Author: Jeff Cassman

Meta’s Andromeda Update Just Made Creativity King

Posted on by Jeff Cassman

Over on LinkedIn, my son Michael asked a great question:

Here’s a detailed answer from ChatGPT for advertising geeks:

✅ What is Andromeda (in plain English)

  • Meta describes Andromeda as a next-gen ad retrieval engine — essentially the system that selects which ad (out of many) gets shown to which user. The MTM Agency+3Engineering at Meta+3Foxwell Digital+3

  • It’s built on large-scale ML and high-throughput hardware (e.g., NVIDIA Grace Hopper superchips) enabling Meta to process vast volumes of creative/ad candidates, make decisions in real-time, and serve more personalized ads. Engineering at Meta+2Foxwell Digital+2

  • The upshot: rather than manually finely segmenting audiences + creating a few ad variations, the system now thrives on lots of creative assets + broad targeting + algorithmic optimization. For example: “Andromeda can now scan thousands or even tens of thousands of ads in milliseconds.” Smart Marketer+2The MTM Agency+2

🔍 What’s changed / What the media-buyers are seeing

Yes — you’re correct on many of the bullets. Here’s a more structured list of what’s changed, and some extra ones you might not have seen.

Major shifts

  1. Audience targeting (narrow interest sets) is de-emphasized

    • The old playbook: build many granular audiences, niche interests, multiple ad sets, test who responds.

    • Now: the update prioritizes broad targeting (or even “everyone” within a country), letting Meta’s algorithm find the pockets of responsiveness. The MTM Agency+1

    • Hard truth: If your agency/funnel is still heavily using ultra-segmented interest sets +

… Read the rest

The Ashes of Olaf

Posted on by Jeff Cassman

The Ashes of Olaf

A tale of kings and crosses, set in the blood-soaked North

The Seer’s Fire

The old man’s eyes were milk-white, the color of a dead man’s skin, though he swore he had seen too much to ever be truly blind. He squatted in a seal-hide tent on the Scilly Isles, beside a fire that smelled of fish oil and ash. When Olaf came ashore—tall and broad and cruel-eyed—the fire danced. The blind man did not rise. He only spoke.

“You were born in blood,” he rasped. “You’ll die in it.”

Olaf snorted. His sword still dripped from a raid on the mainland. “So do most men.”

“But you will rise again,” the seer said, “as fire rises from ash. A king. A Christian. A death worthy of songs.”

The Viking prince laughed then, but quietly. The wind carried that laugh into the sea, where it sank like so many ships.

Olaf Tryggvason, Son of the Sea

The boy was born of a murdered king and a fleeing queen, and both his name and his fate were forged in exile. Pirates took him on the Baltic and sold him like cattle. A whore’s child, some whispered. A wraith. But others said the gods marked him, that Odin had placed a raven’s feather beneath his tongue.

In Novgorod, he killed his foster father’s murderer with an axe in the marketplace. The blood splashed across the bread of a merchant’s stall, and the crowd parted like sea foam. His … Read the rest

Raiders of the Lost Cooler

Posted on by Jeff Cassman
An Old Hickory Odyssey
There are three certainties in life: death, taxes, and that if you put an anarchist, a militant atheist, a left-wing nurse with a mobile petting zoo, and a devout Catholic father of 14 on an 80-foot houseboat, you’re going to need bail money or barbecue. Possibly both.
It was a furnace of a late July morning on Old Hickory Lake, the kind of day when the air feels like someone else’s breath. My wife Sarah—God bless that long-suffering woman—had packed us off with her usual combination of precision, pity, and quiet resignation. After 31 years of marriage, she’d long since not-quite accepted that I was part husband, part chaos agent.
“You and your misfit brigade better not die without bringing my Tupperware back,” she said as she kissed me on the cheek and handed me five coolers—three bursting with prosciutto-wrapped cantaloupe, mini beef Wellingtons, bourbon-glazed salmon bites, deviled eggs with truffle oil, and desserts layered like international politics. The other two coolers sloshed with beer, bourbon, and enough mixers to open a bar in Belize.
We were headed out on The Floating Deficit, a Reagan-era 80-foot houseboat docked at Creekwood that belonged to a dentist friend who’d lost a poker game and part of his soul to me. In lieu of cash, he’d agreed to give me usage rights to this floating monument of questionable electrical wiring and faded leather upholstery. The microwave was bigger than most Nashville apartments and the stereo system could rattle your
… Read the rest

The Divorce Admiral

Posted on by Jeff Cassman

Ronald Eugene Traylor had always dreamed of a quiet retirement. Not of grandeur, mind you—he wasn’t that kind of man. A recliner, a flat-top grill, and maybe some quality time teaching his youngest how to skip stones with military precision.

Instead, the very morning of his retirement ceremony—before the sheet cake had even been cut—his wife of nineteen years and 364 days told him, quite plainly, that she had never loved him, hated the sound of his breathing, and was leaving him for her Zumba instructor named Kyle, taking their four kids and both Labradors.

“The kids too?” Ronald asked.

“And the dogs,” she said. “But you can keep your Air Force retirement and your dumb little coin collection.”

She left him with a pension, a sad jar of cocktail peanuts, and the lingering scent of betrayal mixed with Bath & Body Works. Ronald signed the divorce papers with the same stoicism he’d once reserved for nuclear protocols, then drove straight to the VFW where he drank enough to put down a Clydesdale.

He stood on the bar at one point and gave a speech no one asked for, about patriotism and how “you don’t really know a woman until she says she’s leaving you for a guy with clear skin.”

The next morning, wearing aviators, tube socks, and a Hawaiian shirt that smelled like regret, Ronald wandered toward Green Hill, TN—drawn by nothing more than a whisper of lake wind and a promise from a former colleague that said … Read the rest