Some people really benefit from hearing advice that everyone knows, for the same reason we keep schools open despite every subject in them having been taught before.
In that spirit, here's some quick Things Many People Find Too Obvious To Have Told You Already.
Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. You think you are an exception; you are not. You should not insist on an NDA to talk about it; nobody serious will engage in contract review over an idea, and this will mark you as clueless.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
I think the economic logic of this is inevitable, in that you’ll ~need video to get your N+1 marketing post through the noise on social media even as a Taylor Swift, and your choices are either a $100k shoot *per post* or a relatively junior employee with some taste.
Also expect the friendly neighborhood barbecue joint to get the same-y Madison Avenue look on their ads versus the Comic Sans and pink aesthetic that they might otherwise have ended up with.
“Is that shoot really $100k?”
It probably is if you do it the way her media operation would do it. You can get it done scrappily for like $4-10k. Partly that’s because major brands with professional review teams are buying a different artifact than “Just the file please.”
Listening to a podcast (Trillions) a guest made an interesting claim:
Guest: You know when you swipe a card at [coffee shop] part of the fee pays for your ability to reverse the transaction with the coffee shop. But come on, no one reverses transactions with [coffee shops].
I have removed the name of the coffee shop so that no one believes I am commenting on private financial details when I say: oh you sweet summer child.
You and I will likely go through life having very few arguments with baristas. Baristas do not experience their lives as including very few arguments with customers.
The existence of YouTube does not make reading and writing less valuable. It gives children a constant companion who is responsive, preternaturally so, to their desires and curiosity.
(I devote a bit of brain space—not too much but I pray not to little—to making sure that constant companion does not make the entire world look like a pale imitation of itself, which would be wrong but could easily look accurate to the subjective experience of a child.)
“Any parenting tips?”
I do not have the constant fights about screen time some parents report, do not know how much of that is due to decisions I’ve made, and have one regret: we went two years without a TV due to moving and I should have made that permanent versus “completing.”
(In particular note the cap on cash back and the carveout for particular transaction types which some users are able to generate arbitrarily high amounts of or would naturally have arbitrarily high amounts relative to “normal” CC use.)
“How does this happen?”
Credit card PMs are extremely aware that there are multiple different personas for credit card use out there. One of them has a name in various banks, but you can think of them as Mercenary Financial Enthusiast.
If I can give a slightly more optimistic take on this: much of how commercial software development is done trades some resources for others, in ways that might not be rational for people with very different strengths than e.g. AppAmaGooFaceSoft or BigCo customers.
A lot of AWS services exist so that two teams don't need to have a meeting.
That *is not a criticism of either AWS or those two teams.* That is a preference one can have about time allocation and corporate structure, and capitalism will help you satisfy it.
If you are not constrained on organizational complexity, if meetings with yourself are free, then a lot of the standard stack that BigCo uses is both overkill and underkill at the same time.
So strange that card program managers make such a show of doing this careful balancing act when everyone who reads the Atlantic knows that the real source of rewards is cross-subsidization of elite cardholders by poor people. </sarcasm>
Less sarcastically: it’s a math problem conducted by people who are pretty good at math, and the marching orders they get are “In general and in steady state, all of our card programs should be margin accretive. Make it happen. If you can’t you’ll need a senior signoff.”
(The above is not private information from any particular issuer but rather is a pastiche representing industry standard practice.)