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.

3 Ways to lower Amazon Advertising ACoS

Amazon Advertising revenue topped $10B in 2018, creeping up right behind Facebook and Google, as the third largest ad platform in the US. There would be a major influx of brands investing more into Amazon advertising. Why is this important? More advertisers = more demand = higher CPC. When CPC increases, so does ACoS (Advertising cost of sale). With more ad dollars being allocated to Amazon than ever before, lowering ACoS may seem like a tall task. Here are some ways to make Amazon more profitable.

Negative Keywords - Negative keywords play a key role in keeping ACoS low with Amazon’s advertising platforms. Negative keywords allow you to control what search terms not to serve ads for, which ultimately improves your profitability by focusing ad spend on relevant terms that are more likely to convert and drive sales. Adding negative keywords to your campaigns from the start will help you optimize the campaign faster, as you won’t be wasting money on clicks for irrelevant searches.

Tips – Use keyword planner tools to find negative terms. Create an auto-targeting campaign AND a manual targeting campaign with Broad and/or Phrase match keywords. Once your ads have accumulated enough clicks, use the search term query report. Find and add negative keywords back into campaigns.

Isolate your search terms - In Amazon’s eyes, broad and phrase match keywords are actually “buckets” of search terms often yielding thousands of results for off-topic items. What does this mean? If you target a broad or phrase match keyword, you can only set one bid for that keyword. Amazon then applies that bid to the entire bucket of search terms that match to it. Search term isolation redefines how brands should manage their advertising on Amazon.

Tips - Look at your search terms report frequently and find important keywords. Move these converting search terms into specific campaigns as an Exact Match keyword. Negate the same converting search term from all other campaigns.

Effective Bid Management - Bid management is a lot more complex than most advertisers realize. As we mentioned above, Amazon’s advertising platform only really allows you to control bids for exact match keywords. Phrase and Broad keywords manage a bucket of search terms, which limits your ability to control the CPC. Below are some common scenarios one might encounter when optimizing bids:

If there are low ad sales and high ad spends – Bid down on keywords.

If there is a high conversion rate and low impressions – Increase the bid to capture more traffic and sales

If there are high clicks but low sales and low conversion rate – Check your price and detail page content to make sure they’ve competitive and encouraging conversions.

If there are high impressions but low clicks – Optimize your product image and product title to get better CTRs.

Use below equation to calculate your bids –

Bid = Average Sale Price X Target ACoS (decimal) X Search term conversion Rate (decimal)

I hope these tips to lower your ACoS will help you save money on wasted ad spend and reinvest those funds in your business. Whether you decide to tackle this on your own, with the help of auto-bidding technology, or hire an agency partner, these strategies will help stretch your ad dollars further. Even if your ACoS isn’t skyrocketing yet, Amazon is just getting started with their advertising business and things are about to get crazy, really soon.

How to define and use Ideal target market?

Ironically enough, when it comes to promoting themselves, many businesses jump straight into marketing and forget to really think about the most important part of marketing: their target market. This is a real problem because knowing exactly who you’re targeting with your marketing is the key to successfully reaching, connecting with and convincing them to buy what you’re selling. So, while it’s tempting to jump right into building your marketing campaigns and putting together creative, it always pays to stop and think about your target market first.

Who am I targeting? - Whether you’re a new business or a decades-old company putting together a new ad campaign, you should always be asking yourself “who am I targeting?” Even if you sell products with broad appeal, this question is still important. Specifics sell and the more specifics you know about the market you are targeting, the more effective your marketing will be. The more clearly and precisely you can answer the question “who am I targeting?” the more focused and effective your marketing will be. Obviously, you have to balance market size with market specificity, but understanding that who you are targeting and what motivates them is the key to create compelling marketing campaigns.

How current customers use my products? - Even people who use your product or service for the same thing may use it for different reasons or in different ways. For example, if you offer invoicing software, you may have some customers who use it for every client and transaction, while others only use it for certain clients or situations. Segmenting your current customer base by how they use your product or service can give you a lot of insight into your target market(s). Odds are, if your current customers love your business for a particular reason, potential customers who are motivated by the same things will be likely to respond to marketing that focuses on that same issue.

What am I trying to sell? - This might seem like an obvious part of any marketing campaign, but when it comes to defining your target market, knowing what you are trying to sell is important, especially if you’re changing what you are selling. Many businesses try to use old marketing tactics to sell a new product and then wonder why their results are bad. Whether you’re trying to market something new or simply get more sales for a particular product or service, it’s important to think about who your new target market is. Different products and services appeal to different audiences, so even small tweaks to what you’re selling can have big effects on how well your marketing works.

What is the competition doing? - You can also learn a lot from the competition—both about what to do and what not to do. You can clearly see that this business is targeting high-intensity people who probably lead high-intensity, busy lifestyles. To appeal to this market, their ad copy is high energy and focused on the flexibility of their offering. If you happen to be a competitor of theirs, there’s a lot you can learn from this. On the one hand, if you want to target the same market, you can look for keywords or phrases they are using to try and catch the attention of their target audience. Alternatively, if you want to differentiate yourself and try to target an alternative market, you could try focusing on price, a different exercise option or offering lower-key classes that might appeal to less intense potential customers.

Is my target market niche or non-existent? - One final thing to keep in mind as you identify your target market is the size of that market. The narrower your target market is, the easier it is to create specific, highly targeted messaging for them. Given the massive reach of online advertising platforms like Facebook and Google, this isn’t a common problem, but it is something to keep in mind as you define your target market(s). If you find yourself struggling to effectively target the market you’ve selected, you may need to take a step back and expand your audience a bit.

While it can be easy to assume you know who your target market is and what they want, taking the time to really think about what you’re selling, who you’re selling it to and how to best sell it can significantly improve your marketing results.

Impact of 5G on Marketing and Advertising

5G is gearing up to launch later this year. The coming of next-gen 5G wireless transmission will be a big deal for marketers. Verizon has launched a 5G-enabled home broadband service, AT&T has started 5G service in a dozen cities and 5G networks are expected to be available by mid-2019. With data rates from 1 to 10 gigabits/second – up to 100 times faster than 4G LTE and a major decrease in latency, 5G could alter a lot of the existing digital landscape.

End of Cable - Cable connections & set-top boxes could become irrelevant. If you get a new, large TV, for instance, it might pick up all the HD and 4K programming you want from the air wirelessly. This would totally disrupt the cable and Internet Service Provider industry because the fixed wire infrastructure would no longer be necessary to deliver fast Internet and hundreds of TV channels, and it would similarly disrupt the ad-buying and -serving infrastructure built around it. But it also means something more profound for marketers: any surface with a 5G wireless transceiver can become a high-resolution screen, and an outlet for the most intelligent computing service available.

A 5G-enhanced media environment, offers more ad inventory opportunities as super-fast wireless connectivity means high-end screens can be located anywhere. It also could dramatically change the kind of messaging marketers and advertisers do. The biggest marketing impact of 5G will be that consumers will have actual voice conversations with mobile devices, not just issue a few voice commands and interact at other times via thumb-typing or screen-touching. Mobile marketing could become entirely oriented toward voice conversations.

But it’s not just data repositories that may have to be redesigned to handle massive demand. Advertising infrastructures will also have to be re-invented. Present-day programmatic technologies aren’t built for the demands of a system that delivers ads up to a hundred times faster. The industry needs to prepare for 5G in other ways as well, such as updating creative specs on ad formats and file sizes.

Understanding Amazon Advertising Attribution

Amazon sales attribution is when Amazon assigns credit for a sale to a specific campaign. For example, when a user click on one of your ads and buys a product within a certain time period such as 7 or 14 days, the “sale” is attributed to your campaign. There are three different dashboards you can use to advertise on Amazon.

Seller Central – also known as 3P or the dashboard third party seller’s use.

Advertising Console – known as Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) or the dashboard vendors use (1P/first party sellers)

Amazon DSP – formerly, the Amazon Advertising Platform (AAP), run by the Amazon Media group (AMG). Amazon DSP is offered through AMG managed service. It is also available through select agency partners as a self-service tool or directly to top-tier, large budget advertisers.

Amazon tracks attribution differently depending on the platform you’re using.

Seller Central Attribution

Sponsored Product Campaigns – Sales attribution is measured on a 7-day click through attribution window. If a user clicks on an ad, comes back up to 7 days later, and buys one of your products from your brand Amazon will attribute the sale to that campaign. Sales are attributed only to the last ad the user clicked.

Sponsored Brand Ad Campaigns (SBA) – Sales are measured on 14-day click-through window. Sales are attributed only to the last campaign the user clicked. SBA follows what Amazon calls “Brand Halo” sales attribution. This means that if the user clicks on your ad and buys any product with your brand name on it, not just a product featured in your SBA ad, Amazon will attribute the sale to that campaign.

“Brand Halo” gets very tricky. If you are a brand that has listings with different variants of your brand names, Amazon will attribute any sale from any of those brands, including sales made by anyone on Amazon who sells products under your brand.

Amazon Marketing Services – Attribution for the AMS differs from the Seller Central, even though many of the ad types are the same. Across the board, all the units in the AMS work on Amazon Brand Halo attribution whereas in Seller Central, only SB works on Brand Halo. Instead of a 7-day click attribution, AMS works on a 14 day click-through attribution.

Amazon DSP – There are a few different ways that Amazon attributes sales in the DSP platform, Amazon Display advertising platform. First, if you are advertising a product sold on Amazon, there are two types of reporting metrics or values to measure your return on ad spend: Product Sales and Total Sales.

Product Sales only tracks the ASIN you provide to Amazon for conversion tracking purposes. There is no Brand Halo attribution applied here. Amazon currently has to manually approve each list of ASINs you provide to them to verify they are indeed yours. The Product Sales metric is calculated on a 14-day view through attribution window. Viewable Impressions are based on the Media Rating Council Viewability standards. Only 50% of the display ad needs to be in view for one second or more for a sale to be attributed. Also, only 50% of a video ad needs to be in view for two seconds or more for a sale to be attributed. If user saw a DSP ad but then clicked on an SP ad, SP would take the credit for the sale, not DSP.

Total Sales tracks sales on the ASINs provided to Amazon for conversion tracking and all Brand Halo sales from the brand names included in the tracked ASINs list. If a brand gave a list of the ASINs with 10 different brand names, like the licensed brand, then total sales would be skewed because Amazon would attribute any sale from any of those brands in the list, even if you weren’t tracking those ASINs. Total sales are calculated on a 14-day view-through attribution window.

With Amazon DSP, you can also serve ads sending traffic OFF-Amazon. You can track the number of conversions attributed to the ad campaign but not the amount or type. The same 14-day attribution applies. It’s important to understand not just the numbers, but also the attribution behind the numbers so you can get a complete sense of how advertising is really performing to your specific goals.

Book Review: The Alchemist

The Alchemist is not only Philosophy, it is good Philosophy. It tells us that life is not about the consequences, but about the Journey. It is an unforgettable story about the essential wisdom of listening to our heart and, above all, following our dreams. It is the story of a shepherd boy from the Spanish province of Andalusia who dreams of travelling the world in search of a treasure as desirable as any ever found.

From his home of a treasure as desirable as any ever found. From his home he journeys to the exotic markets of North Africa and then into the Egyptian desert, where a fateful encounter with the Alchemist awaits him. The crux of the novel is mouthed by the Alchemist himself – “When you want something, the whole universe conspires in helping you to achieve it”. The whole purpose of the novel is to dive inside and find yourself.

The book does not get away from the fact that dreams have a price, but as Coelho has noted, not living your dreams also has a price. For the same money, he said, you can either buy a horrible jacket that doesn't fit, or one that suits you and looks right. There will be difficulties in whatever you do in life, but it is better to have problems that make sense because they are part of what you are trying to achieve. Otherwise, difficulties just seem insidious, one terrible setback after another. The dream-follower has a greater responsibility, that of handling their own freedom. That may not seem like such a price, but it does require a level of awareness we are maybe not used to.

The old man that Santiago meets in the town square tells him not to believe 'the biggest lie', that you can't control your destiny. You can, he says, but you must 'read the omens', which becomes possible when you start to see the world as one. The world can be read like a book, but we will never be able to understand it if we have a closed type of existence, complacent with our lot and unwilling to risk anything. Destiny requires the oxygen of higher awareness.

The Alchemist is remarkable for being a love story that renounces the idea that romantic love must be the central thing in your life. Each person has a destiny to pursue that exists independently of other people. It is the thing you would do, or be, even if you have all the love and money you want. The treasure Santiago seeks is of course the symbol of the personal dream or destiny, but he is happy to give up on it when he finds the woman of his dreams in a desert oasis. Yet the alchemist tells him that the love of his oasis girlfriend will only be proved real if she is willing to support his treasure search.

The alchemist Santiago meets in the desert is the real thing. He actually can turn base metals into gold, the goal of the medieval alchemists. Santiago asks why the other alchemists never succeeded, and gets the strange answer, 'They were only looking for gold.' That is, they were seeking only the treasure of their destiny rather actually trying to live the destiny. Their focus on a prize lessened the quality of the present.

Much of self-help literature is about pursuing our destiny, but dreams do not always pull us along; they speak persistently but quietly, and it does not take much effort to smother the inner voices. Who is willing to risk comfort, routine, security and existing relationships to follow something that to others looks like a mirage? It takes courage, and dog-eared, stained copies of Coelho’s classic have become the constant companion of people who need to make fearless decisions daily to keep true to a larger vision.

What is Attribution Modeling?

Understanding the steps a customer takes before converting can be just as valuable to marketers as the sale itself. Attribution models are used to assign credit to touch points in the customer journey.

For example, if a consumer bought an item after clicking on display ad, it’s easy enough to credit that entire sale to that one display ad. But what if a consumer took a more complicated route to purchase? Customer might have initially clicked on the company’s display, then clicked on a social ad a week later, downloaded the company app, then visited the website from an organic search listing and & converted in-store using a coupon in the mobile app. These days, that’s a relatively simple path to conversion.

Attribution aims to help marketers get a better picture of when and how various marketing channels play contributes to conversion events. That information can then be used to inform future budget allocations.

Attribution models - Following are several of the most common attribution models.

·         Last-click attribution. With this model, all the credit goes to the customer’s last touch point before converting. This one-touch model doesn’t take into consideration any other engagements the user may with the company’s marketing efforts leading up to that last engagement.

·      First-click attribution. The other one-touch model, first-click attribution, gives 100 percent of the credit to the first action the customer took on their conversion journey. It ignores any subsequent engagements the customer may have had with other marketing efforts before converting.

·      Linear attribution. This multi-touch attribution model gives equal credit to each touch point along the user’s path.

·     Time decay attribution. This model gives the touchpoints that occurred closer to the time of the conversion more credit than touchpoints further back in time. The closer in time to the event, the more credit a touch point receives.

·      U-shaped attribution. The first and last engagement gets the most credit and the rest is assigned equally to the touchpoints that occurred in between. In Google Analytics, the first and last engagements are each given 40 percent of the credit and the other 20 percent is distributed equally across the middle interactions.

Algorithmic or data-driven attribution - When attribution is handled algorithmically, there is no pre-determined set of rules for assigning credits as there is with each of the models listed above. It uses machine learning to analyze each touchpoint and create an attribution model based on that data. Vendors don’t typically share what their algorithms take into consideration when modeling and weighting touchpoints, which means the results, can vary by provider. Google’s data-driven attribution is just one example of algorithmic attribution modeling.

Custom attribution - As the name suggests, with a custom option, you can create your own attribution model that uses your own set of rules for assigning credit to touchpoints on the conversion path.

Benefits, limitations of attribution - Marketers face the ongoing challenge of being able to stitch all the various touchpoints available to their customers together for a grand view of attribution. There have been improvements, with greater ability to incorporate mobile usage, in-store visits and telephone calls into models, but perfection is elusive.

As marketers invest in more channels and digital mediums, getting a unified view of a customer’s journey is only getting harder. “This will become ever more complicated by increased investments in influencer marketing and Amazon where there are significant challenges in creating unified IDs.

In addition to the customer journey tracking that (Google’s and Facebook’s attribution platforms) provide, we’ll likely see the development of variance analysis solutions within the platforms that will enable marketers to better understand the existing impact of their strategies. At an overarching level, the key takeaway here is the convergence of data across platforms and the ability to understand interactions that occur across channels in both an impression and click capacity.

Book Review: Factfulness

In Factfulness, Hans Rosling together with his two long-time collaborators Anna and Ola offers a radical new explanation of why this happens and reveals the ten instincts that distort our perspective from our tendency to divide the world into camps to the way we consume media to how we perceive progress. Our problem is that we don’t know that we don’t know and even our guesses are informed by unconscious and predictable basis.

It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections is in a much better state than we might think. But when we worry about everything all the time instead of embracing a world view based on facts, we can lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most.

Fuelled with data, Rosling shows us how child mortality is drastically decreasing. He demonstrates how fewer people live in critical poverty. He reminds us how women have better rights today. The book highlights how monkeys are more factful than educated humans. Rosling points out us are less factful because of “Instincts.”

The Gap Instinct describes how we quickly classify something into one of two camps. Examples include being poor/rich, sick/healthy, or us/them. Reality is more of a spectrum, with a majority in the middle and that there’s not that much of a gap. Rosling warns us to be careful of extreme comparisons.

The media fuels the Negativity Instinct. Rosling points out, “Negative news sells.” He contrasts this with an observation that incremental improvements are not considered newsworthy. In this chapter, he starts using the phrase he later repeats, “It can be both better and bad.”

The Straight Line Instinct describes how we think linearly. In the context of an ever growing population, this instinct fuels the fear of overpopulation. Rosling highlights how childbirth rates reduce as a country becomes more prosperous. He challenges us to use data to better understand the shape of data. He gives examples where curves are more like doubling curves, or act like an S-curve. Straight line functions are the exception rather than the rule.

Rosling shares a personal example where the Fear Instinct causes unclear thinking. This reminds me of the Type I thinking. Type I thinking means we react in critical situations with poor results. Fears from physical harm, captivity or contamination drive us to act irrationally. Rosling challenges us to differentiate between frightening and dangerous. Danger is risk multiplied by exposure. When we recognize this instinct, seek calmness before making an important decision.

The Size Instinct focuses our attention on individual numbers out of context. A compelling story or a concrete example leads to us overestimating an impact. Rosling recommends we look at numbers in proportion. We should do relative comparisons, or look at trends rather than numbers alone. Rosling reminds us of the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) or use rates (e.g. number per person).

The Generalization Instinct describes our habit to automatically category and generalizes. Stereotyping through generalizing leads us to incorrect conclusions or unjustified judgments. It also leads us to poorer decisions. GapMinder invented Dollar Street to highlight different categories. Rosling challenges us to look for differences and similarities across categories. Avoid using categories to justify an assumption.

The Destiny Instinct drives us to believe destiny is pre-determined. This reminds me of the Fixed versus Growth Mindsets, made popular by Carol Dweck. To fight the Destiny Instinct, we must recognize small improvements and changes. We should seek knowledge about how cultures and societies do change over time.

The Single Perspective Instinct drives us to seek a simple solution or answer. I recognize this instinct from my studies in Systems Thinking. A counter against this instinct is to collect different Mental Models. Each Mental Model provides a different perspective on a situation. I loved this quote from this chapter. “The world cannot be understood without numbers, and it cannot be understood with numbers alone.”

The Blame Instinct describes our desire to find a scapegoat, or to point the blame at an individual. It blocks our ability to focus on contributing factors. It also means we are unlikely to prevent similar problems in the future. Rosling provides great advice here. It reminds me of advice for healthy, blameless post-mortems. “Look for causes, not villains and look for systems, not heroes.” 

The final instinct Rosling describes is the Urgency Instinct. This instinct draws upon Type I thinking and biases for action now rather than later. Rosling reminds us that urgent decisions are rare. He encourages us to take a breath, insist on data and be wary of taking drastic actions.

I really enjoyed reading this book. Rosling’s personal stories bring vibrancy to the book. He highlights how even “experts” or “highly educated” people fail to act factfully. Inspiring and revelatory, filled with lively anecdotes and moving stories, Factfulness is an urgent and essential book that will change that way we see the world.

PPC changes 2018 and their impact on advertisers in 2019

Major changes in SEM made waves throughout 2018 and are redefining nearly every aspect of paid search marketing. There were a number of momentous shifts, nearly all with a common thread of more automation and machine learning.

Google Ads: New brand name, new UI – The name change from AdWords to Google Ads is indicative of the fact that keyword selection plays a lesser role in paid search marketing than even a year ago, but more broadly the name change reflects the platform’s growth from one created for text ads to one that now includes dozens of ad formats across Search, YouTube, Gmail, Maps and a network of partner sites and apps. With the new interface, we lost some things such as Display Planner and gained a YouTube reach planner, notes and the ability to make changes from the Overview page in addition to other new features.

Responsive Search Ads – RSA are part of the continuum of letting machine learning models do the work of ad creative optimization. Some of the initiatives that have come before it: dynamic search ads, automated ad suggestions and Google efforts over the past years to get advertisers to give up manual A/B testing and add at least three ads per ad group. An ad strength indicator and somewhat more extensive reporting for RSA were introduced in August. Same month, Google said it would soon roll out RSA to more languages and in the meantime extend the extra character benefits of RSA to text ads for everyone. This fall, Bing added support for the third headline and second description in text ads, including the ability to import the longer ads from Google.

Exact Match – As with ads more machine learning was injected into keyword-to-query matching in 2018 with the inclusion of same meaning words in close variants of exact match keywords. The match type lost its literal meaning and forced marketers to rethink how they use match types altogether.

AI-powered insights – Google and Bing have dedicated significant resources to developing much more robust recommendation engines in their interfaces. Bing introduced a competition tab, performance insights and location recommendations that highlight performance changes and competitive pressures, all delivered with machine learning. Google also continues to iterate on the data visualizations available from the overview page. The goal is to spend less time downloading and analyzing spreadsheets and more time focused on strategy and creative tactics.

AI-powered bidding – The manual bidding option is now buried below a growing list of machine learning driven bidding strategies, including ECPC. On the smart bidding front, Google introduced Target Impressions share, Pay for Conversions in Display Campaigns when Target CPA is the bidding strategy and rolled out Smart Bidding for search partners. Bing introduced Target CPA and Maximize Conversions bidding strategies.

Audiences: LinkedIn data for Bing, MSAN and more – Bing launched the Microsoft Audience Network (MSAN) which encompasses native ad inventory on MSN.com, Microsoft Outlook and the Microsoft Edge browser, as well as syndication partner for what are now called Microsoft Audience Ads. It uses AI for ad delivery optimization and uses data from the Microsoft Graph for audience targeting, including web and search activity, demographic and consumer behavior activity and select LinkedIn profile dimensions. In October, Bing also made LinkedIn categories of company, job function and industry available for targeting in search and shopping campaigns in the US.

Universal Automation vs. Hybrid Management – Google introduced goal-optimized Shopping campaigns, Smart Campaigns for small businesses and Local campaigns for driving in-store traffic. With Smart Campaigns, everything from ad creation, audience targeting, ad delivery across Google channels and soon landing page creation are automated based on the advertiser’s goal. Goal-optimized Shopping campaigns employ machine learning to automatically optimize ad delivery to achieve the defined conversion goal value, such as revenue or return on ad spend (ROAS). It also combines dynamic remarketing and standard Shopping in one campaign to deliver an ad across Google properties and the Google Display Network. For Local campaigns, advertisers set a budget, and the ads are generated automatically based on ad creative elements from the advertiser and their location extensions. Google automatically optimizes ad delivery across Search, YouTube, Maps and websites and apps in its ad networks.

Based on the trajectory of automation in ads and exact match, this hybrid approach has the potential to spell the end of manual control of match types (except negatives), bid modifiers, geo-targeting and other tools we use for campaign management. This doesn’t mean people will be erased from the equations and certainly not in 2019 but it will require SEM specialists to adopt a very different mindset. We have to embrace machine learning as a tool that helps us find opportunities that are imperceptible through traditional techniques.

New Inventory Locations and Surfaces – There were a number of new surfaces for ad formats that opened up in 2018. Bing’s native ads extending across the Microsoft Audience Network is just one example. In November, Google made AMP Story ads available to all publishers, and there are now more than 100 ad tech vendors with AMP integrations. Hotel deals from Google Search are now featured on the Benefits tab of the new Google One cloud storage app (for Android only at this point). Expect to see more promotional opportunities. Google said more promotions from the Google Store and Google Express benefits and more will eventually be featured on the tab. Google has also been testing native ads in the Discover Feed (originally Google Now) on the front page of the Google app. It’s a limited whitelist test for now, but could open up more native inventory in a prominent location.

Connected TV advertising is growing rapidly, and YouTube says more people are streaming it on their televisions. This fall, “TV screens” became the latest device type for video and display campaigns in Google Ads. Eligible display and video campaigns are running on TV screens by default now, and can be managed with bid modifiers. Expect to continue hearing much more about connected TV advertising in 2019.

Amazon Ads – The Google - Amazon face off started with where consumers start their product searches. Now it’s extending to search and other advertising. Amazon was declared the third-largest digital ad seller in the US by eMarketer in September, (far) behind Google and Facebook. Its ad revenue is expected to increase by 50 percent per year through 2020, which would put its market share at 7.0 percent, up from 4 percent currently. In our Amazon Advertising Forecast 2019, 80 percent of Amazon advertisers said they plan to increase spends in 2019, with 30 percent saying they’ll shift some budget from search.

Google’s strategy to counter Amazon’s encroachment into product search is to partner with retailers. It debuted Shopping Actions in March to address three key challenges on the e-commerce front: (1) how to make mobile shopping from its properties like Search faster; (2) how to maintain market share for product search in a splintering mobile landscape of apps and digital assistants; and (3) how to compete against Amazon. Shopping Actions runs across Search, any Google Assistant-enabled devices, Google Express (which includes Shopping ads that now feature blue shopping tags instead of parachutes), and features a universal shopping cart and a Google-hosted checkout when users save their payment information in their Google accounts.

2018 is kind of a turning point in terms of SEM I think. “Keywords aren’t gone, but they’ve been greatly depreciated. SEM in 2019 is going to be much closer to modern programmatic than it is to the ‘enhanced’ era.

Employment Geography in India

Where do Indians find regular jobs easily? Where are Jobs harder to find? Are there parts of the country where regular factory jobs outnumber other kinds of jobs? Such questions are typically hard to answer because of the lack of granular jobs data in the country. The official employment surveys conducted by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) typically have very small district-wise samples, which makes district wise estimates much less precise than state-level ones.

The only source that provides rich employment data at the district level and beyond is the census. While the latest census data pertains to 2011, it provides far more granular and rich information than any other data source on jobs. The comparison between 2001 and 2011 census data has been made by merging newly created districts in 2011 back with their parent districts so that all comparisons are on a like-to-like basis.

Most districts in some of India’s most youthful and populous states, such as Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, witnessed either a decline or stasis in the share of regular jobs between 2001 and 2011. These are the districts where the demand for jobs is the greatest, and where regular jobs are increasingly difficult to find. One big reason for the lack of much progress in creating regular non-farm jobs lies in India’s failure in manufacturing. Barely 26 of the 640 districts in 2011 had more than a fifth of their workforce employed in manufacturing. Most districts across the country actually saw the share of regular manufacturing workers fall between 2001 and 2011.

It comes as little surprise therefore that the farm sector was the largest employer across districts. The two big exceptions to this trend lie in the two extremes of the country—Kerala, where construction accounts for the lion’s share of workers across several districts and Jammu and Kashmir, where government workers make up the majority of workers across a large swathe of the state.

Manufacturing is the biggest employer only in a handful of districts: in the Coimbatore-Tirupur belt in Tamil Nadu, the Thane-Mumbai belt in Maharashtra, the Jalandhar-Ludhiana belt in Punjab and a few other districts scattered across the country. Till that picture changes, it is difficult to imagine an end to India’s chronic jobs shortage.

Career Lessons from the game of Poker

Poker has picked up steam in India over the past 10 years. From legal off-shore casinos in Goa and student hostels to professionals catching up over weekends and poker apps on smartphones, either you or someone you know swears by poker for its entertainment value or the excitement of making money. Like every other great game, poker has many lessons to offer for your life or career, if you choose to learn.

Pick the right table- A poker player who does not want to lose money knows that a table full of vacationers or friends catching up over drinks is a better bet than a table full of serious looking professional players. Similarly, picking a career or the right employer is the most important decision you will take. Choose one where your own skills are in short supply, have a direct impact on the business and the employer is willing to recognize your contributions.

Keep improving- The first few skills that a poker player learns are the meaning of different combinations of cards, the mathematical odds of success of each, and calculation of risk depending on how many players are still playing, the size of their stacks, the position on the table and how many cards are yet to be dealt. Identify the basic skills required for your job and master them. Your skills will grow with experience and so will your self-knowledge about how you respond to people and situations.

Discipline compounds your wealth- The ability to consistently play at a high standard is what creates sustainable success in poker. A single emotional disastrous decision can wipe out the winnings of a complete evening. Your wealth is built over long-term discipline in pursuing a career path in an industry or a skill set and building over your past successes and promotions. A single poor action can destroy your reputation and credibility, denting your wealth significantly. 

It’s a lonely journey- The poker player traverses a lonely journey in his mind. He questions his decisions when he is losing and cannot seek solace inside the game. In your profession too, you will be lonely. No one else can take your decisions for you. You cannot seek sympathy at work for your poor decisions and have to bear the consequences alone. Be prepared.

Take the plunge- Players who take zero risks always lose and slowly bleed away their stack over multiple hands while they wait for their dream cards. If you are afraid to try out new roles and responsibilities, or switch jobs, or accept that target, you will be trapped in a sense of false security and bleed with every passing year of your career. Go take that jump and constantly step out of your comfort zone to win big.

A bad hand is not the end- A bad card situation can change when new cards are on the table and if you play the game well. At work too, being the weakest in the team is not the end. You can build upon your output and a change in circumstances can push you to the top. Similarly, good times can turn too. So don’t take a promotion, bonus, your boss or even your job for granted.

Enjoy the game- Poker works because people enjoy it in the right spirit. When playing for fun, players ignore rule violations, friendly indiscretions and distracting banter. When playing for serious money, players don’t seek emotional fulfillment on the table. Similarly, pick a career you enjoy. At your workplace, don’t expect your team to fulfill your emotional needs. Keep your ego in check and never let your emotions run riot and take you away from your primary focus of career growth.

The past is meaningless- The past has no bearing on the present cards dealt in poker. Each hand is played on its merits. Don’t carry baggage from your past employer, work culture, expectations or even failures into your current role. The new outcomes are not dependent on your past but on where you choose to be available and how you act now. 

Let the casino keep the rake- In a casino, at the end of every hand, the dealer strips away 5% of the total winnings of the table for the casino. This is the rake, the fee for the casino to operate the business. Your employer likewise needs to survive and grow in business. While it creates opportunities for your growth and wealth, know that your employer’s goals need to be met first. Don’t forget to deliver outcomes while you pursue your dreams. 

Walk away from bias- Sometimes players cheat and a bunch of them play in concert against the rest. If the dealer doesn’t take corrective action, then the table is biased against the lone player, who ultimately loses. Similarly, if you perceive extreme politics or discrimination, harassment, or bias that the employer is unwilling to change, then walk away and find a fair workplace.

LESSONS FOR THE ENTREPRENEUR

Decisions without complete data- On the poker table, you never have perfect information and yet you take a decision to bet or not in each turn of play in a hand. Likewise, in entrepreneurship, you will operate on incomplete data and, to win, you need to take immediate daily decisions based on your ability, personality and intuition. Some might go wrong.

Your co-founder called luck- Sometimes the luck of the draw lands in the player’s favor. With a poor hand and a low pre-flop investment, he wins a full house in a dramatic reversal of fortunes. Every successful entrepreneur has a story about when their co-founder called Luck flopped out the perfect cards. So, limit your losses and stick it through till that moment.

Learn how to quit- When the odds of success are negligible and the commitment of cash to stay is huge, the good player folds and saves his stack for the next hand. Similarly, be willing to quit and save everyone’s resources when there is no hope of success. Deploy your energies into pivoting your business or building a new one.

It’s the player, not the cards- Poker is not about getting dealt hundreds of hands of great cards over multiple contests. It’s about the player and how he plays. Similarly, good investors choose to bet on the entrepreneur more than the proclaimed business opportunity.

Go all-in- The poker player’s biggest victories come from hands where he goes ‘all-in’ on a winning combination. By committing his entire stack to the game, he multiplies winnings in one go. Similarly, with a successful pilot, a large market and customers willing to pay for your product don’t hold back. Go all-in and commit fully to your venture.