Sex and Gender

There is a little sense, then, in arguing that the natural function of women is to give birth, or that homosexuality is unnatural. Most of the laws, norms, rights and obligations that define manhood and womanhood reflect human imagination more than biological reality.

Biologically, humans are divided into males and females. A male homo sapiens is one who has one X chromosome and one Y chromosome; a female is one with two Xs. But ‘man’ and ‘women’ name social, not biological. While in the great majority of cases in most human societies men are males and women are females. A man is not a Sapiens with particular biological qualities such as XY chromosomes, testicles and lots of testosterone. Rather, he fits into a particular slot in his society’s imagined human order. His culture myths assign him particular masculine roles, rights and duties.

Likewise, a woman is not a Sapiens with two X chromosomes, a womb and plenty of oestrogen. To make things less confusing scholars usually distinguish between ‘sex’, which is a biological category, and ‘gender’, a cultural category. Sex is divided between males and females, and the qualities of this division are objective and have remained constant throughout history. Gender is divided between men and women. So called ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ qualities are inter-subjective and undergo constant changes.

Sex is child’s play but gender is serious business. To get to be a member of the male sex is the simplest thing in the world. You just need to be born with an X and Y chromosome. To get to be a female is equally simple. A pair of X chromosomes will do it. In contrast, becoming a man or a woman is a very complicated and demanding undertaking. Since most masculine and feminine qualities are cultural rather than biological, no society automatically crowns each male a man, or every female a woman. Nor are these titles laurels that can be rested on once they are acquired.

Males must prove their masculinity constantly, throughout their lives, from cradle to grave, in an endless series of rites and performances. And a woman’s work is never done – she must continually convince herself and other that she is feminine enough. Success is not guaranteed. Males in particular live in constant dread of losing their claim to manhood. Throughout history, males have been willing to risk and even sacrifice their lives, just so that people will say, ‘He is a real man!’

Source - Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

How to find New Audiences for Awareness Campaigns?

You’ve tried custom intent audience; custom affinity audience and now you’re having trouble scaling your managed placements. You know you want to grow your audiences but are leery of testing broader targeting options. What audiences should you test next for your display campaigns in Google Ads? The Audience Insights tool in the Google Ads Audience Manager is a great resource for display advertising. Let’s take a look at where to find this tool and how you can utilize the information to find new audience combinations to test.

Click the tools menu in the overhead navigation of Google Ads. In the drop-down menu, find “Audience Manager” under the Shared Library Column. Once you’re in the Audience Manager, click on “Audience Insights” on the left-hand side of the page. By default, the audience we can review first is an all Users audience.

No matter which audience is the default option that shows up, you can also select which country you want to use to review the audience data. Now advertisers can see the top in-market and affinity audiences your selected audience falls under. But you don’t have to stick to all users. You can change the “Audience to get insights on” option to a variety of audiences you have in your Google Ads account. This will help you learn more about the users in each of your base audiences.

Users in different base audiences are going to fall under different in-market and affinity audiences. When crafting your campaign and ad group structure, utilize this information in the Audience insights tool to find the best, new audiences to test your new campaigns. Use different ad copy to speak to different audiences. You can’t review a base audience in the Audience insights tool unless they have 1000 users.

If the default audiences in Google ads are not working for you, consider creating those audiences with longer date ranges to be able to analyze your current users. If your account has built up enough users to view a variety of audience data, try and find patterns between the audiences. If you see certain in-market and affinity audiences show up in several audiences you’re pulling data, you should probably test those first.

If you’re looking for new audiences to try for your display campaigns, the Audience Insights tool will give you new ideas to use based upon the current audiences with your account. Not only you can use the tool to test new audiences, but you can use it to see if the in-market and affinity audience data changes over time. User behavior will change. Your target audience might change. Check back every once in a while to see if you should switch up your display targeting at any point. The audience insight tool is there with the information you need.

Why Businesses can’t run without Google and Facebook

Google controls many of the ways businesses access customers online making it almost impossible to run a company without buying advertising from the internet giant. As politicians increase scrutiny of large technologies companies, Google’s lock on these digital relationships is becoming a potential liability. While consumers pay nothing for most Google services, some businesses say they often can’t avoid giving more money to the company because the internet giant is the main source of answers when go online to get information.

While Facebook matches advertisers with people interested in certain topics, Google can tell what a person really wants, right as that person types their query into the search bar. Showing up at the top of search results is imperative for most companies and in recent years Google has changed its software, especially on smartphones, to make buying ads the best way to achieve that goal. It’s not possible to run a business without advertising on Google.

Nowhere is Google’s power more pervasive and potentially damaging to businesses than in the esoteric market for ‘branded keywords’. This is where businesses buy ads based on their brand names. Some businesses say that they have to buy these ads whatever the cost because rivals can bid on the keywords too. In recent years, this pressure has increased because on mobile devices Google search ads show up at the top of the results, rather than on the side of the page with desktop results. This means people are more likely to click on the ads, rather than the free, ‘organic’ links to companies’ websites.

Google has said in the past that it doesn’t break antitrust laws and that competition online is just a click away. Google also regularly stresses that it never accepts payment to be included in or to be ranked higher in organic search results and doesn’t manipulate search rankings to benefit advertisers. Beyond just branded keywords, the cost of all types of Google search ads has been rising at about 5% a year, according to Merkle, that’s well ahead of US inflation, which is running at 1.6% currently.

Many Google advertisers are happy to pay more because the company has so much data that it can target the marketing messages and generate big returns on that spending. When it comes to brand keywords, some advertisers will spend beyond what makes sense. These decisions are not as rational. That’s a question that comes up when advertisers see costs go up. People are thinking about that and testing it by stopping buying those branded keywords to see what happens. These tests usually result in a decline in traffic, both from search ads and from free, on organic results.  How big depends on the advertiser.