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FIRST-TIME SUPER BOWL ADVERTISERS LOOK TO TACKLE STIFF COMPETITION

Häagen-Dazs, Instacart, and Duracell are running Super Bowl ads for the first time, spending up to $8M for 30 seconds of airtime. New advertisers must work harder to make their brands memorable, as established brands like Budweiser and Doritos already have strong associations with the game. Some, like Angel Soft, are using unconventional strategies, while others, like MSC Cruises and Häagen-Dazs, are leveraging celebrity endorsements. Many first-time advertisers spent years building brand awareness before their Super Bowl debut to maximize impact.

GOOGLE FALLS AS INSTAGRAM AND TIKTOK NOW LEAD BUYING JOURNEY FOR GEN Z

Social media is overtaking search engines for product discovery. 30.4% of Gen Z use Instagram and 23.2% use TikTok, while Google now ranks third. Social commerce is growing, with 72% of Gen Z and 65% of Millennials making purchases directly through social apps. Short-form video (1-3 minutes) is the most engaging format. US social commerce sales are expected to surpass $100 billion in 2025, reflecting a 22.4% increase from the previous year.

6 COMMON MANUAL BIDDING MISTAKES TO AVOID

Google will phase out enhanced CPC (ECPC) by March, leaving advertisers to choose between manual and automated bidding. Poorly optimized manual CPC leads to inconsistent results, but regular performance reviews with proper lookback windows prevent reliance on outdated data. Gradual bid adjustments, long-term reviews, and using bid modifiers like audience and device settings can improve efficiency and ad performance.

WHEN IT COMES TO BRAND ENGAGEMENT, MESSAGE MARKETING IS GETTING RICH

Rich Communication Services (RCS) is transforming mobile marketing by offering an app-like experience directly within messaging apps. 55% of consumers prefer swipeable product galleries, and 50% are open to text-based purchasing, making RCS a powerful engagement tool. Retailers adopting RCS see higher conversion rates and stronger loyalty by delivering personalized, interactive messaging without requiring an app download.

MARKETING CHANNEL MENU, 2025 (GOOGLE DOC)

A list of marketing channels to consider when building a distribution strategy. Channels are labeled with their impact on the customer journey, cost, and measurability.

A/B TESTING GUIDE: THE PROVEN 6-STEP PROCESS FOR HIGHER CONVERSIONS

A/B testing is a powerful strategy for optimizing website performance, increasing conversions, and making data-driven decisions. Employees run tests without approval at Booking.com, leading to over 1,000 experiments at a time and a rich repository of insights. This guide covers the full A/B testing process, from statistical foundations to overcoming common challenges.

INVESTIGATING CHATGPT SEARCH: INSIGHTS FROM 80 MILLION CLICKSTREAM RECORDS

ChatGPT now refers users to over 30K unique domains daily, up from less than 10K in July 2024, driving more traffic to smaller sites and expanding content discovery. While traditional SEO remains important, brands should optimize for AI-driven search with increased mentions and listicle formats. With 70% of queries falling outside traditional search intent, AI search is more about branding than just traffic.

SHOULD I INVEST IN PAID MARKETING? DECISION TREE

5 PRICING TRENDS FOR 2025

The next wave of SaaS growth hinges on AI monetization strategies, shifting from premium tiers to outcome-based pricing. Traditional seat-based models are evolving, and AI-driven support is forcing a rethink of traditional pricing structures. Companies that leverage strategic pricing pages and open pricing playbooks are able to turn transparency into a market differentiator.

TRUMP SAYS NEW US SOVEREIGN WEALTH FUND COULD PURCHASE TIKTOK

The US is set to create its first sovereign wealth fund, with Trump suggesting it could take ownership of TikTok.

POST-PURCHASE SURVEY

Add a comprehensive post-purchase survey to collect insights and include a one-click upsell.

A LOOK INTO L'ORÉAL'S INFLUENCER TRIP

L'Oréal's luxury influencer trip to Switzerland delivered viral, highly engaging lifestyle content.

WATCH NOW OR READ THE TRANSCRIPT (UNGATED)

ROI: SEDUCTIVE BUT OF LIMITED VALUE IN PRODUCT PLANNING

ROI, a fundamental tool for financial decisions, is unreliable for product and engineering planning due to uncertainty in both development costs and future revenue projections. Instead of relying on misleading ROI calculations, product leaders should focus on strategic alignment, broad revenue ranges, realistic team costs, and reframing discussions to highlight trade-offs and risks, ensuring that investment decisions are grounded in market insight rather than false precision.

ANOTHER ONE

The rise of open-source LLMs like DeepSeek has shattered assumptions about AI development, showing that state-of-the-art models can emerge rapidly, disrupting markets and making proprietary models less defensible. This shift suggests that the future of AI is not just about incremental improvements but about a world where thousands of unpredictable models emerge, reshaping industries in ways that go far beyond automation and efficiency.

CUSTOMERS DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR AI FEATURE

Overusing "AI-powered" in marketing can lower expectations and fail to build trust or justify higher prices. Instead, focus on clear, tangible benefits and real outcomes that solve user problems to drive engagement and loyalty.

LONE WOLF OR OVER-COLLABORATOR?

Product managers risk imbalance: Lone Wolves work in isolation, facing missed context and pushback, while Over-Collaborators over-prioritize consensus, leading to delays and inefficiency. Lone Wolves should seek feedback and communicate updates, while Over-Collaborators should limit meetings and focus on deadlines. Balancing collaboration and focus is crucial for success.

ALLOCATION MODELS: THE C-SUITE IMPERATIVE

Allocation models help prioritize and focus resources effectively, preventing scattered efforts and misalignment. Teams can align and make consistent trade-offs by clearly defining priorities. Regular communication, conflict resolution, and reinforcement of these models ensure teams stay focused, driving greater impact and preventing resource dilution.

WHY ULTRA-SUCCESSFUL PRODUCTS DISAPPEAR DAILY

Viral products like Wordle, BeReal, and Thursday thrive by limiting availability and boosting retention and social buzz through scarcity and shared experiences. Strategies like daily exclusives, power hours, or time-bound events turn products into must-use moments, increasing engagement and word of mouth. Less access drives more excitement and virality.

THE AI INFRASTRUCTURE BUILD-OUT DEBATE JUST GOT DEEPER

DeepSeek's R1 release has disrupted AI infrastructure debates by proving that high-performing models can be trained at significantly lower costs, challenging the massive capital expenditures of Big Tech. While this raises questions about AI infrastructure overspending, some argue that efficiency gains could actually increase compute demand, signaling a shift in focus from sheer growth to margin optimization and inference scaling.

WHY DEEPSEEK IS A GIFT TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

DeepSeek's open-source leap reveals the failure of restrictive U.S. AI policies, accelerating AI's Jevons effect - greater efficiency driving greater demand. To stay competitive, the U.S. must embrace open innovation, reduce regulation, and promote entrepreneurship to lead the AI revolution.

OPENAI IS AN APP COMPANY NOW

OpenAI must sustain product innovation and user engagement to stay ahead of growing competition like DeepSeek.

IN 2025, STOP TRYING TO GET BETTER AT OKRS

Teams should focus on treating OKRs as a product that measures progress toward strategic priorities rather than striving for technical correctness.

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DON'T ANIMATE HEIGHT!

A note-taking app had high CPU and GPU usage due to a CSS animation affecting the height property of a visualizer. Animating the height property triggers expensive layout and paint recalculations in the browser's rendering pipeline. Replacing the height animation with a transform animation, specifically using two rectangles with translate transformations instead of scaleY, drastically reduces CPU and GPU usage.

I WROTE A WASM INTERPRETER IN C

This developer spent six months building a WebAssembly (Wasm) interpreter in C as a learning project to deepen their understanding of low-level computing. In this post, they explain the evolution of Wasm and its applications in web and cloud environments, such as in-browser compilation. They then walk through the interpreter's implementation, covering module decoding, function invocation, and execution via an opcode switch loop.

WHAT OKTA BCRYPT INCIDENT CAN TEACH US ABOUT DESIGNING BETTER APIS

The Okta Bcrypt incident exposed a vulnerability where excessively long usernames allowed authentication bypass due to the 72-character input limit of the Bcrypt algorithm, leading to ignored password data. Through testing various implementations in Go, Java, JavaScript, and Python, the blog post shows that while some libraries enforce this limitation correctly (like Go's and Patrick Favre's Java Bcrypt), others fail to do so (such as Spring Security and bcryptjs).

SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT TOPICS I'VE CHANGED MY MIND ON AFTER 10 YEARS IN THE INDUSTRY

A software dev reflects on their decade in the industry, revisiting opinions they had written down in the past. For example, contrary to their past beliefs, they now believe that DynamoDB is a good database, typed languages are essential, and that simplicity is not a given. Some earlier beliefs still hold though, such as skepticism on code style obsession, microservices, and the necessity of project managers.

DEVELOPER PHILOSOPHY

Some key dev philosophies to follow include the importance of avoiding ground-up rewrites by managing technical debt early, recognizing that the last 10% of a project often takes as much effort as the first 90%, and automating good practices to enforce consistency. Devs also need to account for edge cases, simplify code when possible, and write testable, obviously correct code rather than relying on implicit correctness.

GOOSE

Goose is an open-source, local AI agent that automates engineering tasks, allowing devs to focus on higher-level work. It's effective for tasks like debugging, data generation, code migration, and custom CLI command creation.

HTTPTAP

Httptap is a Linux tool that allows users to view the HTTP and HTTPS requests made by any program by running httptap -- `command`. It works by running the given command in an isolated network namespace and transparently proxying the traffic.

BEYOND THE AI MVP: WHAT IT REALLY TAKES

Most AI companies are stuck in the experimental phase and lack proper eval tools to measure and improve model performance. The “AI MVP trap” misleads teams into thinking an impressive prototype is nearly complete, when in reality, building a good AI product requires extensive eval suites and automated testing.

THE DUMB REASON WHY FLAG EMOJIS AREN'T WORKING ON YOUR SITE IN CHROME ON WINDOWS

Flag emojis don't render properly in Chrome on Windows because Microsoft's system font doesn't support them, likely due to geopolitical concerns. As a result, Chrome users see country code letters (e.g., "GB" instead of 🇬🇧), while Firefox avoids the issue by using its own emoji font.

INSIDE IMESSAGE-EXPORTER: REVERSE ENGINEERING APPLE'S TYPEDSTREAM FORMAT

A developer reverse-engineered Apple's undocumented typedstream binary serialization format used in iMessage's attributedBody BLOB, which stores rich text and formatting data. In this post, they explain how they deciphered the format's structure, including type tags, indicators, and object caching, to create imessage-exporter, a tool that can extract and represent this data in a platform-agnostic way.

A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE

A 1979 IBM internal training document stated that "a computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision,” which is very relevant in the age of AI.

I CONDITIONED MYSELF TO FAIL

A developer describes a pattern of losing interest in projects after launch due to an addiction to the dopamine rush of information and feedback during the building process.

REVERSE ENGINEERING: I FOUND A GAME EXPLOIT THAT LETS HACKERS TAKE OVER YOUR PC

A security researcher discovered a dangerous Remote Code Execution exploit in the game Marvel Rivals that could allow attackers on the same network to take over other players' PCs.

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OPENAI UNVEILS A NEW CHATGPT AGENT FOR ‘DEEP RESEARCH'

OpenAI has announced a new AI agent designed to help people conduct in-depth research. The new 'deep research' feature is designed for situations where users need to perform precise and reliable research using information from multiple sources. It is now available to ChatGPT Pro users, limited to 100 queries per month. OpenAI is targeting a Plus rollout about a month from now and support for Team and Enterprise users is planned. The release will be geo-targeted - there are currently no plans to release 'deep research' in the US, Switzerland, or the European Economic Area.

TIKTOK'S TRAFFIC BOUNCES BACK DESPITE BEING PULLED OFF APP STORES, FEARS OF SHUTDOWN

DNS traffic for TikTok-related domains is currently around 10% lower than pre-shutdown levels. The app briefly shut down in the US but came back online after President Trump said he would postpone enforcement of the ban. Traffic to TikTok alternatives peaked on the day TikTok returned online. Many creators are expanding their online presence to other platforms as TikTok's long-term future in the US remains uncertain.

CAN WE BUILD A FIVE GIGAWATT DATA CENTER?

AI labs will need data centers that require the power equivalent of some of the US' largest cities by 2030. Forecasts predict that training runs will require 5-gigawatt centers within five years - GPT-4 was reportedly trained with 30 megawatts of power. While tech leaders seem confident that they will be able to build data centers of unprecedented size, these plans are still in the planning and permission stages and actual sites that can support these projects are scarce for several reasons. The US currently doesn't have the power, funding, or permitting required to meet the forecasted AI data center infrastructure demands, but it might be possible by 2030 through permitting reform and substantial investment.

STABLECOINS ARE FINDING PRODUCT-MARKET FIT IN EMERGING MARKETS

SpaceX faced problems accepting payments in developing markets as its Starlink service expanded to more than 100 countries. This caused the startup to turn to stablecoins, which allowed it to accept cheap and near-instant cross-border transactions. Stablecoins are now a $205 billion market driven by real-world utility, particularly in emerging markets. They are becoming a core part of financial markets and it is possible they could replace outdated financial systems as adoption accelerates.

HOW TO WRITE A GOOD DESIGN DOCUMENT

This essay provides tips on how to write, organize, and edit an effective design document. A design document is a technical report that outlines the implementation strategy for a system in the context of tradeoffs and constraints. Its goal should be to convince the reader that the design is optimal given the situation. Writing a design document adds rigor to otherwise vague intuitions - it helps the author think better.

HOW TO HAVE A CAREER EVEN WHEN OPENAI'S O3 DROPS

There is a real anxiety among students and junior professionals regarding AI and its effects on their careers. The future will belong to people whose work cannot be easily reduced to a dataset and those who can use AI to become even better at what they do. Some jobs are currently vulnerable because we can create clear benchmarks for performance. AI will amplify the gap between high performers and the rest.

AMA WITH OPENAI'S SAM ALTMAN, MARK CHEN, KEVIN WEIL, SRINIVAS NARAYANAN, MICHELLE POKRASS, AND HONGYU REN (REDDIT THREAD)

Sam Altman, Mark Chen, Kevin Weil, Srinivas Narayanan, Michelle Pokrass, and Hongyu Ren from OpenAI recently held a Reddit Ask Me Anything session to talk about o3-mini and the future of AI. In the thread, the representatives answer questions about advanced voice mode, the upcoming 4o image generator, GPT-5, and more. OpenAI plans to cut API prices in half in August. It doesn't have a timeline for the release of GPT-5 yet - the company is still working on the 4o series.