One year and 50 editions of MADvice

It's hard to believe a year has passed since MADvice first saw the light of day. So far we have 50 editions, hundreds of subscribers and, on average, 40% of you open and read the newsletter every week. Thank you for that. To celebrate this first year I thought of bringing back the 10 most popular articles of the past year.

For those of you that never heard of it, MADvice is a simple email with 3 interesting stories about Marketing, Advertising and Digital, curated by me every week. The internet is a big place and few of us have the time to keep up with all of it. My goal with the newsletter is to help you stay updated without spending hours looking for what is relevant. If you want to see what it's like, subscribe or read one of the past issues.

10 most clicked MADvice stories of the past year:

1. Entropy: Why Life Always Seems to Get More Complicated

Entropy provides a good explanation for why Murphy’s Law seems to pop up so frequently in life. There are more ways things can go wrong than right. The difficulties of life do not occur because the planets are misaligned or because some cosmic force is conspiring against you. It is simply entropy at work. [James Clear, 8min]

2. Business Strategy is Simple (Doing it's Hard)

There are only 3 ways for a business to grow: increasing usage, value or utility. That’s it. Cost saving can have a positive impact on margin, but not growth. You can’t grow your business by spending less. [Medium, 6min]

3. The Line vs The Net

A metaphor that combines communications strategy and commercial seafood to explain the benefits of broad reach media. Line fishing is very similar to performance media - you use a specific bait to catch a specific fish, while net fishing is very similar to broad reach brand media. You use a big net to catch a huge amount of different fish. [LinkedIn, 4min]

4. Blockchain Made Simpler by Goldman Sachs

Blockchain combines the openness of the internet with the security of cryptography to give everyone a faster, safer way to verify key information and establish trust. Learn how it can transform the world with this immersive infographic. [Goldman Sachs, 7min]

5. Most Marketing Is Bad Because It Ignores The Most Basic Data

Despite data being one of marketing’s current obsessions, most brands aren’t extracting value from 11 of the most basic data-points available to everyone, writes Tom Roach, Managing Partner at BBH. “Numbers every marketer should know” is a SlideShare presentation with some of the simplest, most basic, but most fundamental data-points that could transform the effectiveness of any brand’s marketing, if only they were more universally known and used. [BBH, 5min]

6. Tinder sent me 800 pages of my deepest, darkest secrets

We are leaning towards a more and more opaque society, towards an even more intangible world where data collected about you will decide even larger facets of your life. Eventually, your whole existence will be affected. [The Guardian, 6min]

7. The Battle for Consumers Gets Physical

The world’s largest taxi firm, Uber, is buying cars. The world’s most popular media company, Facebook, now commissions content. The world’s most valuable retailer is now Amazon, and has more than 350 stores. And the world’s largest hospitality provider, Airbnb, increasingly owns real estate. Things change. [TechCrunch, 5min]

8. Your Strategy Should Be a Hypothesis You Constantly Adjust

An alternative perspective on strategy and execution conceives of strategy as a hypothesis rather than a plan. The authors of this article call this approach strategy as learning, which contrasts sharply with the view of strategy as a stable, analytically rigorous plan for execution in the market. Strategy as learning is an executive activity characterized by ongoing cycles of testing and adjusting, fueled by data that can only be obtained through execution. [HBR, 6min]

9. 2018 Internet Trends In Numbers

Legendary venture capitalist Mary Meeker has just released the 2018 version of her famous Internet Trends report, her annual statistics compilation. It covers everything from mobile to commerce to the competition between tech giants. [KPCB]

10. Why Influencer Marketing Lacks Trust And Credibility

Mark Ritson paid influencers to post a giant picture of his arse, to prove that influencer marketing suffers not just from the problems of fake followers and viewability, but also from a lack of credibility. Exposure, even from a trusted source, is hardly behaviour change. Getting a message seen by a target audience is certainly something of value, but calling it ‘influence’ and the person behind the message an ‘influencer’ is a bit like calling Mark’s arse a work of art. [Marketing Week, 17min]