Just Tell Me When It’s Over
So I’m on the phone with a friend last week. We’re talking about his technology, which is pretty cool and affordable. However, it’s very dependent on your IP address, or where you are using the Internet from. And ideally, if you work for a company, you’d be using their IP address. But if you’re home, you’re not, rendering his solution less effective.
To quantify his problem, I suggested he check out Google’s Covid Dashboard, and scroll down to their mobility chart, which shows how much we are leaving our homes to go to various places. And when it comes to our offices, by and large, we aren’t, yet.
Cole Haan Makes an Attempt to Kick It
Admittedly, I was curious about what the shoe maker was up to when I read this line:
"The goal of the company has been to disrupt the dress footwear world from the inside out," says David Maddocks, brand president.
Sounds promising, eh? So I checked out their website to see what shoe disruption looks like. And it kinda looks like the spawn of Air Jordans and a nice pair of Florsheims:
Full transparency - a handful of years ago I found myself working for a company with a rather restrictive dress code. I totally would’ve bought these, then. These days, the “LLC”, as my wife likes to call it, is operating without a dress code until such time as we deem it necessary.
Does this Plane Look Half-Full or Half-Empty to You?
Last Friday, airline traffic was 44.1% of what it was a year ago. That’s the “best” number since Mid-March. April was the worst, with numbers in the low single-digits. As a nation, we’ve been kicking it around 37% for the past few weeks.
So yeah, if you’re looking for elbow room, you can still get it.
For This, They Should at Least Spell Your Name Right.
Did you know that Starbucks borrows money from their customers at -10% interest? I didn’t. Sounds like a good business model to me!
Google, How Could You?
Readers of this newsletter know that I’m pretty pro-Google. I think, by and large, most of their decisions are good for marketers. (I am not going to discuss if the company is good for society, as a whole. Not my circus. Not my monkeys.) But they announced something last week, and if you participate in Pay-Per-Click advertising, it’s hard not to say this sucks.
Specifically, they announced that they are going to stop showing click-through-data to advertisers for keywords that don’t have a lot of results. This is bad for at least three reasons:
First, while these lower performing terms are just that - marketers need to see the data to determine that the keywords are bad, so that they can remove them from campaigns.
Second, the amount of data you won’t see now, aggregated, is substantial. SEER, a great PPC agency who covered this, is suggesting that up to 28% of your PPC data just went bye-bye.
Third, though I don’t know what the threshold is for results you won’t see, I am highly concerned that for smaller advertisers, the percentage of data that goes into Google’s Black Box could potentially be way more than 28%. (If I find this to be the case, it will mean significant things for several readers of this newsletter. I’ll let you know, for certain.)
Google’s reasoning is that they are protecting the privacy of users with small results. This time around, I’m not buying it. What I am buying is that this will make it harder for people to learn where their wasted spend is. It will also drive consumers to use Google’s Smart Campaigns, whereby the black box does it thing, and you just hope you’re happy with the results.
This ain’t about privacy. It’s about robbery. Shame on you, Google.
Quote of the Week
I’m a huge fan of Ryan Holiday and owe most of my thoughts on stoicism to him. Ryan shared this thought from David Brooks on his blog this week:
“If you look at who actually leads change over the course of American history, it’s not the radicals.
At a certain point, radicals give way to the more prudent and moderate wings of their coalitions. In the 1770s, the rabble-rousing Samuel Adams gave way to the more moderate John Adams (not to mention George Washington, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton). In the middle of the 19th century, radicals like John Brown and purists like Horace Greeley gave way to the incrementalist Abraham Lincoln. In the Progressive era, the radicals and anarchists who started the labor movement in the 1880s gave way to Theodore Roosevelt.
Radicals are not good at producing change because while they are good at shaking up the culture, they don’t have practical strategies to pass legislation when you have to get the support of 50 percent plus one.”
Here in Pennsylvania, there is a lot of venom being directed at our Democratic Governor. He’s been accused of leading by executive order. Ironically, the same criticisms have been levied on Trump, a Republican. Politics aside, I believe these are both merely symptoms of legislative bodies that have lost the ability to do exactly what Brooks is saying is needed: compromise.
Speaking of compromise, how about I promise to write a newsletter next week and you promise to share this one with a friend? Cool? - Marcus