No Treats, Just Tricks
Janessa Drainville said earlier on LinkedIn, “Please, for the love of Marketing, do not send me ANYTHING labeled ‘No Tricks, Just Treats’ this year”. CHALLENGE. ACCEPTED.
If Trick or Treat is supposed to be mischief from the youth to toilet paper your house if you don’t hand over a piece of candy, then the marketing equivalent would be mild mischief from me, the marketer/salesperson unless you hand over money. To hand over money, I have my Highly Opinionated Skill Fixer, which can convert custom GPTs and Gemini Gems (both of which are retiring or retired) to Agent Skills format, a necessity since ChatGPT is retiring GPTs and Gemini is retiring gems. This is actually useful, so I suppose it’s not much of a trick, but it is a blatant attempt to get you to spend some money. OR, I have the most useless course in the world for a dollar. To be clear, this is a trick. Now for the rest of the tricks. YouTube trick: This is yesterday’s YouTube video on my channel about Chinese open weights models and why people are ignoring them, but I appended the sub_confirmation=1 query parameter to the video, so if you click the link, it tries to subscribe you to my channel. Tricky. Analytics trick: always embed dates in your UTM campaign tracking codes so you can easily filter by day, month, and year in analytics reports, even at the pageview level. Video editing trick: Instead of clapping once at the start of a video to sync the audio and video, clap three times - twice quickly, pause, then once. It makes it incredibly easy to sync audio later in an editor because it’s much easier to align. Do it at the beginning AND end of a shot. Generative AI trick: append this sentence to the end of the first prompt in a chat/task, and you won’t ever need another prompting framework: “Ask me up to 20 clarifying questions until you have enough information to succeed at the task.” Then answer the questions. Home care trick: Got a temperature-sensitive pet or a newborn baby? Use a sous vide immersion circulator to warm their bath water to the exact temperature you want, no guessing, no scalding, no cold baths. Please do not put your pet or child in a plastic sous vide bag. This is just a trick for warming the water. Gardening trick: Want to start seeds without buying a ton of gear? If your workplace uses Keurig K-Cups (or similar), remove the foil from the K-Cup and add a bit of potting soil to the coffee grounds. Perfect seed starter with a drain hole built right in. Personal care trick: Got a new hairbrush? Put 1 rubber band vertically between the bristles and 1 rubber band horizontally. Then when you want to clean out clogged hair, pull the rubber bands, remove the hair, and put them back. Kitchen cleaning trick: Tough baked on grime on stainless steel or glass? Use drain cleaner to burn off the grime, then rinse and put in the dishwasher. Do NOT use on plastic or aluminum. Holiday gaming trick: Learn how to second deal and bottom deal cards, then deal yourself the WORST hand in the game so the game ends quickly, or at least you can excuse yourself. No one complaints about cheating if you’re intentionally losing. Okay, that’s enough tricks, and hopefully it was a bit of a treat by itself. See you on Sunday for the regular newsletter, Chris Invite your friends and earn rewards
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