As we shift to a fully remote workforce, the life of the DevOps engineer (just like everybody else’s) has been thrown into some level of chaos. Handling a distributed workforce is an organizational challenge even before you even consider the effect it can have on development. And there’s clear anxiety (though not necessarily one rooted in reality ) across management around the ability of remote teams to deliver, as McKinsey found in a report from a few months ago .

The silver lining to this abrupt, forced remote workforce is that we have the opportunity to usher in true digital transformation in DevOps. This may seem like a time to freak out and despair, and the absolute worst time for a digital upheaval, but the truth is that we’re now in a position to automate, delegate, and organize our infrastructure in a way that wasn’t possible even five years ago.

You no longer have to appeal to management to be digital-first when it’s the only choice they’ve got for at least a few months. A fully distributed time is when DevOps truly has the potential to shine and become some form of the slightly wordy ‘BizDevOps’ term.

In fact, now’ s the time that DevOps can be the hero of the organization . In a time when we’re all desperately looking for a win, IT and DevOps can be in a position to innovate and deliver internally and externally.

Automation versus manual labor

Now is a great time for you to evaluate exactly what works and doesn’t work within your DevOps efforts, and specifically where you’re putting you and your team’s time and energy.

I wrote nearly a year ago that DevOps professionals should trust in automation — and now is the time where you’re going to have to do just that.

Simply put, companies are going to have more limited budgets, hiring freezes (in the best case scenario) will be likely, and this means making sure that you can do more than simply keep the lights on and the sites running.

And as you lose much of your in-person and physical presences for your businesses, you’re going to be under more pressure to deliver quickly and consistently.

I also want to be clear that I’m not simply referring to public-facing sites. In a recent webinar I did I discussed how many modern companies’ internal sites require the same level of care, and arguably even more scrutiny for a DevOps professional.

When an external site goes down, the client’s unhappy, but when an internal site goes down, your boss knows. And they’re not happy.

Automating your infrastructure consistently is helpful even when you’re dealing with a few sites, but it’s essential while managing hundreds or thousands of sites (and that’s when you need to think about FleetOps ).

It’s time to remember what devops actually means

In an ideal world, development and operations should be on the same page, and in a utopia they’re working together at all times.

This means simple things like clear communication of any changes that are happening, and consistent use of scripts and tools across your infrastructure.

This may mean new organizational changes in annotation and reporting for application code (for example), so that your distributed team isn’t constantly trying to work out what’s going on.

This in particular is crucial as your team becomes fully distributed — you can’t just walk to someone’s desk, and you definitely can’t rely on them to pick up the phone or check Slack at exactly the moment you need them to.

Be the hero

As I’ve hinted at, a distributed company is one that no longer silos DevOps outside of core business processes.

Our new rush to a totally digital-first world means that you’re going to see sections of the company buckle under the weight of inefficiencies they never had to fix.

It could be that your marketing department has a hundred microsites that are all managed across a mess of databases, or your university’s admissions department has physical servers literally under desks.

But now is the time that you don’t have to justify why sweeping changes have to be made to make your company faster and more efficient.

As your organization seeks to quickly digitize and “cloudify” itself to face current social and economic challenges, DevOps can take a lead role in spurring transformation, driving value, and keeping the business afloat.

Here’s what Freakonomics gets wrong about advertising

Freakonomics recently applied their formula of Pop Economics to put a challenge to the efficacy of advertising: “ Does Advertising Actually Work? ” where the hosts lay out a compelling narrative to suggest that advertising may have little uplift… but it’s just not that simple.

“Guess what? Advertising doesn’t work!” makes a great narrative hook for a podcast, but it’s not helpful if what you’re trying to do is measure advertising effectiveness.

My concern here is that a lot of decision-makers believe Freakonomics’ general premise that advertising is “guilty until proven innocent.” However, anecdotes aren’t a substitute for a rigorous measurement strategy bespoke to a brand’s characteristics and conditions.

Instead of trying to find “smoking guns” that highlight the inadequacy of advertising, the more productive path for a CEO or CMO is to understand the inadequacy of measuring advertising correctly.

How do I know? Over the last 20 years, I’ve measured advertising for hundreds of brands and witnessed the refinement of measurement to a point where advertisers can reliably predict business outcomes.

So let’s do a point-by-point walkthrough of how to think about advertising measurement in a more productive, less knee-jerk way:

Freakonomics conclusion #1 — Teasing out the causal part of TV uplifts is a near-impossible task

Freakonomics presumes here that academic studies have failed a number of times to understand the causal impact of ads on sales because there was no randomized experiment to examine.

While randomized experiments are preferable when conducting research, they aren’t always achievable , especially in the case of advertising where countless variables must be accounted for.

Evaluation techniques, such as Market Mix Modelling (or MMM) can pull apart all sales drivers without the need for prior tests to be set up.

Freakonomics conclusion #2 — You can’t disentangle seasonality and media uplifts

Brands will indeed — and quite rightly — advertise during seasonal peaks. The podcast puts forward an endogeneity problem: brands that advertise over seasonal peaks are getting advertising uplift confused with seasonality (seasonal demand spikes that would have happened anyway) and “it’s impossible to disentangle” the two.

Approaching this problem the wrong way can cost brands a great deal in mis-allocated spending. Seasonality and media uplift can indeed be disentangled by analyzing a longer time series of data.

For example, analyzing three years of data builds up as much real-world behavior as possible to inform the measurement model, giving you three chances of isolating seasonal effects (e.g., 3x Christmas, 3x Easter, etc).

Also, advertising when customers organically look for your product doesn’t have to be a bad thing. For some brands, seasonal peaks are the highest-ROI opportunity for advertising, so it makes the most financial sense to advertise over the highest possible baseline of demand.

Freakonomics conclusion #3 — Using randomiz ed experiments to measure advertising uplifts in its entirety

Freakonomics presents randomized experiments — or A/B testing — as the best method to measure media uplifts.

While I think A/B testing is great — it is after all one of the most common means of measuring uplifts — it has its shortfalls. It can miss the mark on advertising uplift as it:

Market Mix Modelling considers the initial sales lift of the advertising, as well as measuring the short to medium-term impacts, sometimes lasting up to three years. These kinds of longer-term branding impacts can add around 250% on the initial uplift.

Freakonomics conclusion #4 — TV ads are unprofitable

It’s put forward that TV is unprofitable, and the uplifts are underwhelming. Now to break it down, I’d say there are two things going here: one is the uplift, and the second is the way ROI is measured.

Firstly, the initial uplift suggested by Freakonomics of between 1% and 10% rings about true, but this is true of a consumer packaged goods (CPG) brand, which is the use case the paper is derived from.

Media uplifts for CPG are notoriously small, not because the media impacts are nominal, but because CPG brands tend to spend 10x their total media budgets on trade promotions (temporary price reductions, multibuys, etc.) and this dwarfs media uplifts. Outside of CPG, you can expect to see media uplifts anywhere between 5% and 40% of sales.

Secondly, the ROI calculation is a bit squiffy — they are calculating the marginal ROI rather than the absolute ROI. Freakonomics puts it thusly:

This is a very different point to whether the advertising is paying back or not. It is simply saying the ROI will increase if the budget is reduced. It is not an absolute ROI.

Increases in spending will tend to lead to lower ROI/efficiency, but not the absolute profit uplift. In my experience, 8 times out of 10 clients can increase their spend on media and enjoy higher absolute profits.

Advertising doesn’t always work — the key is being able to tell when

While entertaining, sensational anecdotes from Freakonomics aren’t helpful for brands and decision-makers when it comes to understanding ad effectiveness. The key is to measure and find out what works specifically for your brand.

In your personal life, I hope I haven’t diminished your enjoyment of Freakonomics. In your professional life though, I hope this has been useful input for the next time you are drawn into an “advertising doesn’t work” debate.

5 hot tips for startups to create a strong brand from day one

The importance of brand building has increased significantly in recent years. There are two main reasons why. On the one hand, today’s organizations must show an attitude in order to be successful. On the other hand, good design and the creation of an attractive experience are increasingly becoming the decisive factor in the market.

For Aaron Rasmussen, founder of the learning platforms Masterclass and Outlierrg, we are currently even entering the golden age of design . More than ever before, successful branding provides orientation and differentiation in the market, it allows customers and employees to identify themselves with organizations and eventually generates real, measurable value.

Even though most founders are aware of the importance of brand building, many prefer to postpone it “until later.” Especially in their early stages, startups often experience major changes such as fundamental adjustments to their business model. They are just too busy to deal with branding or the budget is prioritized differently.

However, postponing the development of your brand is not an option, because all conscious and unconscious decisions of your organization will have an influence on it, with positive and negative consequences.

It’s simply impossible not to have a brand. Even young companies should therefore take the reins right from the start rather than leaving the subject of brand building to chance or even to their competition.

But what is the best way to approach building your brand as a startup? In contrast to more mature companies and large corporates, there is no need for an elaborate, complex process. However, it pays off to consider the following five steps from the very beginning:

‘Minimum Viable Brand’

Your brand is a story that translates everything about your organization into a tangible and visible reality. However, constant changes based on ever new insights are part of a startup’s daily life.

In analogy to the MVP in the product area, brand building should be approached dynamically. Your ‘Minimum Viable Brand’ consists of fixed strategic core elements and corporate values, but is able to adapt to changes in target groups, markets, and value propositions.

When your business strategy changes, the brand also needs to be adapted — either fundamentally or only superficially, for example in its messaging. These adaptations not only support your business model, but also hold team and organization together.

Dynamic design system

Your brand and its visual appearance go together hand in hand. Even if the visual representation and communication should change over time, it’s worth thinking through the most important brand design elements from the very beginning and define them accordingly.

Permanently used names, logos, and basic colors — to which you remain faithful over a certain period of time — will become positive assets for your brand. This way, synergies and clarity in the daily work with the brand and in communication are created right from the start — you’ll save energy and costs in the long term.

The extended brand system, including details such as images, illustrations, or layouts, can always be further developed and the brand will grow step by step as a strong part of the organization.

Holistic approach

Especially as a startup, it’s important to always look at your own brand in its entirety. Only if all visible and invisible elements speak the same language, you’ll be able to build and establish your brand the way you intend to.

For example, it’s not helpful to formulate the perfect brand story and communicate it via one touch point, but express and communicate something completely different to your customers via another touch point. This automatically leads to external and internal incomprehension and will negatively impact your brand.

It’s true: an imperfect but still consistent brand experience across all touch points is more valuable in the long run, than one perfect staging. Even though your brand is “work in progress,” it will remain authentic and true to itself.

Pragmatism across applications

In order to also keep track of expenses, startups should initially focus on the most necessary applications with regard to their brand. Are you at a stage in which an investor pitch deck and a simple website are sufficient, or do you already have to think through the entire experience of your product in detail?

For a young startup with a physical product, a shop template works just as well as an elaborately programmed website, as long as the core idea and basic elements of the brand are implemented accordingly.

In the next step, when it’s clear which brand touchpoints are really decisive for your business, the brand identity can be further developed exactly there. The motto is: go only with what you really need first. As your company “grows up,” the investment in your brand should not only increase, but also become more focused.

Finding a suitable partner

Not everyone needs a large agency or consultancy to take care of building their brand. The decisive factor is your own situation and perspective. In some cases a good freelancer or an experienced in-house designer will do the job.

Decision makers should always make sure to find a partner who understands their startup in all its dimensions — entrepreneurial, strategic, cultural, creative, communicative — and who can advise accordingly and grow with the organization.

This decision therefore has a lot to do with your own gut feeling, in addition to all external conditions. After all, no business partner represents the brand better than the founders themselves.