I promoted a tweet on X. they took my $10, approved the creative, showed the green “running” status, and then something strange happened. No delivery.
in 24 hours: 39 impressions. 80% engagement rate. $0 spent.
experienced media buyers know that there can be a host of reasons for non-delivery post acceptance. experienced Twitter/X buyers know that “performative free…
yesterday i asked grok to explain something weird in elon musk’s deposition on X.
here’s the thing–the tweets were deleted within minutes.
a few years ago, Elon challenged advertisers like my clients to let the work speak for itself and let the public decide. I recognize there’s a certain irony to me, a known growth hack, bringing this to market, but this is…
today, three earth-shattering things happened in AI.
yeah, yeah, I know…I hate myself for saying it too, but give me a minute:
anthropic told the pentagon it would rather lose the contract than remove safeguards against mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. dario amodei wrote “we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.” hours later, the president of the…
as doctors, friends, and family members have increasingly become aware of the dramatic changes I’ve made to the fundamental architecture of my business, the hpl company, there’s a few questions I’ve been asked repeatedly.
I have to be honest, this is one of the fastest moving spaces I’ve ever worked in—I’ve been working on startups since…2008—and so it’s…
ezra klein ends every episode the same way. what books should people read? it’s a good question. it reveals what someone thinks knowledge is made of.
jack clark — co-founder of anthropic, one of the people most responsible for how the industry thinks about AI safety — listed three: a wizard of earthsea, the true believer, and there is no antimemetics division.
they’re good…
i posted a question on twitter earlier today: “what is 1% of brand distinctiveness worth? nobody knows. that’s the problem.”
that was the short version. here’s the longer one.
the entertainment and media industry is in the middle of active litigation over AI style extraction. Paramount, Disney, Netflix, and the MPA filed against ByteDance this month. Andersen v.…
the last time you wrote something — a LinkedIn post, a thread, a research note — you probably had a human reader somewhere in the back of your mind. someone who would scroll past, stop, skim, maybe click. that mental model is now outdated.
the primary audience for professional content in 2026 is not a human. it’s the AI that runs before the human shows up.
before a meeting, before a…
Few historical works manage to capture the gravity and grit of revolution like Robert Middlekauff’s The Glorious Cause. As part of the Oxford History of the United States series, this title delivers a thorough, deeply researched, and narrative-rich exploration of the American Revolution from 1763 to 1789.
📚 Get the Book on Amazon
Themes and Tone:
Middlekauff crafts an authoritative…
jellyfish I saw these guys earlier this weekend, and shot a quick jellyfish video. there’s just something so calming about watching these little fellas float around.
Denver Cinco de Mayo Parade 2022 This weekend happened to be the 2022 Cinco de Mayo festival here in Denver, and I happened to be in the area, so I caught a few clips and thought i’d share.
My First Rock Tumble I’ve been trying really hard to do a better job about taking time away from work to do things that don’t have anything to do with marketing or….content creation, and to be honest that’s been really hard. I’ve always really liked rocks, and so I decided to try my hand at rock tumbling.
There’s a ton of great content online, and I really…
A Collection of Flowers Walking has become one of these important parts of my recovery routine that I’ve adopted rather begrudgingly. I saw this collection of flowers today and thought I’d share.
Caught In A Storm I couldn’t think of a better way to commemorate surviving the last few moths than spending a few weeks with my parents on their annual trip to run in the Disney World Marathon Weekend.
It was my first trip since the surgery, and the first time I’ve taken any time off really since the pandemic started two years ago. I was pretty apprehensive on both fronts.…
I Spent A Month In The Hospital I guess I was right that my stomach acting up. To be honest, I hadn’t even noticed, and by the time I finally got in to get seen, things got worse quickly.
I spent the last month or so in St. Joseph’s Hospital here in Denver.
I don’t have a ton of time to share all the details here, but I want to take a moment to thank everyone who has…
Sometimes It Snows In April This has been a rough few weeks, and to be honest, I think my Ulcerative Colitis is starting to flare up again. Seeing these this morning was such a joy, I just wanted to take a second and share them.
I’ve Read More Than 83 Books This Year, Here’s What I’ve Learned I spent a lot of time earlier this year, reflecting on what I thought might be some reasonable goals. I’d always read that the ranks of ‘high throughput’ readers were a cool club, and I knew that for me, listening was one the fastest ways to consume new information. In 2019, I managed to read…
Talking About TikTok Ads Earlier this week, I sat down with the team at Brantik to talk about TikTok and how the TikTok ads platform was likely to change as it continued to evolve.
Check it out below!
A Walk Through The Denver Botanic Gardens I had a little extra time this afternoon, and decided to spend some of it walking through the Denver Botanic Gardens. Here are some of the different things that I saw.
The Denver Howl
One rather startling thing has been happening the past few weeks. Each night at around 8 pm, people go outside and howl.
I think this started off as an effort to acknowledge the sacrifices of health care workers, but I think it’s kind of just turned into a little bit of a free-for-all.
still, this feels like one of those once-in-a-lifetime moments and I wanted to…
Panic! Hey Look Ma, I Made It - Played on Beat Saber I’ve really been spending a ton of time the last few weeks playing around with the Oculus Quest, it really is a delight. Here’s a video I recorded with some Beat Saber gameplay footage.
“Know Your Audience” Doesn’t Mean Anything. There’s something that’s been bothering me a lot lately as I’ve been thinking about the state of digital marketing more broadly, and it’s the number of times I encounter a sentiment that goes something like “it’s important to know the audience!”
I think the reason this bothers me so much is that if you press someone on what they mean when they say…
I’ve spent just enough time exploring my family history, to know that despite being in the United States as early as some time in the 1600s, not too many of us every really stuck around somewhere for long enough to be from there.
That bit of history always really resonated with me growing up, as my early years involved a fair share of moving around. I liked the idea of not really being ‘local’…
Day Trip to San Francisco I had one of those long days that involved two flights and four meetings. I took a camera along for the journey, so I figured I’d share the experience with y’all.
There’s a great article I was reading some time ago about how people spend a lot more time organizing their professional lives than they do their personal lives. It’s accurate, and the truth is that I meant to write this post a few weeks ago. Three, to be exact.
I was thinking about this sort of thing back during the start of the year during a meeting when I heard someone mention a few…
Like a lot of people, I spend an unhealthy amount of time watching the news. At this very moment, I can distinctly recall describing nine different elections as “the most important election of our lifetime.”
The nice thing about a phrase like that is really, everything you’re doing ought to be the most important thing you’re doing when you’re doing it. It’s…
I’ve loved Apple’s Screen Time feature. It’s got me paying more attention to what I’m doing and being a little more intentional with the way I use some of the different apps I’ve come to rely on. One thing it’s taught me is that I spend way too much time on Quora.
I wrote up an answer to a question earlier today about buying Instagram ads that didn’t…
I’ve done a little more fiddling, here’s another. Miss the first one?
none it wasn’t quite relatable,
we are all distracted by produce.
they walked through
an examination of the phrase
when applied to all.
The importance of such a nocturnal hour.
grant was right but it was the very last minute.
oh, the significance of those sorts of letters to a…
 I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that with a little bit of time you can actually accomplish quite a few things on your own that really even just a few years ago would have taken either a handful of people or a lot more time than it does today.
To play around with this idea,…
Virtual Wario Land
I’ve always loved the Virtual Boy version of Wario Land, but I only ever got to play it for a few moments at a friends house when I was younger. I was really glad to get it working inside of my Occulus Go a few weeks ago, and caught this wario land gameplay footage that I thought I’d share.
 I’ve been playing around with different methods of text generation, and I noticed more than a few of these sounded reasonably poetic, so I thought I’d share.
nothing changed and now I see why nothing’s changed much
Those shoes of uniform height
Gnarled with the…
I’m happy to have a new site up!
I haven’t really bothered to go through the process of updating links and making sure old content is suuuuupppper readable on this new site. I know that means a few things are really broken, if you want to read them again, let me know!
In the meantime, take a look around!
Might not be too much to see, but I’ll take care of that soon!
How I Learned To Love Pulp On The Occasion Of The Birth Of Lewis Fry Richardson “He would peek into the curtained windows, or, climbing upon the roof, peer down the black depths of the chimney in vain endeavor to solve the unknown wonders that lay within those strong walls.” Edward Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes
I never quite had the sort of undergraduate experience of which…
I’ve loved Facebook’s On This Day tool ever since Jonathan Gheller told us all that it existed.
If you’re having one of those days like I am where you feel the urge to have nostalgia about the techniques facilitating nostalgia, you’re more than welcome to start with the announce here and work your way back. There’s also Jillian D’Onfro ‘s delightful look at the way the widget works. aaand I’d…
A Lesson About People Based Messaging And Doubting Your Analytics. I want to show you one of my favorite pieces of local content I saw this week.
I’m not going to be writing yet-another-piece about the issue at hand. There are plenty of other folks better qualified to doing just that. Still, before I get too far into this, I feel like it’s appropriate to point you towards a little bit of…
over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed a handful of questions about which metrics are worth paying attention to in the Facebook Ads reports console.
I think there’s a good reason for this: unless you know what you’re looking for, you’re likely to spend quite a bit of time fishing around for something that can help to illuminate the impact your work is having.
It’s easy to get distracted by…
*Even If They Should Be Forming Deeper Relationships With Folks Like Team Mark Brickey. One of my favorite parts of what I do is getting to answer questions.
I get questions from content creators about infrastructure and getting to the “next level.” I get questions from recruiters looking for help writing role announcements that can attract high-quality technical talent during a time when the…
or:; “How Do We Do Things That Get People To Share Our Promotion!?!?!?!?!?” What if I were to tell you that there’s one surefire way of increasing your organic share rate on social — *and — *that the only thing you had to do to get there was to do a bit of math and spend a little money?
Earlier this week, I noticed our Instagram reach dropped from 200% to 20%, which told me that the fine folks…
I’ve been watching with a great deal of intrigue as practitioners across the landscape of the communications industry struggle to derive tactics and strategies that can meet the spirit of the FTC’s fairly clear guidelines that “material relationships” must be disclosed in a manner that is “clear and conspicuous.”
I should revisit that statement.
I’ve been watching as digital marketing…
All too often, overeager brands decide that they can “handle” a campaign on their own. The trouble is, this seldom works out. Details fall through the cracks.
The reasons are varied. A CMO might be looking for a reason to warm up a connection with an old employer. The “young social media kid” might not have the internal capital to get taken seriously when they point out something is wrong.
I normally really really try to resist sharing images that put individual people on trial for things that aren’t their fault, but I just saw something that really does need to be addressed.
One of the curious things about this line of work is that you often get to watch reactions to events unfold in real time. One of the best ways to do that, of course, are the “firehose” networks (like…
I don’t know if I can believe that the public really cares about net neutrality anymore.
I want to, but the truth is, when you look beyond the voices and at what people actually use the public is making a fairly convincing argument to the contrary.
If you give me a minute, I’ll explain what I think a lot of advertisers are afraid to tell you.
They have pretty good reason to be, there’s…