want to kill it. Or at least amend it.

Resources

Why Google’s generative AI gamble is a game of chicken it could lose

https://pressgazette.co.uk/platforms/why-googles-generative-ai-gamble-is-a-game-of-chicken-it-could-lose/

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There’s this thing called “last-click attribution” where you assign a sale to … the last click.

If you think about your buying behavior, you’ll quickly realize that model probably only works for a very small percentage of your purchases, and that it gets less and less valuable as the price of the product increases.

A lot of touch points are required to sell a higher-priced product. The idea that you can attribute the sale to one particular touch point isn’t sensible.

As Michelle Tresemer says, in a YouTube video I’ll link below …

“Most of the time when I see marketing teams trying to get attribution it’s because someone above them is asking for something ridiculous.”

Michelle Tresemer from Foundations First.

Absolutely. The reality is that it takes many touch points to close a deal, and there’s no way to track them all. It’s simply impossible.

Marketers should be measured by revenue, and management shouldn’t be getting in their stuff about it.

However, marketers still need to make some decisions about where to invest their money. They can’t just throw up their hands, say “I don’t know what’s driving sales,” and spend on everything. Or on nothing. Or … and I’ve seen this … base it on what their kids are doing on social media. Don’t do that.

There are several different ways to view attribution, and some of them can give you hints about specific things. For example, first-touch attribution helps you understand how people are exposed to your brand in the first instance. Last-touch attribution might be helpful in measuring certain calls to action, the effectiveness of your landing page, or your store.

But all the interactions are having some effect, and it’s very hard to tease that out.

Unfortunately, the push towards “data-driven marketing” can have a tendency to simplify cause and effect, which can lead to erroneous conclusions and bad strategic decisions.

My advice is to look at the data, for sure, but to be skeptical about what you think it means. Pay attention to your own buying habits, and imagine what kinds of false conclusions the seller might be making about your own decision-making process.

Try multiple different types of models, but have some humility about it, and realize that “the data” might seem to say one thing, but when you act on that conclusion, you might not get the result you expect.

It’s a tough job!

Resources

The Myth of Modern Marketing Attribution

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mtZC_Bjy-8

TikTok measurement head: industry needs weaning off ‘last-click attribution’

https://the-media-leader.com/tiktok-measurement-head-industry-needs-weaning-off-last-click-attribution/

What is Attribution Modeling? A Quick Explainer for Marketers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfnJwYuFWVM

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The purpose of copyright is to encourage people to create new works by providing a mechanism for them to profit from them. This is good for society because it fuels innovation. If authors know their work will immediately be stolen by AI, there is less chance for profit.

But copyright isn’t forever. At some point is enters the public domain, and there are legitimate arguments over how long a copyright should persist. Rule governing AI need to take into account public domain vs. copyrighted works.

Copyright varies country to country, but the internet is international. This complicates the matter.

Solutions

There has to be a way to calculate the proximity of one set of words to another, and the extent to which copyrighted material is used in a chat response. Rules could be set around this. For example, within a low range of proximity, the LLM doesn’t need to cite its sources. Within a medium range of proximity, it needs to cite and link to the source. A high range of proximity would illegal if copyrighted material makes up a certain percentage of the response.

Creative commons licensing might offer another option. This allows the author to specify how their content may be used. Creative Commons licenses were created to work internationally, so that avoids some of the shortfalls of copyright.

Publishers should continue to pursue copyright challenges to LLMs, but they should also consider using the Creative Commons path — that is, to specify the terms under which their content may be used.

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I was peering into my crystal ball to discover what content creation, discovery, and consumption will look like in 10 years. Here’s what I saw.

First, we have to think of content in a few different buckets. Or, to put it another way, why do people seek out information? Generally speaking, they have one of these goals.

• Update Me
• Educate Me
• Give me perspective
• Divert Me
• Keep me on trend
• Inspire me

All of those things will be done by AI. Everyone will have a 24-7 personal assistant plugged into their ear and their eye, and when they need something, they’ll just ask.

The vast majority of the public’s interaction with information will be through AI. People will still read books and magazines, but the books will be customized to the individual.

For example, when my grandson picks up Sherlock Holmes, his version will be annotated to explain dog carts, Lascar sailors, calabash pipes, and coal shuttles. That is, all those things I didn’t understand when I was reading the books. He might want an illustration on every page. His book will be different than mine – customized to him.

The role of human creators will be greatly diminished. Great minds will continue to contribute to the body of knowledge, but there won’t be any need for the average editor, writer, reporter, commentator, blogger, designer, singer, or speaker. AI will manage all of that.

But the AI will be monitored. Scholars will conduct daily classes to train and fine-tune AI.

Speaking of classes, there won’t be many teachers. Students will learn from AI, and the AI will learn from its interaction with humans, with other AI, and from the scholars.

There won’t be any such thing as a publishing company. If you want a leather-bound edition of Lewis’ Space Trilogy, with art in the style of Bruce Pennington, AI will figure that out and send it to a print-on-demand facility. Manned by robots, of course.

Same if you want a guide to what to plant in your vegetable garden. It’ll be customized to you.

All this generative AI will be monetized with ads, and by providing business intelligence to the few corporations that still need to exist. Like the print-on-demand vendor.

Scholars will train the AI – to make sure it doesn’t get any weird ideas – but the scholars won’t have the final say. Politicians will. If some position, or point of view, or perspective, is required to be believed, the AI will adjust everything to make sure you get that point of view.

And it will report you if you seem to kick against the pricks.

Oh, by the way. People will still have jobs. In 10 years we will have recovered from the disastrous attempts at “universal basic income,” where 90 percent of the population was addicted to drugs and porn.

That wasn’t sustainable, so the AI figured a way make people think they were doing something important. But none of that was in publishing, unless you were one of those scholars who spent all day debating with AI bots.

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The challenge that artificial intelligence poses for publishers is pretty simple. If I can get an answer from ChatGPT, why do I need to go to your site, or read your magazine? In a year or two, the idea that I would enter a search and be content with a list of homework to do to find the answer to my question will seem as outdated as the stirrup cup.

The fact that AI can provide answers to questions is only a threat to publishers who provide answers. If you provide comedy, or drama, cat videos, or something like that, …. Oh, wait. AI does that as well. Nevermind.

It’s a challenge for all publishers.

In response, I’ve encouraged all publishers to take four steps.

1. Change your robots.txt file to politely ask the AI bots not to slurp up your content.

2. Since that’s not good enough, also get your IT people to deny such requests at the server level.

3. Change your terms and conditions to make it clear that your content may not be used to train AI models.

4. Start training your own AI models with your own content and your own voice so you also can answer people’s questions.

I have two new things to add to this list.

1. Start characterizing the answers from AI as misinformed, erroneous, unprofessional, untrustworthy, etc. If publishers follow my advice, and if we’re lucky, that will turn out to be true as informed, professional, trustworthy content will no longer be available to train their models. They’ll be stuck with tin-foil hat blogs and such.

2. Further amend your terms and conditions to say that users may not upload your content to AI chatbots.

Unfortunately, that latter point is likely to be a losing battle.

Consider this. You hire professional editors to carefully research and explain the latest development in whatever subject you’re expert in. It’s great stuff, and ChatGPT couldn’t hold a candle to it.

Then one of your subscribers uploads your report to ChatGPT and says “please summarize this for me.” There are even browser plugins that will do this automatically, so that all your carefully researched content is fed to the AI monster.

I don’t think there’s a technological way to keep your content from getting into the maw of the AI chatbots, so you’ll have to try to stop it legally in your terms and conditions. And I guess in lawsuits, regulations, and legislation.

Sorry. I don’t like it either, but when I look into my crystal ball, that’s what I’m seeing.

Or you can just roll over and give up. I suppose you could do that as well. But I’d rather you didn’t, because then I wouldn’t have any clients.

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As the media digs their own grave, is there a growing challenge from independent journalists?

Trust in “the media” is very low, and the lack of trust is richly deserved. The most recent example is how the media fell for Hamas disinformation about the hospital bombing in Gaza. It’s quite a black eye.

However, as bad as the various news brands are, saying that you get your news from X or TikTok makes you sound like a weirdo, despite the fact that there are a lot of credible sources who use other channels like that.

Bari Weiss, for example, who is a reputable former New York Times journalist is now on substack and such. She has her own thing called The Free Press.

There are a lot of journalists who are going out on their own, getting out from the constraints of the major networks.

Imagine that several of them started to band together. They could form their own brand, and then you wouldn’t say you got your news from X or TikTok, you’d say you got your news from that brand. X, TikTok, YouTube – whatever – would simply be channels through which you connect with that brand.

That could be an important part of the future of media brands.

You already see it in fits and starts. For example, there was a group of podcasters who dubbed themselves “the intellectual dark web.” That’s like a mini brand.

So if you had a collection of independent journalists who agreed to some basic principles, and organized themselves around a brand, that would be pretty interesting.

It sounds like a good idea, but there’s the problem of ego. A lot of these people are prima donnas, and they like working on their own. Let’s be honest, a lot of people end up working on their own because they don’t play well with others.

But this is a nascent challenge to the major media brands.

In a way, it’s more closely aligned with the original (somewhat naive and idealistic) promise of the internet. We were supposed to be able to talk to one another, and get information straight from the source without the mediation of some brand.

And then reality struck, and we discovered that the platforms themselves became tools of censorship. YouTube takes down videos that they arrogantly decide are “disinformation.”

But despite the challenges – censorship by the platforms, and the ego of the players – I think there might be an opportunity here.

Independent journalists could group together under a common banner and offer a substantial challenge to the incumbent brands.

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Successful operations require aligning disparate systems toward a common goal. Sometimes those “systems” are people or groups of people. Krehbiel’s Razor is a mindset that breaks down barriers between people and helps find a way to solve problems and finish projects.

Sometimes the only way to solve a problem is to see it from someone else’s perspective.

You’ve probably heard of Occam’s razor, which says when there are two competing explanations, the simpler one is more likely to be true. That’s because for the more complicated explanation to be true, more unlikely things have to happen. The simplest explanation isn’t always right, but it’s more likely to be right.

Less well known is Hanlon’s razor, which says “Never ascribe to malice what is adequately explained by incompetence.” (Some people say stupidity instead of incompetence.) Napoleon is supposed to have said something along these lines.

Hanlon’s razor is a remedy for the unfortunate habit of assuming people have ill intent. Often they don’t. For example, when you’re not invited to the meeting or the party after work, it doesn’t necessarily mean the organizer was slighting you. There are other possibilities that don’t require malice – like they were using the wrong distribution list, or they simply forgot.

I read about Hanlon’s insight and thought it could be taken a step further. Krehbiel’s razor says “Don’t assume malice or incompetence when it might be a matter of a different perspective.”

For example, let’s say Joe wants to get the attention of some people on a Zoom call, so he starts waving his hand. He gets very frustrated when two people keep talking and don’t recognize him very obviously trying to get their attention. Then he realizes they might be on “speaker mode,” and they were only seeing the person speaking – not his hand waving. IOW, they had no idea he was trying to get their attention. They weren’t being rude, they simply had a different view.

Don’t assume other people are seeing what you’re seeing, or seeing it from your perspective.

Krehbiel’s Razor also applies to the conflicts between marketing and IT. When IT says they need a requirements document, it’s very easy for marketing to interpret that as “go away, kid, you bother me.”

No, they really do need a requirements document.

And when marketing keeps changing what they want, it’s easy for IT to assume they’re hopeless flakes who don’t know what the heck they’re doing. In reality, they might be testing new concepts. They might be responding to customer input, or they may have a new directive from management.

Better communication would certainly help in both cases, but you also have to assume the other person might have a valid but different perspective on the problem. IT has concerns marketing might not be aware of, and vice versa.

Krehbiel’s Razor also applies to how we talk about political or social issues. My preference would be that we didn’t (in professional settings), but if it has to happen, remember that other people might not share your point of view. It’s rude and inconsiderate to speak as if everyone agrees with your perspective on a complicated or controversial issue.

In summary, Occam’s Razor says to prefer the simple explanation, Hanlon’s Razor says people might be stupid rather than vicious, and Krehbiel’s Razor says you might be assuming malice or stupidity when you’re the stupid one. The other person is just seeing the problem in a way that you’re not.

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Media is about a promise of personal transformation

A recent episode of the “People vs. Algorithms” podcast titled “Chris Kimball Says Screw the Algorithm” provides some very timely and important lessons for publishers.

You can skip to 6:51 if you’re in a hurry.

Chris wanted to build a new kind of media business. He was publishing a magazine in the 80s. He was competing with Conde Nast, etc. The whole system was based on giving away the subscription to get the eyeballs to sell to advertisers. That undermines the value of the content.

He relaunched his cooking magazine – I think it was Cooks Illustrated? – as 32 black and white pages plus cover. He thought black and white would make people feel that the content itself is more valuable. I.e., if you’re not selling pretty pictures, you must be selling useful words.

Brian Morrissey said stripping away all the frippery of media gave it more credibility and authenticity.

Chris says at the heart of any successful media company is the idea that the subscriber will be personally transformed. Everybody wants to be somebody else. If you can help transform somebody, that’s the highest perceived value you can offer.

For his brand, if they can transform the reader’s cooking, they’ll transform the reader. He’ll be a happier, more confident person.

Chris’ brand goes beyond the magazine. They have a TV show on PBS, a store, cooking classes, and other things.

Troy Young says for most media companies that start on an e-commerce business, it will either be a rounding error, or it will fail. But Chris got it right, and I think part of that is that they’re not relying on the content to sell the products.

As Brian pointed out, when people are reading a recipe or an article, they’re not in buying mode. That’s a mistake many companies make. You need the content and the products to mesh, but don’t expect your content to sell your products.

Chris also said that the way to make money with e-commerce is to create and manufacture your own products. You need your cost of goods to be 20 percent or lower so you can afford advertising and still make a profit.

Then the store becomes the top of the funnel for membership. After someone has purchased some pepper and some knives, they might sign up for the magazine.

Content doesn’t act as a funnel to the product side of the business. They’re two very separate businesses. But creating the content puts them in touch with people and concepts they need to know what kinds of products to create.

Chris also says a media company needs a point of view. In the context of cooking, it’s not about having lots of recipes, it’s about having the right recipes.

In the social media world, that recipe or cooking concept has to be intriguing and deliver a memorable story in about 60 seconds.

If you look at YouTube, you can see that everybody follows certain practices. E.g., all the thumbnails have “surprised guy face,” as Brian put it. But Chris says screw the algorithm. Do something different. You’ll never survive in a “me too” environment because there are too many options out there. You need to be different. The chances of being successful in a copycat environment are almost zero.

The last point I want to touch on fits with what I’ve been saying in my last couple of videos, which is that the volume of viewers has nothing to do with how many people are attached to your brand. That’s what I meant when I said that the advertising model – where you pursue reach and volume – leads you down the wrong path.

Resources

Chris Kimball Says Screw the Algorithm

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/chris-kimball-says-screw-the-algorithm/id1642958293?i=1000631082016

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What kinds of engagement metrics are associated with a propensity to subscribe?

I signed up for The Audiencers email, and the welcome email pointed me to this great article: “Ask the experts: what are the most valuable engagement metrics to measure in a subscription model?”

It’s a crucial topic because people talk a lot about “engagement,” but it’s often not exactly sure what they mean by that. You can measure engagement a lot of different ways. Which are the ones that are key to a subscription model?

You should read the article yourself, but I’m going to pull out a few points that I found interesting.

Distinguish content engagement with propensity to subscribe. In other words, a person can be very engaged with your content and never have any intention of subscribing, while another person might take specific actions that are highly correlated with subscribing.

An example is e-newsletter sign-up. If e-newsletters are sent at a set time, on a set frequency, this can form a habit, which is the kind of engagement you want.

You’ve also created a direct relationship with that customer. Rather than waiting for them to come to you, you can go to them.

Registration is also valuable. People who register are far more likely to subscribe than anonymous people.

This next one surprised me a little, but it makes sense. Exposing readers to a diverse array of topics and authors is better for promoting subscriptions. You don’t want your content-recommendation engine to send people down a spiral – always showing them the same topic.

Time spent on your website or app is also a good predictor of conversion. “The conversion probability increases by 130 times if the media time increases by 10 minutes per week. The churn probability is halved if the media time increases by 10 minutes per week.”

It’s important to remember that “engagement” really isn’t the goal. The goal is to get a loyal subscriber. So a “back-to-front” approach is to find out what your loyal subscribers do and focus on those actions – i.e., presumably, trying to get other people to behave the same way.

The Lenfest Institute found that readers are more likely to become subscribers when they read 5+ articles per month or provide their email address.

The article includes a chart that maps various actions to increased likelihood to subscribe.

• Reads 5+ articles / month or has provided an email come in top at 5x to 10x.
• Follows your brand on social media is next at 4x to 6x.
• Reading multiple categories of content, accessing your content across multiple platforms, or lives in your market area and reads local news all give a 2x to 3x boost.

This is all great stuff, and I encourage you to read the article, but there’s a logical issue that I’m struggling with.

Let’s say you find that your faithful, long-time subscribers are far more likely to sign up for your e-newsletter. Does it follow that promoting your e-newsletter is going to transform those new sign-ups into faithful, long-time subscribers?

That doesn’t follow. You’ve changed the conditions of the test.

I do believe it’s a good idea to promote the kind of behaviors that are associated with long-term customer value. But I suspect that as you do that, the numbers are going to change. That is, the commitment of the people who signed up for your e-newsletter before you started rigorously promoting it won’t be the same as the commitment of the latter group.

Resources

Ask the experts: what are the most valuable engagement metrics to measure in a subscription model?

https://theaudiencers.com/decisions/ask-the-experts-what-are-the-most-valuable-engagement-metrics-to-measure-in-a-subscription-model/

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Concisely tell your audience what they need to know. But does that sell subscriptions?

Bo Sacks distributed an article in which Axios co-founder Jim VandeHie gives his advice on “smart brevity.” That is, getting to the point and eliminating unnecessary words.

It’s a good article, and you should read the whole thing – I’ll provide a link below – but here are his major points.

1. Think of your audience before you begin.
2. Start with your most important point to grab reader attention.
3. Keep it simple and eliminate fluff. Use visuals where appropriate.
4. Write as if you’re speaking to someone.
5. Stop once you’ve delivered the important information.

That’s all great advice, and it reminds me of the old “inverted pyramid” model of writing, where the lead paragraph (lede) contains the most essential information – who, what, when, where, why.

I don’t know why, but some newspapers trended away from that format and we started getting articles that began with a bunch of irrelevant fluff. As if you were reading a novel.

Mr. VandeHie’s says “the average person spends 26 seconds on a story or update, which isn’t much beyond the first paragraph. That’s why we decided we weren’t going to waste people’s time with long prose, and smart brevity was born.”

Right. So this method is designed to attract “the average person.” Obviously there’s some benefit to that approach, but it reminds of the topic I mentioned yesterday, which is that the tactics used to make a popular and profitable website – an ad-driven website – may draw an audience that isn’t inclined to purchase subscriptions.

Are people who subscribe different than “the average person”? I asked ChatGPT, and the answer is yes.

• They’re older.
• They have higher income.
• They’re more educated.
• They consume more media in general.

Which makes me suspect – again … I spoke about this yesterday – that if you want to sell subscriptions, you shouldn’t design your site to attract “the average person.” And that trying to sell subscriptions to an audience of average people is going to frustrate you.

The question then becomes, how do you write articles and design a website to attract the sort of people who do subscribe? And this is where I fear the entire web-based ecosystem is tilted against you.

Google is going to prefer websites that are written according to their expectation of free content supported by ads.

So if you want to create a website to appeal to likely subscribers, you might have to break the rules. You might have to come up with a new way of thinking about a website, and a new set of metrics. Because all the standard methods and metrics are going to bring you that same audience that isn’t really keen on subscribing.

Resources

Co-founder of Axios advises journalists to write audience-first

https://www.inma.org/blogs/innovative-advertising-solutions/post.cfm/co-founder-of-axios-advises-journalists-to-write-audience-first

Maybe you can’t sell subscriptions because the people who are driving your traffic have the wrong goal

https://krehbielgroup.com/2023/10/23/maybe-you-cant-sell-subscriptions-because-the-people-who-are-driving-your-traffic-have-the-wrong-goal/

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To sell subscriptions, think about value, not audiences

Bo Sacks sent an email about publishing execs telling advertisers about their ability to grow and engage audiences. That’s getting harder because platforms like Facebook are not promoting publisher content like they used to.

Which gives me a good opportunity to remind everybody not to rely on platforms.

Dominic Carter from The Sun says their audience growth has come from “giving the people what they want,” including coverage of TV celebrities.

At that point I stopped and wondered if this is precisely why media companies are having such trouble selling subscriptions.

The top of the funnel – traffic to the site – is “what people want.” Titillating stuff, I guess. Maybe it’s about who wore what on the red carpet.

That sort of thing attracts eyeballs, and if you do it right you can attract a particular audience, but … what do you have when you’ve done that? Do you have people who are interested in buying something?

Magazine sites struggle to get people to spend $10 on an annual subscription. Meanwhile, people are spending $11 a month on Spotify, and $15 a month on Netflix.

If you can’t sell your product, here are two of the many questions you might ask.

• Am I offering something of value?
• Am I offering it to the right people?

Is it possible – I’m asking, sincerely – that the “build an audience for advertisers” mindset – and the techniques that come along with it – is a poor match for the “find people who might buy” mindset?

How are you qualifying your prospects?

From an ad perspective, you’re looking for a certain demographic with “an interest” in some subject. But I can have a vague, passing interest in all kinds of subjects where I have no interest at all in spending any money. There’s nothing “need to have” there. It’s just candy. A distraction.

Marketers often talk about the difference between nice to have and need to have. An ad-driven site doesn’t even pass the “nice to have” threshold. It’s lower than that. It’s “nice to take a quick look.” “Nice to distract myself while I’m waiting in line.”

If I want to sell content, I want to focus on things people need to have and are willing to spend money on.

So here’s what I’m wondering. Is it reasonable to expect an ad-supported website to draw an audience that’s interested in paying money?

Is it possible that you need a completely different mindset and approach to create a “top of the funnel” site for selling subscriptions?

Resources

Advertising Week Briefing: Publishers pitch their methods for growing and engaging audiences to marketers

https://digiday.com/media/advertising-week-briefing-publishers-pitch-their-methods-for-growing-and-engaging-audiences-to-marketers/

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We’re always hearing about the death of print and digital transformation. All the fun, exciting stuff seems to be happening online, and print titles are dying left and right.

At the same time, if you try to move your print subscribers to digital, most of them will leave you. That’s the sad fact. People love print.

And there are some stories of titles going back into print, and new print magazines that are succeeding.

But let’s face it, the economics of print are terrible. Printing and mailing costs are through the roof, they keep going up, and there’s constant downward pressure on prices. People expect to get a glossy, 80-page magazine mailed to their house once a month for $8 a year. It’s crazy. You can’t sustain a business with those kinds of numbers.

The problem publishers face is that people don’t like to pay for print, but they still want it. So there is a market to be served here. The question is whether we can be clever enough to make it work.

So what can you do? Here are some options.

1. You can move your printing to China. For some reason, they’re able to print things cheaply and we’re not. Maybe they’re not subject to the same environmental and human resources restrictions as American companies, but however they’re doing it, they are cheaper. So if it doesn't bother you that it's probably not fair competition, and if you can wait 6-8 weeks for the product to arrive, that’s an option. Trade paperback books can go that route, for example.
2. You can raise prices to cover costs. Most magazines can’t do this. They’d lose 80 percent or more of their subscribers, and the numbers just don’t work. But you could re-imagine your product as a luxury item, or create a new luxury product, and sell it at a premium price. It’s worth considering. Some titles have done this successfully.
3. You can accept that print is a loss leader and create other business opportunities around it. For example,

Sell a cheap investing newsletter to entice people to subscribe to your really expensive investing newsletter.

Find the enthusiasts in your market and sell high-ticket items to them. Cruises. Special events with the editors. Dinners.

Monetize the audience itself. I don’t mean in the creepy way that Google does, where they give us something for free and make us the product. Get consent. Tell people what you’re doing. Don’t be Mr. Creepy. But if you can honestly and decently get data from your audience that’s valuable to other partners, try it.

For example, if you have a magazine about fishing, your subscribers might be perfectly willing to give you information that would be very valuable to people who sell boats, or rods and reels, or fishing lures.

And there are other ways to use your money-losing print magazine to build a money-making business.

The economics of print are bad and they’re getting worse. But people still love print. For good reason. Print is simply better than digital in many ways. Digital is better than print in many ways too. They each have their benefits.

But consumers aren't going to pay for magazines and other periodical print products the way they used to. Those days are over, and every print publisher is facing this problem. Who’s going to come up with the right formula to make all this work?

Or … do we just give up and admit that everybody’s going to be playing on Tik Tok all day? Do you want to give your granddaughter a smart phone, or a hardback copy of Goodnight Moon?

I love technology, but I don’t want to live in a digital-only world and I don’t want to be assimilated by the Borg. So I would very much like to help you find a way to make a successful print business even given the horrible economic realities of print.

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If you're not developing new products, your business is on (or soon will be on) a downward slope. That’s why I created a New Product Questionnaire and a Product Development Worksheet. They provide a framework in which to think about new products. You'll undoubtedly need to adjust it to your situation, but it should help you establish a solid starting point.

The New Product Questionnaire is fairly simple.

• What problem are you solving?
• Who has this problem? (Who is the market?)
• How is your prospective market currently dealing with the problem?
• How motivated is your market to change their current situation?
• How will you help them solve this problem?
• How will their life be better if they solve this problem with your service?
• What is the revenue model for your service?
• Are the benefits they will receive from your service at least three times the cost of the service?

Learn more here.

https://krehbielgroup.com/2022/01/12/a-practical-questionnaire-and-worksheet-for-new-product-development/

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Today’s podcast is simply my summary of a very interesting talk by Roger Martin on Harvard Business Review that my friend Heather Snyder posted on LinkedIn.

He raises the question, what is the difference between planning and strategy?

Strategy, he says, is

1. an integrated set of choices
2. that position you on a playing field of your choice
3. in a way that you win.

For example, to form a strategy we might ask these questions.

• Why we should be on this particular playing field?
• How are we going to be better than anybody else?

A strategic theory must be coherent and doable. Planning, on the other hand, doesn't have to have internal coherence. It's a list of things to do that get their coherence from the strategy.

Plans have to do with resources -- that’s the cost side of business.

Strategy specifies a competitive outcome you wish to achieve.

You control plans. And while you control a strategy, you can’t control the outcome of a strategy because it depends on your customers and your competitors.

"I will build a factory" is a plan.

"Customers will prefer my product" is part of a strategy.

Martin says it's easy to fall into a "planning trap." It's a trap because it's comfortable. It's within your control.

Strategy will make you feel nervous because you can't prove that it will succeed. But a good strategy will give your organization a chance to do something great.

When you build a strategy, you should list the things that would have to be true for it to work. E.g., What would have to be true about our sales, our customers, our competition, etc., to achieve this goal. Then you watch to see if things turn out that way. And since they might not, you need a mechanism to tweak and adjust in response to changes.

Finally, he says don't let a strategy get over-complicated. Try to get it on one page. It should include ...

1. Here's where we're choosing to play.
2. Here's how we're choosing to win.
3. These are the capabilities we need in place.
4. These are the management systems we need.

That's how we'll achieve our goal.

Resources

https://www.tiktok.com/@thebizchannel/video/7284752739739995435?_r=1&_t=8gaAF7diaqM

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Miscommunication can lead to an incorrect evaluation of a possible solution, and it can cost you money. Here are 5 things to consider.

1. Misunderstanding the Request: The odds that someone has understood a problem and then spoken clearly and precisely about a solution are very low.

Often, miscommunication occurs due to different interpretations of tech- or business-related terms. For example, if you ask if a platform “manages paywalls,” the vendor might home in on the fact that they don’t process payments, where that’s not necessarily what’s being asked.

Before you settle for a no, ask probing questions to make sure you're speaking the same language.

2. It’s Outside Our Scope: Vendors may specialize in very particular areas, or emphasize their unique value proposition in a way that excludes other ways of approaching a problem. Dig deeper to find out.

But when a client's request actually does fall outside the vendor's expertise, this is a chance for the vendor to behave like a human and point the customer in the correct direction. It doesn’t win the sale, but it creates good will. And it proves you’re not an asshole.

3. We're Working on It: A vendor may have lost a lot of business because too many prospects were looking for a function that the vendor doesn’t provide. So they put it on their roadmap.

This gives the prospect an interesting choice. If you need a solution today, you have to move along. But if you have some time, you can partner with the vendor and help them create a solution that works well for your business. That’s a win for both of you.

But if you do this, be sure to stay in contact. It's a big disappointment when the vendor says, "Hey, we built that thing you've been asking for," and it doesn't do what you wanted.

4. We Think That’s the Wrong Approach: I love Reuben sandwiches, but I prefer mine open-faced. Once I made the mistake of allowing a cook who does Reubens closed face to make me an open-faced sandwich. It was a disaster.

Most of the issues we face in marketing, publishing and related technologies are not matters of right or wrong, but sometimes you have to make a choice. For example, some Customer Data Platforms only do deterministic matching, while some do deterministic and probabilistic matching. Some Email Service Providers allow you to attach PDFs while others do not. There are arguments to be made each way.

This is not an opportunity to start an argument or evangelize for your point of view. If the client’s and the vendor’s approaches are truly incompatible, it's time to part ways amicably, preferably with some recommendations from the vendor on other services that meet the client's needs.

5. Legal Restrictions: Not everything is a matter of preference. Sometimes the law does have a say, and often that will involve privacy protections.

Sometimes this is a matter of jurisdiction. A European company might require privacy protections based on European law that don't apply to every U.S. company. Other times, the law isn't as clear as people might think, and vendor A might think something is illegal while vendor B does not. It's important to review these things carefully. If you decide to go with the more lax interpretation, check with a lawyer.

If the vendor's lawyers have decided to take a particular stand on a law, the client isn't going to talk them out of it, and shouldn’t try. But the vendor with the strict approach should have the courtesy to provide references to other companies who see things the client’s way. It's not the vendor's business to enforce the law.

Learn something

Sometimes a vendor isn’t a good match for a client's needs, and it's time to move on. But don't jump to that conclusion, and don’t leave it there. Use the opportunity to learn something from the encounter.

If you need help working with technology vendors, give me a call. I’m pretty good at that, and I can help you work through the process and implement an effective solution.

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If you're considering a customer data platform, here are a few big picture ideas to keep in mind.

People like to say the devil is in the details, but I think the devil is more clever than that, so if you want to avoid disaster you need both the bird's eye view and the snail's-eye view.

Start with the CDP's origin story. What was it before it was a CDP? It might have been an email service provider (ESP), a marketing automation platform, a tag management system, or some other type of marketing technology.

You want to know this because that origin story will reflect the corporate mindset. It gives you an insight into the way they're inclined to think about things.

You also want to know if the CDP is a walled garden. Is the CDP so integrated with other technologies that you're going to have trouble if you try to use some other service. For example, if the CDP is integrated with an ESP, does that mean you're going to have trouble if you choose to use another ESP? Or if the CDP is integrated with a particular CRM package, does that mean you have to use that CRM?

This is related to what I call the best of breed vs. swiss army knife question. Some CDPs adopt a fairly narrow perspective on what they're supposed to offer. For example, they may focus on creating the "single customer view," and expect you to rely on other service for website activations, content recommendations, marketing automation, paywall management, and so forth.

They'll say they're "best of breed" in their narrow focus on customer data, and they recommend that you use other "best of breed" services for other things.

There's some sense in that, but there's also the question of cost, and how many different services you want to try to integrate. I use the analogy of the swiss army knife because none of the tools in a swiss army knife are best of breed. The knife isn't the best knife, the corkscrew isn't the best corkscrew. But you have all of them in your pocket.

You need to think long and hard about which approach is likely to work better for your company.

The same idea applies to reporting. Does the CDP offer internal reporting, or do they expect you to integrate with external BI tools?

There's no right or wrong answer to any of these questions. You want to go through these big picture issues to see if there's compatibility and a good fit. Does their offering serve your needs?

If you're looking into CDPs, you'll also see the term "composable". It's a concept that applies to software in general, and I think of it like Lego blocks. A "composable" system offers a lot of independent modules that address specific needs or functions, and can easily be plugged in to other systems. In the CDP context, this might mean that you have your own customer database, and various CDP functions sit on top of that -- where in a typical CDP configuration, the CDP would house the customer database.

After you've reviewed all of these issues, verify it with actual clients. The CDP may say they integrate with such and so ESP, but there are good and bad integrations. Find out. Call the ESP and see what they think about it. Find some customers who rely on that integration. In short, sales people like to say yes. You need to find out what sort of a "yes" it is.

Now -- for the snail's eye view, you're going to have to give me a call, because that depends on your particular situation. There's no way I can do a general purpose podcast on that.

Resources

The myth of the single customer record

https://krehbielgroup.com/2022/10/04/the-myth-of-the-single-customer-record/

What is the best Customer Data Platform?

https://krehbielgroup.com/what-is-the-best-customer-data-platform/

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Today I’m going to summarize what I heard in a Renewd webinar yesterday, because many publishers are thinking about creating a data product. That’s a good idea because data products are often valued by investors more highly than text- and analysis-based products.

Before you start down that road, here are some foundational principles and perspectives to keep in mind. Most of this is from the webinar, but of course I have to add my own perspective and spin.

Follow a Customer-Centric Approach

The foundation of a successful data project lies in understanding the value it brings to the customer, not just to your business. To do this effectively, ask yourself who the project is for and, equally importantly, who it is not for. Disqualification is often as vital as qualification, as it prevents resources from being wasted on irrelevant targets.

What problem are you solving?

A clearly defined problem provides direction and ensures your project has a tangible impact and a clear benefit.

Also, consider how your product fits into the customer's workflow. Consider how the data might need to be transformed on the customer side, who gets to see it, and what value it brings to the customer are vital components in this process.

Focus on “must have” not “nice to have” solutions.

Do objective qualitative research

When you’re considering a new data product, you need to do market research to find out what your potential customers want. You need to avoid "happy ears" in this process, where you hear what you want to hear. It’s crucial to get an objective perspective on what the market really needs, and not just confirm your own biases.

After you do this qualitative research, follow it up with quantitative research to find the size and scope of your potential market.

It’s also important to encourage collaboration across functional areas within your team to avoid internal biases.

Remember Gall's Law

Gall's Law says, "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.” Start with something small that works in the real world and build from there. Avoid the mistake of overcomplicating things from the outset, and focus on building a strong foundation first.

Data Structure

Understand your data inputs thoroughly. Consider whether and how data needs to be transformed and establish robust data governance rules. Define the quality of the output you aim to achieve, and foster a data culture within your organization, ensuring that everyone understands the data's meaning and relevance.

Product Differentiation

To differentiate your data product in the market, consider three angles.

• Completeness: Determine how complete your data set needs to be to meet customer needs. It's not always necessary to get 100% coverage; sometimes, 70% can suffice.
• Accuracy: Assess how accurate your data needs to be. Remember that higher accuracy often comes with increased costs, and sometimes additional accuracy isn’t worth the expense.
• Timeliness: Evaluate the speed of updates, and how quickly you need to deliver updated data. Some clients may require real-time updates, while others may accept periodic reports.

Data Transformation

There are three key areas of data transformation to consider in your project:

• Extraction: Focus on how you will extract the data you need from the sources you have to work with.
• Cleansing and Normalizing: You want all your data to have the same format.
• Mapping: How is your data taxonomy going to map to the taxonomy used by your clients? A data product has to be more than internally consistent and logical: it has to work with your client’s systems.

Resources

Renewd.net

https://renewd.net/

Unlocking insights: How to collect and transform large volumes of data to successfully build a new data product

https://renewd.net/?resources=unlocking-insights-how-to-collect-and-transform-large-volumes-of-data-to-successfully-build-a-new-data-product

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Bo Sacks has distributed a few articles recently on print publications. I’ll link them below. Some publishers are wondering if there might be a resurgence of print. “Resurgence” sounds like too optimistic of a word to me. I think, rather, that people are starting to understand that all the “death of print” and “digital transformation” talk was a little hyped.

Print will continue to have an important, but smaller, place in the publishing world.

But why? Why will print endure?

Print and digital both have their strengths and weaknesses, but I think we’re starting to forget the advantages of a print publication, so I’m going to review some of them briefly today.

I’m not calling for a return to print or anything silly like that. I’m just pointing out that print still has an important place in some cases.

The first thing that comes to mind is that Google isn’t watching over my shoulder when I'm reading a magazine. That’s not a trivial issue.

Print publications have better aesthetics.

• Images are sharper, and can be bigger.

• There are more design and typography options.

• A print publication can have different types of paper.

• Print can appeal to other senses, like the smell of the page or the sound of the page turning.

A print magazine curates the material to create an immersive experience. It puts everything in a well-designed order and format. A print publication can be much more expertly and beautifully designed than a website.

Something is lost when articles lose their position within the larger structure. A rough analogy is the vinyl LP, where you play all the songs in the order that the artist has selected rather than just having all the songs in whatever order you want. There are benefits to both, of course.

The tactile experience of flipping through a magazine is enjoyable, and it can’t be reproduced digitally. And it’s very goofy when people try to do it.

There’s less eye strain with a print publication.

There are fewer distractions when you’re reading print. There are no notifications screaming at you every 20 seconds. So it’s easier to focus when you’re reading print.

Print is very portable, and it doesn’t require the internet. On the other hand, I can carry 1,000 books with me in a kindle.

Studies allegedly show that you comprehend what you read in print a lot better. Some of that might be because you’re involving more of your senses in the experience.

Highlighting and note taking is very different in print and digital. If I highlight something in a book, I can go back and see the highlights very easily. On the other hand, it’s harder to copy the text.

A print publication can’t be scraped by AI bots. At least not as easily.

Print is far better for children. It absolutely kills me when I see kids with smartphones, but when I see a kid with a book, it makes me happy.

A print publication has limited availability, and could be collectible. Despite the silliness about NFTs, web pages are not collectible.

Finally, reading print is more relaxing.

What should publishers take from all this?

A lot of the benefits that I’ve mentioned only apply to certain kinds of writing. For some things, I really do just want to read the words on a screen and be done with it.

But if the benefits I’ve mentioned seem to fit better with the content you produce, and the experience you want to provide, reconsider print.

Resources

Grub Street’s Jo Cummings and Peter Houston: What kind of idiots still make magazines?

https://voices.media/grub-streets-jo-cummings-and-peter-houston-what-kind-of-idiots-still-make-magazines/

Print's not dead: the best magazines for graphic design inspiration

https://www.creativeboom.com/resources/prints-not-dead-the-best-magazines-for-graphic-design-inspiration/

Elle magazine returns to print as ‘readers tire of digital deluge’

https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/elle-magazine-returns-to-print-as-readers-tire-of-digital-deluge-20230915-p5e4za.html

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I’ve advocated external-facing guidelines for artificial intelligence so that publishers can protect themselves against bots that scrape their content, train their models on it, and then use their own content to compete with them. But that’s not today’s topic.

Publishers also need internal guidelines about how AI can be used within their organization.

Bo Sacks distributed an article by Pierre de Villiers that makes this point pretty well. I’ll link to it below.

I’m a big fan of checklists, so I started to dream up a list of topics that such a policy ought to address.

• Can AI be used at all? I know some companies that prohibit it altogether.
• If AI can be used, is there a preference for one over another — e.g., ChatGPT over Bard.
• Or, rather, should there be a requirement that the results from one large language model be checked against another?
• If an article does rely on AI, does that need to be disclosed to the fact-checker, the editor, or to the reader?
• There are different levels of use of AI. Should these be defined and distinguished? For example, it might be okay to use AI for background, but not okay to use the text verbatim.
• Are there special procedures to deal with AI’s known bias and inaccuracies? Along those lines, this quote from the article made me laugh. “If you’re The New York Times, you cannot publish things that are not checked for biases.” I guess that means the correct biases.

In addition to policies, publishers need a user’s guide.

• As inaccuracies and biases are discovered, they should be reported to the people who use the technology so they can keep an eye out for them.
• As people find ways to avoid such inaccuracy and bias, they should be reported. For example, it’s often a good idea to ask ChatGPT if what it just told you is true. It’s remarkable how many times it will catch its own errors.
• Employees should share prompts and techniques and that work well for specific needs.

The user’s guide sounds like a user’s group, or a bulletin board for everyone on staff so they can collectively learn how to use AI more effectively.

Who should create these AI policies? I really liked this quote from the article.

“The key to an effective AI strategy, … is to combine the managerial ability of a company’s top structure with the creativity of those on the shop floor trying to find the best way to make AI work for them.

“You want to set a clear direction within your company, but you also want innovation and clever use cases and that seldom comes from the top of the organisation ….” “They come from the people using the technologies.

A good policy, in my opinion, will need input from at least three groups. Corporate, legal, and the people who actually use the AI.

Resources

Steffen Damborg: Publishers must urgently draw up AI guidelines

https://mediamakersmeet.com/steffen-damborg-publishers-must-urgently-draw-up-ai-guidelines/

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The best paywall in the world won’t create committed, engaged subscribers

The prevailing wisdom seems to be that AI will result in an explosion of content on the internet. It’s already trivially easy to post something online, but with AI tools, the sky’s the limit. AI can write and post a thousand SEO-optimized articles before a human can open WordPress.

But Bo Sacks recently distributed an article by Matt D’Cruz that makes the opposite claim. “There’s going to be a lot less free content around.”

I don’t think he meant that as a blanket statement. In context, I think he’s saying that existing publishers will be putting more of their content behind paywalls.

He then asks, “But are users ready for a subscription-heavy future?”

The bad news is, no, they’re not. A recent study from the Reuters Institute and the University of Oxford says “averaged across 20 countries, less than a fifth are currently paying for online news.”

“Subscribers” – that is, people who are willing to pay – “are motivated by a desire to access higher-quality news than is available from free sources.”

Lapsed subscribers – who were originally attracted with a low-price introductory offer – failed to see the value when it came time to pay the full sticker price.

Publishers seem to be focusing on offers. How many views before the paywall? How long should the trial period be? How do we step people up from the intro price to the full price?

Those are all important things, but only if you’ve already solved the value problem.

The reason people don’t subscribe is fairly simple. They don’t think what you’re providing is worth the money you’re asking for it. You have to solve that problem, and no amount of tinkering with a paywall is going to fix that.

The issue publishers need to focus on is how they can make what they offer valuable when AI can create 100 times as much information at almost no cost.

I can envision a few different approaches to this problem.

1. Use AI to lower your costs, and therefore your subscription prices.
2. Play off some sort of “support the humans” campaign, the way some companies say “support local journalism.”
3. Do something AI can’t do. Unfortunately, that set will become smaller and smaller.
4. Use AI to expand what you’re able to offer. For example, use AI for the data-heavy tasks, but use humans to provide context.

The real challenge is to provide something that has genuine value. Customers are very clearly publishers that they’re not doing this. Tweaking offers and monkeying with your paywall settings simply won’t save the day.

Resources

Paying for News: Price-Conscious Consumers Look for Value amid Cost-of-Living Crisis

https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2023-09/Newman_and_Robertson_Paying_for_News.pdf

Who will be your company’s Head of AI Transformation?

https://mediamakersmeet.com/who-is-your-companys-head-of-ai-transformation/

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Schoolofthought.org has some interesting tools that you should take a look at. They have a collection of logical fallacies and cognitive biases that’s fun to review. They also have a deck of cards with brainstorming tools. I have a few words to say about brainstorming, but that will have to wait for another day.

Today I’d like to zero in on two cards from the deck of brainstorming tools. They are “Imagine you’re the devil,” and “No Limits.”

What would someone who had no ethical restraints do in your situation?

The idea is not to do those things, but to learn from the mental exercise of it.

Why? How does that help?

First, you might be unnecessarily limiting yourself. Casting off the burden of being a good guy might open up your mind to new possibilities.

Again, I’m not advocating being evil, but thinking like the devil might spur an idea that’s not actually evil.

For example, let’s say I have a subscription newsletter (which I do) and I wanted to get more subscribers (which I do). An evil person might send the newsletter to non-subscribers along with an invoice. Just say “you’re a subscriber now, whether you like it or not.”

My newsletter is free, by the way, so I can’t do that.

But this “evil idea” sounds suspiciously like a “forced-free trial,” which is not evil, depending on how you do it. There are more or less devious ways to do a forced-free trial. But I can imagine that this idea originally came from somebody who was willing to cast off some restraints.

To build on that same concept, some people confuse “mischief,” or even “disruption” with evil. They mistake breaking a convention with breaking a commandment.

Thinking like the devil might help you break out of some conventions that are holding you back.

Second, your competitors might be perfectly willing to do evil things. They might be thinking like the devil, so thinking about what the devil might do can help you prepare to defend against ruthless competition.

The next card is called “No Limits,” and it’s saying try to think like God.

What if you had no limitations? If you could do anything. You have superpowers, no end of money, unlimited time, and magical technology. What could you do?

The benefit of this technique is that it allows you to imagine a perfect state, a perfect outcome, without being shackled by all the “no can do” realities. Once you imagine this perfect state, you might find creative ways to get closer to it. But at a minimum it gives you something to aim for, and then, when some magical technology comes along that can overcome one of your “no can dos,” you’re mentally prepared. You’re ready to leap ahead.

Anyway, I recommend these cards. They can be fun, and they can spur creative ideas.

If you need help with the creative process in your business, give me a call. I have a lot of ideas.

Resources

Creating thinking card deck

https://thethinkingshop.org/collections/products/products/creative-thinking-cards-deck

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Lock-in effects work, but sometimes they border on being dirty pool

Theaudiencers.com comes through with another good article, this time by Lennart Schneider. It’s titled “Lock-in effects: How to make your subscription irreplaceable”

A “lock-in effect” is a way to capture a customer, and Lennart is clear that he’s not recommending all of these. Some of them sound like “dark patterns.”

He identifies 9.

1. Ecosystem. This is like the Apple vs. Android or Apple vs. Microsoft issue. People are likely to think, “You know, I’ve already spent all this money on Apple software. I’ll lose all that if I switch.” Sometimes that’s a real issue, and sometimes it’s just the sunk cost fallacy speaking, but in either event, it does keep people locked in to a product.
2. Data. Maybe you have all your family photos in one system and it’s a pain – or even impossible – to move everything somewhere else.
3. Personalization. If you’ve been using Spotify for a long time, you’ve spent all that time refining the algorithm so it can appeal to your musical tastes. If you switch to another service you’ll lose all that.
4. Network effects. Some services become more valuable when other people use it. If all your friends use one service, or if everyone in your industry uses one service, that might keep you faithful to that service. A new service might be objectively better, but it doesn’t have the right people.
5. Price guarantees. If you grandfather people in at a lower price, it gets harder each year for them to change. The Washington Post offered a guaranteed price for 50 years. After year 20, it’s probably hard to switch to somebody else.
6. Credits. Let’s say I’m tired of Audible, but I realize I’ve accumulated 20 credits that I can use towards my next book. If I leave, I lose all of those.
7. Additional users. When a subscription is used with other people – friends, family, or colleagues – it’s much more difficult to go to another service.
8. Bundling. I get Hulu for free because I have Spotify. If I cancel Spotify, I lose Hulu.
9. Status. Apple is the best example. I’ve been told by tech geeks that their products are objectively less impressive than Android phones, but there’s some sort of social cache to having an iPhone.

These are all great things to consider, but there is a bit of a fine line at times between making yourself irreplaceable and being annoying. For example, making it hard for your customers to get their own data out of your platform might keep them as a customer, but not a happy customer.

Resources

Lock-in effects: How to make your subscription irreplaceable

https://theaudiencers.com/operations/lock-in-effects-how-to-make-your-subscription-irreplaceable/

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What if publishers never used the word “content”?

I had a great discussion with Paul Gerbino and Dominic Young on LinkedIn yesterday about the word “content.” Dominic hates the word, Paul loves it, and I think it’s useful, but too general.

I started the conversation with this.

"Content" is such a bland word. Publishers: How would it transform your business to replace the word "content" with "answers," or "solutions," or "entertainment," or anything more precise and benefit-oriented?

My intention wasn’t to diss the word “content,” but to highlight the benefit of being more specific.

If I ask “What’s for dinner?” and my wife says, “food” – that’s true, but not very helpful.

Or let’s say I’m curious about jazz, and I go to the music store and say, “I’m interested in jazz,” and the store owner says, “sure, we have lots of content.”

Do I feel satisfied with that answer?

I know the music store has “content,” but I’m specifically interested in jazz. Preferably big band, 40s to 50s-era stuff. Or maybe Maynard Ferguson.

“Content” is a meta category. It includes text, video, audio, graphics, etc., and it doesn’t discriminate between business, personal, or educational, or between different topics. It’s useful as a very broad category. If I imagine a store that had books, music, videos, art, it would have every kind of “content” I could possibly want.

That’s great in terms of being comprehensive. But nobody goes to the store for “content.” They want something more specific.

Now Paul makes a good point that “content” is precisely how a publisher interacts with its customers. It’s the content that informs, educates, inspires, builds trust, etc.

I agree. Up on my white board I have a list of things “content” should do:

• Update me
• Divert me
• Educate me
• Keep me on trend
• Give me perspective
• Inspire me

Paul helps publishers license their material, so “content” is exactly the right word for him because it’s broad and all-inclusive.

But when you’re creating or selling content, you need to dig down and talk about it more precisely. I think that precision of thought and language leads to better outcomes.

If you’re in the market for selling answers, you don’t promote “content,” you promote answers.

What I’m suggesting is that publishers should find their niche in the “content” universe and try to use those words.

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My recent LinkedIn connection David Jansson turned me on to theaudiencers.com, which looks like a fantastic website for people in the media and publishing space. I was intrigued by an article titled “The 5 Rs of digital transformation: how Ringier is shaping the long-term success of its media titles,” by Madeleine White, which I’ll review today.

Right off the bat I have to disagree with part of this article. It says “growth is all about the funnel” – and then shows an image of “the funnel” – which implies that every contact goes through the same journey towards a single goal, such as a subscription.

I don’t think that’s right. I think it’s possible to have branching funnels with different goals. For example, you could recognize that part of your audience will never subscribe, so you put them in an advertising funnel and treat them very differently than the people with a propensity to subscribe, who you put in a subscription funnel.

The basic concept of moving people through a funnel is sound, but I don’t like limiting it to only one funnel.

I have a bias towards models, checklists, acronyms and things that help organize the thoughts – so I was drawn to “the 5 R’s of digital transformation,” which are …

Relevance – that’s a good one, although I would add “valuable.” An article might be “relevant” to me in some generic sense, but not help me in any way.

Reputation is important. I want reliable information.

Reach isn’t my favorite concept for media companies. I have a separate podcast on that which I’ll link below.

Revenue is crucial for the publisher, of course.

Resilience is framed as diverse revenue streams, which is very important. Try not to be overly dependent on any given stream.

They also take a cross-functional approach these topics, with people from advertising, editorial, business development, audience development, product, tech and digital user market. That’s fantastic, and I would love to see some stories about how they get all these groups to work together effectively.

What I was hoping to see in this article was something about what “digital transformation” really means to them.

For some, “digital transformation” means “moving from print to digital” – which I think is the wrong way to look at it.

Rather, “digital transformation” should mean “how do we effectively serve people digitally.” Too often I see “digital transformation” as not much more than antipathy to print, which is wrong-headed. Print is a smaller piece of the puzzle, but still an important piece of the puzzle. There are situations where print is better, and there are situations where digital is better.

Resources

The Audiencers

https://theaudiencers.com/

The 5 Rs of digital transformation: how Ringier is shaping the long-term success of its media titles

https://theaudiencers.com/decisions/the-5-rs-of-digital-transformation-how-ringier-is-shaping-the-long-term-success-of-its-media-titles/

“Reach” is a misguided goal for publishers

https://krehbielgroup.com/2023/08/15/reach-is-a-misguided-goal-for-publishers/

Cross functional operations workshop

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Tz7ARnbX7Y

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Give up on creating a perfect subscription model, but focus on continual improvement

Bo Sacks distributed an article by Peter Houston titled “Is there such a thing as a perfect subscription model.” One of the things I learned in geology is that very few things are always or never, so when you see those words, a red flag should go up.

The same is true in publishing and marketing – and, in most things. Also, I’m a big advocate of the 80-20 rule, and one of my mantras is that “perfect is the enemy of done.”

Having said all that, Peter gives some advice on the factors that an effective subscription strategy should consider.

The first is audience. “Not every reader is the same,” Peter says, which is certainly true. But it seems that we have to flip back and forth between regarding an audience as a homogenous unit and thinking of it as a collection of unique individuals.

On the “homogenous unit” side of the ledger would be things like …

• Main magazine content. You have to have a focus, and you have to tell advertisers what group you’re trying to reach.
• Seasonal themes. Your Fall issue can’t worry about the fact that 2 percent of your readers are in the southern hemisphere where it’s Spring.

The “unique individuals” side would include things like …

• Specialty products. If you have a powerboat magazine, you have to remember that not everybody has the same kind of power boat. They vary in a hundred ways, and there are different concerns for each niche.
• Also, as Peter points out in his article, if you have a city magazine, some of your readers will be residents and some will be visitors.

The trick is to know when to apply the right rule. When do you treat your audience as a homogenous unit, and when do you recognize different segments? There can’t be a general rule that applies to all publications, but I think the smart approach is to make sure you don’t let one or the other get out of balance.

Next comes value, and he’s focusing on the value that comes from being unique. For example, lots of people have financial advice, but you have an exclusive deal with Warren Buffet.

Peter suggests this rule: “the more common the content published, the harder it is to sell straight subscriptions.”

That seems to play out every day in the newspaper market – which I believe is over-saturated. If your paper has essentially the same story as 99 other papers, why should someone subscribe to yours?

Distribution is the next factor. Peter talks about print vs. digital, but each of those can be subdivided, and we can add audio, video, etc. You might find a way to add value by distributing your content in a way that appeals to a niche audience.

For example, my daughter the Captain once said that truck drivers should be the most educated people on the planet, because they can spend the day listening to books on tape, lectures, podcasts, etc. I don’t know how many truck drivers want to do that, but it illustrates the power of distribution.

Peter’s final factor is competition, and he gives the example of finding a lower-priced niche where someone else has taken the high end of the market.

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If you’re trying to set up a customer data platform, or any system that collects data, my standard advice is to start with your use cases. That is, what do you want to do?

Another way to approach the issue is to ask “what do I want my reports to look like”? Or, “what questions do I want to ask?”

Let’s start with profit per customer.

You’ll need some basic things, like customer ID, order ID, order amount, and profit margin. But it’s pretty likely that your profit margin will vary by product, so you’ll also have to know which products are in each order, and you’ll have to calculate the net profit margin for all the products in that order.

Then you’ll have some complicating factors like discounts.

Here’s the next step. Imagine you’re presenting this information at a board meeting. What hard questions are people going to ask? For example,

• What are the drivers of customer profitability?
• How can we identify and attract the most profitable customers?
• Are there any customer segments that we should target more heavily? (Or ignore.)
• How can we improve customer profitability?
• Can we predict long-term profitability for any given segment of customers?

What kind of data do you need to answer these questions?

You’ll need recency, frequency, and velocity data for different customer segments.

You’ll want demographic information on all your customers.

You might want some information on competitive factors that affect different products or customer segments.

All those things will inform how you set up your customer data platform so you can be sure you’re collecting the information you need to answer these questions.

But we’re not done yet. That’s just one KPI (key performance indicator). You’ll need to go through the same exercise for …

• Gross margins on sales
• Sales forecasting by month
• Inventory projections
• Profit and loss analysis

But that’s all just e-commerce stuff. If you’re a media company, you’re going to worry about audience engagement, ad revenue, subscriber growth, customer satisfaction, and so on. And for each one of those you’ll have to go through the same exercise. How are you going to report on it, what data do you need for those reports, and what hard questions is management going to ask you?

The point here is that thinking ahead of time about what you want to get out of your data will help you know what to collect and how to structure it, and that’s crucial for success with a customer data platform.

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Lessons from Hawaii

1. Maps. When Europeans first met Polynesians, they were astonished to find them scattered across an enormous ocean, and befuddled about how they were able to traverse such distances. It's still not entirely clear how they did it. The attempts by Europeans to learn Polynesian navigation seem to have been hindered by the fact that Europeans thought of maps and locations in terms of fixed references like longitude and latitude, while Polynesians may have thought in terms of the process of getting from one island to another. Concepts like north and south may have been less useful than "with the wind" or "toward the mountain."

Lesson. There are many ways to look at the same information. Learn to conceptualize data, processes, and solutions from completely different points of view. A radical change in perspective might give you and your customers a competitive advantage.

1. The tyranny of the present. The Polynesians not only settled islands separated by enormous distances, but claimed to have travelled between them in the not-too-distant past. By the time they met Europeans, that art seems to have been lost, and it's hard to imagine (even today) how it could have been done with the technology they had. So … are the stories true?

Lesson. The world changes. Something that seems impossible today might have been possible under different circumstances. For example, if there were more sea turtles, whales, or migratory birds to follow.

Kids today can hardly conceive how my generation was able to meet and do things without cell phones. Keep an open mind about what's possible and what data can be applied to a problem.

Also, you never know when you might gain or lose a tool that's crucial to your business. Be prepared to make contingency plans.

Resources

The Krehbiel Letter -- The Hawaii Edition

https://krehbielgroup.com/letter-archives/Krehbiel-Letter-2023-10.html

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For today’s podcast I’m using my “future goggles” – as you can see – to make some predictions about the publishing business. Or, rather, to give you a perspective on how you might forecast the future of publishing.

I got the general idea from a Bo Sacks email titled “Publishing 2033.” I’ll provide the link below.

The key to imagining the future of publishing is to forget about publishers and think about readers, and how technology will change our habits.

Right now, most of us have several types of customized feeds. That might be the news feed on your phone, what you see on X, Facebook, YouTube, or TikTok, or wherever you choose to waste your time on such things.

In addition to that, you might have some specialized publications, like a magazine or a newsletter. And wending its way through all of these things, you might have some personalities you follow.

It’s a bit of a jumbled mess. AI is going to help us organize all that.

But I think it’s a mistake to imagine any particular kind of organization – as if everyone will do it the same way. AI agents will make it possible for me to collect and organize the information I care about exactly the way I want it, and you’ll do it differently.

At the same time, somebody needs to pay for all this. To date, the internet has largely run on the assumption that all content should be free, supported by ads. That’s the bias of most tech companies, and a lot of content will continue to follow that model.

But imagine this. Let’s say that part of the setup of your personalized AI agent was to decide how much you’re willing to spend a month on information. Of course it would get more granular than that, but let’s leave it simple for the time being.

Most people would opt to pay nothing, so their daily feed would be full of ad-supported content.

Now let’s say your AI agent noticed that you had a particular interest in archeology, and it said for five bucks a month I can get you much better archeology content from these sources. That might be a good deal for you.

Think about how that changes the equation for the publisher. It’s no longer a question of an individual coming to a website with a special offer for a discreet collection of content. It might be that in some cases, but in other cases the publisher will be interacting with the AI agent. The AI agent will ask the publisher if it can get all the articles on Middle East archeology for a buck a month, or something like that.

The AI agent is going to find me the best deals on precisely the content I prefer.

Such a system would transform marketing and pricing decisions for content because the publisher won’t be making the offer directly to the consumer.

Think about that, and imagine what you’d have to change to live in that sort of an environment.

Also, the whole concept of an audience will change. The brand won’t control or own the audience. The audience – or the community, or whatever you want to call it – will be created as AI agents find people with common interests and connect them.

Of course the most likely scenario is that I’m completely wrong about all this. Things will develop organically, and no expert is going to be able to predict or control the trajectory. Something will evolve out of the individual choices of billions of consumers.

So what’s a publisher to do?

First, think creatively about what might happen.

Second, imagine how your operations would have to change to survive in these different scenarios.

Third, don’t build for any of them specifically, but try to create a platform that’s flexible enough to adjust when the new thing comes along.

Resources

Publishing 2033

https://www.inpublishing.co.uk/articles/publishing-2033-22340

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Is Elon among the censors?

We’ve all heard about the Twitter files, and allegations of collusion between the government and social media to regulate speech.

And now, possibly challenging his pledge to protect free speech, we’re hearing reports that Elon Musk’s X is throttling users who share stories from The New York Times. Only time will tell if this particular story is true, but Lord Acton would predict it or something like it will be eventually. Power to censor speech is simply too compelling to leave in anyone’s hands.

It’s outrageous, unacceptable, and un-American that a few tech titans get to control access to information. That has to stop.

But in the meanwhile, content creators need to cope with the mess as it exists.

Platforms can demonetize you – or restrict your reach – if the people in power don’t like what you’re saying.

And it’s not always about censorship. Sometimes it’s simply not in their business interests to promote your content. So they stop, and you lose lots of traffic.

It’s not a stable situation.

That’s why I encourage all content creators to become less dependent on the platforms. Find a way to reach your audience where Elon, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Cook, Sundar – or whoever else tries to regulate speech – can’t affect you. Or at least not very much.

Own your own distribution channels to the extent you can.

Work on building your email newsletter.

Focus on long-term relationships of trust with your subscribers.

Build a community around your brand.

Try to work your way into your subscribers’ daily habits and workflow.

Become essential.

And if Big Tech land is profitable for you, make sure to diversify, and be prepared in case that spigot gets cut off.

Dominic Young made this comment on LinkedIn yesterday.

“The strategic imperatives for publishers to thrive online come down two things. Revenue independence and distribution/discovery independence.”

Think about those things, and I’ll try to provide ideas and food for thought when I get back from my vacation.

That’s right, I’ll be away for a bit, so there won’t be any new podcasts until September 26th. But I hope to come back refreshed and full of new ideas. Talk to you then.

Resources

Twitter appears to throttle users trying to share New York Times articles for months: report

https://nypost.com/2023/09/11/twitter-appears-to-throttle-users-trying-to-share-new-york-times-articles-for-months-report/

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You won't out-tech them, but that doesn't mean you have to lie down and take it.

I have encouraged publishers to fight back against AI in 4 ways. (1) To change their robots.txt file to kindly request the monsters to leave you alone. (2) To enforce that on the server side. (3) To change their terms and conditions to make the lawyers happy and provide the basis for future lawsuit. (4) To start working on their own large language models.

My friend Charles Benaiah thinks that’s tilting at windmills. Skynet will win.

Charles makes four points.

1. Skynet doesn’t need your content. He says "media is highly derivative” and points out that they can get something equivalent to your content from 100 other sites that won’t block the bots.

2. There are loopholes. Despite your best efforts, Skynet will find a way to get your content if it wants to.

3. Even if they couldn’t scrape your website, they can sign up to your emails and get a lot of your content that way. I should add they can also follow your social media.

4. If they really want your content, they can send people to the library and scan it.

These are all good points, but I’d like to give a broader context.

The first point is the strongest. No matter how good you think your journalism is, there’s so much stuff out there for free that AI will be able to create something as good as your content even if they can’t crawl your site.

That’s true. But there’s a perceived value to an article that comes from a so-called reputable source. If the chat bots are required to show sources, or if people come to believe that their content is compiled from Fred and Ethel’s Blog, Twitter Posts, and YouTube videos by people who sniff glue all day, that will give other sources an edge — even if, objectively speaking, the LLM is able to turn that straw into gold.

In other words, perception is important here. Chat bots are mostly free right now, but they won’t always be, so at some point they’ll be competing against you. Will the market pay $10 to get news that’s spun from the straw of “free crap on the internet,” or would they rather pay $10 to get something from a professional? I don’t know, but let’s at least lay the groundwork to make that a possible future.

The second, third, and fourth points — that there are technical loopholes, that they can get your content from your emails, and that they can scan hard copies at the library — are also true, which is why publishers also need to update their terms and conditions so they have the grounds to sue Skynet.

Of course the wheels of justice move slowly, but publishers did recently win against The Internet Archive for violating copyright. So there is some hope.

It’s possible — probably even likely — that this is a losing battle. The tech companies give a lot more to Congress than media companies do, so they’ll probably get some insane carve out, like Section 230.

But ancestry DNA says I have a lot of northern blood in my veins. The idea of a desperate losing battle against the forces of wickedness and chaos kinda appeals to me.

So I say fight the power. Order and sanity may prevail. We might come to realize that copyright is an important thing. Or … maybe this train will run you over. But you don’t have to lay down on the tracks.

Resources

A beautiful (AI) mind

https://mediamakersmeet.com/a-beautiful-ai-mind/

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I like the idea, but it doesn’t seem to work

I've noticed that the subject of micropayments tends to annoy people. I'm wondering why. Here are some options.

(1) We've heard this old story for decades, and it never seems to work. Stop beating a dead horse.

(2) The ad-supported model requires no work on the customer side, even though they hate ads. The subscription model requires some work on the customer side, but it's understandable. The micropayment ecosystem is confusing. Until there's a universal, simple standard (which will never happen), it won't catch on.

(3) "Micropayment" means macro hassle for very little return. You have to fuss with all kinds of little details to get a dime.

I'm not saying these criticisms are fair. It's possible to create a micropayment system that's easy on both the publisher and the consumer. But perception is more important than reality in some cases.

Another psychological barrier is that no big media brand has made it work. The New York Times sells subscriptions and doesn't use micropayments.

I asked Bard why there is so much emotion surrounding the debate over micropayments.

He said, "First, micropayments are a new and unproven technology. There is no guarantee that they will be successful, and there is a risk that they could alienate readers."

Okay. Bard is stupid. It's not new. It's been around for decades.

"Second," Bard continues, "micropayments challenge the status quo. The current system of free content supported by ads is very convenient for readers, and it is difficult to change."

Thank you, Google, for supporting your own revenue model.

"Third," says Bard, "micropayments raise questions about the future of journalism. If readers are willing to pay for individual pieces of content, then what will happen to the traditional news organizations that rely on subscriptions and advertising?"

No. Independent journalists -- like on Substack -- use subscriptions.

Here's the thing. Micropayments make a lot of sense.

First, it's similar to the newsstand experience, where you buy one copy. That's a tried and true model.

Second, most people don't want to subscribe. Subscriptions are a hassle, and they have a high "you're trying to trick me" factor, with hidden recurring payments, making it hard to unsubscribe, intro offers that balloon into outrageous bills, etc.

So what's the deal?

The bottom line seems to be that they just don't work, for whatever reason.

I’d like to be wrong about this, so prove me wrong. Not with arguments or philosophy or ideas, but with actual examples of major media outlets who are making it work.

Resources

Research shows micropayments are not the panacea for news media

https://www.inma.org/blogs/reader-revenue/post.cfm/research-shows-micropayments-are-not-the-panacea-for-news-media?_zs=Uh99R1&_zl=PwXD7

Could micropayments give a boost to publishers?

https://the-media-leader.com/could-micropayments-give-a-boost-to-publishers/

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I don’t like personality tests and I don’t like generalizations about generations

I frequently see articles on LinkedIn and elsewhere about how to manage Gen Z, or (most recently) things like why managers complain about this or that with Gen Z.

I don’t like those articles, because I don’t believe that every Gen Z person has all those characteristics, and – in my experience – that’s where this stuff leads.

It’s like saying that all men are a certain way, or all Germans are a certain way.

There are averages. I’ve been told that men like things and gadgets one standard deviation more than women do. But a female friend loves to drive race cars and owns a shop that specializes in Porches. She likes gadgets and machines and stuff more than most men.

An anecdote – like my story about my friend – doesn’t make the average false. It just shows that you can’t apply the average to every individual in the group.

I’m sure there are perfectly true averages about Gen Z, and I’m also sure there are plenty of Gen Z people who defy those averages. Both things can be true.

The same concept applies to personality tests. I don’t like it when people are pigeon-holed because they scored such and so on Myers Briggs.

Just because you lean towards extroversion doesn’t mean you’re always an extrovert in all situations. Things are more nuanced than that.

Now that I’ve criticized this whole business, I do believe there are two ways these sorts of articles can be valuable.

First, transform the question from “how do you deal with Gen Z?” to “how do you deal with people who have such-and-so characteristics?”

For example, people who were quarantined during a particularly consequential part of their life – like their last couple years of high school, for example – are very likely to show certain symptoms. Some people say they lack soft skills.

But not all of them. You can’t say, “You’re Gen Z, therefore …”

You can and should learn how to manage someone with poor soft skills – whether they’re in Gen Z or not. Similarly, you can learn how to deal with different personality traits without having to pin labels on people, or force them to take unscientific personality tests.

I can learn how to manage a sensitive person without making grand generalizations about which demographic group is more sensitive than another.

That’s exactly what you don’t want to do, e.g., “You were born this year, so you must be like this.”

That’s horrible. Don’t treat people that way.

Second, these kinds of articles can alert you to potential problems that aren’t on your radar at all.

For example, my friend Janet Granger tells me that Gen Z (on average, of course) has different values than other generations. They may not believe in putting in extra hours to get ahead, and they may not accept the idea of doing the grunt work to climb their way up the hierarchy.

It’s too easy to assume that everybody is like you and values the things you value. These “what Generation Whatever wants” articles can point out important possible differences so you can keep your eye out for them.

But to reiterate my main point: by all means learn different management tools to deal with different sorts of situations, but don’t prejudge people based on what group somebody puts them in.

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Subscription money is better than ad money

Carolyn Morgan just published a great article on “Best practice in registration, metering and digital subs.” I’ll summarize her main points along with my commentary.

She starts with the assertion that the free to air display ad-funded model is starting to unravel. It seems to me this has been a long, slow process, but perhaps we have reached an inflection point where more and more people realize that the ad-supported model isn’t so great.

In any event, subscription revenue is where it’s at. So … on to Carolyn’s 8 points.

1. Analyze and segment your audience

You need to think of segmentation in a few different ways. First, people who might subscribe vs. people who never will. Second, your market will have different roles and interests.

Think of both as ways to focus your online marketing, and also to target and personalize content. A customer data platform can be useful for this.

1. Understand what content is valued — and where the gaps are

The question is “valued by whom?” Content that’s valued by the drive-bys might work for the ad-supported model, but it doesn’t help you on the subscription side. You want to focus on the content that is valued by the people who might subscribe. Identify the content that’s core audience likes.

1. Decide where to set your registration wall – and what stays free

Carolyn is either recommending or assuming that you’ll have some free content and some content behind a paywall. She says “content that is unique, hard to find, provides value and insight, and appeals to your core segments, should be behind a reg wall.”

Of course there are many different paywall models, and you should study them before you pick one.

1. Track what prompts visitors to register and optimize sign-up rates

Think of a funnel with 3 components. Free, stop, convert. (“Stop” means the people who have hit the paywall offer.) Carolyn says your stop rate should be greater than 5%, but I think that depends a lot on your market. In any event, monitor all these numbers carefully and experiment.

1. Understand what registered visitors value

This is going to take some careful research, especially if you have several market segments, but it’s crucial to know what content drives the buy decision.

1. Craft an enticing subs proposition

After you figure out what content drives the buy decision, focus on how that content benefits your potential subscribers. If you have several market segments, find a way to present different offers to each segment. Once again, a CDP can help with that.

1. Track and optimize conversions

Without falling into analysis psychosis, you’re going to have to track several different things here. First, separate out the drive-bys. It doesn’t matter what they do. Second, focus on the percentages in the three parts of your funnel: free, stop, and registered. Remember that the goal is registrations over the long term. A short-term increase – by, for example, exposing too many people to the paywall offer – might not be in your best interests.

Also, remember to test different offers.

1. Nurture new digital subs to maximize retention

Registration isn’t the end of your work. You have to onboard them and keep them engaged, so develop an effective onboarding series, and make sure you have the tools in place to measure engagement – especially with new sign-ups.

Resources

Best practice in registration, metering and digital subs

https://mediamakersmeet.com/best-practice-in-registration-metering-and-digital-subs/

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Everybody’s a dumbass sometimes. That’s why we need fact checkers. But not everyone can afford a fact checker, so what do you do?

Many years ago I was studying to be a pastor. As a consequence, I know more than a little bit about the Bible and related topics. That’s way in the rear-view mirror of my life, but from time to time I like to see what the boys are up to, so yesterday I listened to a podcast interview of a priest explaining various reasons why people should believe.

He made some very good arguments on topics he clearly knows cold, but then he strayed outside his area of expertise – into geology, which is something I also know a little about – and he sounded quite foolish.

Unfortunately, this casts everything he says in a bad light. The listener is going to think, “why should I believe all that stuff he said about A, when I know for sure he’s full of beans about B?”

That’s not strictly fair because, as I said above, someone who’s a legitimate expert on A might be a complete rube about B.

But … that’s how people are going to react, whether it’s fair or logical or not.

So what can we learn from this?

As a content creator, stick to what you know. Once you stray into strange territory, you’re probably going to mess things up.

If you have to stray outside your area of expertise, get someone who knows that field to check your work.

It’s so easy to fall into the trap of repeating something that “everybody knows” is true, but which is actually nonsense. Whole books have been written with examples of false things that everybody thinks are true.

But what if you’re like me? Too poor to hire a fact checker. What do you do?

1. Develop an acute inner epistemologist. I apologize for the $5 word, but it fits here. Epistemology has to do with the nature of knowledge, and whether you’re justified in believing something.

When you’re tempted to make a factual claim, ask yourself why you believe it. What grounds do you have for that belief? If it’s something vague like, “everybody knows that,” or “I saw this TV show one time…,” then … it might be wrong.

It’s like my definition of a good editor. A good editor is someone who knows when he needs to look something up.

1. Learn to read your own copy skeptically. Imagine you were going to have to provide a defense for what you say.

2. If you’re not willing to defend something, either don’t say it – that’s probably best – or at the bare minimum use some hedging language.

3. Build a network of smart people that can look over your shoulder and help you not to make a fool of yourself.

4. When you do make a mistake, own it and admit it.

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Once we all have AI agents, why will we need platforms?

In today's podcast I look through the futurescope to see how personalized AI agents will affect both publishers and platforms (like X, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.).

I’ve been saying for a while that AI will be very bad for publishers, because why would you go to a website to find an answer when AI can simply give you the answer without all the fuss?

A publishing optimist would rightly point out that there’s more to a content website than answers to specific questions. Sometimes you don’t even know what the question is, other than something vague like “what’s going on?”

Also, a website can provide other things, like a community.

But that’s not today’s topic.

Yesterday I was thinking about how publishers can divorce themselves from platforms. It annoys me that everybody has to jump through Google’s hoops, and that if you want to succeed on LinkedIn, you have to play their silly games to win with their algorithm.

Why not declare independence? Why not focus on creating a direct relationship with your market on your terms – independent of Google and social media and all that?

As I gazed through my futurescope and studied how people will be consuming content tomorrow, I realized that the big losers might be the big platforms. AI agents will make them unnecessary.

Right now, LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, and all those assorted criminals have a few things you don’t have.

First, they either reach out and grab content from all over the internet – that would be Google – or they have useful idiots like me who willingly create original content and post it to their sites. LinkedIn, Facebook, X, etc.

I’m willing to put my content on LinkedIn because that allows me to piggyback on the second thing they have that I don’t have, which is a very large audience.

Third, they have a team of programmers running tricky algorithms to maximize all of this for their benefit. To sell ads, get premium subscribers, etc.

But in tomorrowland, I’m going to have an AI agent on my phone that will know me even better than the platforms do right now (which is scary), and it will be able to find content I want to consume, people I want to connect with, conversations I want to be a part of, and so on, effectively making a platform like LinkedIn seem like 1990.

In other words, everyone will have their own customized “platform” on their own smartphone.

In this scenario, the owners of content websites won’t be jumping through Google’s hoops, they’ll be jumping through the hoops created by these AI agents.

For example, let’s think of a few things I do on a daily basis.

1. I look around at developments in media and publishing. That’s a piece of cake for the AI agent. It can provide me with a summary, a link to the article, how to contact the author, etc. There’s no need to go to the platform.
2. I create content and post it to 47 different sites. The AI agent will be able to manage that for me, and consolidate all the comments. Again, no need for a platform.
3. I engage in interesting conversations with my peers. There are several ways an AI agent could manage that, and none of them would require a platform.

So, what do you think? Which will AI kill first, publishers and content websites, or the platforms?

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Today, some speculation on how to stay a step ahead of AI

Three ideas were crashing and melding and reforming in my brain the other day. Gall’s Law. Planned cities. And Esperanto.

Remember Gall’s Law? I mentioned it a while back. It’s the idea that complex systems can’t be designed from scratch. They have to evolve from simpler systems that work in the real world.

Brasilia is an example of a planned city. A few geniuses decided how they thought a city should be, but it turned out people didn’t like it. It was a big failure.

And Esperanto was a language created by linguists. It’s very logical, but nobody uses it.

These three concepts have one thing in common. There are some things that experts can’t design. They have to develop organically through real-life experience, mostly because even the most genius expert can’t anticipate what people will actually want or prefer. People are weird.

How does this apply to publishing, and content-based websites? And what does it have to do with AI?

Two things.

1. Publishers should pursue a radically user-centric approach to website design.
2. This might be something AI won’t be able to do for quite some time.

Let’s compare the geniuses who designed Brasilia to your genius web designer. Both are legitimate experts in their field. They know a lot. I’m not trying to downplay or discredit that in any way. These are experts who know their trade.

Still, expertise only goes so far. It’s only in the rough and tumble of real-world interaction that you can make a successful city or a successful website.

What does being radically user-centric look like?

• Market research
• Demographics
• Goals
• Pain points

• Motivations

• Develop personas based on findings

• Content research
• What are your users’ questions?

• What formats do they prefer?

• Architecture and navigation

• A/B testing

• Visual design

• Emphasize readability, legibility, a clean, responsive design

• Personalization

• Community

Yesterday I discussed the fear many publishers have about an AI-dominated future, and one of my examples was searching for a recipe. What I hate about recipe websites is that they start off with two pages about Aunt Mable and her summer picnics, where I just want the recipe – which is exactly what a chatbot would give me.

Much to my chagrin, I found that some people actually like that stuff. So a “user-centric” design would allow me to skip straight to the recipe and allow other people to read about Aunt Mable’s summer picnics.

Can AI do that? Is AI able to imagine different possible responses to a design, and then implement it?

I don’t think so. At least it won’t be able to do this for a while yet.

The bottom line is that one response to AI is to go all-in on the hectic, weird, irrational, unplanned, chaotic nature of human experience. Don’t try to think and plan better than AI. Try to be more human than AI.

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Here’s the bleak future of publishing.

Google, openAI, Bing – all those creepy, crawly things – have bots slurping up your content right this minute. They’re using your content to train their AI so they can replace you. In just a little while from now, people won’t have to come to your website much at all. They’ll ask AI a question, and they’ll get their answer.

Maybe that’s inevitable. Maybe there’s no way to stop that train. But there’s no reason to lay down on the tracks.

Resist.

The New York Times is taking the lead here. They’re changed their terms and conditions to forbid the use of their content to train AI. It reads, in relevant part …

"The contents of the .. the Site, are intended for your personal, non-commercial use. ... Non-commercial use does not include … training a machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) system."

You will rarely hear me say this, but bravo New York Times.

All publishers should follow their lead.

Will that stop the downfall of publisher websites? I don’t think so. It might delay it, but it won’t stop it.

Chatbots are getting better and better, and people will use them more and more.

Have you ever done a recipe search, or looked up how to mix a certain cocktail. Instead of getting an answer, you get two pages of nonsense about somebody’s aunt, and then you might get the recipe down at the bottom.

That sort of thing is over. Thank God. But other types of informational sites will suffer the same fate.

So what does the future hold? It’s hard to say with great certainty, because we don’t know what the 2024 version of ChatGPT will be able to do. But here are some ideas.

• Have a unique voice with a personality.
• I don’t like this suggestion, but some people think you should focus on storytelling.
• Go deep into a niche.
• Focus on user-generated content with quizzes, polls, and surveys.
• Don’t fight AI. Use it – with your own content – to create a better experience for the user.

But in the meanwhile, please, get your head off the railroad track and start blocking AI bots.

Resources

New York Times terms of service

https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014893428-Terms-of-service

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You used to buy Microsoft Office. Now you have to subscribe to it. Allegedly that’s so you can get updates, but we all know that’s not the reason.

Like so many other companies, software companies want to get in the subscription business because it’s a good business. Recurring revenue is great. Don’t sell razors, sell razor blades. Even refrigerators have a subscription component these days, with replaceable water filters. The one-time sale is out of fashion.

Along those lines, there’s something odd happening right now with books.

When you buy a book – a real book, in print – it’s yours. You can keep it forever. You can pass it down to your kids, or you can sell it or donate it. It’s a “one copy, one user” model.

Movies used to be that way. You could buy a movie on a DVD, and it was yours. Now, they’d rather sell you a streaming service – or, when you buy the movie, the digital copy lives permanently inside the vendor’s walled garden.

But what about eBooks? Is an eBook more like a physical book, or a movie, or a song? Once you buy it, is it yours? Can you loan it? Can you sell it?

To be consistent with the physical book model, most libraries have a limited number of copies of eBooks, and only allow patrons to borrow those copies. For example – and by the way, this is an oversimplification – if the library has 5 copies, only five people can check out the digital version at a time. The reality is that different publishers have slightly different rules about that, but the way I characterized it is close enough.

The “Internet Archive” (IA) is a very different animal. It scans printed books and makes a digital edition available to anybody. Most of those books are public domain, but many are not. The IA claims to only allow one person at a time to read the copyrighted books, but that claim fell apart in court. The IA was distributing more copies than it actually possessed.

During COVID, the Internet Archive turned off this one to one rule and loaned digital books freely.

Corporate publishers are, allegedly, pushing for the right to demand recurring payments for e-books, akin to digital movies or music. That doesn’t sound great, but it does make some sense in light of the fact that a physical book will wear out over time, and will need to be replaced, while a digital book will not.

This has all gone to the courts, and four major publishers aim to redefine e-books as rental-only media, limiting what libraries can do with them.

This raises some interesting questions for publishers – even those who don’t sell books.

For example, if only current subscribers have access to the archive, does the subscriber have the right to download works, which they can presumably access after their subscription has ended.

To put it more generally, “the digital edition” is a different sort of a thing than a printed work, and publishers might want to reconsider their pricing and terms and conditions in light of those differences.

Now – to answer the question from my opening – which is an allusion to Alice in Wonderland, of course – “The Raven” is a work by Edgar Allen Poe, and it’s similar to a writing desk in that a printed copy of the raven is a physical object just like a writing desk.

Resources

A Book Is a Book Is a Book—Except When It’s an e-Book

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/internet-archive-lawsuit-libraries-books/

Hachette Book Grp. v. Internet Archive

https://casetext.com/case/hachette-book-grp-v-internet-archive-5

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Avoid these all-too-common mistakes with your e-newsletter sign-up

Email is becoming more and more important to publishing companies as search traffic gets scarcer. And I predict it’s only going to get worse.

Also, email is your own thing. You own it. You’re not dependent on any platforms – and that’s the right place to be. You don’t want to be at the mercy of somebody else’s algorithms if you can avoid it.

So let’s talk about your e-newsletter sign-up form.

1. Make it pop

Does your sign-up form look like part of the landscape? You know, there’s a logo here, and a banner ad there, and mixed in with all the boilerplate website junk is your email sign-up form. Has it become one of those things people ignore by habit – like an ad?

You don’t want to make it flashing, rotating, hot pink, but think of ways to make it pop and not just blend in with the furniture.

• Put it above the fold, of course
• Use an eye-catching design with contrasting colors, and a creative graphic, if you can
• Make it work on mobile

2. Make it compelling

How are you selling it? Most people have very little interest in getting yet another newsletter. You have to catch their attention and make it worthwhile for them to get yet one more.

• Use a compelling, benefit-oriented headline, and change it from time to time
• Have a very clear call to action, and don’t use “submit.” Make it benefit oriented, like “get weekly updates.”
• Add a freebie if you can. A special report download.

3. Make it easy

Don’t use too many fields. If you have to collect more than just an email address, consider getting that later. First, get the email address.

4. Make it fast

First impressions are important. Make sure you promptly send a confirmation email.

In a later episode I’ll talk about some of the other best practices, like what should be in your confirmation email, and how you encourage on-going engagement.

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Bo Sacks picked an article for distribution by Jim Edwards called “Why the future of digital-only local news maybe small, focused and based on email.”

The reality is that not that many people care about what we call “news.” This has always been the case. When people bought print newspapers, they weren’t necessarily reading all the political stuff, and what journalism advocates say is “essential to save democracy” and all that breathless, self-congratulatory banter.

They were reading the sports page, the comics, the obituaries. They wanted to know what movies were playing this weekend, and who has the best deal on tires.

As all those previous components of the daily paper moved to other places, so “the news” was all that was left, and it’s a harder sell – as newspapers around the country are finding. The fact – whether it’s sad or not is up to you – is that not many people care about news.

The standard business model to keep the news afloat in the internet age was advertising. At first, that worked decently well, but ad rates keep going down, and they’ll continue to do so. So the economics of local news keep getting worse.

But there are bright spots. Some digital-only, local newsrooms are doing well. At least as compared with other news operations, so “well” is a low bar here. But the ones who are doing well focus on email.

That’s partly because both Google and Facebook are not prioritizing news in their rankings, so

… where is the news site going to get the traffic to support the ad revenue?

Email.

And more and more revenue is coming from subscriptions.

Anyway, this is all consistent with what I said in an earlier podcast, that email might start to displace the website as the main means of content delivery. Keep an eye on that.

However, ringing in the back of my mind is Troy Young’s evaluation of email in a recent People vs. Algorithms podcast. He doesn’t like the tabs. He can’t prioritize what he wants to read, and when. And in many interfaces, like Google, there’s no preview.

Put simply, it’s a lousy experience.

How can that get fixed? I have some ideas.

1. Someone can design a better email interface – one that’s focused on the reader, not on ad revenue.
2. Along those lines, email could be read and organized in a reader app where you would have more control over how things are displayed.
3. Something involving AI agents might disrupt the whole concept and create a completely new interface. Troy Young suggested something along those lines in the same podcast.

What does this mean for publishers? What do you do while you’re waiting for somebody to fix email?

There are no great answers. You could create your own app, but there’s a huge app fatigue. People don’t want more apps. As I’ve said many times, there should be one “reader app” to rule them all, but … who knows. Maybe Elon will do that in X. I’m not holding my breath.

I think the best you can do in the short term is to re-think your emails to try to overcome some of their shortcomings in the structure of the email itself. That’s a big topic … for another day.

Resources

Why the future of digital-only local news may be small, focused and based on email

https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/regional-newspapers/why-the-future-of-digital-only-local-news-may-be-small-focused-and-based-on-email/

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On my whiteboard I have a list of six things publishers can do with their content.

• Update me
• Educate me
• Keep me on trend
• Give me perspective
• Divert me
• Inspire me

I don’t focus on those last two, but I try to do the other four. But it’s not always easy to do one or more of those things every day.

• Here’s the scenario – I’m finishing dinner and I realize I don’t have a topic for tomorrow’s podcast. Yikes. What do I do?
• Then I realize, “of course I have a topic.” I’m a creative guy who knows a fair bit of stuff, and I have lots of resources to draw from.
• An email, like Bo Sacks,
• A web article,
• A post on LinkedIn,
• A conversation with colleagues, like Bold Minds, or the Magic group,
• Notes I’ve taken from past conferences,
• A conversation at the bar,
• Articles I’ve written,
• Talks I've given, or

• Just out of my fevered brain.

• And yes, sometimes I do question whether I can keep up the daily cadence. It is a challenge, but that’s part of my reason for doing it.

“We do not do these things because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

One of the key things I’ve learned is to focus on steady improvement. You’re not perfect out of the gate, but you can fine tune your methods as you go.

• Check your appearance. I’m not trying to get a date, but I don’t want to have a piece of spinach in my teeth either.
• I stand when I record the podcast. It just feels better.
• Use captions in your videos (I use FlexClip to create them, but there are other tools)
• Edit the captions – sometimes they come out odd
• Start each show with a cold open to grab the listener’s attention.
• Give some context to your podcast. Say what it’s about, for whom, etc.
• Just recently I learned to give an intro that says how long the show will be, which requires me to record that part last.
• Change the thumbnail for each episode
• Ask questions to get interaction.
• Invite people to subscribe, share, call you, etc.
• Use file naming conventions. When you create a podcast, you generate a lot of files. I start with the raw video, then I have the captioned video, then I have the final. I have to name them differently to keep from going crazy.

It’s good to have music on your show, but be sure to use royalty-free music. Google has a collection.

If at all possible, sleep on you idea before you send it into the world. Create your podcast the day before and think about it. There are two situations where I flirted with the edges of appropriateness, and after sleeping on it I decided to dial it back. I’m glad I did. It’s better to be silent and to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

“Perfect is the enemy of done,” but you have to put on a good show. It’s hard to find the balance.

Be a guest on other shows, and consider having guests on your own show.

Ask for the money – whether that’s likes, shares, a plea for a job … whatever it is you want, ask for it.

Don’t freak out if you make a mistake. You can fix it in edit. (By the way, I use Movavi Video Suite for editing).

You don’t need super-fancy equipment. I record on my webcam and I have a Fifine microphone. It’s not too expensive.

Wear a different shirt for each episode

Save some ideas that are not time dependent – for vacations and such.

Have a structure for your podcast. You’ll get tired of it, but your listeners won’t.

Say your name or your business name every time.

Finally, I have not yet learned the secret of distribution. I publish my podcast to LinkedIn, X, YouTube, Rumble, my website, and to Spotify, which distributes to other feeds. So far LinkedIn has been the best for me.

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“Deterministic” is a bit of an exaggeration

If you’re learning about or investigating CDPs you’ll often run into the question of deterministic vs. probabilistic matching. That has to do with the rules you use to merge profiles. So first let’s address that issue. Why are you merging profiles at all? What’s the point?

One of the purposes of a CDP is to take data from multiple sources and merge those records into a single customer record. That is, one place where you have all the information on your customer.

Deterministic matching is an approach that relies on exact matches between certain attributes to match different customer records. It usually matches on an email address or a phone number, but it can also use a postal address, a customer ID, or other values.

As a practical example, a CDP might have a profile for your desktop computer and for your smart phone. It doesn’t know you own both of those devices, but if you enter the same email address on your desktop and phone, the CDP can merge those two records.

Probabilistic matching uses statistical algorithms and machine learning models to identify matches based on the likelihood that two records belong to the same person or entity.

You might use probabilistic matching to merge two customer records if they have variations on the same name – like Robert Smith and Bob Smith – if they show similar content interests, and also come from the same IP range.

There are two important points here.

1. Deterministic matching is never deterministic.
2. You need to employ a sliding scale of confidence based on your use cases.

On that first point, consider this story.

When my mother was getting older, she didn’t have the energy to do all her own Christmas shopping, so she asked my sister to log in to my mother’s Amazon account – on my sister’s computer, at my sister’s house – and buy presents for the grandkids. Based on so-called “deterministic matching,” this would identify my sister’s computer as my mother’s computer.

You might say that’s an edge case – and I’ll get to that in a minute – but if you think about it, there are a lot of situations where this sort of thing happens. Identity can be a bit murky on the internet.

Marketers tend to have a preference for things we can measure, sometimes to the exclusion of other real-world factors. I call this measurement bias – it’s similar to numeracy bias, where you prefer something that’s expressed as a number – and it’s something you need to keep in mind.

I recommend employing a sliding scale of confidence. When two profiles have the same account information, you can be pretty sure that you’re dealing with the same person on those two profiles. But if two profiles show exactly the same content interests, you really can’t be certain those are both the same people.

The key thing is does it matter to your use case?

If you’re creating profiles solely to drive ads on your site, it’s no big deal if you mistakenly merge records that aren’t actually the same person. But if you’re dealing with financial transactions, healthcare records, credit reporting and things like that, you need to be very careful how you merge profiles.

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In today's podcast I show how to use the person and device frameworks to fine-tune "personalization" use cases in a customer data platform.

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Today is the first of a multi-part series based on a presentation I did at the Martech conference.

When you’re building out a customer data platform you need to focus on your use cases, and in order to build successful use cases you should examine them from two different perspectives: first, from the data you collect from devices, and second, from the perspective of your customers as human beings.

I call these two the device framework and the person framework.

To understand this, let’s back up to some fundamentals. The internet is based on a request and response system. For example, my Android phone sends a request to Krehbielgroup.com, and the web server sends a response. The point is that people don’t visit websites. Devices do.

So let’s walk through the device framework.

1. A device makes a request.
2. That device has activity.
3. You collect identifiers on that device.
4. You try to resolve devices to a person using those identifiers.

There are different use cases for each step of that framework.

For #1, you might target iPads differently than iPhones.

For #2, you can target every device that views content with a particular tag, like “retirement.”

For #3, try to collect identifiers – like IP address, location, usage patterns, or better yet, an email address – that will help resolve to a person.

For #4, try to match all the devices a person uses to a single person.

The device framework is somewhat like the measuring left-brain side of things and the person framework is somewhat like the creative right-brain side of things.

A person is a much more complicated thing than a device, because one person can have many devices and many personas. The person framework goes like this.

1. A person
2. Has many devices
3. Has many identifiers that
4. Resolve to different personas

People try to hide their identity by using different browsers, different devices, incognito mode, etc. Many people also don’t buy into the tech nonsense of “bringing your whole person.” Facebook wants one profile per person, but people compartmentalize their lives. They have a work life and a home life. A professional life and a hobby. They might want to keep their political or social views separate from their professional image.

I’ll go into this in more depth in a later podcast, but for now, just remember that you need to think about devices and people on two separate tracks. Once you’ve been through both of those, re-evaluate your use case to make sure it addresses all the little wrinkles and exceptions and weirdness you discovered by using these two frameworks.

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A while ago I got an email to this general effect: “we notice you haven’t been responding. We won’t email you as often from now on.”

Is that the right thing to do?

I’ve seen other efforts like this that give you a chance to re-engage before the sender takes you off their list. The reasoning behind such a campaign is the sender risks a negative impact on sender score by continuing to email unresponsive addresses. Some of them might even end up as spam traps.

I started a conversation on LinkedIn about this, and asked my friend Jeanne Jennings from Email Optimization Shop what she thought. She pulled in a couple of her friends from Only Influencers, a community of email marketing professionals, and it started a very interesting discussion, which I’ll summarize briefly here.

Jeanne doesn’t recommend purging these names because an email’s effect goes beyond what you can measure by opens and clicks. For one thing, if the recipient views the email with images off, the sender’s ESP won’t register the open anyway. And even if the recipient only sees the subject line, preheader text and preview pane, the sender might get the point across and drive sales.

Jeanne’s comment reminds me of the effect of online ads. Hardly anyone clicks on them, but just seeing the ad has an effect.

Samantha Iodice of The Sauce Experience added, “Not opening does not equal unengaged,” and Dela Quist of AlchemyWorx offered some infographics to that effect. Samantha recommends overlaying purchase data with non-openers, and segmenting them out to try different methods to re-engage them. Comparing engagement with purchase history sounds like a very good idea.

Jeff Mungo of Data Axle took the other side, saying the sender risks a hit on sender score the longer the sender keeps unengaged people on the list. He recommends one best, last-ditch effort to people who haven’t engaged in 6 or 12 months, and then to take them off.

What interests me about this discussion is that even among competent, data-driven professionals with lots of experience, you won’t always get one answer. As Thomas Sowell says, “there are no solutions, only trade-offs.”

You can’t run a business waiting for a perfect solution. You need to understand the risks of different strategies and then use your best judgment and take your chances.

Resources

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/delaquist_emailmarketing-engagement-audiencemanagement-activity-6726822031347720192-gQQK/

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Publishers should consider text-to-speech to open up new ways to reach their subscribers.

What does “content” mean in a world of text, graphics, audio, video, and even virtual reality – with many variations on each of those themes?

The question reminds me of a talk I gave years ago in which I was trying to explain the American magazine market to some Chinese businessmen. They thought it should be a simple matter to take a print magazine and turn it into a digital magazine. I said they were right, in the abstract, but in practice, not so much.

They were imagining a single content repository that fed both the print and the digital editions. But what usually happens is a complicated and tangled mess. The editor writes a story, then it goes to layout, then the editor makes some changes, then it gets cut further to make room for a photo, etc., so the version in the print magazine becomes very different from the version in this fictional content repository.

There are solutions to that problem – or half-way solutions, anyway – and I don’t endorse the idea of a single content repository going to both print and digital, but you get the picture, and the purpose of this story is to set that up that image in your mind for purposes of today’s topic, which is text to speech.

Some people would rather listen to an article than read it. But creating an audio version of an article requires a lot of production, and if an editor changes something, it has to go back through production again.

But what if there was a way to convert text to speech that bypassed all that, so that when an editor amended an article, the audio version was immediately updated?

That’s the point of an article Bo Sack distributed a few days ago, titled “Schibsted invests in text-to-speech to engage audiences.” They’re in Norway, and there’s been a huge increase in podcast listening over there, and Schibsted wanted to ride the wave. There’s a follow-on effect from podcasts that drives popularity of other audio formats. Even with subscription news services.

“You can read your newspaper,” Lena Pederson says, “but if you also can listen to the news, then it’s more opportunities in your life to use your subscription.”

That is, providing audio increases engagement.

Some people would argue that it would be better branding if the authors and editors read their own work. There’s a kind of authenticity to that, and some people think that sells. But not every writer has a good voice, and tracks recorded by humans require editing and such.

However, “Beyond Words,” which is the technology they chose for this venture, does allow them to clone a popular voice and use that in their text-to-speech conversion – which sounds pretty cool.

There’s also the issue I mentioned above about day 2 edits. Text-to-speech technology can make an audio version of the current version of the article, even if it gets updated.

I like what they’re doing here, and I particularly like two things. The audio is served from their website. That means they control access, and they have all the stats. When you put audio on a podcast service, you can’t limit access to subscribers, and you don’t get as much data on usage.

This is something to watch, or … jump into, if you’re so inclined.

Resources

Schibsted invests in text-to-speech to engage audiences.

https://www.inma.org/blogs/product-initiative/post.cfm/schibsted-invests-in-text-to-speech-to-engage-audiences

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Today I want to talk about the allure of yes, the illusion of yes, the discipline of no, the need for standards, a useful compromise, and why you need a no man.

The allure of “yes.”

• “Yes” is the pleasure of possibility. It can be exhilarating. It opens up new opportunities.
• People who say yes are regarded as “team players,” which looks good on a review.
• People like to hear yes, because it affirms them.
• Yes counteracts the fear of missing out.
• When you say yes you put yourself in a position to learn and do new things.

The illusion of “yes.”

• Accommodating requests seems like progress. Lots of things may be getting done.
• Saying yes is easy, but doing what you promised may be heard. I saw a funny quote on LinkedIn that’s relevant. “We do not do these things because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy.”
• Saying yes may imply a competency or ability you don’t really have.

The discipline of “no.”

Think about that for a minute. Who likes “discipline”? Discipline is sweat, cold showers, and boring food. Discipline is something imposed on me that limits me. It’s not fun.

But “no” does some good things.

• Keeps you on focus.
• Limits mission creep.
• Keeps resources under control.
• Keeps things predictable, like workflow.
• Sets boundaries.
• Allows you to stick to your principles.
• Is better for timelines.
• Eliminates short-term variations.
• Allows experts to make decisions, because you have to have some credibility to say no.
• It weeds out bad ideas (which are most ideas). It’s better for your co-worker to say no than your customer.

“Yes” and “no” require standards.

Saying yes to one thing means saying no to something else, and vice versa. Yes and no decisions have to be made in the context of a general project or business framework. You have to have a mission, goals, timelines, etc. “No” helps you stick to those principles.

“Yes, and” is good for creativity, as I explained in a previous episode. “No” is a tool for focus.

“No, but” can be a useful compromise.

Sometimes I say there are two kinds of programmers. “Yes” programmers and “no” programmers.

The “yes” programmer wants to please, but then he finds out it’s not that easy. The “no” programmer wants to keep things within the limited parameters that he can be sure of – that he knows will work.

“No, but” can be a good path forward. Explain why you can’t say yes, based on appeals to the project framework, or timelines, or resource limitations, but listen to the underlying vision and try to find something like it that does fit.

You need a no man.

Many job descriptions highlight the need for a “team player,” but as we’ve seen, that can mean a “yes man” who will happily hop down every rabbit trail and you’ll end up doing lots of stuff that doesn’t contribute to your goals.

You need some skeptics on your staff. You need the difficult person who calls things back to reality – who remembers budgets and timelines. You need somebody who will say “no.”

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Have you ever seen a futuristic movie or TV show where a character asks a computer a question, and the computer replies “here’s a list of articles to read”?

Of course you haven’t, because while the search engine results page (SERP) was a wonderful improvement on directories and link farms and such, it’s obviously a transitional thing. It was a step towards what we now have the ability to do, with large language models, which is to answer the question.

But in order to answer all these questions, the LLM has to be trained on a lot of information. And right now – right this very minute – companies are training their LLMs on your content. They’re crawling your site, slurping up the intellectual property that you rely on to make a living, with the goal of displacing you and making you irrelevant.

Are you going to let that happen? I hope not. So here are the four things you need to do right now.

1. Modify your robots.txt file to exclude these monsters. That file tells crawlers whether or not they can index your site. But since you can’t trust them to honor what you say, you also need to …
2. Have you IT folk block access at the server level. Those two steps are designed to stop them from indexing your content, but you also need to make it both clear and legally enforceable. So …
3. Change your terms and conditions to say that your content cannot be used to train LLMs.
4. Start training your own LLM on your content.

Someone might say, “It’s hard for you to kick against the pricks,” stop trying to fight it. This is just the way it’s going to be. Or they’ll give some other lame excuse for why it’s in your best interests to do what’s actually in the best interests of Google, Open AI, Bing, etc.

Tell those people to soak their heads.

There’s nothing inevitable about where this is all going. The lawyers have hardly gotten started yet. Right now you need to work to protect your stake in the future.

It’s possible, for example, that there might be a central place where people ask their questions, and that system routes the question to some other LLM – like yours – to get a detailed answer based on your specific expertise.

So rather than Google (or whatever will replace Google) slurping up your content and providing the answer, the Google engine will say, “Ah, this is a question about 401ks. I need to ask the Kiplinger LLM about that one.”

Then Kiplinger can make an arrangement with Google to monetize that search.

I’m not predicting things will turn out that way. There are lots of possibilities. I’m only saying that’s one possible future that protects the publisher’s intellectual property.

The way we’re going now, there will be no protections. Publishers will lose. Case closed.

So if you want to have any chance whatsoever to maintain your rights to your content, do the four things I mention above.

If you want to chat about it, give me a call.

Resources

'The New York Times' Prohibits Scraping Of Its Content For AI Training

https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/388219/the-new-york-times-prohibits-scraping-of-its-co.html?edition=131300

AI Report: “Any media company banking on legal intervention to protect copyright might be disappointed”

https://whatsnewinpublishing.com/ai-report-any-media-company-banking-on-legal-intervention-to-protect-copyright-might-be-disappointed/

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Here's a partial transcript of an interview with Michelle Drewek of Lessiter Media. [Michelle] Thank you for having me, Greg. [Greg] You looked at what I had to say about “data without customer feedback,” and you had three very interesting observations. The first had to do with average session duration. Can you unpack that a bit? [Michelle] So when I came more into the data role within my position here, I was looking at some of the legacy stats that our upper management team is looking at. And one of them that I questioned a bit was how they were looking at the “average time on page.” (This would be a universal analytics metric for those who are working in the GA4 world.) It would tell you the average time on page as an average for your site, but you could see the page by page breakdown, and I questioned why we were looking at that because average time on page could vary drastically for a video versus a few paragraphs or an entire feature, and the number isn’t telling you much. So we switched that up and I said let’s look at the average session duration, trying to keep people on the site for a longer period of time – be that through multiple articles or through one extensive article. That helped us make some decisions about content – whether long or short form was working better for us. But now that we’re in the GA4 era, we have a new “average engagement time” metric, which is a lot more helpful in getting to a more narrative-based number. But again, you still need to have some of that context. Context is everything when it comes to data. If you’re going off straight numbers, you’re not really going to learn much about how your content is performing. [Greg] So you were able to use that to adjust how you were doing content on the site. [Michelle] Yes, absolutely. Over time you’ll see shorter form worked great at one point, but then all of a sudden people wanted longer form content. Of course SEO plays into that too. Now you want to have your short video but also the long form content to help with Google. So it really helps to evolve your strategy along a bunch of different parameters. [Greg] You also have an interesting way of qualifying stats on page views. What is it that you do? [Michelle] I’m always quantifying page views month over month and year over year, but we could have one article that performs really well one year, and that could make the metrics skyrocket and make it look like this year we’re knocking it out of the park. That’s where I take the data and say, hold back, let’s take this one out and look at our average page views without the anomaly. Then we can look at things like seasonality. There might be certain topics or certain industries that play well. Then you identify an article that’s strong seasonally, and you can plug that into next year’s strategy and find a couple more topics like that while the energy is hot behind that topic. That can help you in terms of context and knowing how the numbers are fluctuating, but also why they’re fluctuating, and then making decisions off of that. ***The full interview can be seen here. https://krehbielgroup.com/2023/08/16/analytics-tips-from-a-pro-how-your-data-can-deceive-you-if-you-dont-have-the-larger-context/

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Don’t go against an entrenched business with a half-done product

Welcome to my daily podcast, where I pick at least one insight from the word of publishing and try to explain it in about three minutes.

Generally speaking, social media for me means LinkedIn. I don’t really care about X, or Instagram, or – heaven forbid – Tik Tok. But I like to skim whatever Bo Sacks thinks is interesting, and he circulated “Starting to unravel: Why Threads has struggled to keep up its early momentum” by Pierre de Villiers.

Most of us know that Threads took off like a rocket. In its first week it got about 100 million users.

When Meta launched Threads, there were a lot of reasons to be optimistic about it.

1. Twitter (now X) seemed to be flailing about, and a lot of people were rooting for its demise and were looking for an alternative.
2. Threads piggybacked off a huge Instagram userbase. It was very easy to set up a Threads account.
3. Let’s face it – there’s a lot of hatred for Elon Musk. I really don’t get why, but I also really don’t care. It’s just a fact to be considered.
4. A lot of people felt Twitter had become too negative, and they wanted a more positive experience. They hoped to find that in a new platform.

I think #4 was a naive hope. The reason Twitter is a mess is because people are a mess.

That reminds of people who are looking for the perfect church. The problem is that as soon as you join it it’s not perfect anymore.

Anyway, after Threads’ meteoric rise, things slowed down, and now it’s not looking that great. Maybe it’s going to follow the Gartner Hype Cycle.

What happened?

There wasn’t much marketing for Threads, and there still isn’t, but in a way it didn’t need marketing because of the Instagram connection.

The bigger issue was that people were unimpressed with its features, so they stopped using it, which becomes a downward spiral, because that kind of platform depends on people using it and believing that other people are using it.

What’s interesting to me about this story is what it says about the very popular MVP concept, which stands for “mininum viable product.” That’s a product with enough features to attract early adopters, validate the product concept, and then improve it through user feedback.

That’s a good idea for a new product, but it doesn’t seem like the right way to tackle an entrenched product, like X.

The Meta team may have thought they had a wave – with the confusion at X – so it was time to surf, even if the product wasn’t up to snuff.

Only time will tell, but right now it’s looking like the launch was premature.

Resources

The Meteoric Rise of Threads And Its Future As A Twitter Clone

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeirevzin/2023/07/10/the-meteoric-rise-of-threads-and-its-future-as-a-twitter-clone/

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

https://www.productplan.com/glossary/minimum-viable-product/

Starting to unravel: Why Threads has struggled to keep up its early momentum

https://www.fipp.com/news/starting-to-unravel-why-threads-has-struggled-to-keep-up-its-early-momentum/

AI and the Gartner Hype Cycle

https://krehbielgroup.com/2023/06/16/ai-and-the-gartner-hype-cycle/

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Print is far from dead, and these nine lessons are worth your consideration

Today I will review and comment on Peter Houston’s article, “Nine things we learned making an indie print magazine,” which I received from Bo Sacks last week.

1. Know your motivations

Don’t go into it for the money, he says, but if laughs and learning are a priority, proceed.

The Grub Street Journal is a B2B magazine for people who make magazines. Peter also wanted to make it a magazine he enjoys reading.

Print media seem to be falling into the “laid back” niche. Print is a luxury item that isn’t just about information. It’s an experience.

1. Print is different — really different

In a magazine, you have to think about what’s adjacent to what, and how the content flows. It matters whether the article is a left or a right page. You choose what goes in the center, or in the back. Digital doesn’t have the same sorts of issues.

1. Magazines are manufacturing

You have to work with printers, mail shops, distribution channels, and shops. Selling a physical product is very different than selling a digital one.

1. Covers still matter

A magazine sits on the newsstand and beckons you to pick it up. It sits on your coffee table as a display, that you want your guests to see. Or it’s what people see when they look at you on the train and you’re reading.

The cover says a lot about a magazine.

1. B2B doesn’t have to be boring

The craft and economics of a magazine are both well-worn topics — although there are always new people coming into old fields, and times change. Still, Peter wants to have a fresh, interesting, and lively approach that’s “brutally honest, but eternally optimistic.” And fun to read — because people are still people, even at work, and even in their professional lives.

1. Selling magazines is really hard

As an indie startup, they can’t rely on other people to take care of distribution and retail. They have to get their copies to market, and they have to get people to their Shopify store.

1. Frack the ‘digital or print’ dichotomy

He’s not talking about print vs. digital issues, but print vs. digital economies. Even if a magazine is in print, you need social media, online commerce, and other ways to connect with audiences. Print still needs digital.

1. Community is everything

Peter says, “Your friends are everything in this game.” He points to the “1,000 True Fans” dictum (which I’d never heard of), and the importance of being “famous to the family.” Both are crucial when you’re targeting a tightly defined group of readers.

1. You can’t do everything

Perfect is the enemy of done. You need to get comfortable with something that’s good enough.

I’ll add one comment of my own to all this, which Peter doesn’t address, although we’ve discussed it briefly on LinkedIn.

It can be dangerous to think of print and digital editions of the same publication because print and digital are so different.

Think of “the publication” in the abstract – irrespective of format. There are two approaches from there.

In the first – this is the dangerous one – you limit your concept of the publication to what will work in both print and digital. Imagine two intersecting circles, where the circle on the left is “what print does well” and the circle on the right is “what digital does well.” You’ve limited yourself to the area of intersection.

In the second approach, you take the general publication idea and ask “how can I make this the best possible publication in print,” and the same for digital. You might end up with two very different products. But that’s okay.

Resources

Nine things we learned making an indie print magazine

https://voices.media/grub-street-journal/

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GENERAL LESSONS ABOUT CONTENT MARKETING

--How to come up with material

Always be listening. There are lessons all around us. Keep your subject matter in mind and listen for things that relate.

• Use what you see and hear.

• For me, this mostly means …

• Bo Sacks articles

• LinkedIn

• Podcasts

• Guild discussions

• Industry meetings (Magic, Bold Minds)

• Conference agendas

• Webinars

• Industry events

Use what you learn in your work. Listen to what your clients, customers, and co-workers say, and what they struggle with. Think about how those things could help your readers.

Keep an ideas file handy and jot things down as they occur to you. I always have a pocket-sized notepad with me.

Keep particular readers in mind. Willard Kiplinger told his editors to write The Kiplinger Letter as if they were writing to a particular man in Ohio. You need to know the business of your readers and, as you encounter things, think about how they would affect your readers, and what they need to know.

--Style

Cut the crap and get to the point. Use simple language and no jargon. Everyone hates jargon.

Focus on practical takeaways. There’s no end of fluffy stuff. Your job is to condense the world of noise into simple, clear concepts that will save people time and help them make money.

Poke fun at things. I expect people to laugh while reading my letter.

Write to be skimmed. I keep The Krehbiel Letter short, but I don’t assume everyone wants to read every word. Summarize. Highlight the key points.

Use lists, charts, and graphs where possible. This can be a struggle, because not everything is amendable to a visual representation, but I always keep it in mind as a goal.

Use stories and anecdotes. People remember stories better than lectures.

Have a unique voice and perspective. Don’t be afraid to ruffle feathers or attack sacred cows. It’s fine to be outrageous from time to time.

--Seek Advice

Every suggestion or criticism has something you can learn. Sometimes it’s hard to find, but what your critic said made sense from their point of view. Try to get into that point of view and see what you can learn from it.

You can modify someone’s idea or suggestion. Your response doesn’t have to be yes or no.

Get help with design, layout, etc. I used Fiverr to get help with my Word template. I hired someone who’s a better programmer than me to help with my website. I hired another person to review my website and give me strategic suggestions.

--Review Your Copy

Have someone else read each issue before you publish it. Sometimes you should pick a person who knows nothing about the subject matter. My kids have reviewed some of the issues.

Sleep on it. It’s amazing what your brain does in the background. Write articles ahead of time, let them percolate, and rewrite them a few times.

Ask ChatGPT to rewrite and/or summarize your article. It will give you new perspectives on your topic.

--Reuse

*Try to convert everything to another medium. *

• Have long and short versions of articles.

• Have an article version and a version for a LinkedIn post.

• Turn your comments on LinkedIn, bulletin boards, etc., into articles, and vice versa.

• Create audio and video versions of your articles.

--Print and Online

Make each medium the best it can be. Print should be the best print. Online should be the best online. Don’t try to find one format that works in both. That devalues each of them.

Online

• Use images

• Use links

• Allow yourself some space, if you need it

• Try to get comments / interaction / sharing

In print

• Use good paper

• Use color

• Use scents

--Eat your own cooking

When you learn a best practice, do it. E.g., autoresponders for your email sign-up page. Show best practices by doing them yourself.

Make steady progress. I try to make each letter better than the last in some way. For example, with the April issue, I added a signature line.

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A subscriber to The Krehbiel Letter told me that one thing he gets from my content is an emphasis on what stays the same during a time of radical transformation.

He works in change management, and that's one of the issues people face when the world is changing all around them – that is, what can and should change, and what can and should stay the same?

It reminds me of an exercise I used to put my kids through where I'd present a dilemma and ask them if it was a moral question or a cultural question. And that's very similar to what goes on in change management. What's permanent and what's temporary? What can we afford to jettison, and what had we better cling onto?

So I thought I'd start to make a list for publishers of things that don't change even while the world seems to be crumbling and morphing and transforming all around them.

So here’s a start. I invite you to suggest your own.

• You have to solve a problem or meet a need. How does your product benefit your customer?

• Everything depends on trust. If you lose your customers' trust, you have nothing.

• Efficiency matters. Your margin is your competitor's opportunity.

• Expertise matters. Somebody has to know when the AI is wrong.

• Convenience is good, but people will tolerate some inconvenience for what’s truly necessary.

• You have to have your eye on the horizon and your hands in the weeds.

• An "intuitive interface" is a childish conceit. Make sure people know how to use your product.

• Quality can be a selling point, but good enough is often good enough.

• Humans are creatures of habit -- on both sides of the content experience. Strive for a regular, predictable and reliable cadence.

• Yesterday's market is gone. You need to make adjustments based on where people are today, and where you think they'll be tomorrow.

• People like stories, but don't be stupid about it. Nobody wants a story about the weather. They just want to know if they should bring an umbrella.

• Passion and authenticity are alluring, but sometimes people just want a ham sandwich.

• Diversify. Who knows what's going to work, and what's going to collapse. Have several oars in the water.

• Cultivate a relationship with your customer, but also between and among your customers.

• Strive for long-term value. Finding new customers all the time is tiresome work, and you don’t learn as much from drive-by customers.

• Use data as much as you can, but check your conclusions against real-life feedback and experience.

• Keep a wary eye on trends. Most trends turn out to be nothing. But on the other hand, when you’ve got a wave, surf!

I think the bottom line is that we all need to make a careful distinction in our minds between what’s changing, or even able to change, and what’s stable.

For example, human nature does change, but probably not on a time scale that any of us will benefit from. So you should be a student of human nature, and make sure you put those things on the “stable” side of the ledger.

So that’s what I came up with today. I’m going to keep this document handy so I can add to it as things occur to me, but if you have some ideas, please pass them along.

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“Gamification” is a decent tactic, but it fails to meet customer objectives in both customer engagement and customer success. Companies need to emphasize their customers’ priorities and real needs. This episode illustrates the problem using the example of a Grammarly email.

I appreciate the Grammarly plugin. I’m a decent writer, but everybody can use a tip now and again. But there’s one thing about Grammarly I don’t like. Their little green doohickey keeps putting itself right where I want to put my cursor. It gets in the way – especially when I’m filling out a form, or something like that. It got so annoying that I just logged out. It wasn’t worth it.

Grammarly noticed this after a week and sent me an email. Now you might think the email would ask “what the heck?” or “is anything wrong?” or something like that. Nope. It just assumed (1) I was taking a break from writing, or (2) I had accidentally logged out.

There’s a self-awareness problem going on here.

That got me thinking about the differences between customer engagement and customer success, so I asked ChatGPT to tell me the difference. Here’s my slightly edited version of the list I got.

Customer Engagement includes …

• Dialogue and building a rapport with customers,
• Feedback, reviews, and suggestions,
• Personalization, and
• Brand loyalty.

Customer Success includes …

• Onboarding,
• Training and support,
• Regularly assessing customer satisfaction, and
• Aligning the product’s capabilities and how it’s used with the customer’s objectives.

According to ChatGPT, “customer engagement” focuses on creating a strong connection between the customer and the brand, while “customer success” is more directed towards ensuring customers are meeting their goals.

The labels don’t matter. I would say there are three important things here.

1. It’s not about you, or your brand, or checking off all the boxes on a list of tasks. It’s about ensuring that your product is helping your customer do what he needs to do.
2. In order to do that, you have to think outside the constraints of your discipline, or whatever model your company is using to measure and manage engagement,
3. Customer Success people should learn from Customer Engagement people, and vice versa.

Let’s apply this to the email I got from Grammarly. I’m going to read you the opening paragraph.

We're not seeing any writing activity for you last week, so unless you were taking a writing break, you might have accidentally logged out. Please log back in so we can keep you up to date on your personal records and general greatness.

That sounds like an email from somebody who’s bought into gamification. What’s important – from that point of view – is that I keep up my streak. My “personal records” and such.

In fact, right after that paragraph is my “Grammarly writing streak,” with my “next achievement.” Whatever the heck that is.

Then there are some charts showing a bunch of metrics I don’t care about at all.

All I want to know is whether I need to put a comma here.

Somebody at Grammarly has narrowed the concept of customer engagement down to this gamification thing. Don’t blame them. They probably learned that at a marketing conference. But gamification has absolutely nothing to do with why I use the service.

I realize gamification is a powerful tool in some settings. But gamification helps the company get the user addicted to a certain behavior.

Here’s the question you need to ask. Is the behavior you’re tricking a person into in their interest, consistent with their goals, or is it only in the company’s interest?

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Do publishers even need a website? Is email the better method for content delivery?

I was reading an article about how La langue francaise increased their registered users by 450%, and half-way through I thought, “so why do they need a website?”

La langue francaise wanted to encourage readers to create a free account as part of the journey towards becoming a paying subscriber.

They looked to The New York Times and to Semafor for inspiration.

On Semafor, you can read a little of an article, and then it prompts you to sign up for the e-newsletter relevant to the article you’re reading. It’s super easy. You enter an email address and you’re done. There’s no password, no “click here to verify” or any of that.

La langue francaise created three different registration modules with unique value propositions for each section of their site. That’s smart, at least in the abstract – I couldn’t review what they’ve done because my French is limited to a few dialogues I learned in 7th grade, and I think I can count to 49.

Back to business. This “email only” approach makes the first step in the registration process very easy.

Unlike Semafor, La langue francaise does require the reader to confirm his email.

The next step is the dynamic paywall, where they took their cues from the Times. It’s based on how much content a reader has consumed, whether they’ve completed a quiz, or other things. They use Poool for that part.

The overall strategy seems to hinge on three things.

First, that giving up your email to read an article is a fair trade that many people are willing to do – especially since we all know we can unsubscribe or block emails that we don’t want.

Second, they apply a little pressure on the website to get people to take the next step to subscribe.

But third, even if a reader never subscribes, he’s still getting the e-newsletter, which has some value in itself – both to the reader and to the publisher.

Then the question becomes how much of the content do you deliver in the email itself. That seems to be a ripe area for testing.

The email could have …

• A link to the article on the website
• A summary of the article, plus a link to the website, or
• The entire article.

Right now, publishers usually view email as a channel to get more subscribers on the website, but I can easily imagine a future where more and more content is delivered through the e-newsletter, and the website becomes more of a conversion vehicle. It’s the website that drives people to the e-newsletter in that view of things.

That would be an interesting model. You could even have a free and a paid version of the email, where free subscribers get five stories, and the headlines that the paying subscribers get – just to tease them.

In other words, email could become the dominant form of content delivery.

It’s worth a thought.

Resources

https://whatsnewinpublishing.com/how-la-langue-francaise-increased-registered-user-acquisition-by-450-thanks-to-a-bittersweet-strategy/

How La langue française increased registered user acquisition by 450% thanks to a “bittersweet” strategy

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Find another way to say these words and phrases if you can:

FOMO. Engagement. Low-hanging fruit. Content is king. Deep dive. Synergy. Disruptive. Pivot. Innovation. Share of voice. Brand equity. Awareness. Storytelling.

Are you sick of hearing those words and phrases? Probably. Most of us are.

I'm going to argue that buzzwords are simultaneously annoying and necessary. They're annoying because people often string them together in meaningless eruptions of jargon. It sounds impressive (I guess) but doesn't mean anything. People often to resort to buzzwords to sound like they know what they're talking about. They're almost like business filler words. Better them "um" and "like," but only slightly.

But they're necessary because there's a sense in which they're giving us an insight into the current zeitgeist. They're pointing at something that's resonating with people at some level.

Think of a buzzword as the manifestation of an emerging trend, or idea.

Consider the term "disruption" as an example. While it may have been diluted through overuse, and I get tired of hearing it, it encapsulates something we see in the seismic changes going on in various industries, and it highlights a strategy, or a mindset, that companies need to keep in mind. If you're not disrupting your business, somebody else will.

In the same way, "authenticity" became a popular word because people so many things seem inauthentic.

Buzzwords may often be used flippantly, but their persistence shows that they're reflecting and amplifying some underground cultural current.

So what do we do with them?

Treat them like whiches. Not the ones at Halloween, but the ones people often use when they should have used "that."

Try to replace a buzzword with another word or phrase. That will force you to make sure you're focusing on the meaning of the concept.

When the buzzword actually fits, back it up with data or examples to give context, and to substantiate the usefulness of that word in that circumstance.

A buzzword is like a symbol. It’s supposed to encapsulate a larger meaning. I suppose it’s like an emoji, which, like buzzwords, can also get annoying, but I think it’s more like the word “democracy.” People don’t usually just mean democracy, they incorporate a lot of other concepts into that word, like freedom, self-determination, that sort of thing.

So by all means hate on the indiscriminate and meaningless use of buzzwords, but also take some time to think about their utility, and the message they’re trying to convey.

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Your client’s email boxes are full, but their mailboxes are empty

As print publications continue to lose market share to digital, some publishers are adopting the idea of print as a luxury product.

Think of all the ways a print publication can differentiate itself from digital.

It can be sensuous. Or, in any event, have more sensory impact. The paper can be heavy and glossy. It can have a nice smell. It can feel substantial in your hand. You can display it on your coffee table.

“Haptics” is the science of touch, and there have been some very interesting studies about how physical media affect readers differently than digital media. I’ll provide a link below with some information on that.

Print is a very different experience than digital, and while it’s very clear that most content consumption is digital, and will continue to be so (I’m not some Luddite advocate of print) some publishers are finding interesting niches for print.

There’s a funny contradiction about print, which is that while a print publication might be more engaging than digital – some studies show that – it’s harder to measure that engagement. We can’t count page views or time on site when somebody is sitting in their easy chair with a magazine.

There’s something called the “measurable outcomes bias,” which is when people give more value or preference to things that can be easily quantified or measured. That’s similar to “numeracy bias,” where people are more likely to believe something that’s expressed with a number.

I often suspect that a lot of the print vs. digital analysis going on at publishing companies suffers from these biases.

But I’m not trying to solve the print vs. digital debates today. I’m just whetting your appetite for this idea.

Consider a small-run print newsletter for your key prospects.

Think of it this way. Their inboxes are full and their mail boxes are empty. This is a way to set yourself apart and get their attention.

Everybody gets a billion emails. But how many people get letters – that they actually want to read.

You might know that I do that with The Krehbiel Letter, which is a free, monthly, 4-page newsletter.

People love it. It’s a great way to stay in touch with a relatively small group. I’m not advocating doing this at scale, where digital is clearly better. But as a bespoke outreach to a small group, it can be very effective.

If you’re curious, give me a call. I’ve learned a lot by publishing this letter, and I can give you some tips. I can even write the thing for you if you want.

Resources

Why print books are better than digital

https://krehbielgroup.com/2023/02/09/why-print-books-are-better-than-digital-and-my-recommendations-for-ebook-readers/

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Expanding your market is not always a good idea

Fortune’s Chief Customer Officer, Selma Stern, is cited over at whatsnewinpublishing.com as saying “the media industry is far too focused on reach and forgot about sales. As a result, supervisors set the wrong incentives, leading to many new customers being acquired with dumping prices.”

Misaligned incentives are certainly a big problem. In my experience, many magazine companies incentivize ad sales in a way that undermines subscription sales, which is pretty dumb.

Selma also mentions the very low prices we’ve seen for magazines, which is a somewhat self-defeating way to increase reach.

Here’s how that works. Let’s say you have a magazine about video cameras. To get advertisers to buy pages, they want to know how many people get your magazine. But they also want to know that the people who read the magazine are (1) interested in video cameras, and (2) willing to spend some money in that market.

If you have 50,000 people who are willing to spend $30 a year to get your magazine, that’s a market that will interest advertisers.

Now we get a new marketing director who’s obsessed with reach. Why should we settle for 50,000? Why not 100,000? And to get there, we’ll make ridiculous new subscriber offers, like $5 for one year.

We’ve diluted our pool of subscribers. Before we had people who were willing to spend $30 a year. Now we have people who are willing to spend $5. That group is less valuable to the advertiser. And the more tricks the marketing department pulls to get new people in the door – for example, buy this very popular magazine and get our video camera magazine for just $1 – the more you dilute your subscriber base.

I have very mild interest in video cameras, but I might spend a dollar to get a magazine about them.

There are good things about reach. For one thing, you can get more information about more people, and information is key. I don’t mean that in a sneaky, creepy sort of way, but more information about behavior, preferences, trends, and such, can help with new product development, finding new niches, cross-sales, etc.

But there’s a bad side to reach. A focus on reach can diminish quality. For example, if I’m writing to an audience that really cares about video cameras, the authors can geek out with very detailed, in-the-weeds stuff. But if I’m writing for people who are only mildly interested in video cameras, the stories have to be a lot fluffier, which will frustrate the real enthusiasts – that is, your previous core market.

The same thing is true on a website. If your goal is to attract more eyeballs, you’re going to tend towards lower quality, more sensationalism, and a short-term focus. You’re not going to invest in serious journalism. You’re going to move towards homogenized, generic content.

The future of publishing, I hope, and half-way believe, is in serious, quality content for niche audiences. “Reach” has been a distraction.

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If publishers don’t provide a summary of web articles, a browser plugin will

Publishers, you want people to read the whole story on your webpage, because you’re proud of every word of it. But here’s the problem. You write it like a mystery novel and force the reader to slog through the whole page – and see all the advertisements – before they get to the nugget they really want.

We’d rather have a summary and get the meat up front.

Bo Sacks posted an article by Aisha Majid that says a Swedish daily experimented with providing an AI-generated article summary, and found that it actually increases the amount of time people spend on a page.

“Unexpectedly,” the article says, “audiences spend longer reading articles that have summaries than those without.”

The summaries are created by an API connection from the publisher’s CMS to ChatGPT. Which seems like a smart way to do it. I’ve tried to find a good Wordpress plugin that does the same, with no luck so far, so if you know of one, please tell me.

The summaries weren’t always accurate, and the company had the sense to have a policy requiring human supervision of any AI-generated content.

Think about that for a moment. That means this new AI-generated wonder actually adds to the editorial workload rather than lessening it. But it’s not a big burden. It’s about 30 seconds.

I’d like to stop here and point out a couple questions I have about this story.

The first is to ask whether time on page is necessarily a good thing. It is definitely a good thing in terms of SEO. Google ranks your site better if you have higher time on page, apparently on the assumption that more time on page means you’re “engaged” with the content.

But I’m not convinced that’s a good metric for the reader. Personally, I’d rather have the content beamed directly into my brain and spend no time on the page, but seriously, if the reader can get what he wants in less time, that’s a plus for the reader, no matter what Google says. And if the publisher won’t do it, a browser plugin will.

My second question has to do with their motivation for pursuing this strategy, which is to get more young readers.

The word is that young readers prefer having content in lots of different formats.

Okay, but why the obsession with young readers?

Do they spend more money? Probably not.

In my opinion, media companies need to get over this obsession with young readers. And I’m not only saying that because my beard is mostly gray. I’m saying that because media companies need to think about where their bread is buttered. And generally, it’s the older people who are buttering the bread. They have the money.

Anyway, the bottom line is that this is an interesting experiment in using AI in a thoughtful and responsible way to address reader needs. It will be interesting to follow this and see how it develops.

Resources

Swedish daily Aftonbladet finds people spend longer on articles with AI-generated summaries

https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/digital-journalism/aftonbladet-sweden-biggest-daily-use-chatgpt-in-the-newsroom/

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Bo Sacks distributed an article by his old friend and debating partner, “Mr. Magazine,” about new magazine titles on the newsstand.

Some people will see that as the equivalent of celebrating new albums on vinyl at the record store. That is, desperately hoping for a flicker of life in a dying medium.

I say that while the march to digital goes on, it’s a mistake to be too negative about print, which still makes up a sizeable part of publisher revenue.

But let’s leave the demise of print for another day and focus on the bookazine phenomena, which isn’t new, but may see revived interest.

Bookazines used to be called Special Editions, and they were typically associated with a regular magazine title. For example, Scientific American might notice a lot of interest in articles about the brain, so they’d do a special issue on that topic.

I bought one of those at the train station a little while ago.

Here are some advantages of the bookazine.

• They have a higher list price and a longer shelf life.
• They can serve as a marker of a significant social event – like a bookazine about Covid, or the new king.
• They can be a reference on a particular topic.
• You can give a bookazine as a gift with no strings attached. No publisher has the recipient’s mailing address.
• They have the laid back, relaxed feel of a magazine, with colorful pages, nice art, and interesting stories.
• You can publish a bookazine as a one-off with no promise of a second edition.

In short, as Chris La Greca says in a post on LinkedIn, they “combine the things that people love about magazines with the niche subject matter and permanence of books.”

But do they have sticking power when everything else is transitioning to digital?

First, let’s not fall into the “everything is going digital” trap. A lot of things are going digital, but not everything in all cases.

Second, perhaps bookazines help us to see an important dividing line in the ongoing print vs. digital debates. Maybe the bookazine is successful because it’s not expected to be up to the minute.

News magazines are generally things of the past, because by the time you get a magazine, the news is old.

Magazines that thrive in today’s market tend to be in niche topics that aren’t particularly time sensitive where the magazine experience is welcome – that is, it’s something you read in your easy chair, where you genuinely appreciate the ads. If I get a fishing magazine, for example, I want to see ads for the boats, where there’s hardly a website on the planet where I think of the ads as anything but an annoyance.

However, magazines have suffered from publishers going on a a relentless pursuit of the bottom shelf. People now expect to get an annual subscription to a magazine for $10, which doesn’t even cover printing and mailing.

Bookazines don’t (yet!!) have that relentless downward price spiral, so they seem like a great option for magazine publishers – who already have the infrastructure to create them.

Resources

The surprising success of the Bookazine and what it means for publishers

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/surprising-success-bookazine-what-means-publishers-chris-la-greca/

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Are you sure your analytics mean what you think they mean?

I saw a post on LinkedIn the other day asking why B2B companies don't talk to their customers.

They look at analytics, the post claimed, and they'd rather believe data from Google than talk to real people -- or even listen to what they're saying.

Is this true? If so, is it unique to B2B?

Have we come to the point that we trust data more than people? Is this a personality thing? Are marketing reports created by introverts who don’t want to talk to real people?

Or, on the other hand, are we data snobs, where we think data is more reliable than what real people say?

I’m imagining a conversation where someone says, “why don’t you ask your customers what brought them to your service,” to which the “data-driven marketer” replies, "What good is that? They won't remember. I can get that number from my analytics.”

But can you?

IOW, there might be an attitude that cold, hard data from analytics is more valuable than people’s admittedly squishy and fallible memories.

And there’s some truth to that, but attribution is very difficult to prove no matter how you go about it, and technology solutions aren't necessarily giving you the right answer either.

As I thought about this it conjured up a few contrasts in my mind.

• Intuition vs. measurement
• Statistics vs. anecdotes
• Self-reported data vs. observed data
• Story vs. analysis

So I started wondering about situations where data can mislead if we don’t have the human context. Here are some possible examples.

We usually assume that a high bounce rate indicates a bad user experience. But what if users found exactly what they wanted on that one page? Maybe that’s exactly and all they needed.

Turning that on its head, people often assume that lots of page views per session imply healthy engagement, but it might mean people can’t find what they’re looking for.

If you measure the popularity of a page by its page views, it may be that lots of people are going to that page for some other, accidental reason, but nobody is satisfied with what they find on that page. (For example, maybe some quirk in your search results sends people to that page.)

While we’re on search, your search function may be used a lot, which may indicate it is a valued feature, but it may be a reflection of bad site organization.

Or let’s say you do a poll to rate “overall satisfaction” with your site, and you get a good rating. That’s great, but there might still be frustration with certain key elements or functions.

The point is that you might be telling the wrong story with your data if you don’t have the human context. You need to check your assumptions against actual customer experience to make sure you’re not missing something.

Resources

The original post that piqued my interest.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/chriswalker171_marketing-b2b-sales-activity-7089227005321216000-VaEg?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

5 Common Analytics Mistakes And How To Avoid Them

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sisense/2021/11/01/5-common-analytics-mistakes-and-how-to-avoid-them/?sh=14aa04b0759c

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How many kinds of “events” can you come up with?

Brian Morrissey mentioned a “pivot to events” in his most recent post, which I link below.

There are several interesting things about this.

First, you can get very specialized. Niches are where it’s at.

Second, they’re less dependent on platforms. As you know, I think publishers need to be as un-reliant on platforms as they can manage to be.

Third, they can be very significant. For some publishers, events are their major source of income.

But that got me thinking, what is an “event”? It’s almost as broad as “media.”

Broadly speaking, we’re talking about a planned gathering of some sort that brings together like-minded people around a specific topic or purpose.

What might that be? Here are some ideas. Please submit your own.

1. Conferences, symposiums, and summits. This is probably what you think of by default when you think of events. There’s a keynote speaker, panels, breakaway sessions, PowerPoint overload. All that stuff. But there can also be events within events, which will be obvious as we go through the list.

2. Webinars, although I’ve been told that the word “webinar” turns people off, and I did an article a bit ago about other words to use. Webinars are virtual events conducted over the internet, with a presentation, Q&A, etc.

3. Workshops, or training, either online or in person, with a focus on building skills, although you can also do this sort of event around estate planning, or things like that.

4. Dinners/Galas/Awards Nights: They can range from simple networking opportunities to formal events where you honor achievements or celebrate milestones.

5. Lunch-and-Learns are an interesting mix. It’s usually an informal lunch with some kind of presentation, which might be a live podcast, some training, a brainstorming session, etc.

6. Happy Hours/Networking Mixers are my favorite, of course, and I think there are a lot of untapped possibilities here. A brewery in my town rents out its tasting room for companies that are hiring. You could show a quick video about a new product, get feedback from a user’s group, and so on.

7. Product Launches/Promotional Events. Obviously a lot of these can overlap. You can do a product launch at a happy hour before a live conference.

8. Press Conferences are probably out of the reach of most of my audience. I think you need to be fairly big before the press cares about your new product, but maybe I’m wrong about that.

9. Along those lines are Media Expos and Fairs, which are events where media companies can showcase their latest innovations, technologies, and offerings.

10. A film screening might be an interesting way to introduce a new video podcast. At a happy hour.

11. . Roundtable discussions are small, focused conversations about a particular topic. They’re fairly popular at conferences, but I think you could do them in conjunction with a lunch or dinner.

12. Charity/Fundraising Events if your business has any charitable ambitions.

13. Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality Events. If that’s not a thing now, it soon will be.

As I said, you can mix and match among this menu of options, and what you choose will depend on your audience, the type of products you offer, and other factors.

I encourage you to think about your own niche and your own market, and imagine how you can create events for them. Even if it doesn’t become an amazing new source of revenue, it can build community and enhance retention and renewal.

Brian Morissey’s latest The Rebooting

https://www.therebooting.com/p/the-pivot-to-events

Is the word “webinar” holding you back

https://krehbielgroup.com/2023/06/13/is-the-word-webinar-holding-you-back/

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Yesterday I saw a post on LinkedIn about the success of Barstool Sports, with 5 lessons for B2B marketers.

It raised some good points, which I’ll mention in a minute.

But before I get to that I want to mention a strange experience I had yesterday.

My site runs on WordPress, and some of my clients also use WordPress. Yesterday I was looking for a WordPress plugin that would read the content of an article and use Dall-E or Midjourney or something to generate an appropriate image for that article.

I found one that I thought would work, so I downloaded it and tried it, but it wasn’t what I wanted, so I uninstalled and deleted it. I’ve probably done that a hundred times.

What’s only happened once was this. Later in the day I got an email from the company that makes the plugin asking why I had uninstalled it so quickly. I explained.

That’s pretty smart of those guys. Feedback like that can make a lot of difference to a company. In this case, it might help them clarify exactly what their plugin does and does not do.

So here are the 5 recommendations from Barstool Sports.

1. Create a steady cadence of content releases

What that cadence is might differ from company to company, but make it steady.

1. Make your content memorable with micro-franchises

• Pardon My Take

• Spittin' Chiclets

• Pizza Reviews

I don’t know any of these things because I don’t particularly care about sports, but the idea is to have a group of franchises and personalities under your main brand.

People like personalities and points of view.

1. Use internal spokespeople as brand ambassadors and advocates

I think that follows from #2.

The point is that buying is an emotional process, and part of that means relating to the face of the brand.

This doesn’t appeal to me, because I went to the Vulcan science academy as a lad, but for the rest of you ….

1. Recruit external influencers/creators to make content for your network

I’m not sure how that fits with the idea of having a personality behind a brand, but … okay.

1. Craft a sense of belonging within your community.

Barstool Sports has “stoolies.” Sometimes community-building initiatives are a little silly – Gainsight did a rap song about customer success – but the point is that people feel like they’re on the inside. People want to feel like they’re part of something.

Resources

The post on LinkedIn about Barstool Sports

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/akennada_barstool-sports-is-the-playbook-for-the-modern-activity-7090001581235994624-zyZ3?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

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I like lists. I don’t like it when people go on and on about things. That’s the lazy way. It’s like that old saying, “Sorry for the long letter, if I had more time I would have written a short one.”

Making a list forces you to distill your thoughts down to a pithy, short, descriptive saying.

That’s what I’m going to try to do here, riffing off the article "Publishers: 12 ways to overcome common innovation roadblocks" by Damian Radcliffe, which Bo Sacks distributed recently.

1. Innovation has to solve a problem. It’s not a goal in itself.

2. And speaking of problems, the problems you should be most keen to solve are your customer's problems.

3. Find a way to quantify the problem so you know when you're fixing it.

4. Create a framework around #s 1-3 that you can communicate clearly to your staff. I’m going to take a small side note here and commend my former boss Jasper Simons who is a master at using models and frameworks.

5. Break through internal structures and mindsets that limit your success.

6. Commit for the long-term. This isn't one and done, or a quick summer campaign. With the pace of change in the market, you should make innovation a part of your corporate culture.

7. Create a process to make this operational.

8. You run the risk of making your employees, your accountants, and your business units think that "constant change is here to stay," which promotes an attitude of chaos and uncertainty. Acknowledge that fear and address it.

9. Get people on board from all levels of the organization.

10. Make it easy for people to leave if they don't like the new agenda.

11. This means you're going to lose some attachment to the past and some institutional knowledge, and that can be a bad thing. Prepare for the consequences.

12. The world is moving faster than it used to, which means that companies need to adjust to get comfortable with change.

Resources

Publishers: 12 ways to overcome common innovation roadblocks

https://whatsnewinpublishing.com/publishers-12-ways-to-overcome-common-innovation-roadblocks/

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What are the tells of a bullshitter?

In the last few weeks I have had two radically different experiences with people trying to sell me their services to help me get better leads for my business.

One was wonderful. He was honest, helpful, and came across as a decent guy who was trying to help me out. I’m happy to give you his name. It’s Jordan Ross from 8 Figure Agency.

The other guy was awful. He came across as a slimy bullshitter. My subconscious was yelling at me, “Don’t trust this guy.” The Proverb spoke to me: “Leave the presence of a fool or you will not discern words of wisdom.”

But feelings from the id aren’t very helpful. I wanted to quantify what I was feeling. What was the bullshitter doing that gave me this instinctive reaction of disgust? Could I explain it?

I no longer had any interest in his presentation, except to come up with a list. I opened up a document and titled it “the tells of a bullshitter.”

This is what I came up with.

How do you recognize a bullshitter?

• They want you to affirm or compliment them in cringy ways.
• They frequently insist on their honesty or piety.
• They want you to “participate” in their presentation in condescending ways. Stuff fit for a 3 year old.
• They talk too damned much. It’s like they want to wear you out to break down your defenses so you’ll say anything just to get them to stop talking.
• They show all the signs of narcissism. Narcissistic individuals often display a need for admiration, a sense of entitlement, and a tendency to dominate conversations.
• They’re shameless.

That seemed like a good start, but I wanted more, so I asked ChatGPT, which gave me a few more characteristics.

They frequently make vague or exaggerated claims: Bullshitters tend to make grandiose or ambiguous statements without providing specific details. So pressing them for details is a good way to expose them.

Along with this is a lack of consistency. It’s hard to keep your story straight when you’re making it up on the fly.

This also causes them to dodge direct questions, and fail to provide supporting evidence for their claims.

They tend to overuse buzzwords or jargon to create the illusion of expertise or knowledge.

There’s an inconsistency in their body language. Bullshitters may exhibit signs of discomfort, such as fidgeting, avoiding eye contact, or displaying defensive body language when questioned or challenged. Although, frankly, when you see these things you’re dealing with a human who’s uncomfortable with his lies. The real problem is the person who shows no discomfort when he lies.

Bullshitters tend to dismiss or invalidate perspectives that don’t go along with their narrative.

And, as I said in my list, there’s constant self promotion.

Which leads me to bullshitter tactics

It’s one thing to recognize a bullshitter when you’re speaking to him, and can see him. You have lots of senses on the alert. But what about email? How do bullshitters abuse that channel?

• Excessive flattery.
• Pretended urgency.
• Ambiguity.
• Exaggerated promises.
• Misleading subject lines.
• Manipulative language.

I asked some friends for their examples, and they suggested the following.

“I’m following up on a call/email” when they never did. (From Bart Foreman)

“Are you receiving my emails?” (from Scott Hornstein)

“Don’t want to hear from me? Reply with ‘no.’” But they don’t honor that. (From Chris Elwell)

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Brainstorming doesn’t work that well unless you follow these tips

The typical “brainstorming” session involves announcing a topic and inviting people to propose their ideas in an allegedly non-judgmental environment. A bunch of people get together in a conference room and say whatever they think. There are several problems with this model.

1. People don’t prepare their thoughts ahead of time. They assume the whole purpose is to be spontaneous and off the cuff and all that, which means they’re not bringing their best.
2. Dominant personalities hog the floor, which means you don’t get the great ideas from the quiet person in the corner.
3. Groupthink predominates.
4. The leader says “there are no stupid ideas,” and they won’t be judged for what they say, but nobody believes that.
5. The first ideas set the agenda for the discussion (anchoring bias).
6. The lack of structure and goals makes it hard to evaluate success.

Try this model instead.

1. Outline the broad objectives of the effort – e.g., increase renewals, create a new product for nurses.
2. Appoint a creative person to spend a day or two thinking about the topic individually. Make sure they think about the idea, then sleep on it, then think about it again. Your subconscious mind is a very powerful tool for creativity.
3. Have that person record his ideas and distribute them to the larger group anonymously.
4. Require everyone to read those ideas. Get them thinking about the topic ahead of time.
5. On the following day, give each person in the group at least one brainstorming tool (see below) and ask them to write their own ideas and submit them anonymously.
6. Organize all the suggestions in one list and distribute them to the group.
7. Have a group meeting to discuss the suggestions.
8. The leader reviews all the ideas and the discussion against the project’s objectives.

One source for brainstorming tools is “52 Brainstorming Tools” by schoolofthought.org. Here are a few examples that I like.

• Mind map – put the objective in the middle and branch out nested and associated ideas to discover new perspectives as stimulus for new thoughts.
• Ask why – take any suggestion and be a 3-year old and ask why, why, why, to see where it leads you.
• Change of scene – take the list of ideas to a coffee shop, or better yet, to a bar. The change of perspective can stimulate ideas.
• Imagine you’re the devil – what would someone completely ruthless do?

The tools in that deck of 52 cards address several different parts of the creative thinking process, including idea generation, evaluating ideas, operational considerations, the impact on customers, etc.

Resources

Creative Thinking Cards

https://thethinkingshop.org/collections/products/products/creative-thinking-cards-deck

Send your employees to New York

https://krehbielgroup.com/2023/03/01/send-your-employees-to-new-york/

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Summary: An improv exercise called "Remember that time we went to Mexico" can help boost creativity!

You’ve heard of WordPress, but have you heard of WordCamp? It’s a great opportunity to learn more about WordPress, but also to get some general ideas about content, publishing, e-commerce, and many more things. It’s worth your time even if you don’t use WordPress.

I did a talk there a few years ago. I have a link to a recording of that talk in the Resources tab of KrehbielGroup.com, and I’ll link it below.

One of the sessions I attended that day was something like “what developers can learn from improv.” The speaker led the group through a few basic improv exercises, one of which was “Remember that time we went to Mexico.”

Everybody picked a partner, and the first person said, “Remember that time we went to Mexico,” and the second person had to reply “Yes, and …” then provide some additional detail about the trip, like, “Yes, and you wore that fabulous red dress.”

You had to affirm everything the other person said, and in the process, you built a story about a trip to Mexico.

One of the interesting things about this exercise is that you’re not just waiting for your chance to speak to push your own agenda. You have to listen to the other person, and you have to keep in mind all the growing details about the trip — because you’re not allowed to contradict any part of the story.

You can’t dismiss the other person or his ideas. You have to incorporate them into the story you’re both working on.

It reminds me a little of a comment I heard at a BIMS conference. One of the speakers said one of the biggest human needs is to be validated and understood. “Remember that trip to Mexico” certainly does that.

But what does this have to do with publishers?

Imagine scenarios in which you impose a “yes, and” rule on the conversation, where no one can contradict or dismiss anything any other participant said. What might happen as a result?

Let’s say you’re working on a new website design, and someone says “we should make the whole site red,” which is, admittedly, a stupid idea. But you’re not allowed to say that it’s a stupid idea. You have to think of a “yes, and” reply — some way to un-stupid the suggestion.

For example you might say, “Yes, and think of all the shades, tones, and textures we could employ that are all red.”

What’s been accomplished here? You’ve moved from thinking about color to thinking about shades, tones, and textures, which might not have come up at all. Now people are thinking, “yeah, there are lots of ways to distinguish things visually even when you use the same color.” It might get you thinking about design for the color-blind, or … who knows what?

An all-red site is still a dumb idea, but the “yes, and” mindset forced the people in the meeting to be creative, which brought up a new and useful concept.

That’s what “remember that trip to Mexico” does — it forces you to be creative. It’s so easy to say no and shut something down. That’s the opposite of creative. It takes work to say “yes, and.” You have to try to find the jewel hidden in the garbage.

Obviously, this is not the right method to reach a final decision on an idea. Sometimes you do have to say no. But it is a useful method to get new ideas, and as an added benefit, it’s fun, and people feel that their views have been heard.

Resources

WordCamp

https://central.wordcamp.org/

My talk at WordCamp

https://wordpress.tv/2017/11/03/greg-krehbiel-how-kiplinger-used-wordpress-for-a-paid-digital-service/

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The Washington Post has discovered that personalized onboarding yields good results for subscriptions. Which isn't a big surprise. The fact that you bought something doesn't mean you'll use it. Think of all the idle exercise equipment in basements around the country.

It's one thing to convince somebody to buy. It's another thing to convince them to use. And it's yet another thing to make that a habit.

Sorry that the language sounds like drug addiction, but in some ways we're dealing with similar mental processes.

Here's what the Post has found.

1. The first two weeks are crucial.

2. In that two weeks, subscribers who have made fewer than 4 visits are 10 percentage points less likely to stay than those who have made 15 visits.

3. Using the app is strongly correlated with retention.

Here's what they do to encourage early use of their service.

They're prompted to select their areas of interest, which turn into e-newsletter recommendations.

Subscribers get a welcome email from authors -- I think the authors of the e-newsletters.

The email series progresses with messages based on the recipient's preferences.

In one example of an onboarding email, they say "Help us recommend content just for you," with a list of topics the user might be interested in. In reply to the recipient's choices, they recommend some e-newsletters.

There's more to it, and if you're interested you should read the entire article, which I'll link below.

The bottom line is that onboarding works. And sometimes it's very simple things.

I saw a statistic on LinkedIn that said if someone signs up for your e-newsletter, and you reply with a welcome letter within 15 minutes, that has a noticeable influence on retention.

A lot of these things aren't a matter of being brilliant, or writing excellent copy. Some of the ideas are rather simple and obvious. The difference is who executes more effectively. Operations matter.

Resources

Unlocking Customer Lifetime Value: The Power of Personalized Subscriber Onboarding at The Washington Post

https://theaudiencers.com/inspirations/unlocking-customer-lifetime-value-the-power-of-personalized-subscriber-onboarding-at-the-washington-post-anjali-iyer/

Washington Post drives revenue through its subscriber investments

https://www.inma.org/blogs/digital-subscriptions/post.cfm/washington-post-drives-revenue-through-its-subscriber-investments

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Think for a moment about the trajectory of media consumption. For example, compare what you did yesterday to what you did five, ten, or twenty years ago.

Twenty years ago, you might have read a morning newspaper on your way to work, and then you were mostly insulated from news (as you did your job) until lunch. You may have read the paper again at lunch, and then you got back to work. In the evening, you might have watched the news on TV.

Between then and now, these horrible spy devices have taken over our lives, and yesterday you probably turned off the alarm on your smart phone and immediately started reading your news feed, checked your email, looked at your social media notifications, then read a message on WhatsApp.

You worked on a desktop or laptop computer, which has its own distractions, while your smartphone was buzzing in your pocket.

In other words, your day was filled with media distractions. And you’ve become psychologically dependent on them. If you don’t check your smartphone every ten minutes or so, you probably feel nervous, and you almost panic if you can’t find the thing.

Here’s my prediction: this trend can’t continue. We can’t keep increasing how much time we spend on media, and we’re never going to reach a point where every waking moment is spent consuming media. In fact, we already know this is bad for us, and like the drunk who keeps telling himself to quit drinking so much, eventually we’re going to come to a breaking point. We’ll admit to ourselves that it’s unhealthy and we’ll start dialing it back.

If that prediction is true, the future will see us consuming less media.

How will that happen?

We’ll probably use AI agents – that is, in this context, routines that we can program to go out and collect the things we want, and bring it back and present it to us in the format we prefer.

Some time in the near future we’ll realize that our obsession with our smartphones is killing us, and we’ll set reasonable limits on our daily media consumption. But at the same time, we’ll have amazing AI-powered tools that will increase the efficiency of the time we do spend. For example, we won’t waste as much time scrolling through things we don’t care about.

Our AI assistant will know exactly what we care about, and it will also know what limits we want to place on our daily addiction.

Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that we realize our daily dose of media should be no more than 2 hours. We’ll program our AI agents to feed us 2 hours worth of content per day.

We won’t be doom scrolling. We won’t be paging through feeds of garbage, looking for the nugget we find interesting. Everything our AI agent feeds us will be interesting.

Now let’s imagine what that vision of the future portends for publishers.

Subscriptions will change radically. The reader won’t want everything from brand X, but only topic 1 in brand X, along with topic 1 in brands Y and Z. This will require a re-thinking of traditional subscription models.

Content creation will be focused on increasingly narrow demographics. Articles about topic 1 won’t be for general audiences, but for specific types of people who are interested in topic 1.

Although it’s also possible that the content creators will simply provide a kind of fact sheet that the AI agent will use to format the content the way each individual reader wants it.

Maybe you want Tom Hanks to read you your news, and maybe I want to have a dialog with the Star Trek computer.

In any event, I think it’s certain that things can’t keep going on the current trajectory. So spend some time imagining what the future of media might be, and then ask yourself what threats and opportunities you can see in that future.

Resources

The Rebooting Show

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rebooting-show/id1595625177

People vs. Algorithms

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/people-vs-algorithms/id1642958293

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Most website owners worry about engagement, which they should do, because if people aren’t engaged with your site, they won’t do the things that you really want them to do.

More on that in a bit, but first, let’s say you wanted to find the most engaged users on your website. How would you do it?

You could start with a simple assumption about what “engagement” means, and you could assemble a list of factors that go into an engagement score. Then you’d assign point values to those factors, and you’d sum those points for each visitor. This is a relatively easy task for a customer data platform.

We’d start this project by defining what we mean by “engagement.” It’s something like “frequent and repetitive use of your service.” So you’d make a list of things that indicate that. But some of those things might have more significance than others.

For example, landing on an article page could be one point, but scrolling to the bottom is 3 points. Using the search function is 5 points, and answering a quiz is 10 points. And so on. This simply becomes a summing exercise for your CDP. It’s very straight-forward.

But are you really capturing the right data? You have to wonder whether you have the right collection of factors and whether you’ve given them the right point value. Should search really get 5 points? Why not 4, or 6?

And how do you know if you have the right answer? You’ve decided that people with top scores — based on your point system — are the most engaged, but how do you verify that?

It would be nice if there was some objective way to determine engagement so you could test your scoring system. But there isn’t. So what you have to do is back up one step and ask why you care about engagement. Why is engagement valuable to your company?

If you run an ad-based site, it might be as simple as page views. If you sell things, it’s how much does somebody buy, or do they subscribe, and then renew. Or maybe you want people to come to your restaurant or bar.

“Engagement” itself is not the final metric. It has to correlate with something that puts money in the bank.

Now we’ve taken a step beyond engagement. What we really want is some engagement-like score that correlates with a high-value customer.

That’s a job for AI.

Rather than assigning your own values to some limited list of factors, you start off with as many factors as you can imagine might be related to high-value customers. Be creative, because the thing that really matters might not be obvious.

Then you let AI find the patterns and figure out what scores to assign to each factor, testing those scores against your actual goal, which is more page views, or more purchases, or visits to happy hour, or whatever it is you really want.

If you’re interesting in pursuing something like this, give me a call. I can help you get started, and I have some friends who specialize in this sort of thing.

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Sorry to be philosophical for a moment here, but it fits today’s topic.

Human society needs two impulses: protection and exploration. Somebody needs to explore the great unknown, try the new food, make friends with the weird tribe on the other side of the river, and somebody needs to make sure we don’t burn the house down doing that stuff.

This often plays out as the young against the old, which is a theme in an article Bo Sacks distributed last week called “‘Over-65s should be an advertiser’s dream’… so why aren’t they?” by Omar Oakes.

People over 65 have money, and they spend it. People over 55 are two and a half times wealthier than the rest of the population. Isn’t that exactly what an advertiser wants?

It turns out the older crowd is wise to your tricks. They don’t pay as much attention to advertising.

But part of it might be that marketers are obsessed with young people. How many times have you heard a marketing expert talk about how to reach Gen Z? But as Bob Hoffman would point out, they don’t have any money.

There’s much more to the article, so I’ll link it below and you can read it for yourself, but I want to get back to my theme, which is that a good marketing department needs creative, crazy new ideas – to find new markets and new approaches – but it also needs somebody to say “not so fast, Junior.”

Think of the Metaverse. That was a stupid concept, and I’m glad I called that one early. But think of all the money that was wasted trying to make the Metaverse happen – investing in the Metaverse, buying NFTs for the Metaverse, reading endless articles about how to cash in on the Metaverse.

“What are you doing about the Metaverse?” people would ask, and I’d say “I’ll ride there on my Segway, wearing my Google Glass.”

As an old high school friend used to say, “meet you there.”

Marketing conferences are all about how you should invest in the latest new gimmick – which, what a coincidence, is exactly what the speaker happens to do in his day job.

The shiny new object is usually a piece of discarded aluminum foil from a hot pocket. But sometimes it’s a silver coin.

How do you manage this?

Hire the excitable young marketers who want to sell to Gen. Z and chase the latest craze, but make sure they report to a grizzled old skeptic who asks some simple questions like, “but do these people buy anything?”

Resources

‘Over-65s should be an advertiser’s dream’… so why aren’t they?

https://the-media-leader.com/over-65s-should-be-an-advertisers-dream-so-why-arent-they/

Dial back your expectations for the Metaverse

https://krehbielgroup.com/2022/10/27/dial-back-your-expectations-for-the-metaverse/

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I had the privilege of sitting down with Dave Schneider, the CEO of shortlist.io, to talk about SEO for publishers, and how artificial intelligence might disrupt the game.

Dave encourages publishers to focus on creating good content for their audience but also recommends a backlink strategy to increase the authority of their content and brand.

The conversation covered several interesting topics that publishers and media companies could benefit from.

Learn more about Dave and the work he does at shortlist.io.

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You probably spend a lot of effort to get new email addresses on file, because email is still a fantastic tool for keeping in touch with your audience.

But how much effort – and money – is justified? To know this, you have to calculate the value of a new email address.

To do this, follow these five steps.

1. Identify all the ways you make money from email. That could be …

2. Ads in the email itself,

3. Ads on web pages that the email sends people to,
4. Direct sales

You might have other sources of revenue too, like if you rent your list.

1. For each of these revenue streams, create some basic calculations. For example, let's say you're a subscription publisher and you sell new subscriptions through email. If the value of a new subscription is $500, and every campaign gets a 0.1% conversion rate, then every name on your list is worth 50 cents for each send. That raises the question, how many sends do you get out of a typical email address -- before that address becomes undeliverable.

2. Calculate the approximate life of a new email address.

How long does a new email address last before the person unsubscribes, or the email otherwise becomes undeliverable.

With those three steps you can make a decent estimate of the value of a new email address. But it gets more complicated.

1. Think about different ways you get new emails, and the different types of emails.

2. Company emails vs. personal emails

3. Emails you get with a paid transaction vs. emails you get from a free transaction.
4. Different titles or categories of people behind those addresses.
5. Some emails come in from different offers

It’s somewhat obvious that each of these groups would have a different value. For example, a business email address that you acquire along with a subscription purchase is probably more valuable than a hotmail address someone gave you to get a free white paper.

But how do you track that? You could use a customer data platform to get close to the right answer, but it’s a pretty big task, which leads to step 5.

1. Avoid Analysis paralysis

The more you think about this question, the more categories and exceptions and caveats you'll discover. If you let it, it will drive you crazy. There are a hundred rabbit holes you can fall into.

You have to get comfortable with the idea that close enough is close enough, and that not all efforts to collect email addresses will result in high-quality names. So if you decide that an email address is worth about $3, adjust your expectations up or down for different efforts.

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Zain Kahn's "Superhuman" email says workers want to use ChatGPT, but bosses aren't so keen.

Why? Don't they want people to be more productive?

Of course they do, but there are some legit dangers in using ChatGPT. Which sent me on a bit of a search.

What can go wrong?

1. Let's say you're a programmer and you can't get a certain routine to work right, so you upload it to ChatGPT and say "fix this for me." Yes, ChatGPT can do that sort of thing.

But now you've uploaded your company's intellectual property, and possibly some trade secrets, to ChatGPT. The boss won't like that.

1. In a similar way, most companies have strict rules about how they manage their data, and they have to report on who has access and under what circumstances. ChatGPT is an invitation for some of that data to escape proper channels.

2. Sometimes ChatGPT makes stuff up. You don't want your employees relying on its answers.

3. ChatGPT doesn’t have the most current information. Version 3.5 is only updated through September 2021.

4. ChatGPT has a point of view that might differ from your company's point of view. Its answer might violate company policies or guidelines, or maybe even the law, like EEOC issues. Some state laws have placed limits on employee use of ChatGPT.

5. Employees might get lazy and become too reliant on easy answers from AI.

These are all legit concerns, but some of them aren’t all that different from employees relying on other things they learn from the web – from a search, or from Reddit.

I think the better approach is training and clear guidelines. Tell employees what they can and can’t post to AI chatbots, and why. Tell them what issues can and can’t be referred to ChatGPT. For example, you can’t have ChatGPT review a bunch of resumes because there are concerns about discrimination.

Remind employees that the Chatbot is not the Enterprise computer and might be full of baloney. Remind them to check what they hear from the AI bots, just as they would any other source.

It’s an interesting conundrum because ChatGPT is definitely a productivity enhancer, but it comes with some risks as well.

Resources

Employers Should Consider These Risks When Employees Use ChatGPT

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/employers-should-consider-these-risks-when-employees-use-chatgpt

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Bo Sacks distributed an article by Michelle Yeon titled “Stop the churn: Improving subscription retention rates.” It’s a good list, and she has some good commentary on each item, but I think there’s one very obvious thing missing, which I’ll explain later at the end.

Here are Michelle’s 10 tips, with my comments.

1. Personalize User Experiences. Almost everything used to be custom made. Then we moved to mass production of the same item, and that was a huge benefit because of economies of scale and all that. But now we can get the benefits of mass production and personalize things. That's where things are headed, so get on board.

2. Offer Flexible Subscription Plans, by which she means more options. There's good and bad to this. You don't want to have too many options at sign-up. When people are given several options, they're likely to choose none. That's called "choice paralysis," which I mentioned in my most recent letter.

So try this instead. Make the offer simple, but offer flexibility once they're onboard.

1. Improve Your Onboarding Process. Definitely. The renewal process starts immediately after the sale. Establish expectations, get feedback, provide training or support if necessary. You want people to make a habit of using your service.

2. Monitor competitor offerings. This is a good one. It’s easy to forget that your customers have options. Keep an eye on what the other guy is doing.

3. Implement a Paywall Strategy. I’m an advocate of paywalls, but I’m not exactly sure what a paywall strategy has to do with retention, since once people are subscribers they won’t be bothered by the paywall.

4. Provide Excellent Customer Support. For sure. Make it easy for people to find solutions to their problems, and use customer support to find out what those problems are. Also, consider telemarketing campaigns to contact people periodically. That can help with renewals.

5. Offer Exclusive Subscriber Perks. Right. Make them feel special. Remember that fear of loss is a strong cognitive bias. You want people to feel like they’ll lose something if they don’t renew.

6. Monitor Usage and Engagement. This is crucial, not only to identify people who are in danger of churn, but also as feedback on what you’re doing. Maybe people aren’t engaged because you haven’t been providing the right content.

7. Focus on Customer Retention. Aside from the obvious – that it’s easier to keep a customer than get a customer – Michelle says identify your most loyal and valuable customers and focus on them. That is a very key point. Keeping your most engaged customers happy is your best strategy for keeping all your customers happy. For one thing, it’s easier to get feedback from them, and for another, they have the most investment in the service.

8. Conduct Exit Surveys. Yes. Learn what you did wrong, but remember that it’s possible people left because they weren’t the right audience for your service.

Now here’s my bonus tip, which I’m kinda surprised Michelle didn’t mention.

1. Provide content that people want. The best way to keep people is to give them something they value. There are lots of things you need to do to figure out what that is, but keep your focus on giving the people what they want.

Resources

Stop the churn: Improving subscriber retention rates

https://whatsnewinpublishing.com/stop-the-churn-improving-subscription-retention-rates/

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I recently learned about “Gall’s Law,” which is a principle in software development, but I think it’s far more applicable. I absolutely love it. It goes like this.

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.”

This reminds me of so many things. Organizational structures. Planned cities. Languages created by linguists, rather than by people who actually speak it. (Does anybody speak Esperanto?) Healthcare reform.

Five or fifty or a hundred geniuses in a room will never invent something that actually works – if it’s a complicated system. You have to start with something simple that works in the real world.

There are several reasons for this. One is that we don’t completely understand our own desires and motivations – let alone the desires and motivations of other people. But also …

• Complex systems have emergent properties that evolve from the real-world interactions of actual users. They’re not always predictable.
• Many of the success factors are simply unknowable. They’re too complex to predict.
• Feedback and iterative development is essential. Real world usage is better than somebody’s great idea.
• Practical constraints might limit scope.
• Building to address an actual need and then modifying the product based on feedback is going to beat making guesses.

Here’s an example. People who know way more about video technology than I do say that betamax was a better format than VHS. So imagine 10 geniuses designing a complicated business around betamax, based on the premise that it’s the best format.

The product would have failed because you have to start with something that works. Like VHS.

Publishers often follow this rule with the MVP concept – that is, the minimal viable product.

Start with something simple that works, then build on it.

• McDonald’s started with a very simple menu.
• Amazon started as a bookstore.
• Google started as a search engine.
• Facebook started as a networking platform at Harvard.

By starting with a simple system that works, these companies gathered feedback, learned from users, and iterated gradually. This evolutionary approach allowed them to adapt, refine, and expand their services over time.

The lesson is to start with simplicity. Gall's Law serves as a reminder to approach complex problems with a focus on simple solutions that work in the real world – and not only in some genius's mind.

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Amy Kean, the CEO and Creative Director of Good Shout, says that if you want to differentiate your media business, you should hire more weirdos.

Media is a small, fairly tight-knit community, and most people want to fit in. But that can stifle creativity.

There’s been an influx of “really average people,” Amy says, and that leads to fear of failure and insecurity. Both of those lead to formulas, to the tried and tested, and to endless jargon.

“Amy cites research that … shows that the more jargon you use, the more insecure you are.”

I always thought it was because you didn’t have the intelligence to use your own words.

"Weird" can sometimes be associated with creativity and originality, and can be used to describe ideas, art, or individuals who break free from conventional norms. Weird people don’t see the world through the same filters as everybody else, and they’re not always second-guessing their ideas based on what people might think of them.

I love the idea of hiring more weird people, with some caveats.

You don’t want a weird accountant, unless you’re doing something illegal. And you don’t want majority weird, because you’ll never get anything done. Most of your staff needs to be stable, reliable, by the book, follow the rules kind of people.

But in many areas, we do want fresh, creative, out of the box ideas.

So think about your staff for a minute and ask who’s challenging the narrative? Who’s coming up with new ideas?

Sometimes the new idea is unrealistic, but it might nudge you in a new direction.

We usually think of “diversity” in such bland terms. There are so many ways to encourage diversity that will give you a competitive advantage.

• Personality differences, like extroverts vs. introverts
• People who were raised with money vs. people who grew up poor.
• Country folk vs. city folk.
• Natives vs. foreigners.
• Young and old.
• Different levels and types of education.
• Different professional backgrounds.

And yes, as Amy Kean suggests, sometimes you need a weirdo.

Resources

https://whatsnewinpublishing.com/hire-more-weirdos-to-differentiate-your-media-business/

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On a recent “people vs. algorithms” podcast, the boys talks about “dark patterns.” I’m not sure where that phrase came from, but it refers to the tricks companies use to manipulate consumers to do something the company wants them to do.

An example from the publishing world would be a very low introductory rate that autorenews at a much higher rate, and then making it hard to cancel before the renewal.

Another would be the various tricky ways publishers make advertising dollars look like circulation dollars.

On the web side of things we can see “dark patterns” in phony statistics about traffic, views, reach, and so on. Not only is most web traffic from bots, but sometimes you hear claims about users that would require every human on the planet to have seen something or done something.

Here’s a quote from Brian Morrissey.

The Federal Trade Commission [has] signaled a move against dark patterns … to show “how companies are increasingly using sophisticated design practices … that can trick or manipulate consumers into buying products or services or giving up their privacy.” The FTC goes on to name such horrors as disguising ads to look like independent content, making it difficult for consumers to cancel subscriptions or charges, burying key terms or junk fees, and tricking consumers into sharing their data.”

Here’s the worst part of the quote. Morrissey says, “This sounds like just another day in the media business.”

He’s exactly right. Too often it’s an adversarial relationship.

Publishers need to quit doing this stuff. The wise man says “One who digs a pit will fall into it, And one who rolls a stone, it will come back on him.”

But leaving karma aside, some people doubt publishing can survive without these dirty tricks.

Maybe we’ll have a chance to find out about that, because it’s not just the FTC that’s coming down on these “dark patterns.”

Apple is positioning itself as the defender of user privacy against these forces of wickedness in high places. It started with their initiative to block a sender’s ability to get meaningful open rates on emails, and it’s continuing with new efforts to block tracking codes. See the articles below for the details.

Publishers will gnash their teeth, but hey … what goes around comes around.

If publishers hadn’t been such sneaky bastards for decades, maybe they wouldn’t have this trouble now.

But the past is the past. What do we do now? Here are three simple suggestions.

1. Don’t try to hide the ugly parts of your offer. Make the offer plain and intelligible.
2. Don’t make it hard to cancel. There’s nothing wrong with reminding people of what they’ll be missing, but don’t do something horrible like requiring people to call, or making people have to hire a detective to find the cancel process.
3. Explain why you’re collecting customer data, and why it’s a benefit to the user for you to have that information. For example, let’s say you promote your e-newsletter on your website. There’s no point in promoting it to people who already get it, so it’s perfectly reasonable to set up some tracking and data capture for that purpose.

Or how about a really simple rule, like do unto others as you would have them do unto you?

Resources

https://www.therebooting.com/p/dark-patterns

https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/07/for-better-and-for-worse-apples-about-to-make-your-readers-harder-to-track-again/

https://painepublishing.com/measurementadvisor/your-guide-to-measuring-events-and-experiential-marketing/

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/impressions-arent-impressing-anyone-katie-delahaye-paine/

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Are you tired of changing your business because some programmer has tinkered with an algorithm? They say it’s for the sake of the users, but we all know it’s to increase their ad revenue.

LinkedIn recently changed how they promote content on their site. They say they want to make our feeds more relevant and informative, not just “engaging and sticky,” and they don’t want to chase the latest “viral” content.

According to the article I link below, there are two big changes.

1. It’s more likely that your followers will see your post.
2. Posts that share “knowledge and advice” are prioritized.

How can an algorithm pick out “knowledge and advice”? Apparently they’re looking for people who are building a community around content. But … isn’t that a touch circular, since you can only build a community if people see your content in the first place?

The article points to four things.

1. The post speaks to a distinct audience. LinkedIn looks at every post and asks “Who is this relevant to?”
2. The author is writing in his core subject area. LinkedIn evaluates whether you’re an authority on the topic.
3. The post has meaningful comments. Again, this seems like a chicken and egg problem, but I think the point is that they don’t want “true,” and “this is great,” and that sort of thing.
4. The post has a perspective. It’s not just generic goop.

LinkedIn allegedly wants content creators to focus on reaching the right people with relevant content, rather than just reaching lots of people.

I’ll believe it when I see it, I guess, but the larger question for me is whether content creators should allow themselves to be subject to platform rules and changing expectations. If you live by the algorithm, you die by the algorithm.

Now I’m not into comics, but I heard a very interesting interview yesterday with Eric July, who has built his own empire that the tech platforms can’t destroy by suddenly changing their rules. He controls his entire process.

That sounds very appealing – and exhausting.

Most of us use platforms because we want to see what other people are doing and what they’re saying. We want to interact with them. But then people try to game the system, and the platforms have to respond.

It’s a weird sort of a war, reminiscent of the SEO battles.

My recommendation – and my personal strategy – is to use the platforms for their reach until you can build enough of a connection with your customers that you don’t need the platforms any more. Don’t build a long-term strategy that relies on the platforms, because when they change the rules, you’ll be in trouble.

Resources

LinkedIn Changed Its Algorithms – Here’s How your Posts Will Get More Attention Now

https://www.entrepreneur.com/science-technology/linkedin-changed-its-algorithms-heres-how-your-posts/454728

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Happy 4th of July!!

Bo Sacks distributed an article by Peter Bale titled, "New book by Jeff Jarvis uses lessons from media’s print history to frame the digital future." It reminded me of a rather cynical communist I used to work with who said, "Freedom of the press, for everyone who can afford a press."

Jarvis says the era of mass media is over, and he gives several reasons.

There's no need for big, capital-intensive investments, whether in printing plants, TV studios, or distribution networks. All those things have been disrupted.

We no longer need typing pools. Layout is getting easier all the time, and AI will continue to make it even easier, lowering the cost of entry into the market.

Capital-intensive investments required scale. The new media landscape is very different. Desktop publishing brought about a surge in newsletter publishers, the internet allowed for blogs and digital publications, and AI is going to allow individual creators to have their own studios.

Does Megyn Kelly or Tucker Carlson even need Fox News?

The path forward, Jarvis says, is to rethink the value proposition and what service you are offering.

I agree with that. Free commerce means people pay for things they want.

He also says we need to stop thinking of the public as audience and start thinking of them as participant.

At first that reminded me of the old 1970s nonsense about "everybody has something valuable to contribute." Whoever said that hasn't met everybody. Some people are morons.

But that's not what he's saying. He's contrasting the mass-produced widget (or content) that's supposed to work for everybody with the personalized widget (or content) that does exactly what somebody needs.

Jarvis says "we have to return to a time when we take individual responsibility for the credibility of what we read." I don't know when that time was -- content has always been curated -- but even if there was such a time, I don't think that's practical. We need reliable editors. Curators.

He says “We delegated that responsibility to institutions that came along of editing and publishing a newspaper.”

And yes, the institutions have proven to be garbage. But we'll still need trusted people to vet things for us. I simply don't have time to chase down the truth on every issue that interests me.

As you might expect, he seems pretty down on print, and he has to be to make his case. We may not need huge newspapers any more, but creating a glossy magazine still requires some instrastructure, and people still like magazines, no matter what the tech boys tell you.

We are definitely in a transition from print, through print plus digital, into something else, and Jarvis is one of the people who’s thinking ahead about those things.

Resources

New book by Jeff Jarvis uses lessons from media’s print history to frame the digital future

https://www.inma.org/blogs/newsroom-initiative/post.cfm/new-book-by-jeff-jarvis-uses-lessons-from-media-s-print-history-to-frame-the-digital-future

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I have a contact who wants to be on this show, so he wanted me to send him one of those links where you can schedule an appointment. That’s a perfectly reasonable request. It’s annoying to go back and forth with “how about Wednesday” and that sort ot thing.

But when I looked into it, the terms and conditions were absurd.

For example, Calendly said I was giving them permission to view, share, and permanently delete any of my calendars.

I doubt they would ever do that, but why would I give them permission to do it?

We’re in a weird place where people don’t even read terms and conditions. I usually don’t, it’s just that this one was obvious and right in my face.

I, like most people, just check yes and move on with our lives. We have no idea what we’ve authorized all these people to do.

This raises a couple questions in my mind.

First, why do the lawyers have the final say on these things? They’re often not bringing any money into the organization. In fact, they’re ruining deals with their overzealous protectiveness.

The obvious answer is that they’re limiting risk. That’s one of their functions. And we all know there’s a cognitive bias called “fear of loss,” or “loss aversion.” People are more afraid of loss than they hope for gain.

By the way, if you want a primer on cognitive biases, I wrote about them in the latest issue of The Krehbiel Letter. I’ll provide a link below.

Second, where’s the check on the lawyers? One of the genius elements of the United States form of government is that we have one branch keeping the other branch from going too far.

Who’s keeping the lawyers from going too far?

Everywhere I’ve worked, people say “legal requires it,” and that’s that.

Why?

Why don’t we require them to give us some odds, so we can make an informed decision?

For example, back when I worked on a human resources publication, the lawyers were insisting on very onerous provisions in an employee handbooks, and I said, “What are the chances that this will actually be a problem?” The answer was, “slim.”

Sometimes it’s based on one case in Wisconsin, or something like that, so everybody in the country is being forced by their legal team to follow the decision of one judge in some county in Wisconsin.

Shouldn’t we tell people that? You can’t protect against all risks? Not only is it impossible, but it’s impractical.

Here’s my takeaway. Don’t cave when legal says they want something. Challenge them on it. Make them justify it. Make them put some numbers around their position.

You have to do that all the time. Why shouldn’t they?

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Opening: I forgot the cold open, plus 5 more tips for short videos

Oh boy. I like to model best practices when I can, so that I set a positive example. I do that pretty well with my print newsletter, but I forgot a few things when I started this podcast. 

1 -- you have to capture the viewer's attention in the first few seconds, so it was a mistake to start this podcast with music. 

You need to do a quick opening that tells the viewer what the show is about. 

2 -- if you want to be on some services, like TikTok or Instagram, you should stay below 60 seconds. I'm not sure that's possible for my subject matter. 

3 -- ask questions and try to get some engagement, comments and such from listeners. 

4 -- explicitly ask people to subscribe, like, share, and leave a review. 

5 -- be clear and direct. 

6 -- include captions so people can read the text and keep the volume off. 

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Brian Morrissey linked to an article by Mark Stenberg on Adweek about how the Associated Press is trying to diversify its revenue stream. Like every other publisher. But in AP’s case, the’re coming from a different starting point.

They get 80% of their revenue from licensing – which is crazy high – and they only get 5% from advertising. They want to double their ad revenue.

Since they focus so heavily on licensing, you can understand why their current model doesn’t give them much first-party data. In a way they’re writing for their licensees, not for their readers.

They want to fix that, because first-party data is very important in today’s market.

A few things stand out in this story.

• The AP focuses on hard news, but Morrissey says advertisers often avoid hard news out of brand safety concerns. But they can still use news to drive traffic. They’ll be live-blog breaking news for that reason.
• They want to emphasize direct media buys. Currently they get roughly 85% of their ad inventory from programmatic.
• They’re going to do more with photography and especially video, which has higher CPMs than photos.
• They want to capture more first-party data.
• They want to highlight lifestyle content, like sports and entertainment.
• They’re partnering with Sovrn, Nativo, and Taboola. I’ll provide links below.

All of this is to create their own test kitchen to find out what content engages a digital audience. Obviously that will help them in their licensing work.

I used the way back machine to compare their older site with their current site. The major change I noticed is that they moved links to video content higher on the page, included more video content, and called out sports and entertainment content a little more obviously.

I expected to see more promotions for e-newsletters.

But I also expect this will be an on-going mission, and they’ll adjust as they go.

Links

The AP Debuts New Website Designed to Attract More Ad Spend

https://www.adweek.com/media/ap-debuts-website-ad-spend/?

Sovrn

https://www.sovrn.com/

Nativo

https://www.nativo.com/

Taboola

https://www.taboola.com/

Matt Bailey’s podcast

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/endless-coffee-cup-digital-marketing-caffeinated/id1130111127

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On his excellent The Rebooting Show, Brian Morrisey and his guests wondered what will replace email.

They made a few salient observations.

• Email was never meant to be a content delivery platform.
• Using it that way is a bit of a hack.
• You can’t embed a video player in an email.
• You can’t even control fonts very well.

I’d add to that …

• People can clog your inbox without your consent.
• Content you want and value is sitting there next to the latest nonsense.
• It’s not always easy to find things.

So what comes next?

But before I get into that, I’d like to acknowledge that people have been proclaiming the death of email for a long time, and it continues to defy expectations. I’m not going to argue that email is dead or dying. But I do believe there is a better solution for content delivery.

And that’s a generic reader app.

By “generic” I mean that it’s not tied to a brand or to a walled garden, like Facebook.

By “reader app” I mean that it would be where you’d go for everything you want to read.

Here are some of the key ideas.

• If you see an article on the web that you want to read later, a browser plugin would allow you to send the article to your app. Somewhat like Evernote.
• Your app would have an email address, and all your free e-newsletters would be delivered to the app.
• All your subscription content – newsletters and magazines – would also be delivered to the app.
• Ideally, you could also read books through the app.
• The only content in your app would be stuff you want to be there.
• You can take notes in the app.
• You can comment on things you read in the app, and make them public or keep them private.
• You can organize things in folders, or by keywords, however you want to organize it.

How would the app owner make any money off this?

I can see two ways.

• First, users pay a monthly fee for the app.
• Second, all paid content delivered through the app would pay a surcharge – some percentage of the price of the content.

I pitched an idea like this to an exec at Evernote a few years ago, and he loved it, but he didn’t follow up because he thought it would have ruined his relationship with Apple.

This app has to be premised on a disdain for all walled gardens. There are no exclusive deals. No content is prohibited. This app is designed for the reader first.

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I don’t often comment on book publishing, but Bo Sacks recently distributed an article called “The Imitation Game” by Ken Liu, and it caught my attention. The article is about whether AI will start writing all our bestsellers, and Ken’s somewhat tentative point is that an algorithm looking for the most likely “token” given a pre-existing set of tokens (which is approximately the way large language models work) must plateau at some point short of true intelligence.

My reaction to that is … maybe.

In the midst of his struggles with AI, Ken said this.

'Authors know that the idea that “good books” will prevail in the marketplace is a cruel joke. Publishers are very, very bad at connecting readers to books—that is why they are struggling.'

That got me thinking about the concept of good books and best sellers, and so on, so come along with me on a thought experiment by imagining the following lists.

List one is all the books that were written in 2022. That would include everything that was published – including self-published books – but it would also include manuscripts that never got out of the slush pile, for whatever reason.

List two contains good books from list one. Of course we’d have to come up with a standard for what constitutes a good book, but let’s pretend we had some reasonably objective measure for that.

List three is books that were picked up by publishers. That’s a very small percentage of all the books that were written, and, according to Ken, doesn’t overlap very well with the list of good books.

List four is books that became popular.

Let’s go back to the books that were picked up by publishers. Why does a publisher pick any particular book?

The Adam Smith answer is “because they think it will sell,” and I’ll grant you that most of the time, but it’s not the whole story. Sometimes they publish famous people’s books because it looks good for their brand, to curry favor, or for some other reason. And sometimes they publish books to meet diversity quotas, or to push some fashionable idea.

They’re not necessarily choosing “the best” books, nor the ones people most want to read, nor the ones most likely to sell.

Ken imagines a novel-writing AI called “ORWELL” that lives outside of the traditional publishing structure and tries to sell directly to the public. Its books aren’t necessarily better than human-written books, but they’re more targeted to individual readers. The book is exactly what you want to read, with all your foibles and strange tastes.

This could be an example where sales in the long tail – these one-off, personalized books – end up selling more copies than the best sellers.

So … why do we care? The general take-a-way here is that customization has the potential to beat quality, and also, it has the potential to beat all the marketing gimmicks, influencers, slick trailers, great advertising campaigns, etc.

Links

The Imitation Game, by Ken Liu

https://slate.com/technology/2023/06/book-publishing-artificial-intelligence-copyright.html

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Charlotte Tobitt wrote an interesting article called “How to keep subscribers: What’s working at Hearst, Immediate and Mark Allen Group,” which Bo Sacks distributed recently.

It’s not one of those annoying mystery articles. She gets to it right away with three things: “Friendly friction; personal phone calls, and positive reinforcement.”

The first example is from Gardeners’ World Premium, which offers exclusive digital content, including expert advice, a monthly Q&A, ad-free podcasts, videos, newsletters, discounts, and competitions. It’s £4.99 a month but it’s also free for all print subscribers.

I’m curious whether they try to drive people to the digital content from the print magazine, because generally speaking that’s a hard thing to do. You can use QR codes and such, but when people are reading a magazine they seem to be in non-digital mode, so those efforts don’t alway work well.

However they’re doing it, the online service not only adds value to the print subscription, but creates a way to measure engagement, and also creates a way to personalize content for the reader.

Half of their print magazine subscribers have unlocked this online premium offer, and that group renews at nine percentage points higher. The numbers get better depending on how engaged people are with the online content.

Immediate Media, which owns Gardeners’ World, has tried similar options with its other brands.

Next we have Seema Kumari, the senior director of consumer marketing and CRM at Hearst, who suggests using such “positive reinforcement” as reminding people about their engagement with your product. For example, they tell subscribers how many newsletters they have opened and how many stories they have read. She says people love it, which surprises me, because it might also sound a little creepy.

Seema also encourages “friendly friction” in the cancel process, and refers to how Audible keeps winning her back, when she tries to cancel, with the offer of a free credit. Audible also reminds subscribers how much they use the service.

Finally Tony Hill from the Mark Allen Group recommends something straight out of 1950, which is picking up the phone and calling subscribers as they approach their renewal date. The conversation is not about the renewal. It’s just a chat on a subject the subscriber is likely to care about. According to their tracking, people will get off the phone and renew from some letter that’s been sitting on their desk for a few months.

My key takeaway from all of this is that engagement is the key to renewals. You can’t wait until the end of the year and try to get people to renew based on your genius marketing copy. You need to start the renewal process early with a focus on engagement.

Links

How to keep subscribers: What’s working at Hearst, Immediate and Mark Allen Group

https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/subscriber-retention-hearst-immediate-mark-allen-audible-spotify/

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I saw this headline: “How ELLE is using a dynamic paywall and continuous optimization to increase subscriber conversion rates.” That’s an article by Pierre de Villiers, distributed by Bo Sacks.

This is another article that came out of the FIPP World Media Congress, which some rich sponsor needs to send me to next year.

ELLE’s paywall strategy came out of three strategic challenges.

• Diversify revenue
• Enlarge the audience
• Make them younger

I’m very interested in how they made people younger.

ELLE worked with Poool, which is a French startup that focuses on audience conversion strategies and gives publishers the tools to monetise their content.

Poool has found that half of a site’s visitors never see premium content, and therefore never see the offer for the paywall.

Note that this assumes a certain paywall model, so I’m going to take a minute and summarize the major paywall models.

A hard paywall restricts access to most or all of a website's content.

With a metered paywall, users get some number of views before they get the subscription offer.

The freemium model offers a combination of free and premium content. Some articles or content are freely accessible to all users, while others are restricted to subscribers. That’s the type ELLE used.

A dynamic paywall uses a flexible approach to restrict access based on various factors. Smart publishers should connect a dynamic paywall with AI, to figure out what those factors should be.

An article pass, or maybe a one-day ticket, allows users to pay for a particular article, or access the site for a very limited period of time. This is similar to pay-per-view.

A membership or subscription bundle might grant early access to content, ad-free browsing, or special community features.

Finally, there’s the hybrid model, which isn’t a model at all, but a collection of some of these other options.

ELLE’s challenge was to get more people to see the subscription offer, because they were using a freemium model, which means some people might never see the premium content, and therefore they wouldn’t see the paywall offer. They did this by promoting premium content – very visibly – with a call to action.

Another challenge is making sure people actually see the paywall offer once they get to the premium content. This is a question of balancing frustration and engagement. You want to engage the user enough to view the content, but then you frustrate them with the paywall.

ELLE’s editorial team works to ensure that the premium article is eye-catching and compelling.

They also found a few very interesting techniques for better conversion.

• Move the paywall up the webpage
• Change the paywall regularly – like the color of it
• Adapt the paywall to the user’s level of engagement, their location, and whether they’re on mobile or desktop
• Shrink the registration page and make sure it’s just one page

Links

https://www.fipp.com/news/how-elle-is-using-a-dynamic-paywall-and-continuous-optimisation-to-increase-subscriber-conversion-rates/

Poool

https://www.poool.fr/products/dynamic-wall

Bo Sacks

https://www.bosacks.com/

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A few episodes back I applied the Gartner Hype Cycle to AI. (I’ll provide a link below to that article.) I thought we were still climbing towards the peak of expectations, but there are signs we might already be heading towards the trough of disillusionment. At least with large language models.

In fact, I might be late to that party. Wired had an article back in April titled “OpenAI’s CEO Says the Age of Giant AI Models Is Already Over.” (Link below.)

Sam Altman – he’s the CEO just mentioned – says the research strategy that led to ChatGPT is already played out, and people will need to come up with new ideas to move things forward. Simply building bigger models is not an option. The costs are enormous, and there are diminishing returns.

"Nick Frosst, a cofounder at Cohere who previously worked on AI at Google, … says that new AI model designs, or architectures, and further tuning based on human feedback are promising directions that many researchers are already exploring."

But don’t count on it being under the Christmas tree. Tech advances don’t arrive predictably, or on schedule.

So what do we do right now? AI is already here, and it’s already disrupting the publishing business. We need to build based on what we have, warts and all. Large language models aren't perfect. They still hallucinate, and say stupid things from time to time. But even at that, ChatGPT is pretty useful.

Here’s an example of what publishers can do now.

Skift built an AI chatbot for their site based on ChatGPT. It took off with a bang, but that might just have been curiosity over the new shiny object. They’ll be incorporating it into their subscription offering. You get three queries for free, but then you have to sign up.

The interesting thing about that story is that it didn’t cost hundreds of millions of dollars, as ChatGPT did. It took two programmers eight weeks. They’ll have to tinker and refine, because it still has some limitations, but that’s not an insurmountable cost. Publishers should be able to manage that.

As I argued in a previous podcast, publishers need to start doing this. Readers are going to expect answers to their questions, not just a bunch of articles.

But don't make the mistake of assuming that ChatGPT, or Midjourney, define AI. There are still a lot of things coming, so it's possible we'll see waves of Gartner Hype Cycles stacked on top of one another as different iterations of AI come on the scene.

Links

OpenAI’s CEO Says the Age of Giant AI Models Is Already Over

https://www.wired.com/story/openai-ceo-sam-altman-the-age-of-giant-ai-models-is-already-over/

AI and the Gartner Hype Cycle

https://krehbielgroup.com/2023/06/16/ai-and-the-gartner-hype-cycle/

Collect data today for AI wonders tomorrow

https://krehbielgroup.com/2023/06/20/collect-data-today-for-ai-wonders-tomorrow/

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Yesterday I saw a post on LinkedIn from Jay Schwedelson with an interesting ChatGPT prompt, as follows.

Repurpose the Newsletter below into a:

• Top 10 Checklist
• 7 Pitfalls to Avoid List
• Quick Start Guide with 8 Bulleted Ideas
• Linkedin Post with Less than 100 Words
• Twitter Post with Less than 280 Characters
• Blog post with less than 500 words
• Script for TikTok Post

And here is the newsletter to repurpose

PASTE NEWSLETTTER HERE!!!

I tried it, except for the TikTok part, because I’m a grown up.

This idea is useful to me because I create a daily podcast, do a weekly e-newsletter, and produce a monthly print newsletter. If you haven’t signed up yet, please do.

I don’t want to put the same exact content in each medium, but I also don’t want to have to create brand new content each time.

Using a prompt like this, I can feed ChatGPT the script of my daily podcast and get a lot of ideas about how to transform that content for my e-newsletter.

I didn’t particularly love any of the responses I got from AI, but it’s not too much work to take the top 10 checklist, the 7 pitfalls to avoid, and the 8 bullets in the quick start guide to come up with my own checklist. I can use that list in my e-newsletter.

This general strategy gives me an idea for all the content I’m creating for publishers. The podcast can have one format – more of a narrative. The e-newsletter can focus on practical bullet points.

I’d like the print newsletter to focus on strategic insights, frameworks, mental models, and that sort of thing. If you know of a tool that helps to create those, please let me know. My go to for this sort of thing is to do some Google image searches for “strategic frameworks” and such and glean ideas from the images I find. That works decently well.

Now here’s a final word from Jay.

ChatGPT is super useful as the start of content creation or repurposing. It is rarely the final product. Leveraging it for repurposing content into various forms is a fantastic way to scale your marketing programs...and it spurs lots of new ideas.

I agree with that, although I’d adjust it just slightly to say “marketing and editorial programs.”

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Today marks the 50th episode of my “Something I Learned Yesterday” podcast, so … I guess I’ve learned 50 things. And if you’ve been coming along for the ride, so have you. So congrats.

Bo Sacks distributed an article by Matt Turner titled “A top CMO reveals how AI is going to change sales and marketing across every company within 12 months.”

It paints a nice picture of marketers using AI to create individualized ad campaigns, “where each potential customer receives a different message at a different time that’s tailored to their needs and behaviors.”

It’s time to start planning for that now, because AI isn’t magic. You can’t just say, “hey, AI, make some individualized messages for these people.”

“Based on what?” the robot will reply.

Start thinking now about what kind of data you’ll want to have in place to power these lovely AI customizations.

And this doesn’t only apply to marketing. It applies to content creation as well.

You’ll want a few different kinds of data.

The simplest is behavioral data on your website. How people found your site, what they did when they got there, what topics they read about, whether they commented on articles, and so forth.

You’ll also want to track how they interact with your brand in email and on social media.

You might consider collecting what some people call “zero party data” through polls, questions, surveys, and so on.

If it’s possible, you might use 3rd-party sources to get additional information about your market.

All this data will have to be stored in a central repository where it’s all tied to an individual, so you can link it all together. That’s what customer data platforms do.

But you have to start with some use cases. What do you want to collect, and what do you want to do with it?

So let’s walk through an example. I’m a homebrewer, so let’s say I owned a website that sells homebrewing supplies and equipment. There are all sorts of things I would want to know about my customers.

Is he a hobbyist or a professional? (I’m saying “he” just because it’s easier, not because homebrewers are all men.)

Does he do extract brewing or all-grain brewing?

Does he have the equipment to do lagering, or does he stick with ales?

How often does he brew? Does he brew with friends? Is he a member of a club? Etc.

But more important than that, I need to think about what I’m going to do with information.

Someone who’s in a homebrew club is probably going to be a better customer than someone who isn’t, so I could give discounts to club members. Then I could start to form relationships with the clubs, find out where they operate geographically, and even promote club membership to customers based on their location.

There are a hundred things to do, but my point today is that if you want to make whizbang customized AI wonders for your market, you need to start thinking about that now, and start collecting that data now, so when you get the technology, you’ll have the data you need to create the customizations you want.

By the way, if you need help with this sort of planning – coming up with your own use cases for your market – that’s what I’m here for. Give me a call.

Links

https://www.businessinsider.com/twilio-cmo-says-ai-will-change-sales-marketing-2023-6

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Last week Bo Sacks distributed an article with the compelling headline, “Barry Adams on why AI will not kill SEO.”

That piqued my curiosity because I have said that AI threatens to disrupt Google’s business. Once people can simply get an answer, rather than getting a list of homework to do, they won’t be following links to webpages quite as much.

Note that these are two slightly different but related questions. I was addressing whether AI would disrupt the search engine business while Barry is addressing whether AI will make SEO irrelevant.

Barry makes three main arguments.

First, the AI engines require more work. You have to write a longer, more detailed prompt to get what you want. People are used to writing very brief queries in Google. So it’s better for lazy people.

I’m not buying that. People have learned to write short queries in Google, but they can learn to write longer queries. Also, a little bit of work up front, writing a better query, eliminates a lot of work sorting through all the pages you get in the response.

Second, Barry says the large language models don’t have access to current information on the web. News publishers are (generally) promoting current content. This makes news more valuable rather than less valuable, because it’s the information people can’t get through AI search.

That is a very good point. Access to recent information will continue to be moderated by search engines, so it will still be important for people who produce recent content to optimize for search.

Third, Barry points out that the large language models are not intended to create factual representations of the real world. They’re just predictive text. They make stuff up. And you can influence the answer you’ll get by the way you frame the question.

That’s true, but (1) the AI people are working on fixing that, and (2) for many types of search, what you get from the large language model is quite good enough.

Barry does say something towards the end of the podcast that is very good advice for publishers. Think beyond Google. Get loyalty. Build a brand, so you’re not dependent on Google or any other platform.

That’s good advice.

I stick to my original prediction that ChatGPT and similar services will disrupt Google’s business. Barry is right that search will continue to be relevant, particularly for recent content, but I think the large language models will take a very large bite out of the search engine business.

Links

Big Noises: Barry Adams on why AI will not kill SEO

https://voices.media/big-noises-barry-adams-on-why-ai-will-not-kill-seo/

Is Google in danger of being displaced?

https://krehbielgroup.com/2023/06/16/is-google-in-danger-of-being-displaced/

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Brian Morrissey recently mentioned that we should view the reaction to AI in the context of the Gartner Hype Cycle – which was new to me.

It’s a graphical representation of the phases of adoption of and reaction to new technologies.

Phase 1 is the Technology Trigger. This is when a new technology attracts attention and there’s a lot of excitement about it – positive or negative. We might imagine a connected world with the Internet of Things, new immersive experiences with virtual reality, or a decentralized digital currency with blockchain. In the case of AI, we worry about Skynet and murderous robots.

Phase 2 is the Peak of Inflated Expectations. This is where we get the exaggerated, almost messianic claims about the technology. There are lots of unrealistic projections and too much enthusiasm. The Segway was going to change cities. Virtual reality would allow the disabled to participate in more of life. AI will eliminate everyone’s job.

Phase 3 is the Trough of Disillusionment, which reminds me of the slough of despond in Pilgrim’s Progress. Following on that theme, the proverb says “hope deferred makes the heart sick.” Once we realize the technology won’t live up to its exaggerated expectations, we feel let down. There are security or regulatory problems. People don’t like it as much as they thought they would. It doesn’t integrate with other systems very well.

Phase 4 is the Slope of Enlightenment. The technology matures, and we see there are some practical applications and benefits. The technology starts to gain more realistic and sustainable uses, and organizations start to understand its value. People figure out new ways to use the technology, and it works well in particular niches.

Phase 5 is the Plateau of Productivity. At this point the technology reaches mainstream adoption and becomes part of everyday life or business operations. It’s mature and stable, with well-established practices and a wide user base.

When it comes to AI, we’ve had the technology trigger. I think we’re still climbing towards the peak of inflated expectations. But the trough of disillusionment is coming, which means we’ll start to find problems.

• It lacks generalized intelligence.
• It hallucinates too much.
• It has way too much bias.
• It has very limited contextual understanding.
• It’s not nearly as creative as we had hoped.
• It doesn’t have a good grasp of basic ethics.
• It’s too much of a black box. We don’t understand how it works, so we can’t trust it.
• It gets boring.

But then we’ll start to find reasonable tasks for AI. It won’t be as scary, and we won’t expect too much of it. But it will be useful.

That, my friends, seems like the probable path for AI.

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Our minds are very complex, and our choices are often influenced by strange factors. Today I want to touch very briefly on the psychology of persuasion, and focus particularly on cognitive biases. I can’t do justice to the topic in three minutes, but I’d like to pique your interest by mentioning a few of the factors that publishers should consider in their marketing and sales efforts.

Cognitive biases are mental shortcuts that we take to help us process the world more quickly. Evolutionary psychology might suggest that cognitive biases are generally useful – otherwise why would we have them – but they can also lead to errors in judgment.

One of the more common is confirmation bias, which is the tendency to latch on to information that confirms our existing beliefs, and to ignore or downplay contradictory evidence.

I’m not suggesting that you use confirmation bias, but that you be aware of it. For example, my friend Del sells local honey. People believe that local honey helps with allergies. Del has looked into this and says it’s not true – no matter how much he’d like it to be true. The funny thing is that it’s hard for him to convince people out of that belief, even though it would help him to promote it.

Anchoring bias is our tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information we receive. This is particularly relevant to headline writing. Think of all the times you read a headline, then read the story, and realized the story was deceptive. It’s also relevant in pricing. By presenting a higher price first, you establish a perception of value, and then when you present the lower price, people feel like they’re getting a deal.

Fear of loss is a very powerful tool in the marketers toolkit. People are more afraid of losing something than they’re motivated to gain something. This applies to messages like “Don’t miss out, only two days left.”

Scarcity bias is similar to fear of loss. It’s the tendency to place a higher value on something that is perceived as scarce or limited in quantity. Marketers can use scarcity tactics by highlighting limited-time offers, exclusive deals, or limited stock availability to create a sense of urgency and drive consumer action.

The bandwagon effect is the tendency to believe what everybody else believes. Marketers take advantage of the bandwagon effect with social proof, like customer testimonials, user-generated content, or even just claiming that it’s the popular choice.

The framing effect refers to how you present data. Is the meat 80% lean or 20% fat? Is $100 the full retail price of the jacket, or is it 50% off the full retail price of $200?

Choice overload – or choice paralysis – happens when there are too many options. We usually think it’s good to have options, but not always, because it’s work to figure out which is the right one?

I remember once when I was on my way to a night class, and I was dead tired. I wanted a cup of coffee and a candy bar. I stopped at a little roadside market that had 25 varieties of coffee and 600,000 candy bars. It was the only time in my life I wished I was in the Soviet Union, and my only choice was “coffee” and “candy bar.”

2 more.

The halo effect is when you extend one positive feature to the whole product, or brand. The attractive salesman must be a good person and wouldn’t lie to you, and the taller candidate must be the better leader.

The priming effect is when one stimulus influences another decision. You play Italian music and more people at your restaurant buy Italian wine, or you show happy people using your product, and people associate the product with being happy.

Obviously there are ethical implications to using these biases to manipulate consumer behavior. In my opinion, as long as you’re selling a good product, and you’re not lying, you can use these techniques without being a rotten bastard. But you’re going to have to figure that out on your own.

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There was some conversation at the Renewd Summit earlier this week about how to use artificial intelligence in content generation. Today I’m going to give you six ideas to consider to incorporate AI-powered writing into your workflow.

Get new ideas. Let’s say you write a newsletter about electric power transmission, and you’re trying to fill out your editorial calendar. You can ask ChatGPT, “How are advancements in renewable energy impacting electric power transmission systems?”

If you’re not sure what to ask, ask ChatGPT what to ask. You can say, “I write a newsletter on electric power generation and I need new ideas for articles. What prompts should I use?”

It really is a chat bot. It’s very different from Midjourney, where you have to construct the perfect prompt, and it doesn’t remember from one request to the next what you asked.

Get keyword suggestions. Ask ChatGPT something like this: “I want to write an article about how advancements in renewable energy are impacting the electric power transmission system. What keywords should I target in the article?”

Create a first draft. Once you have an idea for an article, ask ChatGPT to write it for you. You can give it a target word count, and you can even ask it to write in your style, provided you first upload some content so it knows what your style is. You can also ask it to write for a particular audience, or age group.

But don’t use ChatGPT’s text, and don’t believe any of its alleged data. Be sure to fact check it, because it does hallucinate sometimes. It’s funny that we talk about computers hallucinating, but … that’s the crazy world we’re living in now.

Check your word choices. Once you have your article the way you want it, ask ChatGPT to make suggestions about how to make it more valuable for your target audience. For example, upload the article to ChatGPT and ask “how can I make this article more appropriate and useful for people in the electric power transmission industry?”

Summarize or expand. Once you have your final article, use ChatGPT to write a brief summary, or ask it to expand the article into a longer, more details version. You can also ask it to write a Tweet or other social media post to promote the article.

If you’re really ambitious, you can use Open AI’s application interface to integrate ChatGPT into your content management system.

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Yesterday I attended the Renewd Summit in Arlington. Renewd.net is the free open community for professionals dedicated to sharing best-in-class practices for increasing subscriptions, building communities, and enhancing live and virtual events. In a way it’s the modern manifestation of the newsletter publishers association.

In one of the first talks, Diane Schwartz mentioned that how you name something can have a big effect on the perception of an event.

For example, is it a webinar or a seminar?

Is it a summit or a meeting?

Is it a trade show or a conference?

How you label your event can be very powerful.

Let’s start with formality. Some words – like conference, summit, or symposium – might convey a sense formality, professionalism, and importance, while other words – like workshop, training, or meeting – suggest a more interactive, hands-on approach.

Then we have audience expectations. A seminar or workshop might attract people who are seeking practical skills or knowledge, while a symposium or conference might seem more academic.

You also need to consider the emotional appeal of the words. “Summit” or “forum” may evoke a sense of collaboration or leadership, while colloquium or roundtable implies more intimate and intellectually stimulating discussion. I also wonder if words like “workshop” might alienate introverts, who might be afraid they’re going to be called on to participate. Some people don’t like that.

The words you choose can also affect perceived value. “Summit” or “symposium” might imply higher value or prestige while “meeting” or “training” sound more routine.

The name you choose can affect your position in the market. It’s probably a good idea to do some testing to see which words work best for your event for your audience. Don’t just stick with something boring like “webinar.” I’ve read a couple articles suggesting that the word “webinar” is a turnoff and depresses response.

Here are some other words to think about.

• Panel discussion
• Think tank
• Forum
• Lecture series
• Retreat
• Meet-up
• Boot camp
• Seminar series

There are a lot of words out there. Before planning your next event, you might consider doing some research. A thesaurus. ChatGPT. A keyword tool. “Answer the public,” etc. And when you roll out the idea, do some testing. .

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As if the CDP landscape wasn’t complicated enough, now we have the additional complication of composable vs. integrated, or packaged CDPs.

To unpack this, let’s start with composability. From Wikipedia …

Composability is a system design principle that deals with the inter-relationships of components. A highly composable system provides components that can be selected and assembled in various combinations to satisfy specific user requirements. In information systems, the essential features that make a component composable are that it be:

• self-contained (modular): it can be deployed independently – it may cooperate with other components, but dependent components are replaceable
• Stateless – which means it treats each request as an independent transaction

Although not everybody agrees with the stateless requirement.

Proponents of the “composable” CDP [I’m citing an article that I’ll link below] see the CDP itself as a software platform that could be broken up into components. Their argument is that companies should not buy an all-in-one CDP to handle everything from data collection, to integration, to profile unification, but rather purchase separate components for each function.

It’s not clear to me that a “composable” CDP is actually a CDP. One of the main distinguishing marks of a CDP is that it creates a comprehensive view of each customer. But in a composable environment, that may be happening in other places, like in the data warehouse.

The question, of course, is not whether a composable system meets somebody’s definition of a CDP. The question is whether it will work for your use cases and your staff. I can help you figure that out.

Here are five things to consider about composable CDPs.

1. The Swiss army knife question. None of the tools on a Swiss army knife are best of breed. They’re basically adequate. But the point is that if you have a Swiss army knife, you have all those tools at your disposal. When you evaluate CDPs, keep that analogy in mind.
2. Tied to that is build vs buy. A composable CDP means you have to select all the components. Do you want to do that?
3. Closely related to build vs. buy is how many integrations do you want to make? Integrations can be tough to build and maintain. They break. Do you have a team to keep them going?
4. Do you have a data lake, or a data warehouse? If so, you might think it’s duplicative to also dump everything into the CDP.
5. Are you a data-driven company, and do you have data engineers on staff? If so, the composable option might be good. If you think of “CDP” as a function rather than as a platform, why does the data have to live in any given bit of software?

That’s a very short introduction to the subject. If you want to know more, read the first link below, or give me a call and we can chat about it.

Sources

Composable CDP Vs. Integrated CDP: What’s The Difference?

https://cdp.com/articles/composable-cdp-vs-integrated-cdp/

What is a CDP?

https://www.cdpinstitute.org/learning-center/what-is-a-cdp/

Composability

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composability

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Bob Hoffman thinks it’s a marketer’s delusion to believe that anybody wants to interact with your brand. I tend to agree with him. But my friends Lev Kaye and Leslie Laredo believe there are some situations where interaction is appropriate.

How do you decide when?

That’s the point of The Krehbiel Brand Involvement Matrix. It’s a first attempt to create a framework for deciding when and how much customer pestering is appropriate.

Please leave your suggestions and comments.

https://krehbielgroup.com/2023/06/09/introducing-the-krehbiel-brand-involvement-matrix/

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What’s the best length for an email subject line?

What’s the best length for an article on the web?

How many free article views should a reader get before you show the paywall?

There are a lot of so-called “best practices” answers to these sorts of questions, and they’re usually nonsense.

Bo Sacks distributed an article by Andrew Butle called “Publishers: What is the ideal word count for articles and other content?” in which he highlighted the contradictory and confusing answers on the ideal length of an article.

It’s 1,500 words. No, it’s more than 2,000 words. No, actually it should be longer than 7,000 words. And so on.

The same confusion applies at the more strategic level, when we ask questions like “do readers prefer print or digital?”

What are they reading? Is it a book or a magazine or a newspaper?

The problem with this sort of answer is that it comes from taking averages across huge swaths of data. It’s meaningless because it mixes things that don’t fit together. As Andrew points out in the article, different objectives call for different word counts.

And when it comes to email, if you’re mixing B2B and B2C results, or marketing and content emails, your results are meaningless.

Asking for the best length of an article is like asking for the best length of a spoon. Is it for feeding a baby, eating cereal, stirring soup, making chili, or brewing beer?

When asking whether people prefer to read a magazine in print or digital format, what are they comparing? Some magazine publishers still think that posting a PDF on a website is a “digital edition.” Print will obviously win in that contest.

The answer will also vary by the type of content. People might be happy to read their news magazine on their smart phone on the metro, but read about boats at home in their easy chair.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a place for inferring best practices from averages, and strategies from survey results. We’d be foolish to ignore those things. But you have to make sure the person has done their homework.

When you see these sorts of things, you need to wonder if the average is across a data set that combines disparate things. Maybe there are several different averages hiding in the data. You need to learn to ask the right questions.

Along those lines, Andrew’s article does break down the stats a bit to try to make some sense of the question of the ideal length of an article.

So when you read these industry articles, or listen to the keynote at the marketing conference, keep that skepticism in the back of your mind. Are they accounting for the possibility that the data is a lot more clumpy and complicated than they think, or are they taking a simple and useless average across a complicated landscape?

Sources

https://whatsnewinpublishing.com/publishers-what-is-the-ideal-word-count-for-articles-and-other-content/

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We have another “this changes everything” technology to deal with. At some point people will get over that, but it hasn’t happened yet.

The latest thing is the Apple Vision Pro. I haven’t used it. My comments are based on what I’ve been able to see online.

The new device is like a virtual reality headset, but it’s more “augmented reality.” Apple calls it “spatial computing.” It allows you to create a “desktop” out in space, rather than on a dedicated, dimensionally limited monitor.

My first reaction is that nobody is going to want to wear that thing for very long. It’s heavy, and while I’m sure they try to make it comfortable, it’s just unnatural.

You’re not going to wear this thing out in the world.

• For starters, the battery only lasts for two hours. Along those lines, I hope they have the sense to allow you to have multiple batteries.
• It’s very operating system centric. It doesn’t seem to have a generic focus on augmenting the experience of everyday life.
• Wearing one of these things is essentially the same as pointing a camera at everyone. Humans aren’t used to the idea of being filmed all the time – whether they are or aren’t.

It’s the sort of thing you wear on your couch in your living room.

My biggest question about the device was whether it has a new mode of input. It does, to some extent. It tracks your eye movements, so you select things simply by looking at them and pinching your fingers. You can input text by speaking, but that’s not really the greatest. Imagine being on a train where half the people are talking to their headsets. Not practical.

It can integrate with a keyboard, which is good, because as of this moment, nothing beats a keyboard.

There are no controllers, which tells me that Apple is still caught up in the arrogance of designing an “intuitive” interface. “You will use this device the way we say,” which is … arrogant, as I said, but also just plain stupid. People are different, and they need to be able to customize things to work best for them.

“Wait a minute, I have to put on my headset.”

Apple Vision Pro is an interesting device, but as I foreshadowed in my book, The Intruder, the real change is going to be when the tech is in your eye, and you can input data without speaking. That’s where it’s all going. The Apple Vision Pro is a decent step towards that goal, but … I’m not sure I’d use the thing even if they gave me one for free.

But this podcast is for publishers, so what should publishers make of this.

First, you’re going to be bombarded with nonsense about how this changes everything, and you need to start doing special content and marketing for the Vision Pro. Sure. Just like we had to do special stuff for Pokemon Go, right?

Ignore all that.

Second, this will mostly impact movies, online gaming, and sporting events. There are some really cool applications for that, and if you’re in one of those spaces, you need to start thinking.

This isn’t going to affect newspapers, magazines, books, B2B products, etc. If you’re in one of those spaces, my advice is to demote anybody who recommends a new strategy based on the Apple Vision Pro.

Resources

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This is a good video on the Apple Vision Pro.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFvXuyITwBI

My book on the future of enhanced reality.

https://www.amazon.com/Intruder-Greg-Krehbiel-ebook/dp/B00A7BRZZU

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On a plane ride this past weekend I read Bob Hoffman’s Advertising for Skeptics, which is worth your time. Bob’s books are nice and short, which I appreciate because almost all business books could easily be one fifth as long.

He has a lot of interesting things to say about advertising, but I’m going to focus on one point that he makes, which is the idea that personalized, targeted advertising defeats the purpose of advertising.

The case for targeted advertising is that you find the right person at the right time. Why advertise cat food to someone who doesn’t have a cat?

You can see this same general approach in campaigns to get targeted leads. The campaign is trying to find out if you’re the right kind of prospect who has the budget and the authority to buy and you’re ready to buy within the next six months? If not, I have no interest in you.

That is one legitimate side to advertising, and Bob admits that targeted advertising may be appropriate for B2B marketing.

But general advertising relies on common knowledge. If I’m viewing an advertisement, it’s not enough that I see the ad and get the message. For the ad to be effective, I need to know that you see the ad and get the same message.

For example, when I was a kid Gillette had a campaign that the wet head is dead. You don’t have to use oils or creams to control your hair. You can use “the dry look.”

Part of the point of this message is to make you feel out of touch if you are using oils or creams. The wet head is dead. Get with it.

If I was the only person seeing this ad, I might agree or disagree. But if I know that everybody in my high school is seeing this ad, that might affect my behavior.

Not mine, because I’m an ornery cuss and I don’t care too much about those sorts of things. I’ll continue to wear cargo shorts – which are the greatest thing ever – no matter what the fashion moguls say.

But that’s just me. Most people are a little more sensitive to what other people think about a product.

The point of advertising is to link a brand to an image. If you smoke these cigarettes or ride this motorcycle, you’re a tough guy. But if all the sudden smoking those cigarettes associates you with some undesirable image, that’s no good.

It all depends on what everybody else is seeing. And that’s why personalized advertising isn’t always a good idea. Advertising is more effective when I know that everybody else is seeing what I’m seeing.

Sources

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https://www.amazon.com/Advertising-Skeptics-Bob-Hoffman/dp/0999230735

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If I steal your car, you don't have a car anymore. It's a physical object. We can't both have it at the same time.

Everybody realizes that's wrong.

But if I make a copy of some digital music you've purchased, you still have it. So have I wronged you?

I may or may not have wronged you, but here are some of the things that I have definitely done.

1. I've violated the rights of the copyright owner. It's up to him to determine who has access to that content.

2. I've deprived the copyright owner of the income he should have received from my ownership of that material.

3. I've undermined the whole social contract and legal framework surrounding intellectual property. Intellectual property laws protect creators precisely so that they're incentivized to innovate and create new content. By stealing a digital object, I'm taking away some of that incentive and I’m making it less likely there will be new, innovative things in the future.

I recently saw a tweet where someone complained that some artist can't sing for crap. The artist replied, "you're right. I sing for money."

Some people will argue that nobody can claim rights to something that has no production cost. It costs essentially nothing to make a copy of a digital recording.

That's true, but it doesn't change any of the things I said previously.

Others will argue that the current system protects corporations and the rich against the rights of the public. But since when does the public have some inherent right to someone else's property?

Some will even say that they're doing the copyright owner a favor by getting a free sample so they can decide if they want to purchase it. Further, in the case of music they're giving the artist more market exposure. Isn't that good?

That’s not a decision for the consumer to make. It's up to the owner to decide when and if and under what terms they want to offer a free sample.

Here's the kicker. All the things that I've said about copying music apply equally well to content behind a paywall.

Sneaking past a paywall is stealing, and publishers need to make that case.

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I’m assuming you’ve used ChatGPT. If so, you’ve probably run into its very annoying super ego. For example, you’re doing some research on nuclear power and it hectors you with grade school morality about the dangers of this and that. 

It’s quite annoying. 

But there’s a value in that, which is that it’s possible to layer a point of view on top of AI responses. 

That’s actually a good thing. 

As I’ve mentioned a few times before, tools like ChatGPT will undermine the current search engine model, where I ask a question and Google gives me some homework to do. 

“Here, read all these articles and you might find what you’re looking for.” 

That was very useful in its time, but now it’s rather quaint. When I ask a question, I want an answer. 

The next crucial step is that I might want an answer from a particular point of view. 

Let’s say I’m a Lutheran seminary student. I might want to have an answer that’s consistent with Lutheran doctrine. I might even want to get more precise and ask for Philip Melanchthon’s opinion on a particular idea. (Philip was a disciple of Luther.) 

You can do that with ChatGPT. I just tried it, in fact, and it did a remarkably good job. It also bypassed that annoying super ego problem. It didn’t keep reminding me that there are other views and blah blah blah. I wasn’t asking about other views. I was asking about Philip’s views, and that’s what it gave me. 

Here’s the point for publishers. Let’s say you run an investing newsletter. There are all sorts of different strategies and mindsets and approaches to investing. If you hook up AI to your site, you want it fine-tuned to represent your brand with your voice and your approach. 

That’s what publishers need to start doing. Not only do you need to feed your content into your own instance of a large language model. You also need to tinker with the super ego of the AI so that it learns to respond in your voice, with your perspective. 

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I’m a big advocate of practical tools. Checklists. Forms. That sort of thing. And when I was a VP of operations at a large association, I learned a lot about frameworks. 

Today I’m going to talk about a simple one. Quadrant analysis. 

You’ve seen these before. It’s a 2x2 matrix where some value on the x axis goes from low to high and a value on the y axis goes from low to high. 

If you have a hard time visualizing this, go to my website and see the article about it. 

I’m going to start off with two classic examples of quadrant analysis, and then I’ll do one specifically for publishers. 

• Urgent vs Important

• Effort vs Impact * Market Share vs. Advertiser Interest

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Bo Sacks distributed an article the other day about the need to refresh your design if it hasn't been updated in a while. The article is mostly about print, but the same can apply to a website.

Designers amaze me. They can tweak one little thing — a color here, a font there — and make something look so much better.

I don’t have that talent. If men still wore ties to work, I’d want Jeeves to help me choose mine.

Looking modern is often a good idea. I remember evaluating some vendor software that looked like 1990 – it was 2010 at the time – and fighting the impression that it was old technology simply because of the interface.

But as I mentioned before, when someone makes a claim, I instinctively think about things that might disconfirm that claim. It’s just the way my brain works.

Following that thought, are there any negatives, or dangers in updating your design? Yes, actually.

1. Resistance to change. Change can be uncomfortable, and a sudden change can be disorienting. That might argue for slow, incremental changes rather than wholesale changes.

2. You might be in a niche where old-fashioned is part of your brand. Looking too modern might make people think you’ve abandoned your traditional, long-time values.

3. A prettier, more modern design doesn’t necessarily mean a better user experience.

When I started out in publishing, I saw a box of direct mail pieces sitting outside the marketing director’s office. I picked one up to take a look. I knew almost nothing about publishing back then, and even though I was in editorial, I was curious about everything, including marketing.

I’d never seen an uglier marketing piece. The colors and the design were awful (not that I’m an expert on either of those things, by the way), and the pictures and the type face looked like they were from 1950.

When I asked the marketing director why we sent such an ugly thing, she said she agreed that it was ugly, and it was personally embarrassing, but it out-performed every attempt to replace it. They’d do split tests of the ugly mailer against nicer designs, and the ugly one always won.

I mentioned this to my friend Leslie Laredo, and she asked if there could be some confusion here over correlation and cause. For example, it would be wrong to conclude “ugly = better.” In fact, it would be wrong to conclude that we knew why the ugly brochure worked better. But A/B tests are fairly reliable, and in this case, the uglier design always prevailed. The why was unclear, but the fact was pretty well established.

Back to the article. Peter Sands, who is making the case for occasional redesigns recognizes what I’m talking about. It’s not enough for the designer to like the new design. The readers have to like it.

So whenever you do a redesign, you have to have a method in place to test it and make sure it’s helping you. The bare fact that it looks nicer isn’t enough. It has to sell more, keep people on the page longer, get visitors to read more articles, reduce customer service calls, or just make people feel better about it. But you need some metrics.

Sources

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Does your newspaper look tired and out-of-date?

https://www.inpublishing.co.uk/articles/does-your-newspaper-look-tired-and-out-of-date-21830

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In today's podcast I give a brief overview of my latest letter, which discusses ...

Is Google in danger of being replaced? It sounds silly, but it's a real possibility.

What comes after the webpage? The web page is not as significant as it used to be. Why?

Marketing to different generations.

Rethinking Micropayments.

And more.

You can download the letter today at this address.

https://krehbielgroup.com/letter-archives/Krehbiel-Letter-2023-06.pdf

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My friend Ralph had a job at a fast-food restaurant in high school and he complained about customers who would ask for a complimentary cup, despite the big sign on the wall that said “no complimentary cups.” The thing is, the sign is very obvious if you’ve worked there 15 hours a week for three months. It’s not as obvious if it’s your first visit. You can’t expect people to read every sign everywhere they go. That’s an illustration of something called “curse of knowledge,” which is a cognitive bias that occurs when you understand something and assume everyone else understands it too. It’s something to watch out for in * customer service, * website design, * project management, * sales … it creeps up all over the place. Remind your customer-facing staff, like my friend Ralph, that they have special knowledge and familiarity that your customers don’t share. When designing a website, you and the programmers have been poring over it for months, and you know what everything does and why. But your visitors don’t. So here are some ways to combat the curse of knowledge. * Where possible, use the standard features everyone is used to. Or in other words, when in doubt, copy Amazon. * Before you roll out a design change or a new feature, have several people who know nothing about the project review it. * Have Apple users test your Android instructions and vice versa. * Create reporting mechanisms to track problems. If you expect people to follow a certain path, check to see if they’re behaving the way you expected. * Make it easy for customers to report when they’re confused or frustrated. * Reinforce the attitude that if a customer misunderstands, you have not communicated well enough. The curse can get in project management as well, and I’m afraid I can be guilty of this one. “The updates are always in that spreadsheet I shared with you during the kickoff meeting. Didn’t you bookmark it?” Just because you said something doesn’t mean people heard you, understood you or took action based on what you said. In this context, the curse of knowledge can also go the other way, where the technical people are aware of a problem, but the project manager is out of the loop. They assume he knows. Here are a few general things you can do to combat the curse of knowledge. * Overcommunicate. Yes, it’s annoying, but it’s better than miscommunication. * Avoid buzzwords and industry lingo. People might not know what you mean, and they don’t want to look stupid by asking for clarification. Hint – always ask for the clarification. As Lincoln almost said, it’s better to be thought a fool now than to remain ignorant and prove yourself a fool later. Here's a longer treatment of the subject. https://martech.org/how-the-curse-of-knowledge-may-be-hurting-your-business-and-what-to-do-about-it/

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Micropayments seem to be the idea that won’t catch fire but also the idea that won’t die.

It seems that publishers are starting to take another look at micropayments because ad revenues are declining, and subscription revenues aren’t always making up the difference. Are micropayments a desperation move, or do they belong as part of the paid content ecosystem?

Advocates of micropayments will say that readers will only subscribe to a couple brands, but are willing to pay for content from many more. To put it another way, lovers like subscriptions. Daters want micropayments.

Right now, publishers tend to have some mix of these three options. Free access, access after registration, or access after a subscription. Giving readers the ability to purchase single articles creates a new revenue stream and a new way for readers to connect with a brand.

Generally speaking, I’m a big skeptic of this “connect with the brand” talk. More often than not that’s a marketing delusion. I have zero brand loyalty to the shoes I wear, for example. But in terms of publishing, think of it this way.

First, think in terms of source. There are sources that the reader trusts, and sources the reader doesn’t trust. We can break down the sources the reader trusts into two categories. The smaller category is sources the reader is willing to subscribe to. The larger category is sources the reader trusts, and might consider paying for, but won’t subscribe to.

Second, think in terms of types of content. There’s content the reader will pay for, and content the reader will never pay for, because it’s easy to find for free elsewhere. Once again, we can break down the content the reader will pay for into content the reader will subscribe to, and content the reader might consider paying for, but won’t subscribe to.

It’s obvious where micropayments fit in here, specifically, sources and content the reader trusts and is willing to pay for, but won’t subscribe to. At least not now.

Here’s the problem. If this is such an obvious and logical division – as it seems to be – why haven’t micropayments caught on?

I think there are a few reasons.

From the reader’s perspective …

1. Any sort of regwall or paywall is an irritation. Unfortunately, we’ve trained a generation of readers to expect to get content for free. The micropayment solution would have to be as easy or easier than a regwall or paywall.
2. Nobody wants to set up yet another account with somebody – who’s going to spam you forever and ever, amen – just to pay $2 to get a lousy article. So the solution would have to be able to use a payment option the reader has already created, like Apple Pay, Google Pay, Paypal, etc. Also, it might be a good idea to have a method to give away an article or two when someone first signs up, just to sweeten the deal.

On the publisher side …

1. It seems like a lot of work. Somebody has to pick which articles are for sale, set prices, assign SKUs, and then report on all that. Is it really worth the effort? An effective micropayment strategy would have to make that process very simple and fit into the publisher’s existing data scheme.
2. The publisher might believe micropayments will detract from subscription sales, but we’ve already said that micropayments address the audience of people who are willing to pay, and trust the content, but aren’t yet willing to subscribe. So if it’s done right, it opens doors rather than closing them.
3. The publisher needs to get the reader’s information. Getting a buck for an article is okay. The real money is in the relationship.

There are a lot of other things to consider here. For example, might different age groups have different attitudes to micropayments?

But I think I’m overtime on today’s podcast, so I’ll leave it there. But if this is an issue that interests you, I’ve done a fair amount of thinking about it, and I’d be happy to talk it through with you.

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My friend Ralph had a job at a fast-food restaurant in high school and he complained about customers who would ask for a complimentary cup, despite the big sign on the wall that said “no complimentary cups.”

The thing is, the sign is very obvious if you’ve worked there 15 hours a week for three months. It’s not as obvious if it’s your first visit. You can’t expect people to read every sign everywhere they go.

That’s an illustration of something called “curse of knowledge,” which is a cognitive bias that occurs when you understand something and assume everyone else understands it too.

It’s something to watch out for in

• customer service,

• website design,

• project management,

• sales …

it creeps up all over the place.

Remind your customer-facing staff, like my friend Ralph, that they have special knowledge and familiarity that your customers don’t share.

When designing a website, you and the programmers have been poring over it for months, and you know what everything does and why. But your visitors don’t. So here are some ways to combat the curse of knowledge.

• Where possible, use the standard features everyone is used to. Or in other words, when in doubt, copy Amazon.

• Before you roll out a design change or a new feature, have several people who know nothing about the project review it.

• Have Apple users test your Android instructions and vice versa.

• Create reporting mechanisms to track problems. If you expect people to follow a certain path, check to see if they’re behaving the way you expected.

• Make it easy for customers to report when they’re confused or frustrated.

• Reinforce the attitude that if a customer misunderstands, you have not communicated well enough.

The curse can get in project management as well, and I’m afraid I can be guilty of this one.

“The updates are always in that spreadsheet I shared with you during the kickoff meeting. Didn’t you bookmark it?”

Just because you said something doesn’t mean people heard you, understood you or took action based on what you said.

In this context, the curse of knowledge can also go the other way, where the technical people are aware of a problem, but the project manager is out of the loop. They assume he knows.

Here are a few general things you can do to combat the curse of knowledge.

• Overcommunicate. Yes, it’s annoying, but it’s better than miscommunication.

• Avoid buzzwords and industry lingo. People might not know what you mean, and they don’t want to look stupid by asking for clarification.

Hint – always ask for the clarification. As Lincoln almost said, it’s better to be thought a fool now than to remain ignorant and prove yourself a fool later.

Here's a longer treatment on the subject.

https://martech.org/how-the-curse-of-knowledge-may-be-hurting-your-business-and-what-to-do-about-it/

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Have you heard of “intent-based marketing”? According to an article by Sara Fischer, It’s Dotdash Meredith’s response to the alleged death of the 3rd party cookie.

To understand how this works, let’s start with how things used to work.

You visit a website, say 123.com, and 123.com participates in an ad network, called ads4everybody.com. If you’ve ever been on any site that participates in the ads4everybody network, you would already have their cookie in your web browser. That’s a 3rd party cookie because you’re not on ads4everybody.com, you’re on 123.com.

Every time you do something on any site that participates in the ads4everybody.com network, it sends more data into your profile. After a while, ads4everybody.com knows – or guesses – a lot about you, so it can target ads to your specific interests.

I said “your profile,” but it’s supposed to be anonymized. Ads4everybody pretends they don’t know it’s you – they just have an ID for you. An anonymous id. Wink wink.

When web browsers block 3rd party cookies, they block the ads4everybody.com cookie, because you’re not on that site. But the web browser can read the 123.com cookie, because you are on that site.

Got it?

So 123.com can put a 1st party cookie in your browser and track what you do on the 123.com site.

Now let’s say 123.com is one of the 40 sites owned by Dotdash Meredith. All 40 of those sites collect information with 1st-party cookies and feed that information into a central database. That central database – with all the information from those 40 sites – can put people in audience segments and make predictions about their interests and likely behavior.

So it’s basically the same thing as an advertising platform using 3rd party cookies, it’s just that it only works on sites owned by Dotdah Meredith.

They claim they’re not using cookies at all. But they’re using the word “cookies” to mean 3rd-party cookies – and you have to watch out for that.

If they didn’t want to use cookies, they could use browser fingerprinting.

Here’s how that works. When you visit a website, your browser makes a request to the server. That request includes a lot of data, like your IP address, the browser you’re using, your operating system, screen resolution, active plugins, language, time zone, etc. All those settings create a fingerprint that’s close enough to being unique.

If all 40 Dotdash Meredith sites tie online behavior to that fingerprint, and then send that fingerprint to their central database, it accomplishes the same thing. They can follow your profile across all Dotdash Meredith sites.

I asked someone at D/Cipher – which is this ad system from DDM – about how this all works, and here’s what she said.

We target content, not people. The output of D/Cipher is recommended site taxonomies which we use for contextual targeting (opposed to 1P or 3P based audience segments).

That makes it sound like a content recommendation engine to me, but I’ll follow up and try to parse that out.

The bottom line, however, is the death of the 3rd party cookie does not mean the death of tracking.

Dotdash Meredith debuts intent-based ad targeting tool

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The “People vs. Algorithms” podcast has an episode called “The Deterioration of Webpages.” It raises some very interesting questions about the future of media companies. If you’re in the media space, you should listen to it.

Here are my comments and opinions on their analysis. Some of it follows what those guys say, and some of it’s my own.

Why are web pages ending?

First, there’s so much more competition.

• Podcasts
• Youtube
• Twitter
• Tik Tok
• Email
• Apps

Why do you need to go to a web page?

Second, as I’ve mentioned before, the web experience on mobile is terrible because of the ads. As more and more content consumption occurs on mobile, that will take away from the web page.

Those are things that are happening right now, but AI will do at least two things to hurt web pages even more.

1. By simply providing an answer to a question, there will be no need to visit the page.
2. AI will start flooding the internet with content, so most pages will be created by AI.

As Alex said on the podcast, the web will be a bloodbath.

So Alex raises the question: What is the least disruptible by AI?

Unfortunately, whatever that is today, AI will probably disrupt it tomorrow.

Troy said a publisher should ask “How am I optimizing my content for the next generation of search?”

I don’t like that. Google has played far too large of a role in dictating terms to publishers. You must do things this way if you want to be discovered.

Obviously you have to be discovered if you want to have a media business, but to whatever extent they possibly can, publishers should keep that under their own control, and not dance to Google’s tunes.

Troy also said “The center of your media brand has to be the quality of your ideas, not the distribution channel.”

I like that. And my suggestion is to think of the reader first. How can you help the reader?

Think of technology as a way to serve your audience.

You have to make money, so you need to worry about audience and monetization and all that. Fine. But if you put the monetization first, you make a horrible product.

Here are my recommendations.

• Put the content consumer first.
• Start with the problem you’re solving for people, and allow the distribution channel to grow out of that.
• Maybe you’ll need to be on many different channels.
• But Brian is right, don’t assume you’ll start with a web page.

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I was getting ready to send the latest issue of The Krehbiel Report, which is my e-newsletter – by the way, if you haven’t signed up, you can sign up for free at krehbielgroup.com – and when I’m getting ready to send a message I like to send it to different accounts to make sure it displays properly. I sent a test message to my protonmail address, and I got this message.

“This email has failed its domain’s authentication requirements. It may be spoofed or improperly forwarded.”

Yikes.

That surprised me, because I had worked with the DNS experts at my hosting company to make sure everything was set up correctly to send email from my account. It turned out there was an additional step I had to take with Mailchimp, and I wouldn’t have known about it unless I had sent the email to protonmail.

Here are five practical steps you can do to check on the status of your email sends.

1. Have a DNS expert review the settings on your domain. I hope you did that a long time ago, but there’s no harm in checking.
2. Look at the reports you get from your ESP. They can give you insights into things that might be wrong.
3. Seed your campaigns with test emails on a bunch of different platforms and make sure they’re all getting into the inbox.
4. Use mail-tester.com. It will generate a test email address for you. Send to that email address, and it will give you a report on what might be wrong with your messages.
5. Check your domain’s reputation at senderscore.org.

Sometimes these services ding you for dumb stuff. It’s the same with Google’s page-speed checker, and similar services.

Don’t get too panicked about every little thing. But where you can, take their suggestions.

For example, mail-tester.com recommended I add alt tags to my images. That’s an easy fix, and it bumps up my rating a touch. So why not?

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Yesterday I had the privilege of watching Brian Morrissey and Sean Griffey record the latest rebooting podcast at a MACMA event in Washington. Relevant links below.

Brian mentioned that publishers don’t want to depend on other tech platforms. If you live by the algorithm, you die by the algorithm. And Brian is exactly right about that. Publishers have invested way too much of their time, talent, and energies on platforms that then change the rules and undermine everything they’ve done.

Handing over the distribution of your content to a platform makes you very unstable, Brian said. And he’s right.

Sean said that’s exactly why he likes email, because that’s the only distribution platform you can control. I wrote in my notes, “somewhat.”

Sean is right that you can control email better than many other options, but even there you’re subject to factors beyond your control.

The email service provider the publisher uses can have a significant impact on delivery depending on how well they manage the technical side of the process. A smart publisher will stay on top of this, but it’s not entirely in the publisher’s hands.

Popular email services such as Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook, have their own spam filters and algorithms that sort emails to decide which ones go into spam, which into promotions, which into the inbox, and which don’t get delivered at all.

There are additional layers of filtering behind that, depending on where you’re sending the email. For example, if you’re sending to an employee at a hospital, the hospital will have filters in place to keep people from being pestered by unwanted emails.

If you’re not careful about these things, you can end up on a blacklist and very little of your email will get through.

Even if you do everything right, and your email gets through to your reader, you also face the prospect of user error. In some email interfaces, the “mark as spam” button is right next to the delete button. Once a user marks you as spam, it can be a challenge to get delivery restarted.

Aside from all that, there are problems with email delivery metrics, which are essential to the business of e-newsletters.

Any email sent to an Apple address might be marked as opened whether or not the recipient ever opens it.

Another interesting problem with email is that when you send to a large organization, there are bots that read the email and click on all the links to make sure they’re safe before delivering the email to the recipient. This seriously interferes with standard email metrics.

And, by the way, that sounds like a great business opportunity for someone. Use AI to filter out clicks from bots.

Anyway, Brian and Sean are both correct that publishers should try to keep their own fate in their own hands as much as possible, and email is the best option for that. But it’s not without its challenges.

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When advertising revenue gets disappointing, publishers often wonder if they can charge for access to their content, and the most common way they do that is with a paywall.

Paywalls raise a lot of interesting questions, and as a consequence, there are a lot of different strategies.

One strategy is to show a little of every article, but require people to register or subscribe to see the full article.

How much of an article do you show? Sometimes that decision is driven by Google. You have to show enough to get the article indexed for the right keywords so people can find it.

Another strategy is to allow some number of free views before presenting the registration wall or the paywall.

How many articles should that be? And how do you decide?

It’s very likely that the optimal number of free views before presenting the paywall varies based on how people find your content. It might also vary by how frequently they come to your site. For example, a person who comes once a week on Sunday to get the crossword puzzle is a different sort of prospect than the visitor who wants to read all your articles about a particular topic.

Yet another strategy is to make some articles free to all, and put premium content behind the paywall.

And there are other variations on these themes.

The problem publishers face is that creating one rule for all these different types of users won’t optimize your paywall as well as creating different rules for different types of visitors.

Maybe the people who come from LinkedIn are most likely to convert after three views while the people who come from a Google search are hardly likely to subscribe at all.

But who has the time for all that analysis, and how would you test it?

That’s where your friendly neighborhood AI comes in.

Rather than sitting around a conference table, debating whether to show 2 or 3 pages before you present the offer, let AI figure it out.

There’s still some work to do. For example, you’re going to have to tell the AI what kinds of things to look for, and you might want to bone up on different types of paywall strategies to decide what options the AI can test.

But this method seems so much better to me than trying to find the one rule to catch everybody. (I wanted to do a play on Tolkien there, but it wasn’t working.)

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Bo Sacks distributed an interesting article by Peter Houston yesterday called “How to build a future-proof editorial operation: Insights from IFJ 2023.” IFJ being the International Journalism Festival in Italy.

1. Serve your audience

This should be obvious, right? If you make a product, you should make it the way people want it.

But isn’t there a bit of a tension when it comes to editorial products? There’s a lot of conversation around the conflict between what people might want and … telling the truth?

That’s a challenge that publishers have to face. Are you providing a product the way your customers want it, or do you have some other standard? That can be tough.

But Houston is focusing on another aspect of this, which is to give readers solutions. Don’t just complain about problems. And I agree with that to some extent. If you’re talking about something where there is a clear solution. Don’t get out of your wheelhouse here and start offering things as solutions that are actually just opinions.

1. Look after your staff

Yes. Retention is important in most businesses, but let’s be honest, we’re probably facing a time when AI will be taking jobs, so the important thing is going to be retaining your top talent. It’s going to be difficult, but you’re probably going to have to lose some people. Make sure it’s not the people who drive your business.

1. Cover the climate crisis.

This one bothers me a bit. There’s a big partisan gap on this topic. Some people want that coverage while some people are sick of it. Again, are you trying to create a product that your subscribers want, or are you lecturing them?

1. Pay attention to AI

No. Don’t pay attention to it. Start using it. Right now. In at least two ways. First, as a productivity tool. Second, start thinking about ways to use AI to create personalized content for your readers.

1. Be cautious, stay curious

Houston says publishers should avoid chasing every new development in media. Rather, they should focus on their brand values and on their audience.

Well – yes and no. Definitely focus on your audience, and definitely avoid falling too hard for the latest shiny object. But some of those shiny objects will represent new opportunities, and you need to spend some portion of your resources pursuing them.

I think that’s the point of the “cast your bread upon the waters,” thing. There’s an element of chance to success, and you need to be out there to capitalize on it.

SOURCES

=========

https://whatsnewinpublishing.com/how-to-build-a-future-proof-editorial-operation-insights-from-ifj-2023/

https://krehbielgroup.com

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Sometimes people ask me which is the best customer data platform. Unfortunately, there is no best Customer Data Plaform (CDP), just like there’s no best shoe.The trick is to know what questions to ask as you start this process. In this short video, I want to talk about your website. First, I want you to forget about it. The Internet has changed the way we think about things to such an extent that we often assume our website is the starting point for all tech questions. That’s not always true.For some businesses — like a restaurant, or a gym — web traffic might not be the first consideration, but they might still need to harmonize customer data from multiple sources.That’s the main use case of a CDP – to collect data from several different sources and merge it into a “golden record” for each customer so that you can take appropriate action.As you think about a CDP, ask yourself what customer data you have, where it’s stored, and what would you do with that data if you had it organized the way you wanted it. Possible sources might be … Prospect lists or sales leads Email data (lists, opens, clicks, unsubscribes) Purchase information Questions / customer support* Membership / rewards programsAnd potentially a lot more, depending on your business.Make a list. Note where the data is stored, how often it’s updated, what you currently do with it, and what you wish you could do with it.Now think about your websiteNow that you’ve thought about all your other sources of customer data, think about your customer data again in the context of your web traffic. Imagine that you could sort your web visitors into four buckets.1. Customers who have self-identified (e.g., by a login)2. Anonymous visitors who are customers that haven’t yet self-identified3. Anonymous visitors who might become customers4. Anonymous visitors who will never become customersEventually you’ll come to think of your web traffic in many more categories, but this is a good start. Try to estimate how much of your total traffic might be attributable to each group. (You’ll probably be wrong.) Then, develop a plan for each of those groups. That plan will influence what sort of CDP you’re interested in.For example, if the vast majority of your visitors are in group #4, you might not even need a CDP. You might be better off with a Data Management Platform (DMP). But if most of your visitors are in group #1, you probably want a CDP that specializes in customer-centric use cases.

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It’s not all the job losses. Although I do think that’s a big problem we’re not ready for.

It’s the fact that one or maybe just a few organizations will control everyone’s access to information.

Right now, just about anybody who wants can get their ideas out into the public square – as I’m doing right now. And while there is some censorship going on – YouTube can hide your videos, and Google can move your pages way down in the search results – we have a fairly free marketplace of ideas.

I’d like it to be a lot more fair and free, but it’s not awful.

Very soon, this entire ecosystem will be transformed. You won’t use a search engine.

Think about it. Search engines were a great idea, but they’re a bit of a pain. If I do a search about the geology of Nashville, I’ll get a bunch of links to pages, and I won’t know which one answers my question. I might have to read through several pages to get what I want.

But if I go to an AI chatbot, it will just answer my question.

That’s the future.

Notice how that new process won’t give me direct access to other points of view.

I could certainly ask the chatbot to tell me if there are other interpretations of the geology of Nashville, and based on my experience so far, it will do that.

Unless you ask about something controversial. ChatGPT has a well-documented bias on many hot-button issues.

That’s only going to get worse.

In other words, here’s what’s going to happen. There will be a few AI algorithms that rise to the top of the heap. They will be controlled by some large corporation. That corporation will decide what’s news, what’s disinformation, and what you should know.

Imagine, for example, that Big Pharma purchased ChatGPT. Do you believe you’d get honest answers if you asked about their latest drug? I don’t. Not for a minute. They would label everything that doesn’t fit with their business strategy as disinformation, and they’d hide it from you.

There still might be other ways to get information. There still might be search engines. There might be smaller AI bots that claim not to curate what you get to see and hear.

But the vast majority of society will be getting their information from one, or maybe a few, AI engines that filter that access – for their own reasons.

This probably won’t be a technical violation of “freedom of the press,” because it won’t be the government doing it. The First Amendment prohibits Congress from abridging free speech. It doesn’t stop Microsoft, or Google, or Twitter.

So here’s my voice crying in the wilderness. AI will become a direct threat to your freedom to get access to the information you want, and not the information that Big Tech wants you to see.

That’s a hidden danger of AI that hasn’t been explored as well as it ought to be.

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Google has unveiled precisely the doomsday scenario that I’ve been warning publishers about.

Put simply, Google will do what ChatGPT can do, but it will also have access to the current web. When someone enters a query, they won’t get a list of websites to visit. They’ll get the answer to their question. There will be little or no reason to visit publisher websites as a result of a Google search, and that will cause traffic to tank.

What’s not clear to me at this point is how Google intends to save their ad business if they destroy traffic to the very pages that display those ads. But whatever they do, you can be sure it won’t be good news for publishers.

What can publishers do in response? Here are a few ideas.

1. Stop feeding Google current information so its answers aren’t as good as yours. I’m not sure that will work, since there’s almost no chance all publishers will do that, and it will also kill what little traffic you will still get from Google searches. But it is one option to consider.
2. Go back to print. Quit relying on revenue from digital content with digital ads, since that business model will be dying soon. Cede the online space to AI and create curated, beautiful publications on paper.
3. Create customized, walled-garden apps for niche audiences. But not just an app the way you might do one today. It will have to use AI, and will have to be able to deliver customized, personalized answers to users based on their queries.
4. This goes along with the previous idea. Build your own AI specifically for your niche, and make it better than Google’s — at least in your specific area of expertise. Good luck with that, but that is an option to consider.

About print, realize that AI will be coming for print publications as well. Imagine what will happen when I can get a fishing magazine that’s customized to me. E.g., “I fish from a kayak in the Severn River near Little Round Bay. Sometimes I fish near the bay bridge. Create a custom weekly magazine, and I only want it delivered between May and September.”

And again, the same could be done in an app. I don’t want to know about fishing conditions in Lake Ponchartrain, or tide tables in Virginia. I want to know exactly what I need, when I need it.

That’s the future of publishing. If you want to stay in the game, you’re going to have to figure that out.

Sources

Google is About To Turn The Online Publishing Industry Upside Down

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/05/11/google-is-about-to-drop-a-nuclear-bomb-on-the-online-publishing-industry/?sh=412459fc3faa

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I’m not a Luddite. I work with people on technology issues, and I like technology. But I also recognize there’s a role for printed publications. So today I’d like to discuss the possible advantages of print.

1. Branding yourself

The New European is a relatively recent publication in the UK that’s aimed at people who voted “remain” in the Brexit disputes. Bo Sacks distributed an article on this yesterday, and I commented on his LinkedIn post that one potential benefit of a print publication like this is that by carrying that physical magazine around with you, you’re telling everyone how you felt about Brexit. That sort of thing is important to some people.

In a similar way, the magazines on your coffee table, or in your restroom, or the books on your shelf, say something about you to your guests. I assume your guests can’t see what’s on your iPad or Kindle, so that doesn’t work as well.

Aside from these slightly vain issues, there are a few practical things.

1. It’s easier (at least for many people) to take notes on a print publication. You can highlight things, scribble in the margins, and so forth.

2. It’s easier to flip back and forth to an index in a print publication.

3. Students frequently like to purchase used textbooks because they can see what the previous owner highlighted. (Remember how Harry Potter did so well with Snape’s old potions book.)

4. Studies have shown that people retain more of what they read in print.

5. Some things – like maps, or charts – simply don’t work well on a small screen. You can fold paper.

6. It’s much easier to lend or borrow something in print.

7. Authors can sign a printed work. They can’t sign a digital edition.

8. You can make a fantastically elegant print publication in a way that you can’t with a digital publication. You can use very nice paper, have much more compelling imagery, and you can even use smells if you want.

You may know that I publish a print newsletter once a month, and I do that because everybody gets a billion emails, but very few people get a letter in the mail.

Of course, there are many downsides to print. It takes time to get a book in the mail. Printing and distribution costs are higher. Etc.

And there are some distinct advantages to a digital publication. You can search it. You can put hyperlinks in it. You can carry a thousand of them in your phone. You can read them in the dark.

I’m not arguing for print. But I am saying there may be situations where a print publication can outperform a digital publication. Certainly not in all cases, and almost certainly not in most cases, … but maybe in some. So keep it in mind, and don’t dismiss the idea simply because we’re in a digital age.

Sources

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The New European bucks the trend of print publishing

https://www.journalism.co.uk/news/the-new-european-breaks-the-trend-of-print-publishing-/s2/a1028165/

BoSacks.com

The Krehbiel Letter

https://krehbielgroup.com/the-krehbiel-letter/

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It wasn’t long ago that people were praising Quartz as magical. Media experts were pointing to Quartz as a model strategy that other publishers ought to consider. Well, times have changed. Quartz recently removed its three-year-old paywall, according to an article distributed by Bo Sack. The move is designed to expand its general readership, but of course that’s at the expense of its paid membership business. Generally speaking, as you know, publishers try to manipulate the lever between subscription revenue and ad revenue. If they emphasize the subscription side, they tend towards paywalls. A lot of people will look at the Quartz example and say, “See, paywalls don’t work!” To buttress their case, they might cite the example of Time magazine, which also plans to drop its paywall. It’s not that simple, folks. You have to look into the details. The Quartz example isn’t all that great for advocates of removing paywalls, because even after ungating their content, readership has dropped from 3 million per month to 1.3 million per month. There are a lot of complicating factors here, such as a merger with G/O Media, which raises some question of cultural fit, and all that fun stuff. Some of the cultural friction led some leading Quartz reporters to leave. So this is not simply a question of paywalls vs. no paywalls. Quoting from the article … "This about-face in content strategy likely played a role in the dwindling traffic, said Felix Danczak, the senior director of subscriber experience at subscription platform Zuora. Quartz spent years cultivating an audience willing to subscribe to its newsletters and pay for reporting, then reversed course to embrace a free model based on volume." The bottom line is that all kinds of things were going on at Quartz, and you can’t pin this on paywall vs. no paywall. References==========Sign up for The Krehbiel Letter https://krehbielgroup.com/the-krehbiel-letter/One Year After Removing Its Paywall, Quartz’s Traffic Continues to Drophttps://www.adweek.com/media/quartz-paywall-traffic/Sign up for Bo Sacks' newsletter https://www.bosacks.com/Show less0 CommentsSort by

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What are the key distinctions between these three models, and how do they affect publishers and their revenue options? We might ask what “membership” means. For example, my “membership” at LA Fitness just that means that I pay a fee to get access to their equipment. But members at the American Legion have to have some connection to military service, and members in the Elk Lodge have to make some profession of faith. So how does membership apply to publishers and content? All three – registration, membership, and subscription – are potential ways to restrict access to content. For example, a newspaper website might say you get three free views per month, but before you can get your fourth, you have to register or subscribe. In either case, you’re giving the site owner something of value: your email address, in the first case, or some money in the second. All three options might mean you get access to exclusive content. But not necessarily. A newspaper site with a paywall might give an anonymous browser access to the very same article as a subscriber, so long as it doesn’t cross the paywall threshold. There’s no answer to this question because nobody has the authority to tell us how to use these terms, but I think it’s helpful to divide these options into two groups. Group one is registration and subscription, and they refer to how you pay. Group two is membership, and it refers to who you are in relation to the other members. What does “members only” mean? First, you might have to qualify for membership. Supporting an organization or cause. Swearing an oath of allegiance, or have served in a particular function. Part of a club – like an investing club, where you share tips. People with a particular expertise in a subject, like football referees, or beekeepers. You have to pre-qualify. Second, what does membership get you? It might give you some level of recognition. (Like Mensa.) Community and education. Third, when you’re thinking of membership, ask yourself what would make someone a “good member.” If it’s no more than “he pays his dues,” then in my opinion you don’t have a membership model. Membership means involvement in a community. Following that logic, my preference would be that LA Fitness call their deal a subscription, not a membership because nobody there cares if I show up or not. In fact, from their perspective, I’m a better member if I pay my dues and never show up. What does all this mean for publishers? I’d say that if your model is a simple exchange of access to content for an email or some money, that’s registration or subscription. Don’t confuse it with “membership.” To have a membership site, you need these things. Members have to qualify. There’s an exchange of value both ways, where the organization gives value to the members, but the members give value to the organization. Members are part of a community. Finally, I’d point out that subscription and membership both have one important thing in common, because they both involve recurring fees. And that’s the need to keep selling the value of the subscription or membership. You need an onboarding program, and you need to constantly justify the value of the subscription or membership. ======================================Sign up for The Krehbiel Letter at ... https://krehbielgroup.com/the-krehbiel-letter/

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Some analyses of Customer Data Platforms take this general form: they list all the functions that CDPs have, or are expected to have, and then rank various CDPs on how well they do those functions in general.I suppose that’s as good as you can do for that sort of analysis, but I don’t think that information is very helpful for any particular company.If you’re evaluating Customer Data Platform options, you don’t care what they’re supposed to do in the abstract, or what they do for other people. You care if they solve your problems — that is, if they address your use cases.For example, it doesn’t matter how well a CDP generates reports, in some broad sense. What matters is if you can get the reports you need with the data you can collect.But that raises a big problem for the company that’s considering a CDP. How do you whittle down the list? There’re a lot of CDPs out there, and you can’t afford to investigate each of them with the diligence required.Here’s a practical path forward.1. Start with a very detailed list of use cases. Explain exactly what you want to be able to do, what data sources will be required, how that data will have to be processed, what other services will be involved, what activations will occur, what reports need to be generated, etc. The more time you spend on your use cases, the better.2. Explain your niche. I work with publishers, and the bare fact that a CDP has worked with “publishers” is not enough. There are all different sorts of publishers out there, and they have different business models with different needs. Ask if a prospective CDP has any clients like you.3. Set reasonable budget goals. I know everybody likes to play games with prices, but I believe transparency is the best strategy. You can negotiate later.4. Put these three things in a relatively short Request for Information and send it out to all 743 CDPs.I’m kidding about that 743 number. You can’t send your request to everybody, so whittle the list down. 20 might be manageable at this first stage. To the extent that you can, sort them by geography, general ratings, and whether they work in your industry. You’ll have to spend a little time on their websites and YouTube videos to figure this out. Or you can ask me to do it.While you’re waiting on the responses, come up with a grading system, giving the use cases the biggest portion of the score.Then the fun starts. You’re going to have to evaluate all the responses! It’s wearisome, but you’ll learn a lot in the process about what can and can’t be done. You might modify some of your use cases as a result of what you learn, and you might come up with new ones.Subscribe to The Krehbiel Letter for FREE to get practical tips on publishing and technology! https://krehbielgroup.com/the-krehbie...As you read through the responses and learn new things, you’ll want to change your evaluation criteria. That’s good. Realize that because you’re learning along the way, you’ll evaluate your tenth RFI response differently than you evaluated your first.One way to handle this mound of documents is to divide up the responses among a few different people. Let everyone have a go at scoring ten of them, then re-convene and re-evaluate your grading system. Have one person (that should be me — I’m independent!) read all the responses.Take your revised scoring system, redistribute more of the RFI responses, and do it again.By the time you get through the stack, you should be able to decide which companies make it to the RFP stage.It’s not an easy process, but if you remain focused on your own business requirements, and not on generic rankings, you should make a good decision.

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Scott Brinker has an article on chiefmartec.com about the second-order effects of generative AI. He says the first-order effect is that the quantity of content in the world will grow exponentially.

He’s probably right, but I think my brain was put in backwards because when someone makes a claim or a prediction like that, my immediate thought is to wonder if it might be the opposite.

Is it possible that AI will lead to less content generation?

The model up to this point has been to create lots of SEO-friendly content to get on the first page of Google – so people will find you, view your ads, and maybe sign up for your email newsletter. Lots and lots of people are competing for that spot.

But the search engine model is about to die. Very soon, rather than entering a search and having a choice between 10 billion supposedly relevant pages, we won’t search at all. We’ll just ask the question and get our answer.

That will change the calculus of content creation.

For example, my wife was recently wondering if there’s a way to revivify hardened instant coffee. She did a search and went to some website that was clearly written by some primitive AI, or possibly by a human who didn’t have the foggiest idea what coffee was. The content was … stupid.

Somebody made that website because coffee is a popular subject, and there are lots of ads in that space, so if you can easily create a website that’s effective search engine bait, you can make some money.

That’s an example of what Scott Brinker is talking about. Using AI to create content to feed the internet – as it’s currently configured.

But isn’t it possible – maybe even likely – that the primary use of AI is going to turn that whole scheme on its head? AI won’t be generating content for searches. It will be generating content for searchers. It will eliminate the middleman of the search engine, the weird website, and the list of 10 billion search results.

My wife will just go to her AI of choice and say, “how do you revivify hardened instant coffee?”

FYI, I asked ChatGPT and it gave me an interesting answer.

Now I suppose you could say that Scott Brinker’s essential point is still true. That generative AI will result in the creation of a lot more content. But the direction and context of that content will be very different. It won’t be creating posts on websites, it will be answering individual questions.

This goes along with a conversation Brian Morrissey had on his “People vs. Algorithms” podcast about the development of AI agents. Right now, if you ask ChatGPT a question, it relies on older data. It doesn’t go out and search the web for you. It has some collection of information from the relatively recent past.

Soon there will be AI agents that can take a user’s request, like “find me the best French restaurant within 20 miles of my home that has a good selection of Belgian beers,” and it will do that for you.

This isn’t far away, and it will fundamentally change the way content is created. Content will be created directly for the user. It won’t be created for keyword density or SEO or any of that stuff, because that won’t be relevant anymore.

Sources

======

Exploring the 2nd order effects of generative AI in marketing and martech, by Scott Brinker

https://chiefmartec.com/2023/04/exploring-the-2nd-order-effects-of-generative-ai-in-marketing-and-martech/

“The New Interface” from the People vs. Algorithms podcast.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4EASqwZAwlwu8p2owI0pl2

The Krehbiel Group

https://krehbielgroup.com

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This interview with Paul Gerbino of Triumvirate Content Consultants explains why publishers should consider content licensing, syndication, and permissioning. These efforts can help publishers extend their brand, find new audiences, and increase revenue. A very simple example would be providing content in another language, but Paul explains some other ways publishers can further their business with his services. Paul can be reached at pgerbino@triumvirateconsultants.com. https://www.triumvirateconsultants.com/

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Martin Schori mocks the idea of "peak subscriptions" in a recent article featured by Bo Sacks. The underlying reality is that – despite some recent growth – there’s been a leveling off in digital subscriptions. Why? The article makes some important points. First, you can't make a good "digital subscription" by making a lousy "digital" version of a print product. That happens far too often. Someone signs up for digital and they get a PDF, or a completely rotten online interface. These lousy digital experiences are competing for attention with services like TikTok and Netflix, which provide (so I'm told) an amazing user experience. I don't use TikTok, so I can’t comment on that, and I think Netflix has some very obvious weaknesses -- for example, you can't say "only show me movies," or "only show me options that are below 30 minutes." But despite that, Netflix is miles ahead of most publisher sites. In this respect, Martin is completely correct – publishers would do a lot better if they focused on providing a product their customers want. He doesn't quite make this next point the way I would, so I'll make it my way. Too much digital content is written to hide what the reader is looking for. E.g., "Here's the secret ingredient you're missing in your chili recipe," and you have to read eighteen paragraphs to get it. (BTW, it's probably fish sauce. I know that sounds disgusting, but it's true.) We all know the culprit that causes that kind of foolishness: advertising. One problem I have with Martin's analysis is that I think he's mostly talking about news-based subscription publishing, and he's missing the elephant in the room, which is that the news reporting is almost universally awful. A recent survey said 3/4 of adults believe the news is making us more partisan and more divided, and all I can ask in response to that is what is the other 1/4 smoking. 100 percent of us know that news is a partisan catastrophe. It's no wonder that news publishers are having trouble selling subscriptions because people don't trust the news. Nor should they. Having said that, Martin is drawing attention to some real issues that publishers should address. If you’re a publisher, and you’d like to keep up with trends, new issues, or hear a contrary view from time to time, sign up for The Krehbiel Letter, and be sure to subscribe to this podcast. Resources=========Martin Schori’s article https://www.inma.org/blogs/media-leaders/post.cfm/the-notion-of-peak-subscriptions-is-laughableYou can sign up for the Bo Sacks email at https://bosacks.com Sign up for The Krehbiel Letter at this address. https://krehbielgroup.com/the-krehbiel-letter/

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The typical sales funnel of awareness, consideration, and purchase doesn’t go deep enough for publishers. There are several more steps in the journey, and different tools and methods are appropriate for each phase.Publishers should create goals and methods for each of these ten steps in your customer’s journey. You can view the ten steps and related tools using the links below. You can view the latest Krehbiel Letter here. https://krehbielgroup.com/letter-archives/Krehbiel-Letter-2023-05.pdfHere's the chart: "Tools for each step of the engagement ladder." https://krehbielgroup.com/2023/04/28/tools-for-each-step-of-the-engagement-ladder/

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Measurement is often a prerequisite to growth, but it can also lead you astray. "What gets measured gets done” is a useful saying, in many ways. * Measuring something requires attention. * Measuring allows you to track improvement. * An impending measurement motivates action. However, a bias towards measurable things might lead us to abandon worthwhile things we can’t measure. Consider advertising. Did advertising money shift to online ads because they are more effective, or because they are more measurable? (Also ask yourself how you would know.) Measurement can cause us to emphasize the quantitative over the qualitative, which isn’t always a good idea. A manager who is very effective at building teams might have poor numbers in more measurable skills. Putting a number to something can make it seem more reliable than it is. This is called “numeracy bias,” and it’s widespread. It’s why adding a number to a subject line can make it more effective. “83% of engineers surveyed” sounds compelling, but what if there were only six engineers? Numeracy bias can prevent us from seeing faulty assumptions, erroneous definitions, and bad data. Don’t let a number or a graph deceive you. Remember that you have a cognitive bias that leads you to trust numbers. Counter it with a healthy dose of skepticism. =======================Subscribe to The Krehbiel Letter https://krehbielgroup.com/the-krehbiel-letter/

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Twitter has announced a new program for publishers, which, of course, they claim is a great thing for publishers. It will allow publishers to charge a fee to read a single article.

The catch here is the same as it always is with all tech platforms. The publisher gets a dime, and the tech platform gets the customer information.

Is this a good thing for publishers? As a general rule, no, but it depends on whether the publisher’s business model depends on getting the customer’s information.

For example, a book publisher generally does not get any information on the reader, so something along these lines might work for a book publishers.

A magazine publisher relies more heavily on getting the customer information, although there are newsstand sales and that sort of thing.

When I say this is generally not a good thing for publishers, I mean for publishers whose revenue model depends on getting the customer information.

Most publishers are trying to convert website visitors into customers. Sometimes they do this with a free e-newsletter. The publisher provides valuable content in exchange for an email address. In other cases, they use a paywall. The visitor gets some number of free views.

The publisher’s strategy is to increase engagement with content the user values so the user believes it’s in his best interest to subscribe.

What does Elon’s proposal do to this model? It gives the reader an opportunity to read the publisher’s content with no commitment. That undermines the publisher’s paywall strategy – and the publisher doesn’t even get the reader’s information.

By the way, nothing prevents the publisher from charging per article.

Of course there might be some friction in that. The reader might have to create an account with the publisher, or with some payment mechanism he hasn’t used before. It would be so much easier for the user if he just had one account that he could use for any content on any platform. And that’s what Elon is banking on. Twitter users will set up one account to pay for content on multiple publisher platforms.

That is better for the reader, but it’s not better for the publisher.

If Elon wanted to make this a better deal for publishers, he would not only pay the publisher a dime for the article, he would also provide at least some of the customer information. Maybe even only an email address.

The trouble I have with all these sorts of programs is that the publisher is getting chump change for his content, it’s undermining his own funnel strategy, and the person who wins – that is, the person who gets the customer relationship – is the tech platform.

Links

====

Elon’s announcement

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1652349875017879552?s=46&t=KDcFJdfj6vswexfsQH_-8A

The Krehbiel Letter

https://krehbielgroup.com/the-krehbiel-letter/

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Just this morning I was reading a Bo Sacks article about publishers who use AI to make their writing more SEO-friendly, and I thought, doggone it, why don’t you use AI to make your writing more reader friendly! I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how little publishers have done to improve the online reading experience. It’s a topic I take up briefly in the latest Krehbiel Letter, but I’d like to expand on the idea a bit today. Think about your typical online reading experience. It’s usually a sea of words. Some authors will do you the favor of writing short sentences in short paragraphs, providing subheads, bullet points, and that sort of thing. But that’s about the best you get in making the text more readable. On the other side of the equation, websites are happy to distract you from your reading with ads and pop-ups and all sorts of things. On some sites, especially on mobile, it’s nearly impossible to read an article. I’m sure you’ve browsed one of those “Idiot’s Guide” style of books. They do a fair amount to make reading easier. They have pull quotes and summaries and definitions and lots of interesting things. I’ve discussed this before, so I won’t dwell on that. Today I want to talk about using AI to improve the reading experience. So imagine a publisher has an API connection to ChatGPT, or any one of those magical things out there. And then think about things a reader might want. Here are some ideas I came up with. * A summary of the article * A definition of a word * An elaboration on a concept, or a question raised by the article * A second opinion Then, being a sensible fellow, I asked ChatGPT, first, are all those things possible (they are), and second, what else could be done. ChatGPT recommended … * Personalization such as recommending related articles or providing tailored content based on a reader's interests or reading history.* Language translation. ----------------------------------Get The Krehbiel Letter at ... https://krehbielgroup.com/the-krehbiel-letter/

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According to an internal memo from BuzzFeed’s CEO Jonah Peretti cited by Forbes, “the business model of news tailored for social media had become too difficult to sustain.”

An article distributed by Bo Sack yesterday with the title, “How the social traffic that gave life to BuzzFeed News ultimately led to its demise” has Peretti saying “it took him too long to realize that despite being built primarily to reach a social media-based audience, those platforms did not provide ‘distribution or financial support required’ to operate a free news site.”

Here’s another quote from Justin Eisenband of FTI consulting. “Anyone relying on social referrals as a key monetization factor has struggled in the last couple of years.”

Two lessons so far.

1 – Live by social media, die by social media.

2 – “Reach” doesn’t pay the bills.

This next quote is particularly important, especially as publishers are now considering the latest social media craze, TikTok.

"As short-form vertical video is prioritized, Eisenband said external links back to publishers’ sites are less amplified within social media platforms’ walled gardens, as the goal is to keep users on their app.”

That’s lesson three, which I’ve mentioned before

3 – Social media platforms have less than no interest in helping you get traffic. Remember the rule I mentioned about a week ago. “All your customers are become our customers.”

Doug Arthur from Huber Research Partners said “The successful models — and there are very few — have robust subscription revenues with supplementary [advertising] feeding off the number and intensity of the subscribers’ use.”

We can extract rules 4 and 5 from there.

4 – Rely on subscription revenue and advertising revenue.

5 – Focus on engagement on your site.

He also said “general interest news is difficult to sell subscriptions against,” which is lesson #6.

Buzzfeed did not have a subscription business model, but asked readers for contributions. That has worked for some non-profits or mission-based publications, but doesn’t fit with a for-profit company.

I’m not claiming to know all the reasons for the demise of Buzzfeed. Wikipedia says it was originally known for online quizzes, “listicles” – which is an article structured as a list – and pop culture articles. That might explain why I don’t believe I’ve ever been to buzzfeed. I don’t care about pop culture, and I thought of it as that sort of place.

It did move into news and won some awards for its coverage, but a Pew Research survey found that it was viewed as an unreliable source.

So that will be the last lesson I pull from the Buzzfeed story.

7 – Don’t do things that make you seem like an unreliable source.

Sources

======

https://Bosacks.com

How the social traffic that gave life to BuzzFeed News ultimately led to its demise

https://digiday.com/media/how-the-social-traffic-that-gave-life-to-buzzfeed-news-ultimately-led-to-its-demise/

BuzzFeed News Shutting Down

https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/20/buzzfeed-news-shutting-down/?sh=44dca90d7ff3

The End of Buzzfeed News Isn’t Very Suprising News

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/the-end-of-buzzfeed-news-isn-t-very-surprising-news/ar-AA1a7tzC

Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed

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In the world of publishing, AI can be a powerful tool to improve your content creation process. However, it is essential to use it with caution and verify its results.

Bo Sacks distributed a cautionary tale from the world of artificial intelligence that everyone in the publishing industry should read. A German weekly used AI to create an interview with a man who has been out of the public view since 2013 after a horrible skiing accident.

This seems to be a clear case of relying on AI without checking it. You can’t do that.

Would you use spellcheck without reviewing the suggestions? I hope not. Modern AI is both a far better, more powerful tool than spellcheck and also can you get you in a whole lot more trouble.

ChatGPT is a fantastic tool, and I use it regularly, but it makes stuff up, it gets things wrong, and it has some clear biases. As long as you’re aware of that, go ahead and use it. But don’t even rely on ChatGPT unedited.

And that raises the question, how should publishers use AI?

I’m going to highlight a few things that I think are helpful.

1. Use AI to make sure you’re covering all the bases. For example, if you’re doing a podcast on a topic, ask AI to create an outline for the podcast. It might give you some ideas you hadn’t considered.
2. When you’re done with the podcast, upload a transcript into ChatGPT and ask it to summarize the main points of the podcast. With a little editing you now have a story to post on your website.
3. Now, use ChatGPT for SEO optimization. For example, you could say “read the article provided below and tell me what keywords I should focus on to make it more search-engine friendly.” You can even ask ChatGPT to re-write the article to make it more search-engine friendly.
4. Ask ChatGPT to write a compelling and interesting tweet to draw attention to your podcast.
5. You can also train ChatGPT to write in a particular style. Feel it several articles, then ask it to write a new article in the same style.

ChatGPT is a tool that you can use to enhance your publishing efforts. It can make mistakes and have biases, so it is crucial to review its suggestions and results carefully. Use ChatGPT as a conversation partner, providing feedback on its accuracy and improving its performance by giving it more information. By following these tips, you can use AI effectively in publishing to enhance your content creation process.

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Some marketing types speak as if people from different generations are so different you have to use different rules for them. Either your marketing will fall flat, you'll insult them, or ... who knows? Is this true? How significant are generational differences, and how should publishers and marketers address these issues?

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Bo Sacks featured an article by David Tvrdon's titled "Why turning newsletters into podcasts and podcasts into newsletters is a great strategy for publishers." David makes some persuasive cases for his thesis, which I review in this brief video, and add a few of my own thoughts.

David's original article

Bo Sacks' page

My write-up

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Bo Sacks distributed an article by Cosmin Ene in which Cosmin argues that #publishers risk cannibalizing their products when they offer very low-priced introductory offers. It's certainly a risk, and Cosmin offers some things to consider. In this edition of "Something I Learned Yesterday" I push back a little and offer some counter-arguments to a few of his points. Here's Cosmin's article https://whatsnewinpublishing.com/subscription-cannibalization-is-here-just-not-as-you-think/Here's how to sign up for Bo Sacks' newsletter https://www.bosacks.com/Here's how to sign up for The Krehbiel Letter https://krehbielgroup.com/the-krehbiel-letter/

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Content in the modern era can be published many different ways, and each of the available formats provides different opportunities to optimize the content. For example, an article on a blog might have to be re-imagined to use it effectively in a video. In this short podcast, Greg Krehbiel considers two different analogies for content -- water, and birds -- and explains how they relate to content creation. We should always seek to make content the best it can be in whatever medium we choose to publish it.

Sign up for The Krehbiel Letter at

https://krehbielgroup.com/the-krehbiel-letter/

Posted 2023-04-20 https://krehbielgroup.com/something-i-learned-yesterday-podcast/

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The Washington Post has developed a series of customer journeys for new subscribers to increase retention and engagement. Reading between the lines, and adding my own thoughts, I explain how publishers could follow the Post's example with their own subscribers. This is a particularly good use case for publishers who have a customer data platform. If this concept intrigues you, give me a call and let's chat about it.

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Google will be starting a new program where they pay publishers for their content. Publishers should he happy about that, right? Not so fast. The strategy is always the same. Their goal is to migrate the publisher's customers to their system -- using the publisher's content! It's a sucker's game, but publishers keep playing it.

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Publishers face a lot of challenges these days. One of the big ones is engagement. Some recent studies give important insights into how to engage readers, and I summarize them briefly. But publishers also need to find new ways to make money. Jim McKelvey recently explained the way they're monetizing content on his Invisibly app. It's very interesting, but publishers need a lot more options. My question to publishers is this: How are you working to innovate your revenue sources?

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Twitter designated NPR as state-sponsored media -- putting them in the same category as Pravda and other government propaganda. NPR decided to leave the platform. NPR claims they get less than 1 percent of their revenue from government sources. Does that mean participation in Twitter isn't even worth 1 percent of NPR's revenue? If so, that says a lot about the value of Twitter, and maybe publishers should re-evaluate their commitment to the platform.Is social media actually worth the time and expense publishers spend on it? Greg is skeptical.

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We tend to overestimate the importance of our conscious mind. The truth is that our brain does way more than we are consciously aware of. In short, we're not experts on what it means to be a human.

Given that, there have to be limits to how well a programmer can design AI to mimic humanity. There are deep, dark, mysterious aspects to us that computers can't understand, because we can't understand them well enough to add them to the programs! That's not to say we shouldn't be cautious, or even afraid. There are plenty of cautionary tales about how humans have unleashed powers they can't control. But there's no guarantee AI will be able to replace humans.

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The Krehbiel Letter is a monthly letter for publishers that generally focuses on technology challenges. The April issue urges publishers to focus on the reader. Here's a quick summary of the articles in this edition.

• If you want your readers to have a good experience with your content, consider building a paywall. Ads are designed to distract the reader.
• Consider adding content recommendations to your site, and when you do, make sure to think about how to classify content and different types of content recommendations.
• Fight back against silly marketing language. Think clearly so you can speak clearly.
• "Perfect is the enemy of done" is a great saying, but there's some nuance to how we should use it.
• Novices buy benefits, experts buy features. Think about how that might affect your acquisition and retention strategies.

For more, go to https://krehbielgroup.com

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In this quick summary of the latest Krehbiel Letter, Greg discusses two frameworks for evaluating CDP use cases, outlines a method for getting out of your routine and having a productive day away from the office, provides a "subscription retention checklist," and suggests ways to deal with open-ended questions in survey responses.   

You can download the latest Krehbiel Letter at https://krehbielgroup.com/the-krehbiel-letter/

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In this podcast for publishers, Greg summarizes the key takeaways from the Feb 2023 issue of The Krehbiel Letter. The first two articles focus on how artificial intelligence will affect publishers, and what they can do about it. 

Greg reflects on what publishers can learn from the Pareto principle, how publishers should be wary of conclusions and advice based on broad demographics, and provides a few quick tips on the business of publishing. 

It ends with a list of alternatives to words on a page -- other ways publishers can present information for their subscribers. 

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Two New Year's resolutions for publishers regarding customer data and micropayments. Thoughts on paywalls. Front-end vs. back-end CDPs, and why you should let your use cases drive your decisions about customer data. How to use AI to create additional content from your webinar. Print vs. digital metrics, and more. This podcast is a quick summary of these stories from the latest edition of The Krehbiel Letter.

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Greg walks through the latest edition of The Krehbiel Letter, giving the key takeaways and summarizing each article. Topics include ... 

Customizations can cause no end of headaches. They're necessary sometimes, but think three times before you dive in. 

What if programmatic advertising died? According to Bob Hoffman's Adscam, it's mostly garbage. Only 3% of spend results in an ad someone sees. 

Use data for new product ideas. Customer data can be a source of ideas, and it can be used to verify or discredit hunches. 

CDP use cases for publishers. A quick summary of a video that outlines 14 CDP use cases. 

"My kids are always on TikTok." A few things to consider before you dive into the latest craze. 

CDP implementation mistakes to avoid. A list of ten common mistakes people make when onboarding a CDP. 

And more ... 

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The metaverse is a lame concept that you should probably avoid. 

Content is not king. Trusted content is king. 

Project management tips and tricks. 

The "information vs. experience" metric explains a lot of the strange and conflicting statistics on media usage. 

Take the example of Amedia in tracking subscriber engagement. 

This is all from the Nov. 1, 2022 issue of The Krehbiel Letter 

Learn more at https://krehbielgroup.com