Issue #185

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This is issue no. 185. The last issue had a 🔥51.26% open rate with 4.04% of you going to this article on the Amazon Echo's increasing relevance in eCommerce. Brief: Tom Brady's September ad filming ends up winning in more ways than one. GoDaddy's Super Bowl ads score big. The history of content marketing [infographic]. The "AMP" (accelerated mobile pages) launched an ad product.

A reader submitted this eloquent quote on the collective goal of  "Two PM":

Everyone respects the specialist, who is deeply informed in his or her area of expertise, but can seem a little narrow. Someone of wide but superficial knowledge is easily dismissed as a dilettante. But occasionally one comes across someone whose knowledge is both wide-ranging and deep, and such a person we call a polymath.

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And 🕺🏾3 of 3 Partnership Opportunities have been filled. Email me at web@2pml.com to discuss any additional opportunity. 

Today's Top Intelligence (12 Reads)


Why Snap's IPO valuation is reasonable? CB Insights used their data analytics software to track Snap's growth and longterm viability. Read here. 

Last Word: BREAKING THROUGH ON THE INTERNET


An excerpt By Ben Thompson, Stratechery.com (subscribe): 

  • Before the Internet, when distribution was the bottleneck, the optimal strategy was to maximize the available throughput. The best example is consumer packaged goods: companies like Proctor & Gamble built massive brands that were designed to appeal to the broadest swaths of population possible, maximizing the return on the effort and expense necessary to advertise and secure retail space. In the case of politics, this manifested as a push by the parties for broadly acceptable candidates who could appeal to the middle.
  • Internet companies, on the other hand, have effectively infinite throughput. Amazon, for example, unbound by the need for shelf space and capitalizing on its transformation into an e-commerce platform, can plausibly bill itself as “The Everything Store”; products are found not through browsing but by search. This, by extension, means that products need to be wanted, not simply recognized — and the same goes for Google’s impact on politics.
  • Facebook, as is its wont, supercharges these effects: instead of users “pulling” out content they are interested in, the algorithm “pushes” content based on its capability of driving engagement. And what drives engagement? Emotion and passion. That may mean a funny product video, or, in the case of politics, politicians who eschew the middle and run to the extremes.