Day: 25 April 2021

Weeknotes #4

Week commencing Monday, 19 April 2021

  • Beautiful weekend weather lead to much sitting in the sun. I may be a bit sunburnt. Taking a train to Southampton to see family on Sunday seemed very normal (even though I haven’t done it for over a year). The train disruption on the return journey also seemed remarkably normal and predictable.
  • The question I can’t get out of my head this week: at any given moment, how many people are saying the word “Alexa”?
  • We’re starting to plan what our ‘return to the office’ will look like. According to the BBC, HSBC plans to shrink its office space by 40% in a post-pandemic shake-up which, I suspect, is like a lot of other companies.
  • We had a team meeting to discuss our individual thoughts on the back-to-the-office. Generally, the return to the over-crowded commute was unwelcome. But, also, the idea of turning up to an office space to don headphones and video conference the people who are not in on that day. This is more than a change of ‘where’; it will be a change of ‘how’.
  • For a random reason I saw a statement on a Spotify job spec and I love this sentence, “You are welcome at Spotify for who you are, no matter where you come from, what you look like, or what’s playing in your headphones.”
  • Reminded this week about Troubled Diva’s ‘The 40 in 40 Days Project’ which you can still read via The Wayback Machine.
  • I feel asleep while watching The Spy Who Loved Me on Saturday night which must have been as a result of the wine I drink in the sunshine and the large Indian takeaway that we had.
  • Spent more time listening to Podcasts than I have for a while. The Chaos and collapse: European football’s not-so-super league episode of The Guardian’s Today in Focus was an interesting discussion about the launch and collapse of the Super League this week. Also recommend for the remote working conversations, Stephen Wolfram on 28 Years of Remote Work an episode of ‘Distributed, with Matt Mullenweg’ that’s from 2019 but interesting in light of this week’s conversations.

Archive

To save the links getting lost in the future I checked the Internet Archive to see what they had saved for the posts linked here.

Thank You aiMatch

aiMatch logo

Almost four years ago, on a blistering hot Sunday afternoon in North Hills, Raleigh, North Carolina, I sat listening to a group of passionate technologists outline a vision for ad-serving aimed at digital publishers that would – before the world had got so hung up on big data – show that there’s much more business insight in the ad-server data than just clicks and impressions.

Just over 18 months later that bootstrapped startup, aiMatch, was acquired by the world’s leading analytics company, SAS: validation that the publisher advertising technology space needed more than just delivery technology and that, in order to compete, publishers need quick insights into how advertising is performing and impacting their business. There’s so much more to come in that area.

Today, however, marks my last day with SAS Intelligent Advertising for Publishers; I’ve accepted a job with another company in the ad tech space, but I wanted to do two things before I return my pass to HQ. In the coming weeks, to serve as my own aide memoir, I’ll write the 10 things about the publisher ad space and its evolution that I have learned over the past four years. I am not yet sure if the challenge will be to get to 10 unique points or restrict it to 10. We’ll see …

Right now, however, I want this to serve as a very public thank you to the entire aiMatch team, past and present, in the US and the UK, who made the past four years possible. I joined the company before the first customer had served an ad, and now, as I leave, billions & billions of decisions are made for customers across the globe and growing at a rate that, back then, we could only have dreamed about.

It may be a cliché to say, but it is true that everybody in that team played their part in growing the business. I can’t call them all out individually, but thanks must go to Jeff, Guy and Ryan for having the vision and the will to get aiMatch going. A self-funded technology start-up isn’t easy, but they delivered for customers around the world, and I will remain very proud of the whole team because of that. Of course, I’ve worked with Steve here in the UK, in a number of companies, for more of the last 15 years than I haven’t, and he probably deserves some kind of award for that. It was his idea that we hire that cinema in Soho – the outcome of which was the first UK customer, in spite of my fear we wouldn’t be able to fill the space.

When we came into the SAS family, we met many great people who helped take the product to the next level. There’s a whole world of them, but I would be remiss if I didn’t thank the Australian team who’ve been entirely responsible for my jet lag, resulting grumpiness and bad eating habits over the last 18 months. They’re one of the best teams in the business.

I learnt many things along the way. It’s clear that setting up something from scratch in a competitive space isn’t easy, but it’s worth trying; it can work out well, but you will never know if you don’t jump in. Executing a plan that’s constantly moving is a fun challenge, even if it doesn’t seem like it at the time. Working closely with your customers is the best way to succeed. But parking the CEO’s car in the tiny remaining space in a concrete parking lot in Wilmington on a 40-degree day is the most nerve-wracking challenge of them all.

If you’re a publisher and you want something better from your ad-technology stack, then I recommend SAS Intelligent Advertising for Publishers as a very good place to start looking. And, when you see it, remember that the killer feature you’re going to love was all my idea, don’t let anybody convince you otherwise!

Please Don’t Shout On Late Trains

Jakob Nielsen reports that researchers from the University of York have performed a study to assess why it’s so annoying when other people have cellphone conversations in public.

Earlier in the week, my fifteen-minute train journey was delayed due to overrunning engineering works. Any regular traveller on the South West Trains suburban lines into London Waterloo station will be used to these delays after weekends or bank holidays. I know it’s so likely that I even plan for it and force myself out of bed and to the station a little earlier if I know there have been engineering works nearby.

As always, some people are caught off guard by this, or perhaps they use it as a cover for the fact that they are running late. It’s amazing how many mobile phone conversations announce that the caller will be late for the office/appointment/meeting due to how late the trains are, when, in fact, there is no more than a ten-minute delay (which, when using London’s transport infrastructure, you should be accounting for anyway).

Earlier this week, however, there was a well-spoken gentleman in my carriage who insisted on calling – what appeared to be – most of his mobile phone contact book to let them know just how late he was. He also said that Justin would have to take the meeting (if Justin ever reads this, the gentleman in question claimed to have confidence that you wouldn’t screw it up, which I thought sounded good for you). All very well, but I didn’t want to know it.

The conversation was irritating, and irritation is always enhanced when a train is late (even if you have planned for it because others haven’t, and civilised behaviour goes out the window). The conversation, however, was loud, but each one was brief and to the point and without any pointless small-talk. The gentleman was efficient in his conversations and factual. He was, however, still irritating.

So I started looking for items on irritation factors caused by mobile telephony, only to find that Jakob Nielsen has some research on ‘Why Mobile Phones are Annoying‘ which implies that, upon testing, conversations face-to-face at the same volume are less irritating than the equivalent mobile conversation. The research suggests,

Designing phones that encourage users to speak softly will reduce their impact on other people. For example, more sensitive microphones and improved quality on incoming audio will make most users less inclined to shout.

[source]

Let’s hope Nokia et al. are listening.

No other posts on this day.