Strands of Genius: What The Fuck Happened to The Good Old Internet, How It Used To Be, Where Is Everybody
Guest curated by Dr. Grace Kite, Founder of Magic Numbers and Magic Works
This edition of Strands of Genius is guest curated by Grace Kite, Founder of Magic Numbers and Magic Works (Faris and Rosie will be back next week!)
:: A BIT MORE ABOUT GUEST CURATOR, GRACE KITE:
LOCATION: London, UK
Someone told me that in the B2B world of selling parts to jet plane builders, the cleverest and most respected wise people debate ways to get square luggage to fit in cylindrical holds of airplanes. It's pretty blooming niche content, but it makes a big difference to how fast your airplane flies and how much expensive fuel it guzzles.
And that's me for marketing.
I've done a million projects to evaluate real life modern campaigns and I can see the patterns across them. And I share what I've learnt for the benefit of marketing people... to help them get the benefit of every inch of the metaphorical cyclindrical hold space.
If you're a normal person in the pub you probably wouldn't care about what I write, but if you're in marketing you could learn something that helps you sell more stuff.
I have a course on e-commerce marketing and another that makes marketing data doable. They have gifs and silliness as well as benchmarks, frameworks and case studies.
Faris&Rosie: We got to meet Dr. Grace through a client we were both working on at a workshop and have been obsessed with her ever since. She’s great and brilliant. The constant stream of insight from Magic Works is all super useful and a fresh voice in the effectiveness conversation. MMM is only going to get more important, now is the the time to make sure you can understand and work with data.
Fortunately, Magic Works are offering Strands readers £100 off their two courses with the links below!
Data Works – the “how to use” guide for marketing data
Scaling Up Works – all about balancing brand and performance marketing
Info on the courses can be found here. Faris has done the first one and it was great. The next cohort starts in April. Get yer data knowhow sorted.
:: WE ASKED GRACE FOR HER HOT TAKES ON METRICS MADNESS ::
How can we reclaim data as a tool for clarity instead of submitting to its chaos?
Making marketing decisions by reading data and reacting to it means always playing catch up. There’s so much data that as soon as you react to one thing, something else appears. It wouldn’t matter if data always pointed in the same optimal direction. But it doesn’t.
I think it’s like playing whack-a-mole, which my kids love to do at the arcade on Brighton Pier.
Most metrics only show today’s relationship between marketing and business outcomes, so, by tomorrow, there’s a new relationship and you have to react again. The advice is to stop it and focus on the bigger picture instead. Set out a strategy and only use data to check that the plan is working.
It’s understandable why this is happening. Senior people quite rightly want marketing to be numerate and accountable. So, marketing data scientists create reports and dashboards in good faith. The trouble is that ups and downs in the metrics often don’t actually indicate ups and downs in how good your marketing is. What to do instead? Swap attribution for a stable view of cause and effect – from econometrics – to see if your marketing is working, and further improve it using the findings.How do you resolve the tension between short-term performance metrics and investments in brand, which are inherently longer term?
This is a question that I love to answer. It's a big one, I even wrote a whole course about it, Scaling Up Works.
The thing is that shorter-term performance marketing mainly work on people who are in market - they are actively looking for a product like yours online.
Longer term brand investment is also capable of influencing people who are less interested right now, but might come into market later. In most categories, there are way more people who are "not in market now, but will be later" than "in market and keen right now", so if you only do performance, you're missing a big piece of the puzzle.
You're right there's a tension though. The course focuses on how you convincing performance marketing people that brand building isn’t a threat to them.
:: THE LINKS ::
WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO THE GOOD OLD INTERNET?
I think about this a lot. I was so optimistic about the internet in the 90s. I thought it would make us all wiser and make the economy work better too. My dad sent me an article in WIRED back then that said the explosion of information would put power in the hands of editors and they'd abuse that power to make money. He was right. Dads usually are. (Medium)
HOW IT USED TO BE
The article is about how there's no ginormous famous Hollywood stars like there used to be. Personally I'm not that fussed about actors. I never know who my husband is on about when he says about them while we're watching Netflix. But there's a wider theme that this is just an example of, a lack of widely shared experience. A million different pairs of jeans could be fashionable, and there isn't something that human beings as a whole agree on any more. I don't know if it's good or bad, but it's new and it's becoming more and more the case. (LinkedIn; MediaCat UK)
WHERE IS EVERYBODY?
There must be life in the alomst-infinite universe, why don't we see it? Like really? Why not? This article goes through all the theories. This one is a bit of a wild card. Off topic for marketing effectiveness, but I like a big picture view, and this is a big picture as you can get. It's about space. There must be other intelligent life out there - and you'd think that life would come looking for people like us, because we're intelligent too. And that begs the question, why haven't we heard from any neighbours yet? It's a mystery, but this post has some answers.(Wait But Why)
:: AND NOW… SOME FAST FAVORITES ::
Game :: Kings of Tokyo
City :: London
Book :: Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson
Podcast :: Uncanny on BBC
:: THE BEST THING THAT HAPPENED TO ME IN 2024 ::
Here's the best thing that happened to me in 2024. I went to the pub with my hero Les Binet. We geeked out about marketing effectiveness and it was all very jolly. We edited out most of the rambling that happened after the 2nd pint.
:: ‘TIL NEXT TIME ::
This edition was guest curated by Dr. Grace Kite, who you can connect with via LinkedIn. Your regularly scheduled hosts, Rosie & Faris Yakob, will be back next week!
Hit reply if you’ve got a guest curator that we should highlight - There’s no fancy application process, we just want a few sentences as to why they (or you!) would be a good fit. (Because yes, self-nominations are always accepted!)
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It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.
Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. Our Director of Operations is nomadic like us, our accounting team is based out of Washington, our company is registered in Tennessee, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.
Hit reply and let’s talk about how we might be able to work together :)