Program Your Sleep

I recently wanted to clear up space on my nightstand, so I moved my CPAP machine to one of the drawers in the nightstand. When it's not in use, I can curl the hose up in the drawer and close the drawer most of the way (only the power cord prevents full closure).  

I never really used the drawer, so it still has a fresh woodsy smell. So now so does the air that the CPAP machine brings in.   When I was replacing the air filter the other day, it hit me:

What if there were scented air filters or oils for CPAP machines?

Naturally, I threw a bag of coffee in the drawer.  But, what if there was a new opportunity here?

In the simplest form, you could have vanilla or lavender or any number of those scents they put in candles.

Most CPAPs have a compartment for distilled water, with a heater underneath to warm the water. I don't know if it would mess it up to have scented oils or Vicks Vaporub in the same compartment to deliver smells/medicine to you while you slept. Because if you could, a fancy CPAP machine could release different smells at different times, allowing you to program your sleep.  Maybe you start off with the smell of evergreens and after a few hours, the smell of the ocean and right before your alarm goes off, coffee or toast. This could launch a whole new line of premium CPAP machines.

2021 Charities

Welcome to 2021. As we start off this new year, it's almost as if last year didn't exist. But as I start to work on my taxes and look at where we made charitable contributions last year, I'm reminded of this yearly tradition to recommend a few places you might consider helping out in the new year. 2020 was so messed up that now as I look at last year's post, I realize I didn't even contribute to either recommendation. I will take care of that this week.

Please consider joining me in supporting these charities in 2021:

* No Kid Hungry - They feed kids. It's one of my wife's favorites. 

* Little Free Library Foundation - your gift helps them get books into more communities. 

* NAACP Legal and Education Defense Fund - they did a matching thing at work with the LDF last year and when I donated, I told them I did not want any solitications for future gifts and they honored my request. I haven't heard from them since. I know charities don't necessarily like that, but it means my gift wasn't spent on fundraising.

Charities on the naughty list for wasting my past donations on way too many mailings: Wounded Warrior and Sierra Club. Yes, Sierra Club. Oh my gosh, they send me so much crap and I've asked them to stop so many times. I don't believe they actually care about the environment. 

2020 Charities

* Bithiah's House

* RAICES (The Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services)

2019 Charities

* Autism Society

* Burbank Arts for All

* Women of Email

View-Time Optimization (VTO) is a bad idea

 I recently saw a post on LinkedIn suggesting "Send-Time Optimization is Dead, Long Live View-Time Optimization" but they're wrong.  VTO is a bad idea.

First, what is Send-Time Optimization (STO)?  

In your toolbox of "right message, right person, right time" STO is the best-guess about when you send your next email. 

For a long-standing subscriber, you can use it at the individual-level.  For segments and audiences with a number of newer subscribers, you can do it at the campaign level. And for prospects and brand-new customers (or if you have a lot of churn in your subscription base), you can do it at the program or organizational level.

Some drawbacks - it impacts forecasting and planning. You have to establish a window for deployment, so you have to carefully consider when to send the next email after that. It's also not useful with time-sensitive opportunities and limited-time sales. 

Also, behavior patterns change over time. If your analytical model is slow to catch a shift in trends or if there are events or competitive changes it has no way to be aware of or consider, it can end up being wrong in its predictions.

Still,  it has been proven to increase opens and clicks and decrease opt-outs (to a statistically significant degree), which makes it a win-win for customers and companies alike. Programmatic Automations, Journeys and Metered/Deferred Deployments are other methods with similar aims.

So, what is View-Time Optimization (VTO)?

In mid-2020, SendGrid announced an exclusive offering with VMG in a blog post and only really recommended it for Winback and Re-engagement Campaigns.  

This has apparently ended as now Validity is announcing an exclusive offering with with Verizon Media Group for VTO. There aren't a lot of details, but here's what I've been able to figure out.

Validity says the top email in a person's inbox is 2x as likely to be opened as even the second email. VTO happens entirely on the VMG side. When you open the app, a VTO-enabled email is placed at the top of your inbox. 

How it works

You tell Validity how many "credits" you want to apply to the campaign. This determines how many people will be treated to the VTO experience. 

You tell Validity how VMG can spot your VTO campaign. This can be a static subject line, a body tag or an X-Header, depending on what your ESP will allow. 

You also tell Validity what to do at the end of the campaign.  The options were not explained in the video. Hopefully it just places the rest in the inbox without any credit deducted. 

Then you send your campaign normally through your ESP. 

VMG recognizes your VTO-enabled campaign and holds it. As soon as the recipient opens their inbox (app or webmail), the campaign is placed into the top of their inbox. Because this doesn't rely on a tracking pixel/beacon, this will work even if a user has images off.  But, again, limited to AOL/Verizon customers.

So what will I learn from this campaign?

Your ESP will tell you that all messages were sent and delivered, even if they haven't yet made it into the customer's inbox. Bounces will still be handled in real-time. Where STO will tell you when the message was sent, you will have less analytics with VTO.

Campaign results will be available within the Validity portal 48 hours after the campaign concludes. (The end of the window you specify.) Because they are working with Verizon, they will have open and click rates, probably better than you get with your own ESP or Analytics tool that relies on a tracking pixel.  

Again, this is only for VMG mailboxes like Yahoo and AOL. For your own analytics, you might end up splitting AOL, Yahoo, Verizon.net and others into their own separate send so that you can match up your analytics to what you see in the Validity portal. They didn't say, but hopefully there's exportable data you can bring back to your own systems for additional analysis.

Questions that were unanswered after reading up on VTO on Validity's site:

• Do they still get notified as soon as the email is delivered if they have app notifications turned on? 
   
• What if multiple people pay for VTO to the same customer? Which message appears in that coveted top spot? Or does it work once for each app open? Or is your message delivered but no credit deducted if you don't get the top spot?
   
• What if you just keep the webmail open in a tab? Deliver normally with no credit deducted?
   
• What does this do for POP/IMAP? Deliver normally with no credit deducted?
   
• How does this work with messages or senders who are filtered or have been previously sent to spam?
   
• What does the "end of campaign" look like? Does it dump all emails into a user's inbox at the time that the last credit is spent? Does it dump them at the end of the window? But they do all eventually get delivered, right?
   
• Does the message "pop-in" after the app has loaded, or is it just waiting there at the top of the list?
   
• People are 2x more likely to open, but what's comparison rates for clicks, time-spent reading/scrolling, or opt-outs?

To Recap

This is a pay-for-play scheme limited only to a small number of the internet's inboxes that tries to game the system for people's limited time and attention. For some senders, it could lead to fatigue or have a negative impact by making it look like they're always sending emails. 

May require a re-thinking of how you assess efficacy of a campaign or at least considerations towards the change in behavior at these inboxes. 

Lastly, it rewards Verizon and Validity for monetizing what has been an open and free system. (Verizon has been rumored to be working to kill tracking pixels from ESPs, Litmus and others.)

Is it worth it?

I don't think so.  The application, coverage and utility will be limited, the overall metrics are unproven. I also think there are a lot of important unanswered questions. Validity can probably answer some of them, but have intentionally chosen not to in their current explanation of the program. 

(Cross-posted to LinkedIn)

Coffee Math

Someone gave me a 3-bag subscription to Trade Coffee* and I was trying to figure out how much a cup of coffee actually cost.  My wife and I were unsuccessful in our Google searches, so eventually I found some space on the whiteboard and figured it out. Posting it here in case it fills in the gap of missing info on Google for a future searcher.

So, I need to know how many mugs of coffee I can get from one bag of coffee grounds.

I am using the "1 scoop per cup" method for ground coffee in a drip coffee maker. A scoop is traditionally 2 tablespoons. My scoop seems to be about that, though I haven't measured for sure, so your measurements may vary, but here's how you can figure it out.

Bag of coffee: 12 oz

10 scoops: 2.1 oz

Number of times I can get 10 scoops from a bag: approx 5.71

Amount of water to reach the "10" line on the coffee maker: 50 fl oz

Amount of coffee my mug holds: 12 fl oz

Number of mugs of coffee per "10": approx 4.17 

Multiply those together and I get about 24 mugs.  

Divide that by the maximum cost of a bag ($20) and I get $0.83 per mug. Maybe even round up to $1/mug since scoops might not always be as level as they were for this test.

*This is an affiliate link, if you buy coffee, I get some free coffee.  You can also visit drinktrade.com directly if you don't like the idea of being tracked or if you think I wrote this for the purposes of the free coffee and you don't want me to get free coffee, that's fine, I get it. I'm still slightly undecided about them. The first bag they sent me I didn't care for at all. They have a first-bag guarantee so they replaced it with another bag I do like, but I haven't decided yet if I will continue the subscription or go back to ordering random bags of different kinds from Amazon.

One Person, One Vote

I've been sitting on this post, incomplete for two years. Sitting at home sick today, I'm just going to post it. I'm no political scientist, but I've been very frustrated around the conversation (and stupid comments) I hear about the Electoral College.

"Los Angeles and New York shouldn't decide the election." 

If you're saying this, what you're really saying is "I don't believe every American should be entitled to an equal vote." Usually, this is said by people who hold unpopular views. That is, if everyone got an equal vote, their political party wouldn't retain power. (These people seem to confuse geography with population and like to show those red/blue maps when they really should show purple maps or show maps to inflate/shrink states by population.)

"My vote doesn't count because no matter how I vote, my state will vote x so why bother?"

 I used this excuse in the past to vote third party, believing I was sending a message. I don't think that message got through to anyone and here we are stuck with the same two frustrating parties, pushed further and further to the edges by modern politics. Also, if you look at a major state like California, 61% votes for Clinton and 32% voted for Trump and all 55 votes went to Clinton.  In Texas, Trump got 52% and Clinton 43% and all 38 votes went to Trump. That's an opportunity to discourage a lot of people from voting and it can also discourage candidates from voting for a state they already assume they've won/lost.

Let's look at the power of the Electoral College. Not only does it turn a state into a collective making each voice feel less important, but it's also quite uneven.

I've been frustrated with the charts I could find on the Electoral College, so I ended up making my own (below). Basically, I wanted to look at the value of a vote and show unequal things are.

Let's say that we got rid of the Electoral College but everyone kept their relative power. We'd give eligible voters in Florida one ticket each. But we'd give eligible voters in Wyoming 3.59 tickets each. 

Does that seem right? Should people in Wyoming have such an outsized impact on how we vote? The answer might depend on whether or not Wyoming votes the way you want them to, but that's pretty selfish and doesn't feel very American.

Politicians that had to campaign for each and every vote might also exhibit a more moderate stance that respects each American and works to improve the situation for all Americans.

Encourage Your Kids

I was part of a podcast yesterday and one of the hosts told a story of when they were a child they really wanted to be a radio DJ. Their mom told them that because of their stutter, they'd never be a DJ.

Reminded me of a time when I had wanted to be a drummer and my mom told me I lacked the rhythm.  I probably think of this at least once a year, decades later.

Our moms would probably be mortified if they knew that they had said this or that it had stuck with us our entire lives. 

As a result, I've tried to avoid ever telling my children they lack something necessary to follow their dreams. Instead, I've tried to support, encourage, provide space and materials for whatever they've wanted to explore. 

Some things don't pan out. Sometimes they're down on themselves for something they've attempted and failed at. When this happens, I try to encourage them to see if there's anything they can learn from it, and if it's something they really do want to do. Because if it is, they need to persevere. Practice makes perfect, some things come easy to some people, but other people have to work at it. 

But I'm never going to say that my children can't do something they set their mind to. If it's dangerous or illegal or expensive, we might have to chat about the wisdom of something or its impact on other people or their unincarcerated future or how they're going to fund such a venture. But my kids are never going to hear they're not good enough to attempt something they are excited about.

Please, people, be careful with the words you use, you never know how long they will bounce around in someone else's head.

Social Distancing: We Screwed Up

Hindsight is always 20/20, but I sure wish we had taken a different approach to staying home.

When we were all sent to our homes, they should have told us that it would only be "for a time" - that they'd figure out what it would mean for us to get back to normal and that they'd get back to us. Maybe a week, two weeks top and they'd have a rough plan for what reopening looked like: the stages, the goals and metrics. Instead, it's been open-ended and repeatedly extended. That isn't healthy, it isn't tenable and it's like the never-ending car ride where we're all saying "are we there yet?" and dad keeps changing the answer.  

So now we have the "stay at home" group vs the "stop telling me what to do" group.

Both groups want a return to "normalcy" but we're fighting with each other. If, instead, we had a set of goals and metrics that the governor and mayor were regularly reporting, then we could see the progress we were making.  People would still protest and fight, but everyone would at least agree they were looking in the same direction: towards reopening.  

I know the people in charge are trying to figure this out just like all of us, but we need something to cling to, something to look forward to. 

Personally, I don't care. I've enjoyed staying home. I'm fortunate enough to still be employed.  The weather has been nice, I haven't had my commute, I've gotten more time with my family, I've done some cleaning around the house that would have otherwise never occurred. I've been drinking coffee, harvesting a lot of roses and doing some weeding in the yard.  If this keeps up, I'll probably end up taking a few days off to build a fence. The argument that we all need to be in the same office to collaborate and get stuff done has been disproved. And somehow, amazingly, we've all managed to do OK with only a single bathroom. I'm fine as-is. I'm an introvert with my family close. I know that's not the case for everyone, especially my extrovert friends who are trapped alone and begging for Zoom calls.

Hang in there, peeps. I drove past the Citadel Outlet Mall today and their massive screens said "Tough times don't last, tough people do" and "Los Angeles Strong" and "This Too Shall Pass."

It will.