You Need To Go Where Others Aren’t To Find Gold

We’re running this ad for one of our clients, Lab Supply.

It’s generating a 14.58 x ROAS, which means for every dollar they spend, they’re getting $14.58 back.

The secret? They’re the only lab supply company running ads on Meta in the country (everyone else is on Google).

A lot of time in marketing is spent testing and seeing what sticks.

Or you can own a monopoly on one platform.

The lesson is to be the only competitor in the race, and you’ll reap all the rewards.

Taste vs Prediction

I just finished watching a speech given by a tech entrepreneur in 1983.

Impressive coherence and vision for a 28 year old.

He made a raft of predictions about the future and many of them became true.

They say he was a visionary. A predictor person, who could see the future before others.

I'm fascinated by these people. They play power law games. Which means they only need to be right once to change their lives and those of many others.

As we obsess over how to stay relevant, thanks to Ai. Taste is being mentioned a lot. Apparently it's our saviour.

But Taste is static. Taste is now. ChatGPT has taste.

Ask it to design you a dashboard with current "trends" and it'll do a decent job. Ask it what a "modern" lawnmower looks like and it'll tell you. It knows taste.

But ask ChatGPT to tell you the hemline preferences of a bohemian 26 year old from the lower east side in 2028 and it runs in circles.

"Having taste" is basically saying you can read the news. You know how to follow the puck. That's better than nothing I guess. But what you want to be doing is skating to where the puck will be. You want to be the news, not reading it.

If you can do that, taste becomes irrelevant.

Predicting things is more art than science. More wrong than right. And predictors only matter if they make bets.

But they only need to be right once.

Where-as news readers have to be constantly on the ball, persistently adapting to what's in front of them. Succeeding with taste is hard.

If anything, Steve Jobs was a gambler who became a visionary because he made some correct bets. You don't hear about what he got wrong, because it doesn't matter. Because you only need to be right once.