The “science” of marketing is increasingly done in the realm of algorithms. The human side is the “art.”

Even the king of web analytics and data himself, Avinash, is saying it:

Creative contributes between 60% to 70% of the campaign’s success.

Avinash’s Third Law of Marketing Dynamics:

A great Creative can, often, overcome a poor Media Plan.

A great Media Plan cannot overcome a poor Creative.

Got an email from Equifax today with the subject line:

⚠️ Important Update from Equifax ⚠️

It was announcing a new app.

That’s bad marketing. Each touchpoint is a promise, clickbait breaks that promise.

that’s why this podcast got started, actually, was because we wanted to humanize the brand. We’re a research company, so people interacted with us with a website, maybe a salesperson, and we wanted to be like, “There are a bunch of folks back here with brilliant minds and personalities and senses of humor, and we’d love for you to meet them and that to be your gateway, your doorway into the home of EMARKETER”

It works!

I get their emails with the person’s name as the sender, which I recognize from them being on the podcast—a spark of connection.

via Behind the Numbers podcast

Infinite content + copycatting + channels everywhere

Is not an equation for connecting the dots—at least when it comes to people paying attention to your brand and messaging.

if you’re telling a different story in multiple places, they might as well just be different companies, completely different stories, because the consumers aren’t going to make the connection by themselves.

-Marcus Johnson

Brands are stories. Your marketing should be like Dickens serials, not Infinite Jest.

Connect the dots for your audience.

via Behind the Numbers podcast

Been a minute since I’ve done an attack vector post but it’s time to being it back:

🚨 Think before you scan

Consumers have incredible bs detectors.

So if you’re not being consistent with your story in multiple places, then they’re not going to believe you.

If you’re showing up and you’re telling me one thing and you’re behaving another way, even if it’s just a few times, it starts to erode that trust.

People don’t believe what you’re doing. Consumers will start to call you out.

Consistency is incredibly important.

What does this look like and feel like every time I’m interacting with my consumer, no matter how small the interaction is?

-Heidi Waldusky

via Behind the Numbers podcast

Everything Is Billboards Now

Kieran Flanagan posted on LinkedIn:

SEO isn’t dying. It’s evolving into TV ads.

Everyone sees your Ad, and no one clicks it. AI assistants turn search into a billboard.

To which I added:

Getting a click or a sale isn’t the purpose of each individual ad or touchpoint. It’s about the aggregate impact.

Each exposure is a seed planted in the mind of the audience member. A field of flowers makes a bigger impact than a solitary bloom.

This can be an uncomfortable shift for performance marketers that have been mainlining real-time data and ROAS numbers for years. It’s harder to measure the impact of exposure and reach but we don’t want to stop at counting impressions or mistaking correlation for causation.

But I’ve been giving my Google Ads ecommerce team member a hard time for years that my social ads work with unimpressive ROAS numbers has been driving easy sales to his high performing channel. I put in the work, he reaps the glory. (It is a joke, but the best jokes are rooted in the truth (or complete absurdity, but that’s not relevant here).)

But now even a Google Search isn’t the obvious end point.

Our role as marketers is to tell a story across the channels we operate on for a brand to establish familiarity so that when a customer is about to make a decision we come to mind. Whether that happens via them actively seeking us out or anchoring on our name in a consideration set.

Make an impression. Provide value. Play the long game.

It’s (still) humans all the way down

👓

Al glasses gained further traction in the first half of the year, with Ray-Ban Meta more than tripling in revenue year-over-year.

&

Following the category-defining success of Ray-Ban Meta, the #1 selling Al glasses in the world which had sold millions of units since launch…

&

the insatiable demand for Ray-Ban Meta

Meta is mentioned 32 times in this eyewear company’s earnings report.

Oakley and Prada versions are next.

Is Zuck’s hardware platform dream being realized? Smart glasses remain my bet for the next consumer computing shift.

via Luxottica earnings report (PDF)

A disciplined menu structure doesn’t limit user choice, it increases it.

If someone is asking “where do I go next?” / “what do I do next?” during one of your experiences, it’s probably not a great experience.

via Seth Godin

A good search experience gets someone off platform as quickly as possible.

A good social experience keeps them on platform (yeah, this is debatable).

What happens when search tries to keep people on platform?
What happens when social takes on search?
What’s a good LLM experience?

TikTok is betting big on search ads

122 open roles tied to TikTok Search across sales, engineering, and product teams.

The safest marketing budgets are those tied to direct response conversion, which on the internet usually means search.

TikTok Shop muddied the commerce waters for The Clock App, maybe this will unlock some of those budgets for it to collect.

via Search Engine Land

Memes, trends, virality seeking behavior. It all works a lot like making a Hollywood blockbuster: follow the formula.

We’re living through the reign of Template Chic: a global style consensus built on recycling the last thing that worked. Not because people don’t care, but because the industry stopped asking them to.

AI can both accelerate and steer this trend. So…

the best brands resist this erosion. They speak with clarity, even if softly. They don’t design for consensus. They design for conviction. They trust the audience to catch up, or not.

via The Sociology of Business

Zuckerberg isn’t just saying the quiet part out loud, he’s saying it a lot.

we’re going to get to a point where you’re a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account, you don’t need any creative, you don’t need any targeting demographic, you don’t need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out. I think that’s going to be huge, I think it is a redefinition of the category of advertising.

Probability is high that this approach becomes very successful. The value of the human hand will also increase.

via The Verge

In the garden, dig a $100 hole for a $10 plant.

Gardening is a great metaphor for marketing.

from Excellent Advice for Living by Kevin Kelly 📚

Yesterday I asked if Amazon leaving Google Shopping is “temporary or a sign that the channel wasn’t worth the money?”

Google’s dominance in product discovery is under pressure as consumer behavioral shifts and genAI tools reshape how people search, shop, and buy.

The Year of the Splinter is now on year 3 and the era of the mega platform is over.

Google could become this cycle’s Microsoft.

via EMARKETER

The Silicon Valley Xerox machine is humming again, Instagram and TikTok want to pull a YouTube and move to the big(ger) screen.

Why? Pull in the different demos and higher ad rates that TVs make possible.

Amazon has turned off Google Shopping (ads and free from the sound of it).

Auction pressure has reduced dramatically between this and the Temu and Shein pullbacks. Should mean a lot more opportunity.

Now the big question, is this temporary or a sign that the channel wasn’t worth the money?

AI may resolve a problem with the fishermen, but it wouldn’t change what is in the pond.

-Philippe Aghion

via Marginal Revolution

It’s time to rethink our approach to email marketing. Instead of leading with campaigns, we should focus on conversations — engaging customers throughout their entire lifecycle, starting when they opt in.

This is the business version of Austin Kleon saying:

Newsletters should be letters

After all, we’re (still) marketing to humans.

via MarTech