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From Tom Asacker:
Ask them if your organization, your culture, is producing the results it is designed to produce?
It’s a trick question. A sort of business koan.
The answer is “yes.”
If you don’t like the results your thing is producing, you don’t change how you think or approach it, you change how it’s designed.
If your marketing campaign isn’t producing the results you were hoping for, change the campaign. Or change the target, I suppose.
Everything is an experiment. Every brief or KPI target a hypothesis.
If you get unexpected results, redesign the experiment.
Similar to Google:
Microsoft Ads is rolling out a new feature called “brand lists” for Performance Max (PMax) campaigns.
Brand lists allow advertisers to exclude their ads from appearing alongside specific brands, potentially improving ad relevance and return on ad spend (ROAS).
Can pick up to 20 but sounds like you’re limited to a pre-defined list or requesting additions.
If you’re having different kinds of conversations in the same moment, it’s really, really hard to hear each other. It’s really hard to feel connected.
At the core of successful communication is having the same kind of conversation at the same moment.
-Charles Duhigg
This is why your messaging frequency needs to be > 1.
Marketing is a conversation. And your audience is not always in the mood to have the same conversation your messaging wants to have.
via Radio Headspace
🚨 🪦
Google to kill off URL shortener once and for all
Links shortened with goo.gl will stop working in 2025
You have just over a year to migrate if you’re currently using Google URL Shortener.
via The Register
Stories are our wealth.
-Joy Harjo
was assumed that for a streaming service to work as a standalone business, you needed at least 100,000,000 subscribers. And now the thought from these market leaders is that you really need more like 200,000,000.
The list of services that hit the 200M mark (YouTube not included):
- Netflix
- Amazon Prime
- Disney-Hulu
Forecast includes:
Apple remaining a niche participant but appears to be feeling its way into a long-term, albeit money losing presence, which it can afford to do.
Consolidation is coming.
via the Behind the Numbers podcast
Paramount might do for streaming TV ads what Spotify did for podcast ads: make it accessible at small budgets.
With the new offering, SMBs will be able to easily create and launch ads in one business day, with campaign minimums as low as $500. In addition, Paramount is looking to give these new-to-TV advertisers several self-service creative tools.
This reduces the barrier of entry to the point of “why not try it?”
via Adweek
Ad tech giant Taboola has struck a deal with Apple to power native advertising within the Apple News and Apple Stocks apps
🤔
Imagine this is a bridge deal (like Netflix’s initial partnership with Microsoft) until the internal infrastructure is there, but this is such a weird choice.
Maybe the Taboola model is less reliant on user data and therefore more privacy friendly to match Apple’s positioning.
Right now though, I’m with Om, this feels like the enshittification of Apple.
via Axios
This is an interesting stat about Prime Day ads:
15 dollars of incremental sales for every dollar of AM/FM radio advertising
Audio content, especially the more intimate medium of podcasting, continues to be advertisers’ best bet for attracting customers and clinching the sale
The best ideas are when you’re like, “we can never do this, we’re going to get in big trouble, this is so wrong.” When you feel that, you’ve got to stay there. That’s where all the interesting stuff happens.
-Chris Beresford-Hill
&
Make sure you always feel like you’re doing something vaguely naughty.
-Jeff Goodby
This is how you push beyond the tried and true.
The imitation game.
The pack.
The goal isn’t the easy “no” that can be dismissed and forgotten.
But the “no” that opens a bunch of yeses that were nos before.
Sacred places are the first places to be destroyed by invaders and iconoclasts, for whom nothing is more offensive than the enemy’s gods.
…
For there are two broad approaches to building: the way of settlement, and the way of disruption.
…
the iconoclast seeks to replace old gods with new, to disenchant the landscape and to mark the place with signs of his defiance.
The playbook for disruptor / insurgent brands.
Find an enemy and replace one of its “gods” with your own.
Make your brand’s ritual a rebellion against settlement.
from The Face of God by Roger Scruton 📚
she found it hard to believe that all living things needed to speak.
Believe, said the bear. Whether you hear them or not, they need it like they need air to breathe.
We are a culture built on oral traditions.
This is why (early) social media took off and titled the axis of marketing and branding.
& why “community” is returning to buzzword status in the cycle
People want to speak.
Are you able to listen?
from The Bear by Andrew Krivak 📚
According to research
headlines featuring common words outperform those with complex phrasing when grabbing readers’ attention.
Outperform meaning higher CTRs and deeper content engagement.
using more common words, a simpler writing style, and more readable text led to more clicks.
Know your audience.
Use their language.
A little trend watching thanks the Gen Alpha’s digital behavior (even though generations are garbage)
the bigger the platform—so athletes, celebrities, big brands, TV commercials—they have less trust in those spokespeople and those formats
&
like their favorite brands to help them learn more about their interests.
(preferences being games and how to videos)
parents of Gen Alphas say their kids have a more mature understanding and knowledge of brands than they did at the same age.
Brand is becoming more important
via emarketer
YouTube Sees Brand Fans Move From Consumers Of Culture To Shaping It
Content creators are the new studios and the Gen Z entertainment paradigm is taking hold in the mainstream.
Spotify for Podcasters has introduced the ability for podcast audiences to leave comments on podcasts
Spotify adding a little YouTube-esque social-adjacent functionality to podcasts.
From the 2024 Women’s NCAA tournament reaching a peak of 24 million viewers at the final game, to the UK’s national Women’s Soccer League receiving a 17% boost in interest between 2023 and 2024 according to Nielsen, fandom for women’s sports is on the rise.