Customer Data & the Immovable Object

The number one obsession in digital marketing for the last decade or so has been targeting. For all the money in ad-tech and sponsored content and other 21st century marketing things, the actual experience of being advertised to and, for lack of a better word, effectively propositioned by companies online is pretty lame. Targeting promises […]

We Are Out of Ideas

This just eats at my soul.  Grocery workers across the country say morale is crushingly low as the pandemic wears on with no end in sight. Overwhelmed employees are quitting mid-shift. Those who remain say they are overworked, taking on extra hours, enforcing mask requirements and dealing with hostile customers. Most retailers have done away […]

Problem Solving

The NBA started back up this week, and it’s nice to have it back in my life, even if the whole thing is extremely precarious. And of course, it is extremely precarious — the league is attempting to operate in the middle of a pandemic a few months after shutting down its season. But as I […]

“Marketing”

In general, having kids has been pretty detrimental to my brain, at least in terms of raw cognitive ability. I’m tired a lot, I have way less time to think, and I have a lot of hilarious conversations that are enlightening about say, the human condition, but aren’t exactly sophisticated technical or policy discussions. I […]

Applied Compliance

It’s only my opinion, but one of the more interesting things I’ve written (and then promptly lost in a tangled web of SQL dumps while messing around with this site) was a piece on managing people and the different approaches towards setting goals. I thought of these two approaches as engagement and compliance, where the […]

Where The Good Jobs Are, (Part 2)

One of the funny things about any kind of economic system is that, by definition, you learn a lot about it simply by existing in it. But as more and more people are realizing, there are a wide variety of ways to exist in any system, thanks to a bunch of different factors we have […]