Newsletter 10/28/2022: Happy Halloweekend
From the Desk of Dennis:
Does anyone else feel like the loosening of anonymity on the internet is muddying the quality of the content? Here’s how I think this process is going down:
Algorithms are looking for hand-raisers to be authorities on a topic - “who are the gizmo experts?”, asks Google search
Simultaneously, the results of being found by the algorithm are virtually always beneficial - more likes, more eyes on content, more transactions converting from all that traffic
In response, users are proactive and explicit in identifying their skillsets and backgrounds, in order to be found by the algorithms. If you can identify how an algorithm assigns authority to something else, you can copy that method.
So, as content and search algorithms rank what they find based on measures of authority and how well they predict positive KPI trends (arbitrary internet points), users are ultimately left seeing high noise-to-signal content. The algorithms can’t tell whether or not a piece of content is the “right” answer to a question, only that it is one possible answer that exists amongst thousands of others.
Good news: Even as the “social” and “personalized” webs continue to expand, the cluttering of the online space might actually make it easier for brands to be heard above all the ruckus. See: the priority you get in search results when you pay for Google Ads, or the watchtime you get on YouTube for a promoted video versus throwing your content to the winds of organic distribution.
As a digital marketer, it’s my responsibility to make sure that the information I’m proliferating online provides some value to the end-user in order to maintain a high-quality internet content ecosystem. I use strict targeting measures to make sure that the images and words my clients’ potential customers see flows naturally with the rest of their online experience. It’s the best way to cut through all that noise.
TGIF,
Dennis A. Wilson
This Week in Marketing and Technology:
PetaPixel, “You Have to Pay a Subscription to Use Pantone Colors in Photoshop Now”
“It is highly useful for those who are designing clothing or products on a computer that want to know without a shadow of a doubt what that color will look like on a physical surface. It’s why Pantone sells a $10,000 collection of physical swatches that is incredibly helpful to product designers.”
So to tone down the alarmism, this is more like having to buy a ruler than having to buy a license for the concepts of inches and feet. You can make a pretty good periwinkle logo formula yourself without it being Color of the Year “Very Peri”, but you won’t know if it’s going to look exactly the same when you go to print. If you’re serious about brand consistency, you or your agency better pony up.
Polygon, “Modern Warfare 2’s campaign is a masterpiece, in the worst way”
“Do you see how Modern Warfare 2 says something, and then unsays it, but in a way you might not notice, but also leaves the writers, developers, and the entity of Call of Duty an escape route from any accusations of intent or subjective belief?”
There’s two ways to review a CoD game in 2022: you’re either picking apart multiplayer exploits and performance flaws to determine if the game is better/worse than its predecessor (trick question; the community is going to abandon any old games in a franchise the moment the new version drops), or you’re screaming into a narrative void, calling the name of a shapeshifting ideology that sanitizes the worst excesses of the military industrial complex.
NYTimes, “Still the Biggest Skeleton in the Game?”
“Devotees have spent years hunting for a 12-foot skeleton introduced by the Home Depot in 2020. Can the hype survive?”
Yard decoration frenzies for Halloween are the new “Black Friday starts on Thanksgiving.”
