Come on. Learn!

3. Gratuitous use of Flash.

It is not Adobe’s fault, it is your fault for using Flash for the most pathetic things mankind has known. Why? Because your agency can win an award? Because you believe that the Web is essentially TV? Slow sites make your management happy?

Remember every time you use flash on your website, a cute puppy dies. Think of the puppy!

Most of the items on this extended list compiled by Avinash Kaushik seem pretty obvious to me. Most likely you, my internet-savvy friends, would question even the need for writing these down like Avinash has.

Oh, how ignorance is bliss, my friends!

My work with Real-time Decisions (RTD) has introduced me into the wonderful world of marketing and advertising. A world where many companies still consider basic concepts like scientific control to be the latest craze (they call it ‘A/B testing’, but the idea remains the same). A world where gut feeling and HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) continue to rule, while real data and hard evidence are readily available.

The fact that Avinash felt the need to publish his list of truisms might explain some of the difficulty in conveying the concepts behind RTD to customers. Number ten on the list in particular sounds sounds awfully familiar to me.

Measuring success, a hot topic?

10. Making lame metrics the measures of success: Impressions, Click-throughs, Page Views.

They, and their brethren like video views and emails sent and # of followers on Twitter and Likes on Facebook and. . . all stink worse than Amorphophallus Titanum.

Use metrics that matter: Loyalty, Recency, Net Profit, Conversation Rate, Message Amplification, Brand Evangelist Index, Customer Lifetime Value and so on and so forth. Each a glorious magnificent metric that truly tells you that value was delivered, or delivers the swift kick in the pants that we all need when we don’t. How can you not love that?

If these people are not at ease with the idea of using cold data to measure success, or if they simply do not know how to define ‘success’ in the first place, how do you think they are going to feel about letting an artificially intelligent computer program improve the rate of that success by learning about customer behavior and preference? Not so good, I guess.

David Lightman: [to Joshua] Come on. Learn, goddammit.

Intervention

It’s been a while. Too long, to be precise. I did not forget, I’ve simply been postponing writing anything for this blog for days on end. Not that I’ve been sitting still, doing nothing. I don’t think I could, even if I tried. Just that I did not take the time to write about any of it here.

Keeping up with the bi-weekly blogging schedule I forced upon myself proves to be more difficult than I had anticipated. Something needs to change.

Analogous to the Project Triangle there are several ways we could fix these non-compliance issues regarding my self-imposed constraint.

"Good - Cheap - Fast: Pick Any Two" - Kevin Lim

Change the schedule. Reducing the target frequency would ostensibly have the same net result as my current habit of postponing writing posts, but it would reduce the associated guilt experienced on my part. This change would be almost trivial to implement and would not result in any significant changes to the end result.

Reduce the quality. Writing is difficult. Being satisfied with the result proves to be almost impossible for me. I spend a lot of time writing, tweaking, pruning, rewriting and eventually deleting posts. If I were to post instead of delete the content that does not live up to my personal standards, the frequency of posts on this blog would certainly increase. Of course, this would mean that the overall quality of posts would decrease; a sacrifice I am not sure I would be willing to make.

Not do other things. The most obvious, but also the most difficult to implement. In my life, sleep would currently be the most likely candidate to be de-prioritized.

It’s about time for an intervention. I think the solution is obvious. What do you think?