Why digital advertising is broken and how we’re fixing it: (thread)

1/ Attention is a scarce asset. Yet, today’s advertising platforms are built on a model of interruption, forcing brands between you and your intention.
2/ Though ads are everywhere, people don’t trust them. Study after study shows, when you pay to reach people in an interruptive way, less than 5% pay attention.
3/ In today’s interruption-based ad model, the more money you spend, the more people you annoy. Advertisers are trying to solve this problem by spending more money and showing more ads but that only makes it worse.
4/ Ads interrupt us everywhere, leading to more people tuning them out. This is not a content problem. This is not a targeting problem. It’s a context problem.
5/ People don’t trust ads. People trust people. Brands don’t need more ads. They need more people sharing them in trusted contexts.
6/ By making images available for open use, Unsplash has become the primary source for visuals on the internet. Images on Unsplash are regularly seen more than the frontpage of The New York Times.
7/ Unsplash puts your content in the hands of people, the creators of the internet. They add context by sharing your visuals with their audiences as part of their content.
8/ When content is leveraged by choice and embedded in a trusted context, it is no longer tuned out.
9/ When your content is made available for use in a platform where all the creators go, reach compounds exponentially. Initially, you reach all the creators. Then, with their networks, you reach the entire internet.
10/ Through this mechanism, your content organically spreads across the internet reinforcing your message.
11/ The attention of devoted audiences can't be bought. It can only be earned by brands that stop trying to take value and start trying to add it instead.

more: https://t.co/3XBXuCOE0K

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big louis winthorpe III energy


i almost feel bad for the guy, because someone this absolutely clueless about how he sounds really shouldn't be allowed to post under his own name.

he seems like someone who *genuinely* means well most of the time, but it extremely easy to excite and wind up, and who is just profoundly dense about the wisdom of getting wound up the way he does in public.

on the other hand, the tara reade business was indefensible, exploitative, and gross. if there is ever a writer who desperately needs an editor to save him from himself, it's nathan robinson.

i had a few friends in high school who were well-meaning, wealthier than they realized, and in drama class, and most of them grew out of their nathan robinson stage because, well, it was oklahoma. there's almost something a little charming about the fact that he didn't.
I get DM's from founders with the same specific problems.

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"I lied about my basic beliefs in order to keep a prestigious job. Now that it will be zero-cost to me, I have a few things to say."


We know that elite institutions like the one Flier was in (partial) charge of rely on irrelevant status markers like private school education, whiteness, legacy, and ability to charm an old white guy at an interview.

Harvard's discriminatory policies are becoming increasingly well known, across the political spectrum (see, e.g., the recent lawsuit on discrimination against East Asian applications.)

It's refreshing to hear a senior administrator admits to personally opposing policies that attempt to remedy these basic flaws. These are flaws that harm his institution's ability to do cutting-edge research and to serve the public.

Harvard is being eclipsed by institutions that have different ideas about how to run a 21st Century institution. Stanford, for one; the UC system; the "public Ivys".