Something I Learned Yesterday

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 ...

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 s...

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 hap...

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 focusin...

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 ...

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. I...

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...

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 w...

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 ...

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 abo...

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 b...

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 ...

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.

Religi...

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 keep...

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, c...

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 s...

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 ...

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 rem...

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...