@brentsum I started working on this book way back in 2009, so needless to say, there have been a lot of challenges :). @jwmares thankfully came along and rescued it from a dormant state, and then we were off to the races, or so we thought! The biggest challenge was yet to reveal itself: editing.
Our first draft was roughly 350 pages, and we ended the first edition with roughly 250, and this second edition is much better edited down to around 200 (with new sections added as well). For the first edition we did I think 6 editing passes, and eventually had to just put it out, only to be finally totally cleaned up to the state we wanted in this upcoming second edition.
Editing was so tough because the scope of the project is so vast, trying to give a useful primer on all 19 channels in addition to a framework to wade through them all. It was a constant struggle of what to include and what not to include, and how to organize each chapter, aside from making the prose good itself. For each chapter, we ended up with hundreds of comments to wade through and widdle down to the final version.
@brentsum I actually think having a co-author made it much easier. At least for me, having someone I had to be accountable to made me do the hard work of sitting down to write.
Writing a book is f'ing hard.
@nateliason we structured the 19 channels covered in the book to be pretty catch-all, e.g. Offline Ads, Social & Display Ads and Existing Platforms often pick up some of the "new hotness" you might see in emerging app platforms like Snapchat or Periscope/Meerkat. We broadly advise throughout the book, however, to have your ear to the ground about these new places to market as they are often the places with the highest conversion because they're not yet saturated.
In fact, if you're absolutely first to an area you can have some ridiculous conversions. DuckDuckGo was one of the first advertisers on reddit and saw this type of thing -- 7-10% CTRs at the beginning at very low cost since they were just experimenting with the platform. Because of these outsized returns, I suggest keeping an eye out for these things. A more recent example would have been doing podcast ads before they got bought up over the past year.
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