Have you heard about Ockham’s razor?

No, it’s not vintage style shaving equipment, it is a principle and an interesting one at that.

Concepts, products, plans all should be simple to understand and shouldn’t assume or add in elements it does not need. The razor here refers to shaving off unnecessary elements.

A quote from Seth Godin’s blog –

When an unexpected event occurs, we look for stories, coincidences, supernatural causes and other forms of solace to explain something that frightens or surprises us. But unexpected events are usually caused by simple mechanisms.

How we react and respond to these events as a culture, on the other hand, is complicated indeed.

What this means is that not only should we create simple ideas but also solve ‘complex’ looking events and problems simply.

Onto the Weekly Wrap

Image SEO is often overlooked but can drastically improve your overall rankings. Itamar Blauer shares how alt text, image configurations, and more tips improve the page experience and rankings. The general logic is to make images great looking, accessible along with balancing the backend energy it takes to load these images.

It’s great when things get easier, especially with media planning. Get Revue’s Cody Plofker shares his exact strategy for the upcoming year considering trends, goals and highlighting retargeting strategies. One thing to remember – paid search or social media ads are created not to acquire a customer at any cost or least cost but to get the right kind of customer to see your product and become an advocate over time.

Amanda Natividad is back with another informative thread, this time on content marketing success. Often we’re unable to bring our content and our goals together. We know the answer is to be engaging, but how? One of the interesting ideas was the Influence Gap. It’s a framework that shows the public view of your brand and what possible media outlets can be right.

We all know the success that email marketing has shown in the past 2 years, now to keep the ship sailing newsletters have to become more engaging and Marketing Examined shares precisely how it’s done. A lot of these ideas naturally are about appearance, using emojis in subject lines, gif like profile photos any many more. All in moderation of course.

Brian Bouroque’s Twitter thread highlights something we all want to hear, the paradoxes of marketing the great ideas that changed the course of business one too many times. The most fun one – Apple, how they used the smallest thing the iPod to relaunch and make themselves relevant again. what they really did was create a cultural shift with technology, a mission they’ve been dedicated to since forever.