Due to a special request I have made Part 2 of Aimee’s interview last week freely available. Feel free to share with non-subscribers.

This week’s briefing is light on traditional marketing stuff this week, but lots of Marketing BS-themed material, especially related to privacy and changes in the world due to COVID - and an amazing GTP-3 application. Enjoy!

Edward, Startup Curated

Followup/Meta

  • Bureaucratization: In my essay on “Plausible Deniability” I wrote about how Twitter claimed the decision to ban Trump was “out of its hands” as it was just “following its policies”. Never mind that they were changing those policies as they went along and applying them very differently to different accounts. Now Facebook is taking the “bureaucratization of decision making” even further and pushing the decision to ban Trump to their oversight board. These platforms do not want to be forced to make decisions (that are sure to angry someone), so they create policies and then hide behind the policies like they were not the ones to create the policies to begin with (feels a lot like a call center employee telling you “there is nothing they can do”)
  • China and Twitter: The Chinese Embassy has been locked out of their Twitter account for violating policy (“dehumanizing”)

News

Marketing/Advertising

  • Amazon search: Amazon has announced changes to their search algorithm. Going forward it will give more weight to the amount of traffic to a product page from off-site (and therefore less weight to things like product reviews and CTR/purchase rate on site). This doe two things for Amazon: (1) Allows it to coast off of Google’s search investments (I expect much of the offsite traffic will come from Google. And Google’s search is still MUCH better than Amazon’s - When I can’t find something on Amazon, I will often resort to searching on Google); (2) There is now an incentive for merchants to improve the Google SEO for their Amazon products and drive that traffic to Amazon - which is obviously good for Amazon.

Business/Strategy

Privacy

Marketing to Employees

AI, Machine Learning and GPT-3

  • Medical Advice: This is a great GPT-3 story. A man has a shoulder injury when he is a child that causes serious chronic problems through his entire life. He sees many doctors and other medical specialists over the years, but it never gets better. Then in his late 30s a doctor thinks he has figured out the problem. The man has a special surgery and his shoulder is healed. Last week he plugged a description of the initial situation into a GPT-3 diagnostic tool, and well…
Edward, Startup Curated

COVID and the New World Order

Edward, Startup Curated

Edward, Startup Curated

Edward, Startup Curated

Fun

Edward, Startup Curated

Keep it Simple,

Edward

Edward, Startup Curated