The Marketing BS Story
In March 2019 I had finished the first draft of a book called “Marketing BS”. I decided I needed to build up an email list for when I published it. I had started a few blogs in the past that had some subscribers. I imported the lists I had, threw up a versions of some of the old posts I had written on those blogs, and got started writing. For four years I wrote at least one (very long) post a week. I grew my readership to over 20,000 subscribers with a 40%+ open rate.
I tried moving to paid (twice) but never picked up more than $10,000/year in subscription revenue. While I loved the idea of a paid newsletter, in practice it meant putting content behind a paywall that I would rather be widely read. It also meant constant pressure to publish at at least 2x or more of the frequency I was dojg before. I tried different ways to reduce that load (podcast interviews, link round-ups, short posts), but my obsession with quality meant that all of them took up more time and effort than the payback from the small number of paid subscribers I had.
So I paused payments.
In January 2024 I took a break from writing entirely. My first break since I started in April 2019. It felt great. With the pressure offI was able to dive into other interests I had without a constant need to be thinking about the newsletter. I generally believe there is one thing you can focus on in the shower every day. When I was an executive that was the businesses I was helping build. For the last few years that had been the newsletter. It was really nice to rudiment on other things.
What other things?
One of my long running beliefs about marketing is that there are two types of marketers:
Brand Marketers
Acquisition Marketers
Brand marketers ruled the roost for the first 100 or so years of the marketing function. They had ideas, but any data was purely anecdotal. They used their gut to make decisions and their charm and sales techniques to sell those decisions.
Acquisition marketers began as “direct mail marketers” but they really exploded with the advent of dgital marketing (particularly search marketing). The big difference was that acquisition marketing had tracking and the ability to run a/b tests. They solved the brand marketers famous concern that “I know half my marketing is wasted but I don’t know which half”. Marketing became a math problem.
But the problem with acquisition marketing is that it is reliant on short term feedback. You spend a dollar today, and you can tie that spend to revenue that comes shortly thereafter. How shortly? Sometimes within minutes, but good acquisition marketers do things that connect that spend to revenue further in the future — they cookie the computer to see if the individual buys later, they run a/b tests on spend by geography to see if there is a longer term geographic lift, they collect email addresses and then track whether those emails become accounts that buy in the future, they measure life time value of the customers they do acquire to understand impact beyond the first purchase, and so on.
But no matter how good the acquisition marketer is at tying spend to future revenue, there will be impacts they can’t measure. A good top of funnel marketing campaign can do things like:
Improve conversion rate across all channels
Increase click through rate on paid search
Improve un-branded SEO placement
Decrease customer price elasticity (maybe the most important impact)
Increase willingness of potential partners to partner
Increase ability to attract and retain employees
Good luck measuring any of those things with traditional marketing measurement tools.
The result is that brand marketers are ignorant of ROI, and acquisition marketers focus on what can be measured rather than what matters.
I find the solution to this dilemma important, interesting and difficult.
Call it “understanding long term impact”.
Marketing is where I came at this challenge and where I have the most expertise. A lot of the book I wrote (but have still not published) is about this issue.
But for the last year I have been exploring this idea in areas beyond marketing, or even traditional business.
Some examples:
Raising Children
Bryan Caplan will tell you that how your kids will turn out is all genetic. So after you have chosen your spouse there is not much you can do. He has a lot of data and twin and adoption studies to back that up. I don’t doubt his data. But it is very similar to the acquisition marketing problem. It focuses on what we can measure, rather than what matters.
There are a few anecdotal things that challenge his assumptions:
Almost all the data is for families in the middle of the bell curve. Caplan admits that it does not apply for kids raised in harsh conditions. But I think it likely does not apply for kids raised on the other end of the bell curve as well. The Polgar sisters clearly had genetics on their side, but I find it very unlikely they would have all grown up to be chess masters if they had been adopted at birth into a “normal” family
The rate that kids follow in their parents profession is very high. This is true of athletes, actors and politicians, but also things like doctors, lawyers and tool and die crafters. Making it to eh NBA is clearly genetic, but I doubt that is true for working in a tool and die shop. Parents matter
There is lots of data that where a family lives is important — “moving to the right zip code”. That has been argued as kids being influenced by their environment. But when you look at what matters in a zip code it is things like “percent of people who vote” and “percent of people who graduated college”. Is it possible that the PARENTS are influenced by their peers as well, and that is at least partially impacted on the kids
I also find interesting the impact of birth order on life outcomes. This isn’t genes, it is something else, and it seems real.
Education
For a long time the “best” data showed that the impact of going to top college was all selection effect. Then in 2023 a new study came out that showed that was not true at all. That overall income post graduation was not that different, but that students who graduated from a top school were far more upwardly mobile. Their income increased faster, they were more likely to employed by A-list firms, and by 10-years post school they were FAR more likely to be in the top-1% of achievement.
Similar arguments are made about how the K12 school a kid goes to does not matter. I am skeptical.
Nutrition
Nutrition is a mess of a “science”. It is very hard to run any sort of A/B test — both for ethical reasons, but also compliance. So instead we get observational studies that find correlation between people’s food choices and their health outcomes. The problem is everything good is correlated. So people who are smart tend to have high conscientiousness and high income — and longer healthier lifespans. So when something is a trend among smart rich people — like drinking alcohol in moderation — the observational data tells you that it leads to better health outcomes. Mostly nutrition science tells you what rich people choose to eat (often influenced by nutrition science of yesteryear).
Lifespan extension is the most extreme of this. If there was a drug today that you could take that would add 10 healthy years to your life (i.e. slow aging by ~10%) how would we ever know? Even if we could run a test/control trial, it would take decades to get any results. The ROI on that trial investment would be terrible, so it does not happen. It doesn’t mean there aren’t answers out there, but you run into the marketing problem again:
Scammers who have no data to back things up and just want to sell you on their supplement
Traditional doctors who will tell you the data does not support any intervention because the trial is not statistically significant
Happiness
When you measure them in real time parents are less happy than non-parents. There happiness level only gets back to the level of non-parents somewhere around when their last kid turns 18 and leaves the house. But if you ask people how satisfied they are with their lives parents score much higher.
For a long time there was a belief that money did not make you any happier once you got to about $70,000/year in income. That has since been disproved. It turns out it was a function of logarithmic curves (a percent increase in income gives you a linear increase in happiness), low numbers of data points from high income respondents, and the arbitrary nature of happiness measurements (if I am making $100K and give myself a 5/5 on happiness, does that means I won’t be happier if someone hands me a million dollars? Seems unlikely, but unlike Spinal Tap the amplifier does not go to eleven).
Happiness has a measurement problem, but that does not mean there aren’t things you can do to make your life better and more satisfying, no matter what you call it.
Organizational Culture and Path Dependence
Google is good at creating new services. Apple is good at making products. Amazon moves quickly. Netflix is strong in analytics. A least that is what it looks like from the outside (insiders will often say many of the external views are wrong, but I wonder how much of that is “in comparison to”, and they just happen to be in the part of the organization that is not as strong as the other parts). How does this culture happen? How much is set based on the past, and how much can be changed?
I am particularly interested in long long term effects. Descendants of the people who survived a stint in Stalin’s gulag are now MORE educated than their peers today. People who came of age during the oil crisis in the 1970s, still now drive at lower rates than those a few years older or younger. The heavily bombed areas of London during WWII are now more developed than the areas that avoided devastation. People living along an ancient Inca highway have better health and economic outcomes today than others in their countries. I have collected dozens of these examples over the years, and am excited to share them over the coming months and years.
So Now What?
This newsletter is still called “Marketing BS” — changing a brand is almost always a terrible idea. I will still write about marketing from time to time. But I am going to use this platform to write about the things that I am interested in right now. That is less about optimizing paid search spend and more about the things I mentioned above.
I have done a little of this last year:
Longevity: “How to Live Forever”
Business: “Twitter Community Notes”
GLP-1 Inhibitors: “Companies are about to lose their best customers”
Education/Training: “How to learn the thing”
Public Relations: “All Publicity is good publicity if you are a small company”
Here are some posts I want to write over the next few months:
Education: Alpha School
Education: Boundless Life
My experience with GLP-1
Hormone replacement therapy, Blueprint and Rapamycin
I also have some drafts ready for my takes on more marketing-related topics like Netflix advertising, Superbowl advertising, internal marketing, pay transparency, onboarding, awareness ties to sales, product-led marketing, product placements, what does it mean to care about your people, and incompetence vs maleficence.
I will not be publishing multiple times per week. I am not even making a commitment to publish every week. I will publish more than I have been the last six months. And I will keep the pause on paid subscribers. What I MIGHT do is turn on paid subscriptions for a day and drop content for those who are on there, but effectively your membership will last roughly “forever” — at least for now unless I decide to punish myself by trying the paid route sometime again in the future.
In the meantime I am going on vacation next week, so don’t count on anything soon.
Thanks for your patience, and keep it simple,
Edward
P.S., From the old About Page:
What some people say about Marketing BS
“Edward is the actual legit version of Tim Ferris”
Enmi Kendall, General Partner, Healthy Ventures
"Marketing BS should be required weekly reading for any marketing executive, much like Ben Thompson's Stratechery is the standard for strategy professionals."
Jason Goldlist, Cofounder TechTO; former GM/Head of Marketing, WealthSimple
"Always good. I don't know how he does it"
Nicolas Murat, Partner, Levant Capital
"I rarely have time to read these kind of things, but I always make time for Marketing BS. A different way of thinking and I find it very valuable as a CMO."
Leena Jain, CMO, HumanScale
"Marketing BS is really amazing. One day it might be remembered as the pinnacle of the industry."
David Atchison, CEO/Founder NewEngen; Former CMO Zulily
"Marketing BS is always rewarding and worth the time spent…..most importantly what he says generally jives with my real world experience."
Cannon Ghelani, Principal, Shorerock Group
"Marketing BS is so flippin good! Edward is creating phenomenal content. I am so glad to receive my Marketing BS email every week".
Lindsay Pedersen, Author, Ironclad Branding
"Marketing BS is a constantly great read. I can’t tell you how few weekly newsletters I even open, let alone read and I always read Marketing BS. I often read it on Tuesdays before I get out of bed. Every part holds my attention"
Andy Morris, Founder, Seattle Vacation Homes; former VP Ops TaskUS
“Blocked”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Author The Black Swan and AntiFragile
Who is Edward Nevraumont?
Edward is a Senior Advisor with Warburg Pincus (the private equity firm). Previously he was CMO/CRO at General Assembly, where he helped build and prepare the company for a $412.5MM sale to Adecco. As CMO at A Place for Mom, he steered the company from the brink of collapse to generating 30% annual growth over multiple years. As an executive at Expedia, he created the VIP Hotel program, Expedia Rewards, and the first landing pages organization. He’s done his time at at McKinsey, Procter & Gamble, and earned an MBA from Wharton.
You can find out more at www.marketingbs.com.
