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At Blue Ion, we’re big into help brands uncover, articulate, and share their mission, vision, and purpose. Which means we’re always collecting compelling thoughts about these ideas.
I like these from Dr. Michael Gervais
Vision
Vision is like this compelling future that I see, I imagine, and it is so compelling and beautiful and electric to me that I want to work towards that future state.
Purpose
Purpose is the deep why that you’re here.
To get deeper, ask another why.
Is SEO for AI all about vectors?
Instead of relying on exact keyword matches, search engines now use vector embeddings – a technique that maps words, phrases, and even images into multi-dimensional space based on their meaning and relationships.
3 strategies mentioned:
- Add semantic topic modeling to your keyword research mix
- Focus on where topic meets intent over keywords
- Make good content (which means make it for humans, not bots)
Of course, the best way to find out what AI might think about your content is to use AI to tell you.
YouTube is making changes to avoid the most annoying ad placement occurrence on the platform, a midroll ad cutting off a sentence.
Starting May 12, 2025, We’re improving the quality of mid-roll ads on YouTube. That means we’ll show more mid-roll ads at natural break points, like pauses and transitions, and fewer ads where they may feel interruptive or cause viewers to abandon the video, like in the middle of a sentence or action sequence.
Another example of AI (I’m assuming) turbocharging contextual features.
As a follow up to my post about Alexa+, this is the inflection moment for voice assistants.
Adding “true” AI capabilities will either expand their use cases and, therefore, adoption. Or it will prove that they’ll merely be an extension of other tech and not a new platform of sorts.
GenAI as customer lock in
Alexa Plus is $19.99 per month on its own or free for Amazon Prime members — a better deal, considering Prime costs just $14.99 per month or $139 per year.
Prime is the digital version of Costco or Sam’s Club. People pay a membership fee with the expectation of receiving more value through savings. Then a bunch of secondary benefits sweeten the deal.
By paying a fee, members are more likely to spend money to justify the initial fee to themselves.
Amazon’s primary retail customer is Prime. Everything else funnels there.
via The Verge
Promotions and sales are a lever. But if pulled too often they become your brand. (See: JCPenny)
discounting and promotions in general is a place where retailers all too frequently get caught up in the short-term goal of juicing sales, get caught up in the short-term goal of taking advantage of promotional environments by using promotions as a lever, again, to drive conversion and the short-term.
what gets very dangerous there is that you can really erode the value of your brand.
Competing on price is hard.
Compete on something that makes you unique and use sales and promos as sprinkles.
The 2024 holiday shopping season proved splintering is still the trend.
One other thing that I saw was this growing divide between higher and lower, and middle income consumers.
There really is a growing divide between people who feel pretty good, are spending, they’re going out to eat and those who are pinching pennies.
you see a growing split on the haves and have-nots within retailers.
…
It sounds like the haves and have-nots are really maybe going to be the water we’re all swimming in as we enter this new year.
Like when a frozen pond cracks, the splinters are still spreading.
Brand vs. Performance marketing? Trick question.
Brand equity is the foundation—it’s Job #1 for any marketing team.
Brand marketing is now discovery marketing. Discovery leads performance.
Without a brand, there is no performance.
Performance marketing can drive quick sales, but it’s brand-building that gives consumers a reason to buy again and again.
Brand marketing and performance marketing aren’t two different disciplines. They’re just measured on two different timelines.
Advice from the guy behind the Gorillaz videos, Pete Candeland:
You always try to build entertainment almost like a ladder — or steps — going up to a climax. Like a little story. You want to keep people involved by giving them just enough to want to know what’s going to happen next.
In a short video, it’s about what comes in the next 20 seconds, and then the next 20 seconds, and then the next. It’s an escalating ramp-up of interest, and sometimes a ramp-up of activity and richness of imagery.
Research has shown that rhymes are more memorable. But I much prefer this way of saying it from the Weird Studies podcast
Sound—rhyme and meter, or musical measure—whether we’re talking about poetry or whether we’re talking about music is absolutely the handmaid of memory. Of how things get into the heart.
The function of your message is important. The content must be worth the attention.
But the form determines its reach. This is the vehicle of transmission.
From MediaDailyNews: Search Ads Slide As A Way To Reach Consumers
Not a new trend—and likely even more pronounced since this was published—but search is no longer a discovery mechanism.
Search is truly an intent channel—harvesting discoveries happening elsewhere.
One of the 9 F’s of Attention is Future Me.
Purchasing is an act of aspiration. Buying a future state.
As Seth Godin says, very few of our purchases are for what the thing says on the tin.
Our focus, energy and money are often spent on transactions that are disguised as something else. What we’re really doing is buying affiliation, status or the freedom from fear.
Amazon is running a beta called shop brand sites directly, which surfaces results for brands not sold on the platform, directing shoppers to the brand’s site to purchase.
Likely 1 of 2 plays here (maybe both):
- It gets monetized as an ad product
- Recruit more sellers via website referral tracking
The Walmart index is…unclear
The mega-retailer forecasts lower growth this year, saying:
“We have to acknowledge that we are in an uncertain time and we don’t want to get out over our skis here.”
More high earners are shopping for rollbacks, as value remains shoppers' top priority.
Walmart did not factor looming US tariffs on foreign goods into its forecast, because it’s unclear if or when they’ll kick in.
inventory levels increased 3% last quarter, suggesting it may be calling in orders to get ahead of future levies.
via The Daily Upside
Retro is an evergreen trend, thanks to the One Song podcast I now have a benchmark for what that means:
Retro is almost always running on a 20 year clock
So if you want to try riding the front of the retro wave, look back 19-20 years and pick your trend to revive.
Microsoft’s Clarity is an under discussed part of the analytics toolkit (who doesn’t like free heatmaps and session recordings?), the new conversion maps feature will only make it more useful.
Conversion maps provide specific data of key business metrics of your E-Commerce sites. Through Conversion maps, you can understand your website interactions that affect your purchase rate.
Conversion maps show the conversion rate, representing the percentage of all sessions that resulted in a purchase when a user clicks in a selected area.
There’s no use in being a lesser version of Lego.
This is not just about Lego.
Beware “not”
Soon after being exposed to a message, people forget whether or not there was a “not” in it.
Meaning your anti-positioning backfires.
Over time, “not like those other companies” becomes “like those other companies.”
Think in terms of “not,” but don’t say it.
EMARKETER with more good research, as usual.
the most intrusive ads and the least likely to be noticed ads were the ones where the display covers the entire screen.
The best kind, the most likely to be noticed and the least intrusive ads were pre-roll video and targeted ads using your search history were a close second.
the level of interruption of the ad rather than its invasiveness informed how ads were ranked, mid-roll ads, display ads and that fully covered the screen and ads that follow users around the screen were ranked as much more intrusive than any targeting method.