Spotify is transitioning and not just via their podcast investments.
They are starting to enter the world of advertising and arming artists with tools to reach audiences, at a price.
First via Marquee mode – mobile app pop ups to advertise new releases. These see 20% conversion rates, 2.2x lift on saved/playlisted tracks which itself leads to increased playing by 250%.
Second via a new Discovery mode – where an artist can boost a track in Spotify’s algorithm in return for a lower take.
Interesting post covers the logic behind this as well as price increases.
“Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer at P&G, the world’s largest advertiser, dropped a bombshell at the ANA conference a few weeks ago. He said that P&G would be moving away from the upfront model of TV ad buying. With TV advertising going digital, it makes no sense to make massive uninformed bets just because that’s the way it’s been done for decades. Now they can apply data to those decisions and be more deliberate ” The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green.
Apple silicon performance improvement has been staggering – “Whilst in the past 5 years Intel has managed to increase their best single-thread performance by about 28%, Apple has managed to improve their designs by 198%, or 2.98x (let’s call it 3x) the performance of the Apple A9 of late 2015.“
US clearly stands out as it spends far more on healthcare than any other rich country in the world yet has little to show for it in terms of life expectancy improvement. Source.
Interesting chart plotting global PMI (green line) against an index of containment (orange line, degree to which economies are locked up).
This index eased from a peak of 64 in April to 32 in September, helping PMIs rise.
In October it has started to rise to 35, and throughout has remained higher than what was expected a few months ago (dashes) – it should have been 18 by now.
Last week Denmark sounded the alarm on potentially dangerous developments related to SARS-CoV-2 virus.
The two worrying elements are (1) a mutation in the spike protein which could render the upcoming vaccines and antibody immunity of those already infected useless (2) a jump from animal (mink) to human.
This is a good summary and the press release from the Danish Serum Institute (use Google Translate) is also worth reading.
STAT news have a more sanguine take – arguing that there is nothing to suggest the mutated virus could have higher transmission rates or risks for humans and single mutations rarely are cause for alarm.
Earlier this year we covered Biogen’s decision to file Aducanumab (their experimental treatment for Alzheimer’s Disease) here and here.
This saga reignited this past week with the publication of FDA adcom documents which on the surface looked positive sending the shares soaring only to be voted down (8-1) at the meeting on Friday sending them crashing down.
This really good blog post discusses these events and why it is always important to read all the details.
The final FDA outcome is yet to be determined (Adcom decisions aren’t binding) and as previously highlighted could be political.
“When teaching, an idea is often put forth and the students may not grasp it. It’s like sailing into the wind. So what do you do? You tack with an analogy. You move to the side so that in the end you will make progress towards a goal that can’t be reached directly. “
An awesome database of analogy and metaphor to improve your writing – Metamia.
“I came across this guy, Sean Ellis. Now, Sean ran growth in the early days at Dropbox, LogMeIn, and Eventbrite. He even coined the term “growth hacker.” Now Sean found a leading indicator of product to market fit, one that is benchmarked and predictive. Just ask your users this. How would you feel if you could no longer use the product? And measure the percent who answer, very disappointed. After benchmarking hundreds of startups, Sean found that thecompanies that struggle to grow always get less than 40% very disappointed. The companies that grow most easily almost always get more than 40%, very disappointed. In other words, if more than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, you have initial product to market fit. Now, this metric turns out to be more objective than a feeling. It predicts success better than net promoter score, and it’s not only the best way to measure product to market fit”
