I recently came across Will Patrick’s website. His writing is humorous and has a fast fun cadence to it.

One of his posts, Notes From A Flat Earth Conference (archived copy) talks empathically about Flat Earth believers. I stepped away with a feeling that, of course, something had to go wrong in these people’s lives in order for them to take on this fringe identity.

Thinking further, there have always been quacks and conspiracy theorists. Will himself admits this. At a time of personal turmoil a person is suddenly “open” – cults and terrorists know this. They’ve always looked out for people undergoing transitions. These are the ripest recruits.

This one is probably about group identity and belonging.

The post reminded me of a brilliant piece of writing by Jeff Atwood called They Have To Be Monsters (archive link). And had me going on a tangent:

A reference for myself. And maybe for others.

Pardot-specific

Sercante Creuz Your Data tool – when you are creating Pardot rules for matching prospects, you can create a string of semicolon-separated conditions up to 250 characters long. This tool splits up multi-condition rules that are longer than that into separate rules up to 250 chars each.

My own tool for embedding Pardot iFrame forms in a way that resizes the iFrame on the fly according to the content of the form. This prevents little scrollbars from appearing next to a form that gets longer during submission.

I was recently reminded of a fantastic article about how ineffective digital advertising is:

“The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising”, by Jesse Frederik and Maurits Martijn. Published in the (now defunct) Correspondent on 6 of November, 2019. [archive link]

Someone linked to it as part of a discussion around the latest nefarious behaviour by Facebook.

It came out that Facebook knowingly mislead advertisers about the size of “potential reach” for campaigns. They overestimated possible campaign reach by including an extra 10% of fake + duplicate accounts.

As part of a local art project, I was looking for old photographs of the Mt. Pleasant and Eglinton neighbourhood in Toronto.

What I found was a “Google Streetview Time Machine” of sorts. A project called OldTO which places over 30,000 photos from the City of Toronto Archives on an interactive map of the city. (Just like Streetwiew, it was created by Google. This one, as part of Sidewalklabs’ aborted attempt to romance our city into an unwholesome who-knows-what.)

I was puzzled by one of the first photos I saw.

I saw an interesting discussion about SPF and email infrastructure on hackernews.

User citrin_ru shared the following list of common SPF problems they see:

1. No space between directives: "v=spf1 ip4:192.0.2.0/24 include:example.org-all"
2. Space inside a directive: "v=spf1 ip4:192. 0.2.0/24 -all"
3. Bad mechanism: "v=spf1 ipv4:192.0.2.1 -all"
4. No mechanism: "v=spf1 192.0.2.1 example.com"
5. = instead of : "v=spf1 include=example.com"
6. Unicode in SPF, mostly dashes (but I’ve seen zero-width spaces too): "v=spf1 —all"
7. Two SPF records for the same domain: "v=spf1 mx:example.com -all", "v=spf1 include:example.net ?all"

On December 11, 2020, I spoke at Pardot conference Pardreamin’ about unusual types of content you can put into emails. If you are one of the 88 people who attended: thank you for your time and kind comments!

For a copy of the slide deck, click “download” below:

And here is the video recording:

And the hyperlinks that were used on the slides with a “Resources” section:

http://kalinka.tardate.com/

https://www.litmus.com/blog/how-to-create-an-add-to-calendar-link-for-your-emails/

What is it like to be an in-house Marketing Operations Manager? How do you become one?
Find out in this interview I gave to Shikhar from CareerFair.io.

Have more questions for me? Post them into the comments!

“Can Con” is a Canadian system of quotas that require radio stations to set aside a percent of airtime towards playing Canadian-created music.

Because of this system, you sometimes get exposed to some unexpected acts here in Canada. Musicians that never made it big globally.

This is a collection of Canadian “Can Con” gems that I like.

Recently Jacques Corby-Tuech, a Marketing Technologist with skills and attitudes similar to my own, wrote a post about how Marketers are addicted to bad data (archive link).

Jacques showed some great examples where marketing data is seen as reliable – but is actually broken. Even the processes used for decision making around marketing data are often broken (ex: split tests and statistical significance)

Because I’m passionate about the topic of marketing data, I’d like to add 2 types of Bad Data to the original list and offer 7 tips for marketers to stay productive despite this issue:

This is a short reference, initial listing is from the Wikipedia page on Anti-competitive prices.

Dumping

Where a company sells a product in a competitive market at a loss. Though the company loses money for each sale, the company hopes to force other competitors out of the market, after which the company would be free to raise prices for a greater profit.

Ex: I believe this is how Uber and Lyft set their pricing, hoping to drive out traditional taxi services from the market. Once they do this, they’ll either be the only game in town (because nobody can ever start a brand new taxi service ever again, right?), or they’ll have a permanently low cost structure with driverless cars (spoiler: not happening).

Exclusive Dealing

Where a retailer or wholesaler is obliged by contract to only purchase from the contracted supplier.

Price Fixing

Where companies collude to set prices, effectively dismantling the free market.

Refusal to Deal

Two companies agree not to use a certain vendor

Dividing Territories

An agreement by two companies to stay out of each other’s way and reduce competition in the agreed-upon territories.

Limit Pricing

A limit price is a price, or pricing strategy, where products are sold by a supplier at a price low enough to make it unprofitable for other players to enter the market.

Tying

Where products that are not naturally related must be purchased together.

Resale Price Maintenance

Where resellers are not allowed to set prices independently.

Canadian Whack-A-Mole

The practice of creating the illusion of competition in an oligopolistic market, by creating subsidiaries and sub-brands.

Grocery

• Loblaw Companies
  • Great Canadian Superstore
  • Independent CityMarket
  • T&T
  • No Frills

Mobile Telecom

• Rogers, Fido, Chatr
• Telus, Koodo, Public Mobile
• Bell, Virgin Mobile, Lucky Mobile
• Shaw, Freedom Mobile

Jan, 2019 – Tefficient report shows Canada has world’s highest carrier revenue per SIM

Oct. 2019 – Tefficient removes Canada from mobile price ranking over industry pressure and CRTC’s delays in releasing information.

The 2019 Price Comparison Study of Telecommunications Services in Canada and with Foreign Jurisdictions, prepared by Wall Communications Inc.

International Comparison: Canada has the highest or second highest PPP-adjusted prices in all five Level baskets.

From the Executive Summary, Mobile Wireless section

Jul. 2019 – Rewheel research shows Canada carriers give you the fewest GB of data for 30 Euros, in the world.

2019 – Telus commissioned NERA study to rebut Rewheel report

Other people’s writing on the topic

Ishmael N. Daro – Canada has an oligopoly problem. This article makes a strong point that having a government-backed player in an oligopolistic market lowers prices for customers. It was interesting to consider that oligoplies exist in media, and that the “public option” CBC is under constant attack. I don’t find ishmael’s points about the big 5 banks convincing – how is that an oligopoly? How are they making life worse for Canadians?