If you don’t schedule time for maintenance, your equipment will do it for you.

-Deb Chachra

via A Learning A Day

• Consumers continue to focus on value, and are responding to price reductions

• Smaller form factors — minis — also drove growth, “with travel on the rise and consumers looking for a little bit of affordable indulgence for at-home, too.”

These insights are from Target’s Q2 earnings call.

This was the trend of the summer: reining in COVID revenge spending but still adding luxury and indulgence around the margins, just downsized.

This holiday season projects to be a value bonanza

Video is the most compelling form of content: 63% of B2B buyers say that short-form social video content helps inform buying decisions, with 80% of those who consume video content saying that video-focused influencer content is one of the most trusted forms of content in B2B.

B2B buyers, they’re just like us!

Short form video has taken over. (Of course, this also means a new format / medium is next.)

• When you are running prospecting ads at a large scale, you often need to “over explain” the benefits and value props in your ad.

• If this isn’t a retargeting campaign, then it’s considered cold traffic. For this audience, simplifying the product and re-iterating all of the key value props is a must to get the most out of your media at scale.

• My favorite framework is to first write out how you would explain what you’re selling to a friend over text. Then write out the answer to, “Why did you buy this”, but think of someone asking that in a condescending tone. Combine that and you have an amazing prospecting ad.

I love a question that makes you alter your perspective, so the “why did you buy this” idea above is right up my alley.

Fun listen about Formula 1 as a brand and it’s accidental rise in popularity.

Pandemic + Netflix doc + TikTok + creator economy = Formula 1’s (American) ascension

Doc popularity was a surprise to Netflix.

Now there’s a major sport with a differentiated audience demo compared to the legacy leagues.

We study the macroeconomic implications of narratives, defined as beliefs about the economy that spread contagiously. In an otherwise standard business-cycle model, narratives generate persistent and belief-driven fluctuations. Sufficiently contagious narratives can "go viral," generating hysteresis in the model's unique equilibrium. Empirically, we use natural-language-processing methods to measure firms' narratives. Consistent with the theory, narratives spread contagiously and firms expand after adopting optimistic narratives, even though these narratives have no predictive power for future firm fundamentals. Quantitatively, narratives explain 32% and 18% of the output reductions over the early 2000s recession and Great Recession, respectively, and 19% of output variance.

For all our advancements, we’re still a storytelling species subject to animal spirits. Interpreting the shadows cast by the communal fire and sense making through story.

Narratives matter.

Glamming up a robot risks overpromising what the robot as a product can actually do.  That risks disappointing customers. And disappointed customers are not going to be an advocate for your product/robot, nor be repeat buyers.

Replace “robot” with whatever you sell.

Marketing and selling is a series of promises made to a potential customer. The product better keep—or better yet, exceed—those promises.

The spectacle should be ancillary to the product—an attention magnet. The spectacle shouldn’t be the promise.

This post combines two things I like: Dracula and AI.

as a rule of thumb, in most companies if one type of information “belongs” to one C-level executive and another type to another, the chances of the company building an AI that takes advantage of both is quite low.

If you’re at the cutting edge or attempting to get there, if you’re doing new things in new ways, you aren’t fighting a war, you’re dealing with a vampire. What’s worse, it’s the beginning of Dracula and you have no idea what they look like.

Any new AI that’s more than an iterative improvement of a previous one will need not new algorithms but new questions, not bigger data but stranger combinations of data sets.

There’s always a vampire waiting to suck the life out of your business.

Convergent thinking helps with normal problems.
Divergent thinking helps with vampires.

🧛‍♂️

AI will turbocharge contextual capabilities, and the most important piece of content these days is impressions.

Enter Integral Ad Science:

The tool, called Quality Attention for Publishers, uses machine learning to gauge how much attention readers might give webpages.

The next wave of measurement?

In recent years, attention metrics, which aim to estimate the quality of content adjacent to ad inventory, have become all the rage as advertisers and publishers continue to shift away from more traditional metrics like viewability.

Attentive impressions > impressions

Every platform is a video platform these days (at least that’s what it feels like). That coupled with the growth of video in B2B marketing means you might be starting to develop a LinkedIn video strategy.

Here’s what you need to know before you turn the camera on:

Best Practices

Show what you want your audience to see in the first 10 seconds of the video. (Later they say to Establish your point in the first 5 seconds, then drive it home.)

Think like a silent film director: a large portion of LinkedIn members will watch your ad with the sound off.

Keep videos under 30 seconds for brand awareness and brand consideration goals. A study by LinkedIn* found that videos under 30 seconds reported a 200% lift in view completion rates (Source: LinkedIn internal study, 2018).

Test longer videos for demand generation.

Specs

• Format: MP4 (max 200mb)
• Length: 3 seconds - 30 minutes

Multiple aspect ratios supported:

• 4:5 - 1080 x 1350 pixels
• 9:16 - 1080 x 1920 pixels
• 16:9 - 1920 x 1080 pixels
• 1:1 - 1080 x 1080 pixels

Custom thumbnail is optional - 2mb max, match video dimensions

When a potential customer visits your site, they aren’t trying to talk themselves out of becoming a customer. They’re trying to talk themselves into it.

They have a list of objections they are just waiting to raise and run.

Your job is to answer each one. And even then they still may not convert.

“After years of post-pandemic revenge spending, consumers are becoming more prudent as they face economic uncertainty, still-high interest rates, and vehicle prices that remain elevated,”

Although the U.S. economy is fairly strong, Americans’ perceptions and priorities have changed, leaving many still uncertain, especially in an election year. 

Vehicle affordability in the U.S. is “very stretched”

Cars are big ticket items, making this trend more apparent.

Elsewhere in the market you may see a widening divide between luxury and value with a shrinking middle market.

We find that experiencing positive emotion at the outset of an online product search primes emotionally congruent thoughts. This priming makes consumers more likely to use positive emotion keywords (e.g., a happy book) than neutral keywords (e.g., a paperback book) to describe the product they are searching for.

As a result, consumers are more likely to click on paid search ads if they used a positive emotion keyword rather than a neutral keyword in their query.

People in good moods use happy words in their searches, which can lead to improved ad performance.

(I LOVE this story the Do Lectures shared in their email newsletter, in partnership with Hiut Denim.)

It was the #2 rated hotel on Trip Advisor from thousands of reviews.

• It is not fancy.
• It does not have deep pockets.
• Even the deep end of its pool isn’t that deep.

But, it did not play by the rules.

It understood it could not win by trying to be better. Instead, it chose to be different. But it realised there is an art to being different.

Being different is powerful when you understand it must come from a truth you can uniquely bring to life.

A truth.

Kids of a certain age don’t give a hoot about luxury.

• They don’t care about the thread count on the Egyptian cotton pillows.
• They don’t care about the muted pastel shades of wall paint that are designed to relax you and make you feel calm.
• They don’t care about the wine cellar with 15,000 bottles of fine wine from France and beyond.

On the other hand, they do care about Lollipops. Now, they MATTER.

Which is why by the very average-looking pool at the Castle Magic Hotel, there’s a bright red phone that has a sign above it that says, “Popsicle Hotline.”

And when the kids pick up the phone, somebody answers and says, “Popsicle Hotline! We’ll be right out.”

And moments later, somebody comes out wearing a suit, carrying a silver tray loaded with grape and cherry and orange popsicles. They present them to you wearing white gloves, like an English butler, all for free.

Someone at Castle Hotel had an important insight:

• Kids make the decisions.
• Adults provide the transportation.
• And, if they behave, they get to pick up the bill at the end of the stay.

If it’s down to the kids where to stay, and, OH, IT IS, they don’t stay at the boring Four Seasons.

The ‘Popsicle Hotline’ didn’t cost $33 million. The ‘Popsicle Hotline’ provided a peak moment for the kids. And you can be sure, that kids will tell their friends about the ‘Popsicle Hotline’, especially if their friends’ parents are making them suffer by staying at the Four Seasons.

Ryan Holiday writes about the spectacle:

it captures attention, sparks curiosity, and draws people in

At his bookstore they built a book tower of 2,000 books

it’s also probably one of the single best marketing and business decisions we made in the whole store. Because it’s the number one thing people come into the store to take pictures of.

The spectacle gets you noticed. It’s the hook.

The key is not to become a P.T. Barnum and have nothing but spectacle.

The spectacle hooks.
The substance lands.

Survey says…

80% of respondents said cost savings is more important than convenience, with 42% ranking saving money as their top priority

It’s all about the deals this holiday season.

There is plenty of speculation floating around that the middle of the market (or the middle of everything) is hollowing out. Meaning the split is increasingly becoming luxury or discount.

The middle is a tough place to get stuck. But maybe it’s where the next wave of opportunity lies.

Search Ads Campaign enables sophisticated keyword-based ads which specifically target TikTok's search results page. From a user experience perspective, the ads are the same, but for advertisers, a whole host of new features and targeting capabilities are now available.

Search is splintering, with TikTok one of the growing channels for younger searchers. Now the Trend Machine wants to splinter some of those search ad budgets.