Jacob Ross

@businessbarista Claude

I want to start a community dedicated to Claude Code. It’s become the gateway drug to coding and experiencing the power of AI for tons of people. This will be a space for people to share killer use cases, agentic workflows, proven prompts, and connect with other CC obsessives. Comment “Claude” if you want to join.

NYC on a sunny Sunday at 1pm in November is absolute peak

It's crazy to me that brands spending millions of dollars per month solely optimize budgets based on user-based attribution, the most flawed and gameable metric possible. I've seen countless setups where clients will put 5 or 6 different adtech vendors on a plan and optimize solely based on who's driving the lowest trackable CPA. That is the most broken way to optimize. It favors whoever just sits at the bottom of the funnel waiting for a layup. Unfortunately, this isn't basketball, and layups don't add value. The ones holding budgets, measuring success in this way need to have a come-to-Jesus moment, talk to their vendors, really understand how their tech works, analyze their trackable CPAs directionally, run additional tests like incrementality, MMM, or some other form of validation other than last touch wins all the budget. This setup is so common it's led to the internet we have today, massive ID fraud and congested web pages to serve that very competition.

@DrDominicNg Causation or correlation?

Light exposure predicts mental health in a study of 85,000 people. 1. More daylight → ↓ depression, anxiety, PTSD 2. More light at night → ↑ 30% risk for depression

@clairevo Incredibly well said!

Let me tell you a dirty secret about a lot of execs: They're extremely smart. And they haven't had to do their own work for years. Look inside any mid->large size company and you'll find VP+ executives that were promoted fast and furious in their early career because they're smart, hard working, make good decisions, have good taste, and can manage up down and sideways well. And as they become more senior, they start to earn the "you're too important to [X]" executive scaffold: - EAs for admin/scheduling/todos - Chief of Staff to keep their directs on track - Sr. leaders working under them eager for opportunity, so take on projects, presentations, meetings, etc. They're still smart, and they're still hard working, and they still make good decisions, so they tend to orchestrate and use these tools at their disposal quite well, choosing what gets done by whom. But - they show up to board meetings with decks made by their team - they show up to sales meetings with prep docs done by the sales person - they share insights generated by some data team - they +@[ea] to schedule every meeting - someone reads & responds to their emails And their job becomes - charm customers - charm candidates - charm the team - charm the board - charm the market - have good ideas (for someone else to do) And before someone shouts "this just optimizes for people who are highly political!" I must emphasize: these people are still usually wicked smart, they're usually extremely charming, and they work really hard (earliest on, latest off.) They hang in the forest, not a tree. Their experience saves your butt once or twice. They just don't have to put their hands on a keyboard and do the things. Sometimes they *can't* put their hands on a keyboard and do the things, because they're in endless meetings and on endless trips to do the charming/idea things. But after awhile of this, their "doing the things" muscle atrophies. Your CMO can't write compelling copy. Your CPO doesn't look at designs anymore. Your CRO can't login to demo. Your VPE doesn't have the latest local env setup. And over time, as an exec, your ability to be wicked smart degrades with your distance from the work, especially when things like AI come and smack your team in the face. This is all to say, I have two warnings for you if you've made it this far: EXECS: Do not stop doing the things. Take on projects, write your docs, do your own damn analysis, and don't stop touching the work. Fix your calendar so you're not just bopping meeting to meeting, and use that big brain of yours do actually build something. TEAMS: Consider yourself lucky if you have a leadership team that can still/wants to do the things. Trust: you'd rather have a micromanagey CEO who drops suggested edits in your doc than a manager-class exec team that doesn't even know your doc exists. Your company will be better for the work, the specificity, the care that comes with a doing-the-things leadership team, than a organizes-the-work leadership team. And for all of you: AI will generate a little microcosm of the dynamic above, but for IC work. I love AI, but still think it's important to exercise the muscle daily of writing, coding, reading, speaking, thinking. All unused skills will atrophy. Make sure you get stronger, not weaker, with these new tools. Ok back to doing things 😎

Counting down to eTail Connect West! ⏳ Want to learn how Programmatic Direct Mail and Performance CTV are driving incremental outcomes at scale for leading brands? 📩 DM us to lock in a time to connect. See you in Coronado! #etail #retailmarketing #adtech @eTailNews

This week, we hosted our third-annual #Hackathon in downtown NYC—and the energy was off the charts. 🚀 Over 2.5 days, team members from Engineering, Data Science, Product, Campaign Operations, and Analytics & Insights came together to collaborate, experiment, and build. Every project was rooted in driving real business impact and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible at PebblePost. We’re so proud of the creativity, #innovation, and teamwork on display. Can't wait to see what we cook up next! 🔥

F. Scott Fitzgerald, can you feel it

Some common themes from the worlds most intimate Ecom conference, beanstalk: 1- profits are down this year. Everyone spent 6 months reworking supply chains. Maybe that means getting out of China. Maybe that means moving warehouses into the USA. But that work did cost time and profit potential. Going from duties free, cross border shipments to fully loaded NEW HIGHER tariffs and shipping from inside the USA is breaking the economics for a lot of businesses. 2- growth isn’t bad. 2022-2024 growth was a 4 letter word. Profit ruled everything around me. And, strangely, even if these brands can’t be profitable this year- there is more growth to be had than the past few years. 3- debates about the USA consumer. Is it strong? Are we in a recession? No one knows. For everyone shouting that we are falling off a cliff, someone else is putting up 60% growth. 4- channel expansion. Ai is coming. Agentic commerce will be the biggest disruption since mobile How can you best hedge it? Probably just be available everywhere. You don’t know who will win the chat race, and you don’t know what data they will prioritize. If Amazon and meta win, have to be on Amazon. If it is target buying from (who knows what could happen) you need to be there. The only hedge is to be everywhere, for everyone. 5- tik tok wasn’t the hot topic it was last year. Actually, advertising in general took a back seat. Ops and ai were where the energy was. Typically these turn into a tip swapping conference, with ads manager up and loaded. Naw- people just wanted to talk about how tired they are from all the warehouse moves. —— This is the generalized summary of talking to 400 brands, doing somewhere north of 20 billion all together. Wild times ahead. Wild times in the past. Wild times now. Wild times forever <3

Not to brag but I've been fielding a lot of job offers lately

🚨 Exciting news at PebblePost! 🚨 Our team just got even stronger—please join us in welcoming our new Chief Revenue Officer, Will Harrington! Here’s what Will had to say about stepping into the role: “PebblePost has the technology, the data, and the vision to lead the next era of performance marketing. What excites me most is the company’s ability to combine the precision and measurability of digital with the immersive power of TV—and deliver outcomes that marketers can trust.” Learn more about Will’s extensive track record in #adtech, including senior leadership positions at Criteo, Vayner3, and MiQ Digital, and why he's a great fit for our next growth phase: pebblepost.com/news/pebblepos… #Leadership #PerformanceMarketing #CTV

Everyone talks about brand building, but does it actually drive measurable, incremental sales? We spent £740k on a brand campaign to find out and the results are in. It's not what you think 👇

24x iROAS. 46% lower iCPA. One major shift in #CTV strategy. 🤩 After seeing strong results with PebblePost’s #Programmatic Direct Mail, a luxury jewelry brand extended its lookalike audiences to our Performance CTV solution and unlocked even bigger returns. CTV now has the highest iROAS of any channel in its media mix. 😮 Find out how the brand turned CTV from an awareness tool into an incremental revenue driver: pebblepost.com/blog/luxury-je… #adtech #performancemarketing #retailmarketing

Before you accept a leadership role, write down: 1. The mission 2. The current plan 3. What you'll change 4. Why it should work 5. How it could fail Don't skip #5. You can only win the game if you stay in it.

Parents know

Our experience has been really different, marketers are dying for simple ways to measure outcomes using a mix of incrementality, mmm and yes, last click. We've been offering always-on incrementality measurement for years, either driven by us or measurement platforms. (and yeah, you need an ID graph and an agreed upon conversion window)

@joe_zappa @airgups23 Tried that. Doesn't work. End of the day most marketers aren't savvy enough to measure anything that isn't last click.

audio advertising is going to explode very soon

@joe_zappa Totally Joe. Not cliched. Not robotic. Just authentic.

A little tip: remove the cliches from ChatGPT when you use it to write content. “Not x. Not y. Just z.” These cliches are becoming grating. It’s not using AI that’s the problem. It’s doing it with no editing. Give it a little human touch, folks.

@AdtechGod 👀

@AdtechGod Oh Noooo! FOMO…

@jacobaross Kind of already did it. youtu.be/FbJS5r3f5QE?fe…

What theme would be good for our NY event/Party in October? (Wrong answers only)