Making Sense:

Considering both qualitative and quantitative data when looking at how we can improve our approach to working together.

• A Feminist Critique of Silicon Valley. MIT Technology Review: The Valley has bought into the idea of itself as a meritocracy: a world of self-starting, bootstrapping geniuses so much better and smarter than anyone else in the world that they deserve wildly disproportionate opportunities for wealth and power. The problem is that this is the exact opposite of what Silicon Valley actually is: a sexist and racist wealth distribution mechanism that relies on cronyism, corruption, and exclusion to function.

• The Biased Way Leaders Delegate Power. Fast Company: The study, which calls itself the first to document group-based biases in power decisions, raises a number of questions for further investigation. Would leaders have shown the same tendencies if they knew more about team members than just their names—say, perhaps, their qualifications? And are underperforming leaders truly more race- and gender-biased than successful ones, or do they just seem that way because they're more inclined to delegate power, period?

Making Do:

Another opportunity to take a look at data points and connect them to perform better.

• The ad industry needs to embrace its incompetence to get better. Eaon Pritchard: The commonly held ideas of those operating in Dunning-Kruger peak mode are some sort of party-mix that contains ‘advertising is dead, everything is now about content, participation and conversation’, ‘creative departments are no longer required as ideas come from anywhere’ and ‘anyone with a smartphone can be an ad agency’ amongst many others. Dunning and Kruger discovered that people who are unskilled at something — in this case advertising — are often unable to see how bad they are.

• How Facebook Knows When Its Ads Influence Your Offline Purchases. Wired: Facebook recently launched a new tool for online advertisers called Atlas, and part of the company’s pitch is that it can explicitly establish a link between online ads and offline purchases. The way it works, says Brian Boland, the vice president of ad products at Facebook, is that the company can match the phone numbers and email addresses of Facebookers with the phone numbers and email addresses consumers provide in stores. People voluntarily link things like phone numbers and email addresses to their Facebook accounts, and the company gets the store info from various partners, including a data collection company called DataLogix.

Making It:

The point is human data is important.

• 2014 Christmas Ads: The Emotional Winners Revealed. Brian Juicer: remember the rule of emotional advertising. If you feel nothing, you do nothing. If you feel more, you buy more.

• YKK zippers: Why so many designers use them. Slate: the Japanese zipper behemoth, makes roughly half of all the zippers on earth. More than 7 billion zippers each year. Those three capital letters are ubiquitous—no doubt you’ve seen them while zipping up your windbreaker or unzipping someone else’s jeans. How did YKK come to dominate this quirky corner of industry?

• Inside Omnicom’s new programmatic consultancy. Digiday: “We have worked with clients in the past and helped them take things in-house in the search arena. We’ve run something for them for six months during which we’ve helped them transition it in-house. If that’s what someone wants to do, there’s no point us fighting it”

 Bonus link: Google Programmatic Guide for brand marketers.

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Valeria is an experienced listener. She designs service and product experiences to help businesses rediscover the value of promises and its effect on relationships and culture. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. Book her to speak here.