No one listens to the safety message before their flight. So Virgin (and other copycats later) decided to shake up the boring old safety video with something unexpected and fun.

But now “quirky safety videos” are the new normal. And now once again, no one listens to the safety message before their flight.

Remarkable is a moving target.

It should come as no surprise that an ops guy like myself loves a good system for organization. Wikis, notebooks, task lists– I love building and optimizing systems for both productivity personally and within my team. But there comes a time when I come to recognize we’ve simply outgrown an existing system – and it’s time to start from scratch.

Yet making a decision like this is tough when you’ve already invested so much time and energy in the old way of doing things. It feels like all that past work was wasted.

It’s the classic sunk cost fallacy – We think we’re losing something, all those hours we invested in the old system if we move to the new one. Of course – the longer you spend using a system that doesn’t work, the more you’re losing moving forward.

So it’s always worth asking yourself “why am I fighting this change?” And if the answer is a sunk cost, your next question ought to be “what do I lose by not making this change?”

Don’t let your sunk costs hide. They lose a lot of their power once you shed light on them.

If you find yourself frustrated with increasingly algorithm driven news feeds on your favorite social networks, you’ve got an alternative: RSS. It’s relatively ancient by internet years, it’s not trendy, and it’s super predictable. And that’s why I love it.

Years ago I remember having a packed Google Reader account loaded with interesting articles and topics. I could selectively curate exactly the stuff I wanted to read, and it was, at least in the early days, a great way to avoid the clunky interfaces and advertising of the source material. Most importantly, I could control what I saw and in what order. A luxury I apparently took for granted, because for some reason I eventually abandoned RSS in favor of Twitter and other social sites for my news curation. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one.

The social web had it solved. You wouldn’t have to worry about finding specific material – your network would surface it for you. And to some extent, that promise was real and valuable. But it meant the stuff I already wanted to read often got lost in the noise.

So today, I’m still using twitter and linkedin for some news curation, but my primary go-to is now RSS once more. If you’re frustrated with the material you’re getting from your social feeds – give it a try.

P.S. I’m using Feedly as my RSS reader.

Marketers are obsessed with personalization. It’s heralded as the solution to standing out in the marketplace and earning the attention of your target audience. It’s baked into nearly every piece of technology we use, and it’s frequently pointed to when results are below expectations—”well of course the campaign wasn’t effective. It wasn’t personalized.”

Meanwhile, the public concern over data privacy is at an all-time high. Consumers are both more aware and more discerning with where they put their data and how they want it to be used.

I wonder if this endless chase of personalization is working against marketers’ desire to appear trustworthy and respectful of privacy. And apparently consumers aren’t as into personalization as marketers anyway. So what’s it all for anyway?

Obviously there has to be an element of balance here. Extreme personalization has privacy issues, not to mention the scale and efficiency challenges. But skipping even basic personalization probably won’t reflect well on your brand either. The answer to what the appropriate level of personalization is, as for most tough problems, “it depends”. It depends on how technologically savvy your audience is. It depends where on the spectrum they delineate helpful from creepy marketing. It depends if the personalization is adding real value or is just a facade.

My rule of thumb in tackling this problem is to ensure campaigns never “show the hand” of the data too much to the consumer. That even if I have access to all sorts of valuable activity and firmographic data, to focus on using it in strategic and subtle ways that enhance the campaign’s targeting and message without looking like big brother. And of course behind the scenes, ensuring all data is handled responsibly, with truly sensitive data avoided completely if possible.

We can’t chase personalization endlessly without recognizing its inverse effect on the perception of privacy. It’s a tight rope walk, and we’ve got to get better at it.

As a consultant, I mostly worked on projects solving specific issues for my clients. Their lead scoring model was out of whack. Their CRM and their marketing automation platform weren’t talking together properly. They needed a better way to nurture leads. They wanted a new lifecycle model to start their account based marketing initiative.

These projects were satisfying to work on. They scratched an intellectual itch, and the process of learning the issue inside and out, recommending and then implementing the solution was pretty enjoyable. But the problem with these sorts of consulting engagements is that you’re usually only fixing a part of the issue. The bigger problem was often out of scope.

I felt like a plumber working to fix a sink, in a house that was on fire.

The lack of ownership to not only call out, but address the bigger issues was my biggest issue with full time, freelance consulting. It’s why I decided to go back to a full time, in-house role. But I imagine I’m hardly the first to come up against this issue. The challenge, I think, to making consulting a worthwhile full-time pursuit long term, is to pursue clients and projects that involve a more strategic role in the organization.

But that may mean coming to terms with the fact that the big, strategic projects may not be something you can do alone.

There comes a time in marketing teams where the debate has to end. Where it’s time for everyone to start rowing in the same direction on a campaign. When that moment happens might change from campaign to campaign, but that it needs to happen is a necessity.

Yet too often, the debate continues long after the campaign has shipped, and people start to undermine the decision if it wasn’t their favorite to begin with. If someone’s idea didn’t “win”, they start to hope things go wrong, just so they can say “told ya so!”

Amazon has this concept of “disagree and commit” that is a great solution to this. It’s this notion of confirming that while we may have different views on the right way forward – we’ll all get behind the majority supported plan after the debate is over, even if it’s not our personal favorite.

The key I think is committing in writing. To get on the record with supporting the plan. It’s a little scary to do so, especially with a plan you aren’t thrilled with, but it has a way of helping dodge the unproductive “I never thought this was a good idea” comments later.

New York Magazine shared an interesting article on the fake internet. The article has much deeper aims than just implications for marketing, but it’s a worthwhile reminder that much of what we marketers obsessively track isn’t all that close to reality.

Much of the web’s traffic is fake. Over half, if this report is to believed. This suggests that many of the “users” we track are fake by extension. Smart marketers know this, and view their web metrics with a healthy grain of salt, considering them leading indicators, not hard metrics. Perhaps a more elegant solution is one where the organizations automatically deflate metrics to account for bot traffic. Of course, the challenge with this approach is figuring out which half of your data is full of bots.

The silver lining about all this fake data is that it’s a reminder to look downstream at metrics that are harder to fake – those where money changes hands. This of course is where we marketers should be focusing more of our attention anyways. No good can come of sales-marketing alignment when the former is talking about revenue and pipeline, and the latter is still talking clicks and opens.

A recent Litmus article highlighted some of the some usual suspects in manipulative email marketing: passive aggressive opt in or opt out language, clickbait subject lines, etc. When read from the perspective of the subscriber, most of these are obviously annoying.

But if you flip the perspective to that of the business sending them, a lot of these start to look pretty attractive– some may even say “best practice”. When’s the last time you went to a blog that did not have a focus-stealing pop up with passive aggressive text imploring you to subscribe? And I imagine most email marketers have tried to juice open rates by getting overly clever? Some of the stuff in this list is relatively innocuous, but it’s interesting the see the significant gap between expectations of the business and those of their subscribers.

My solution to navigating these waters is to always bring my experience as a subscriber into consideration. I joke marketers are one of the worst audiences to market to – because we know how the process works – and some of us are a little jaded about it. So use this as a compass in your own marketing decisions as ask: “If I was a subscriber, would this frustrate or delight me?”

I’ve been playing what is probably one of the most expensive video games ever made, Red Dead Redemption 2. Every detail of the game is painstakingly polished. It’s hard sometimes to find the seams in the game and see it for the bundle of code that it really is.

Rockstar, the developer, has gone to incredible lengths to build something perfect. But the closer you get to perfect, the more noticeable flaws are. Small imperfections or glitches you’d never notice in a lesser polished game are suddenly glaringly obvious.

Perfect, of course, is an illusion, and pursuing it endlessly has a downside: small flaws become big flaws.

Why did we all decide that sounding like a robot is the best way to present ourselves on resumes and Linkedin?

You see it all the time.

“I focus on aggressive KPIs and complex stakeholder management.”

“Adept at setting priorities, adapting to change and learning on the fly”

Surely if you were to describe yourself in conversation, you’d never use such obtuse language. Sow what’s the gain? Maybe it’s to fool some search algorithm to shunt your profile to the top of the stack. But one look from a human and your profile starts to look pretty generic.

I think I’m as guilty of this as anyone, so how do I (and you) solve it? For starters—stop using other profiles as a template. Focus on the unusual nature of you. The stuff that no one else does (or says). Ditch generic empty statements like “Enjoy working with smart, strategic and fun people.” and tell a story instead.

If you routinely settle for average with how you present yourself publicly, don’t be surprised when you end up with average opportunities. Have a profile worth remarking about, and perhaps remarkable opportunities will find you.