Come on. Learn!

3: Gratuitous use of Flash.

It is not Adobe’s fault, it is your fault for using Flash for the most pathetic things mankind has known. Why? Because your agency can win an award? Because you believe that the Web is essentially TV? Slow sites make your management happy?

Remember every time you use flash on your website, a cute puppy dies. Think of the puppy!

Most of the items on this extended list compiled by Avinash Kaushik seem pretty obvious to me. Most likely you, my internet-savvy friends, would question even the need for writing these down like Avinash has.

Oh, how ignorance is bliss, my friends!

My work with Real-time Decisions (RTD) has introduced me into the wonderful world of marketing and advertising. A world where many companies still consider basic concepts like scientific control to be the latest craze (they call it ‘A/B testing’, but the idea remains the same). A world where gut feeling and HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) continue to rule, while real data and hard evidence are readily available.

The fact that Avinash felt the need to publish his list of truisms might explain some of the difficulty in conveying the concepts behind RTD to customers. Number ten on the list in particular sounds sounds awfully familiar to me.

10: Making lame metrics the measures of success: Impressions, Click-throughs, Page Views.

They, and their brethren like video views and emails sent and # of followers on Twitter and Likes on Facebook and. . . all stink worse than Amorphophallus Titanum.

Use metrics that matter: Loyalty, Recency, Net Profit, Conversation Rate, Message Amplification, Brand Evangelist Index, Customer Lifetime Value and so on and so forth. Each a glorious magnificent metric that truly tells you that value was delivered, or delivers the swift kick in the pants that we all need when we don’t. How can you not love that?

If these people are not at ease with the idea of using cold data to measure success, or if they simply do not know how to define ‘success’ in the first place, how do you think they are going to feel about letting an artificially intelligent computer program improve the rate of that success by learning about customer behavior and preference? Not so good, I guess.

David Lightman: [to Joshua] Come on. Learn, goddammit.