Society is increasingly divided, with 47% of the UK and 49% of the US concerned about societal breakdown. Gaps persist in the representation of the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, and older adults in advertising. Active inclusion, where diverse characters are portrayed with respect and nuance, has been shown to drive both short-term sales and long-term brand equity. Brands are encouraged to lead with empathy, enrich their storytelling, and address broader issues such as climate change, food security, and societal divisions.
Mastercard is launching a haptic logo that provides vibrations in sync with its sonic brand to enhance customer trust during transactions. This innovation addresses shoppers' uncertainty at checkout and will initially debut in Latin America and Eastern Europe. The brand shares that addressing even small customer anxieties can lead to substantial returns.
This article showcases how brands can turn a piece of content into numerous assets. Lincoln Literacy transformed a 30-minute interview into multiple unpaid channel engagements, including PR features, newsletters, and radio spots. Freshpaint used a webinar with a healthcare lawyer to produce social media posts, Q&A blogs, and videos. M Float repurposed case studies for every stage of the funnel, while Qase transformed case studies into employee advocacy posts.
Running Search campaigns alongside Performance Max (pMax) can lead to reduced Search performance. Search Themes can cannibalize Search campaigns by competing with phrase and broad match keywords. A user found that 53% of his pMax budget went to the Search network, limiting his Search campaigns. After removing Search Themes from pMax, spend shifted to Shopping, and Search campaigns began performing again.
Marketing planning often falls short when treated as a check-the-box task instead of a strategy to win the next year. Teams commonly make mistakes like creating unprioritized idea lists and setting KPIs based on top-down forecasts. Instead, the process should focus on a clear roadmap of major priorities, similar to product teams. A successful plan includes a vision, strategy, goals, forecasts, budget, and timeline for key initiatives.
AdMockups.com is a free tool for creating mockups of ads on the fly. The tool supports top ad platforms including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Snapchat. Select the platform, then edit the copy and imagery to produce a professional and realistic mock. You can download the mock as a PNG, JPG, or SVG file.
Use Screaming Frog and its OpenAI integration to optimize website meta descriptions at scale. When setting up the ChatGPT template in Screaming Frog, use the prompt template provided in this article. Then run the website crawl, which will output a table of new meta descriptions for all crawled pages. An OpenAI API key is required for this process.
TikTok is expanding its subscription option to non-live creators. This allows more users to build an audience of paying subscribers in the app. Creators can customize their subscription packages to offer three different tiers, selecting benefits such as private communication channels and exclusive content. Eligible creators have to be 18 years or older and have an account in good standing with 10K+ followers and 100K+ video views in the past calendar month.
Aggregation occurs when multiple sites rehash or break out a specific angle from a trending article, often outranking the original reporting. Newsrooms can protect their search market share by aggregating their own content and linking back to the main source. This strategy helps maintain visibility while optimizing for audience search intent.
A deep dive into the company behind Forbes Advisor, the affiliate marketing arm of Forbes that dominates a diverse number of SERPs.
SEO book recommendations including The Art of SEO, Product-Led SEO, Entity SEO, and Feck Perfuction.
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You're under so much pressure to ship that new feature. But what if it's broken? Or what if it breaks something in your customer's environment?
As software becomes commoditized, taste — encompassing design, branding, and user experience — has emerged as the key differentiator for tech companies, influencing how products are perceived and adopted. Leaders must now master cultural relevance alongside technical innovation to succeed in this new era where taste is as crucial as functionality.
This article discusses the differences between founder mode and manager mode in leadership, arguing that while manager mode is effective for scaling established companies, founder mode is crucial for innovation, particularly in early-stage startups or when facing disruptive changes like the introduction of GenAI. It also highlights how women leaders can successfully navigate founder mode by adopting a nurturing, collaborative approach while maintaining urgency and decisiveness.
Product discovery shouldn't be a separate phase or team, as that limits continuous learning and end-to-end responsibility. Balancing discovery with delivery leads to solutions users love, boosts business value, improves team morale, and makes product creation enjoyable.
Freemium strategies are powerful, but deciding whether new features should be free or paid requires careful consideration. Key factors include whether the feature drives retention, has virality, supports paid use cases, or is a commodity, while also balancing complexity and innovation to maintain competitiveness and brand perception.
Platform PMs must understand both the needs of their users and their users' end customers. This broader view enables building a platform that solves user needs while empowering them to address their customers' problems. By mastering this, platform teams can shift from being reactive to proactive, anticipating needs instead of merely responding to requests.
The McDonald's app tracks spending to offer personalized kiosk deals, driving engagement and indulgent choices by removing judgment and encouraging quick decisions.
Solve tough problems with unconventional methods. Embrace disagreements as a way to stay grounded. Make timely, good decisions even if they're not perfect. Listen to understand, not to respond. Approach conflicts with a win/win mindset.
Key lessons from this podcast include using the Product-Led Growth Iceberg Framework sequentially, optimizing 2-3 layers aligned with current goals, and recognizing that PLG might not always be the best go-to strategy, depending on factors like customer lifetime value and product complexity. Additionally, avoid over-relying on A/B testing or growth teams as a crutch and prioritize building trust early on through strong business understanding and consistent communication.
The individual contributor path in engineering can be just as rewarding as a management path, offering similar compensation and leadership opportunities without the need to manage people. ICs can bring immense value by driving technical innovation, mentoring peers, and contributing to a company's success, especially as the demand for skilled engineers continues to grow.
2024.09.24·newsletter.eng-leadership.com·4 min read·TLDR Product We expect leaders to excel in communication, valuing those who speak and persuade effectively. Treat speaking as a skill — practice builds confidence and influence.
To stand out in PM interviews, candidates should adopt an evaluative mindset, prepare specific questions about team dynamics and challenges, and engage deeply to demonstrate curiosity and interest in the role.
Pitfalls of unproductive deep work include more than just failing to block calendar time.
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When a concurrent Postgres index creation silently failed, the app that used the database faced performance degradation, almost leading to a production outage. This failure was exacerbated by the use of partitioned tables, resulting in inconsistent index usage across different partitions. To avoid such issues, monitor concurrent index creation, validate indexes regularly, and create partition indexes consistently.
Use environment variables to control feature visibility, validate them, and then access them within server and client components using custom functions and a feature provider. This blog post explains how to implement basic feature flagging with the Next.js App Router. It demonstrates a practical application of feature flagging by controlling the visibility of sidebar routes based on feature flags.
Chrome's User Experience Report provides Round-Trip-Time (RTT) data, which reveals the network conditions of users. Many users have slower network connections, so web applications should be able to handle high-latency environments well. Some strategies to handle these include reducing transfer size, using a CDN, upgrading to HTTP/2 and TLS 1.3, and adopting HTTP/3 (QUIC) if possible.
Sam Altman describes a new “Intelligence Age” driven by new AI advancements. This new era promises massive improvements in various aspects of life, including healthcare, education, and even solving global problems like climate change. While AI's potential for prosperity is immense, there is still a need to navigate risks, like those related to labor markets.
RSA is a widely used public-key cryptosystem which is arguably fundamentally flawed and should be abandoned. Its security relies on carefully chosen parameters, which developers often fail to select properly, leading to vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities stem from subtle mathematical properties that average developers are unlikely to grasp, making RSA inherently fragile and prone to attacks.
Zach Wilson, an ex-Airbnb staff data engineer, goes through seven tech interviews he failed over the last decade. He shares learnings from his time. For example, job hopping early in your career is great for growth, but not as great after you hit your mid-career.
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ts-blank-space is a TypeScript-to-JavaScript compiler that focuses on speed by removing type annotations and replacing them with whitespace. It utilizes the original TypeScript parser and is written in pure TypeScript.
Sidekick is a tool that simplifies the deployment applications on VPS', making the process of hosting side projects faster and more affordable by automating the setup and deployment process. It enables zero-downtime deployments and provides features like high availability, load balancing, and automatic SSL certificates.
A library of JavaScript packages with small footprints.
Felafax successfully fine-tuned the LLaMA 3.1 405B model on 8 AMD MI300x GPUs using JAX, Google's Python library for high-performance numerical computing and machine learning. Its team used JAX for efficient parameter sharding and a LoRA implementation, achieving near-linear scaling and high memory efficiency.
No data lasts forever. From ancient papyrus scrolls to modern hard drives and flash memory, every method of data storage has limitations and eventually fails. In modern times, the potential for data loss comes from hardware failures, technological obsolescence, and intentional or accidental deletion.
Cloudflare is launching a marketplace where website owners can sell access to their content to AI model providers. This marketplace will allow websites to charge AI bots for scraping their content. Cloudflare has also introduced AI Audit, a tool that allows website owners to monitor and block AI bots.
Automattic recently wrote an article and gave a speech publicly disparaging WP Engine - WP Engine has responded with a public “cease and desist”.
This special feature explores Deno, a new JavaScript runtime created by the minds behind Node.js, examining its origins, differences from Node.js, and the lessons learned in its development.
This article explains how to implement Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) in TypeScript and React to create a chatbot that can answer questions about content from a large text dataset by retrieving relevant information from a vector database and providing it to an LLM.
Using callbacks in React to achieve better component decoupling involves shifting control of state updates from child components to parent components.
This is a full-featured, pre-configured starter project for building SaaS applications using Next.js, Prisma, Neon, Auth.js, Resend, React Email, Shadcn/ui, and Stripe.
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2024.09.23·advertise.tldr.tech·Sponsor·TLDR Qualcomm has approached Intel about a takeover in what could be one of the largest and most consequential deals in recent years. Intel is currently suffering through one of its most significant crises in its five-decade history. Its shares have dropped roughly 60% so far this year. A deal is far from certain and it will likely attract antitrust scrutiny.
2024.09.23·links.tldrnewsletter.com·4 min read·TLDR Meta smart glasses have succeeded where other AI wearables and smart glasses haven't and even beyond Meta's own expectations. They're expensive, but affordable compared to an Apple Vision Pro or a Humane Pin, and they have good quality speakers, microphones, and cameras. The AI is sometimes finicky and inelegant, but it works in a natural way. The device easily slots into people's lives now, with no future software update to wait for.
2024.09.23·theverge.com·5 min read·TLDR Microsoft has signed a major deal with nuclear plant operator Constellation Energy to buy power for its data centers from the energy company's Three Mile Island Unit 1 nuclear plant. Constellation plans to spend $1.6 billion to revive the Unit 1 plant, which was shut down in 2019 due to a lack of demand for nuclear energy, by 2028. Microsoft has agreed to purchase all of the power from the reactor, which promises a capacity of 835 megawatts once restored, over the next 20 years. The plant is expected to create 3,400 direct and indirect jobs, add $16 billion to Pennsylvania's GDP, and generate more than $3 billion in state and federal taxes.
2024.09.23·techcrunch.com·3 min read·TLDR