Tuesday Thought: Staying Simple

Howdy!

Hope this finds you well on a breezy Tuesday night.

Today’s newsletter is sponsored by Rick BEISPEL.

I nailed the spelling this time.

This sponsorship is added value because I screwed up Rick’s name last week.

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Onto to the thought! And don’t forget to sponsor, @danny-weisman. $5.34.

Tuesday Thought

I’m tired.

It’s been about five weeks since our daughter was born.

And while it’s been incredibly rewarding, it’s definitely incredibly tiring.

To quote Rams coach Sean McVay, who also recently had a kid:

“The sleep thing is real.”

I head back to work next week post-paternity leave.

And while I’m a little worried about the adjustment, one thing has become clear to me:

I’ll value simplicity, more than ever.

When you’re tired, there’s no room for rambling, fluff, or superfluous thinking.

You need to be as focused as possible, with the little stamina you have.

That means no extraneous KPIs.

Or long, aimless narratives.

Or dense documents.

It’ll be prioritizing the most important thing - not thing(s)! - and marching towards that.

As someone who himself is prone to long-winded rants (you’re familiar, after all, as readers of this newsletter), this will be difficult to adopt.

But it’s something that a book my dad gave me in these early weeks of parenthood, Clear Thinking by Shane Parrish, preaches.

The book is fantastic, and is a must read for indecisive people like me.

It gives you frameworks and lessons to apply clearer thinking, make sounder decisions, and prioritize process over outcome.

One of the lessons is to prioritize the most important thing when make decisions, and rally yourself and your team around that.

And Parrish means just one thing.

Not multiple goals.

Not multiple priorities.

Just one. Cut out the rest.

As marketers, that’s very hard.

We load up campaigns with as many KPIs as possible, because we know we can’t measure any one of them as accurately as we’d like.

We invent proxies, we make sure that this and that stakeholder’s priorities are accounted for, and before you know it, the campaign is being measured on 10+ things.

But like a college basketball team that plays multiple defenses or a NYC buffet, if you can’t do one really well, you likely can’t do any well at all.

And that’s the case - because the measurement plan lacks simplicity, it confuses and disappoints all who are involved.

So I’ll be prioritizing simplicity…

…to an extent.

Because I do think the forces of marketing are forcing us into simplicity, at the expense of great work.

Take this piece of news recently from Google.

Now in one of their products, Performance Max, all you need to do is upload your company’s website URL, and they’ll do the rest.

They’ll make the assets, using their own systems and AI, and have it ready to go for your ad campaign, using Google’s own targeting to find the best customers.

And in its black box of inventory sources it will go, using their own measurement to tell you if it will work or not.

Or take this tweet from a prominent performance marketer.

He’s opining how crazy it is that one day Facebook sales will be great, and the next, they’re not - without any explanation.

This is a symptom of relying too much on simplicity - giving too much power to marketing platforms in the name of clean and simple results.

But when something goes wrong, the information is too high level to get a read on what’s actually going on.

In a world of rising costs and decreasing time to do anything - let alone do it on a full night’s sleep! - simplicity is seductive.

It lets you get summaries from AI, and think you know what you’re talking about.

It lets you cut back on staff and longer bouts of thinking, instead opting for the quick scale and volume of AI or other resources to deliver what you need quicker, sooner, simpler.

And I do think, to some extent, AI is a net-positive here in simplifying things that are hard to understand, or providing jumping off points to get started thinking.

But when you aren’t able to retrieve that extra information, if you want it, or diagnose problems if things go south, then it becomes a problem.

For example, Google may generate ads for you quickly based on your URL, but it will only give you so much information on how your campaign is performing, especially if that information negatively reflects on Google itself.

So I think prioritizing simplicity in this tired, dad life of mine will be good.

But overdoing it, without going deep enough when I have questions or truly need to learn more, will be bad.

And I ask all of us reading this, especially the marketers, to not prioritize simplicity to the point of handing over access to important information to platforms like Facebook, or Google.

It’s OK to put a finer focus on the business goals you need to achieve, while cutting out the fluff.

But it becomes a problem when you lose the forest from the trees, and give these places the keys to control your business, all in the name of working harder, faster, and simpler.

So, that’s it! Simple stuff.

I’m going to get some sleep.

But when I’m back in action, I’ll be simpler than ever.

Unless I need to go deeper.

Then I’ll take a beat, drink a coffee, and dig as deep as I need to so I can stay simple on the things that are important, while digging deeper on how to make those things better.

Stay thinkin,

Danny