Edition #494
Einstein – “if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”.
Last week I swapped out how we send this, so you may notice some changes as we fine tune the set up. Love your feedback! This makes my process to send a bit easier/streamlined.
I really enjoyed Alex Schultz’s post on how to do things you can’t measure, this is my approach or lens on measurement, simple, practical and anchored in the business objectives.
In measurement & analytics the industry is very guilty of overcomplicating things, but I like the Einstein quote “if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”.
That doesn’t mean the answer is always simple. But a reasonable person should be able to understand it. So I found Alex’s post refreshing, as I don’t often see this, at least shared publicly at his level.
I tried a feature on Perplexity earlier this week, I gave it a YouTube video and said “can you listen to this YouTube video and give me a play by play of what is happening in it.”. It was for a video I had seen before, but this just helped me get to the salient parts. Neat huh.
Meta AI now has one billion monthly active users. But I’m not sure how to understand that number, because AI is in every app. Is the best comparison to AI overviews from Google? Whereby AI is being triggered in a search result.
Another tidbit from Zuckerberg “As Meta AI improves overtime, Zuckerberg said “there will be opportunities to either insert paid recommendations” or offer “a subscription service so that people can pay to use more compute.”.
The question is, will advertisers be able to buy that inventory direct, or like Google will it just be sold through their black box products. Lets see.
Last week I touched on how rapidly Google is launching new products in the AI race. And then there was a little kerfuffle about how AI Mode wasn’t sending referrer traffic, that Google was trying to hide it. My take was it was probably a mistake, and sure enough, they fixed the bug. Given the velocity of execution it’s not surprising to see even Google have a few product slip ups.
What’s scaring them? OpenAI at 500m monthly active users.
Notable stories this week
- How to do things you can’t measure.
- Wired’s editor tells me how she got 62,000 new subscribers in 2 weeks.
- Brands are underspending on creators. Can ad tech (finally) help?
- On Finance Substacks moving the markets.
- Roblox wants to become the new shopping mall for Gen Z.
- Google AI mode is untrackable. But then Google fixed it.
- Video is making podcasts a premium buy for advertisers.
- Google queries with AI overviews now monetize at the same rate as those without AI overviews.
- AI Mode is obviously the future of Google Search
- CMO Strategies: Marketers from Georgia-Pacific to Samsung weigh in on display ad strategies, success metrics and challenges.
- ‘Zuckerberg has made it clear – his first loyalty is to shareholders’: Confessions of a media agency executive.
- Search slips, Discover delivers: Publishers navigate latest Google update.
- Dozens of Premium Publishers join Adelaide’s new ‘AU ecosystem’.
- Reddit Trends is officially live. More on it here.
- The agentic web and original sin.
- How Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) rewrites the rules of search.
- In-house agencies navigate a new phase of purpose and pressure.
- James & James is using MMM to keep its AI-based ad buying ‘Honest’.
- Sam Altman said AI would replace 95% of ad agency work. 3 top creative directors say AI has won them lucrative business.
- Neil Vogel on Google Zero.
Deals/M&A
- Benioff buys stake in influencer agency Whaler Group at $400m valuation.
Campaign of the week
- Sir Lewis Hamilton with Perplexity.
View all 2024 best campaigns.
Smartest commentary
- “Measure what can & should be measured and measure it well but be honest where that ends. So when you are doing a massive brand campaign, have holdouts… do regional tests… do AB tests and show whether it worked and if it did how much it worked. Know if you increase your target sentiment metrics (awareness, consideration or something less focused on the funnel like trust) and report on that to finance and your peers & superiors. Ensure areas that are very easy to be data driven around like direct response marketing are well measured and understood and build a reputation for excellence around those. This is absolutely key, if you go in to important stakeholders without a solid position here they will not give you the benefit of the doubt on the other, less measurable, areas.” –Alex Schultz, CMO & VP Analytics, Meta.
Datapoints of note
- Google primarily sends users to recent articles, whereas ChatGPT traffic is predominantly directed to articles over a year old, mostly from 2024 posts. This ChatGPT surge seems to have begun the week of April 6th, during which it referred users to over 10,000 long-tail articles.
- ChatGPT mobile app usage is now approaching 20 minutes per user per day. This is up 3x from app launch.
- Meta AI has 1 billion users.
Events
- Media breakfast coming up in June, let me know if you want to join.
View all 2024 datapoints of note.
That’s it for this week.
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