technology. science. marketing.
The more I learn about food, the more I’m amazed by how much science is involved in the things we eat. My most recent food interest is in sous-vide cooking. It’s a method of cooking food in a plastic bag in a water bath. This allows you to evenly cook your food consistently all the way through without overcooking it. In other words, the interior and exterior of your food will be the same amount of “doneness.” Wild.
What you see below is steak prepared sous-vide style.
There are a handful of iPhone apps I use on a regular basis that enhance my life. Here’s my list (in no particular order):
Spotify is a music streaming service with on-demand access to millions of songs. It’s a music discovery, internet radio, and a way to share music with your friends all in one application. My favorite music app of all time.
One of my favorite childhood memories of coding was during a class project when I was about 8 or 9 years old. I had a dinky metal car wired to a computer, and the assignment was to give it various commands to move it from point A to point B. I loved it. The funny thing is, I specifically remember being surprised that I loved it because a) I didn’t like cars at the time and b) punching a bunch of random commands on a black screen seemed uninteresting. It wasn’t until I witnessed the car moving it hit me what I had just done. A few short years later, I was creating html websites and learning CSS from whatever I could find on Yahoo!.
Today, I don’t code often, but when I do it’s rewarding.
I support Code.org and bringing computer programming courses to schools. =)
I am an information junkie that reads just about anything I get my hands on – books, articles, blogs, advertisements, magazines, billboards, tweets and my most recent addition, food and ingredient labels. This may sound like a lot to absorb, but all of these things combined don’t even come close to how overwhelmed I feel when I wake up each morning and check my email inbox. I scroll through pages and pages of attention-grabbing subject lines like:
When I see the flood of these unread emails, a brief panic goes through me and I immediately skim the subject lines and do a single group delete. Done. Immediate relief. If I’m looking for something in particular, I may peek at a couple of emails, but those usually get zapped too.
I know what you’re thinking, “You could just unsubscribe from those emails.” You’re right, I could. However, I’m not going to just in case there comes a time I will want those emails. 99% of the time I’ll probably delete them all, but for that measly 1% I’m going to endure the daily pain.
It’s stressful being a consumer.
Then I got to thinking, marketers need to know their audience better.
Seth Godin writes,
So true. No one, especially nowadays, appreciates feeling like they’re being mass marketed to, and I get it – the idea of businesses knowing your buying patterns and interests is creepy. However, whether we want to admit it or not, there is some level of expectation that businesses should have an inkling of what we want. It’s almost offensive to receive “recommendations” or “suggestions” from websites and businesses when they are way off and totally wrong. Right?
Take Netflix recommendations for example. When I first signed up as a member, over 6 years ago, I’d flip through a ton of random hodge podge selection of movies. Fast forward to today, and I love what gets recommended to me. Perhaps too much.
Data. Data. Data. It’s out there. And as marketers, we just need to be better about slicing, dicing and making sense of it all.
You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.
– Jim Rohn