In Quora, somebody asked why Warren Buffet prefers not to invest in startups [1]. One of the answers that resonated with me was this one: “In an interview several years back, Warren Buffet said that he does not like to invest in companies whose success is based on the smartness of its people. His reasoning was that all companies hire…
Introduction Now, earlier I wrote a post arguing that Facebook has an incentive to lower the CPC of well-targeting advertisers because better targeting improves user experience (in two-sided market terms, relevance through more precise targeting reduces the negative indirect network effects perceived by ad targets). You can read that post here. However, consider the point from another perspective: the well-targeting advertiser is…
The bot can be boss, as long as we have jobs. Why are human services the future of our economy? (And, therefore, an absolute requirement for world peace [1].) For three reasons: They do not pollute or waste material resources (or tend to do so with significantly less degree than material consumption) Exponential growth of population absolutely requires more human labor…
Yellow ad, red ad… Does it matter in the end? Introduction I used to think differently about creating ad variations, but having tested both methods I’ve changed my mind. Read the explanation below. There are two alternative approaches to ad testing: “Qwaya” method* — you create some base elements (headlines, copy texts, pictures), out of which a tool will create…
Facebook has an incentive to lower the advertising cost for more precise targeting by advertisers. What, why? Because by definition, the more precise targeting is the more relevant it its for end users. Knowing the standard nature of ads (as in: negative indirect network effect vis-à-vis users), the more relevant they are, the less unsatisfied the users. What’s more, their…
This post explains the use of NVivo software package for analysis of qualitative data. It focuses on four aspects: coding categorization relationships comparison of background variables First, coding. This is simply giving names to phenomena observed in the material. It’s a process of abstraction and conceptualization, i.e. making the rich qualitative material more easily approachable by reducing its complexity into simple…
Hello, my young padawan! This time I will write a fairly concise post about optimizing Google AdWords campaigns. As usual, my students gave the inspiration to this post. They’re currently participating in Google Online Marketing Challenge, and — from the mouths of children you hear the truth 🙂 — asked a very simple question: “What do we do when the campaigns…
“In this age, in past ages, in any age… Napoleon.” (The Duke of Wellington) This is a short post reflecting upon Napoleon’s writing on war and efficient management. I think many of his principles are universal and apply to communication — my special consideration here is writing of emails, which is a vital skill because 1) you want your message to…
Google has an incentive to group advertisers in ad auction even when this conflicts with the goals of an individual advertiser. For example, you’d like to bid on ‘term x‘ and would not like be included in auctions ‘term x+n‘ due to e.g. lower relevance, your ad might still participate in the auction. This relates to two features: use of…
I was inspired to write this post by the following pictures that I’d included in my lecture material a few years. Writing it in a bit of a hurry since the class starts soon! (but it’ll good enough to make the point) (You can find the original source for the pictures by googling.) Okay, a couple of things. First, it’s highly…
