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Started reading
November 18, 2018
The Ads team takes users and turns them into money. The Growth team takes money and turns it into users. Together they form the counterweighted yin-yang of Facebook.
How advertising works is effectively a call-and-response of names,
great digital powers to control identity, targeting, and attribution,
Mobile, desktop, and offline:
like Axciom, Experian, Epsilon, Merkle, and Neustar
They suck in what’s known as customer relations management (CRM) data from most big retailers, basically the rap sheet on each and every customer—the data holy of holies for them.
means online advertising can get away with being a thousand times less effective than mail, and still come out even in terms of your marketing return.
That join, between a cookie and personal information, is then sold and resold a bazillion times a day to whoever is willing to pay for
high-fidelity, persistent, and immutable pseudonym
The way Facebook sussed out anything: it mooched information from potential acquirees and business partners via meetings of dubious good faith, and then figured out how to hack the outside world to its advantage. It’s what every large company with incumbent leverage does, incidentally.
real-time ads exchange
The exchange would have separate data stores with billions of lines of data, reflecting the various data joins to the outside world we had made.
contact machines all over the world for bids and ads in real time, and react to bids
A company decides it wants to “float” part of its equity on the public markets, allowing employees and founders to sell private shares to pay them off for years of service, as well as sell shares out of the corporate treasury to have some money in the bank.
To mitigate the risk, the bank convinces the offering company to expect a lower price, while simultaneously jacking up what real price the market will bear with a zealous sales pitch to the market’s deepest pockets.
Back in the days of floor traders, the “specialists” responsible for trading that stock weighed the amount of buying versus selling interest, and calculated a reasonable “midmarket” price.
now had a mountain of money to recruit the best engineers, acquire budding competitors, and outspend rivals on product development, all with minimal dilution of the shareholders
“Stock X Pops on First Day of Trading and Declared a Success,” instead think “Founders and employees just got completely screwed, and the bankers and their wealthy clients made fortunes.”
The people listening for your presence in billions of such requests per day are known as “demand-side platforms”
would always aim to create monopoly pricing power and maintain information asymmetry, rather than drive true innovation.
performance of Facebook’s ads and identity data
the ad servers that feed you the flashing pixels in the ad all work with the standardized sizes.
The analytics software that slices and dices your data by publisher, ad size, and placement on the page also assumes the standard sizes.
Look: the advertiser doesn’t trust its agency, the agency doesn’t trust its trading desk, the trading desk doesn’t trust the ads-buying software it’s using, and the ads-buying technology company doesn’t trust the exchanges.
The ad server isn’t merely a data server spewing forth pixels on demand; it’s also the accounting system that decides what gets delivered when, to whom, how often, and where on the Internet.
viewthrough: the physical viewing of an ad, but with no resulting immediate action.
online retargeting.
months
You learn that what matters in a big company is to avoid falling victim to firing or layoffs, and to appear important and critical to the company’s mission.
You make sure to form allegiances and friendships with your peer managers, particularly in organizations like sales or business development that you’ll need to push your business agenda forward.
You’re middle management: you’re the necessary layer between the visionaries and risk-takers
That’s the nature of Valley success, however: you try ten things, based mostly on random hunches, a few key product insights, and whatever internal mythologies your culture reveres.
