Author Archives: EJ Lawless

GPT-3 opened up a competitive market for generative AI for copywriting tools Marketing has been a hot vertical for generative AI, helped by the fact that marketers have been “open” to AI assisted tools having experienced them through Google and Meta ad products. SEOs in particular have created content with algorithms through “spun” content forContinue reading “How Jasper.ai beat Copy.ai at go-to-market — despite launch a year later”

AI is having a moment, but integrating AI into robotics is more challenging than the web browser. Unlike pure software AI, robotic AI must grapple with the physical world. Despite the challenges, AI does find its way into robots, improving how robots interact with their environments. This is an overview of AI advancements in roboticsContinue reading “AI in Robots: A brief historical survey”

Don’t diversify channels. Double down on growing channels. There’s a school of acquisition thought that it’s better to cap investment in a specific marketing channel to reduce the risk to the business. This is particularly true when running acquisition on algorithmically driven platforms, e.g., Facebook. Instead double down on what’s working. If a channel hasContinue reading “Double Down on Scaling Channels”

Services Have A Larger Market Service businesses are better businesses than Tech Enabled Service (TES) businesses. Service businesses can charge higher prices points for a similar service as a Tech Enabled Service businesses, and serve a wider set of customers. Effectively creating a larger market. Services Have Higher Operating Margin Service businesses can have higherContinue reading “Service Business >Tech Enabled Services”

Overview A previous post showed how long it takes staffing firms to recover revenue after recessions. Noting the unexpected similarity in recovery time between the dotcom crash and the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). importantly, that ⅓ of staffing firms never get back to the same level of revenue. There was a noticeable difference in how longContinue reading “Staffing Firms Recovering Market Cap”

There is no right structure. There is a structure for right now. The growth marketing structure for a single product company is straightforward. As the product offering grows in complexity so does supporting the products. A good team structure can lay the foundation for growth marketing team and product success. The wrong one will createContinue reading “Staffing Growth Marketing Teams to Products”

Why Test for Incrementality Understanding the incrementality of advertising spend is one of the biggest advertising efficiency step changes there is. Bigger than creative. Bigger than multi-touch attribution. Despite that, incrementality tests are rare: rare to discuss and rare to implement. All of the biggest and best advertisers run them. Incrementality tests are not limitedContinue reading “Incrementality Testing: True Value of Your Ads”

Overview In an analysis of 12 publicly traded staffing firms (job advertising, placement, and temporary workers) through the Dotcom bubble and the Global Financial Crisis, the behavior of staffing firm’s revenue was remarkably consistent. Roughly ⅓ of the publicly traded firms never regained the same level of revenue as before the start of either recessionContinue reading “Staffing Firms Revenue After a Recession”

Preview(opens in a new tab) It was the 28th consecutive day of sun. My boss had just made two female coworkers cry over how little he paid them. Little Woodrow’s was empty because it was 3 PM on a Wednesday. We were drinking. It was part of the culture.  “We’re going to IPO!” my bossContinue reading “Big Companies > Startups”

Googlebot loves to crawl: it’ll crawl any thing that looks like a URL, anything it can find in javascript, html, or on the page. If it looks like a URL, Googlebot will try to crawl it. Great for Google, probably great for web users because Google learns more about the web, but it can leadContinue reading “Preventing Wasted Crawls Part 1 of Many”