AI isn’t going to replace people, but it will replace people that don’t use AI.
via Manton Reece
The future is centaurs.
The more important it is to meet your numbers, the more important it is to stop concentrating on your numbers and start concentrating on the clients’ numbers.
via Josh Spector
We might have reached peak vertical video:
Have consumers started to cool towards short-form video? That’s certainly one read from Google and Snap results.
If anything this serves as a good reminder to not go all in on one content format based on the platforms’ push du jour (just ask news publishers about social video). Different businesses do different forms of content better than others and different forms work better for different purposes.
Don’t give up on vertical video. But don’t go all in on it either.
I’ve been waiting for streaming to make TV advertising easier and more accessible, Amazon is giving it a shot.
Amazon Ads announced Sponsored TV, a new self-service advertising product that allows all brands that sell on Amazon in the U.S. to reach audiences on streaming TV, including on Amazon Freevee, Twitch and third-party services through Fire TV apps.
More ways Amazon is trying to connect its various platforms and generate more ad revenue.
This is my kind of lateral thinking:
Disproving
Based on the idea that the majority is always wrong (as suggested by Henrik Ibsen and by John Kenneth Galbraith), take anything that is obvious and generally accepted as “goes without saying”, question it, take an opposite view, and try to convincingly disprove it.
Podcasts are coming to TV.
This is partly Amazon connecting the dots between existing parts to get more mileage out of content and channels and add more ad slots to the mix.
Partly due to the rise of video in podcasting. (Thanks YouTube!)
And maybe partly due to the Smartless show on (HBO) Max (which might have been embarrassing for Amazon since it’s a Wondery show).
Community & Curiosity: Pod Notes
The Philosophy of Community™ (~7:10):
Can you bring groups together and create a sense of belonging and then you inherit the credibility of bringing that group together and having that sense of belonging.
And that can happen lots of different places in your marketing journey. There could be customer communities. There could be non-customer communities. It could be you infiltrating communities that already exist.
But it's almost more of a philosophical approach to marketing than a program.
If you decide to join a community, how you join as a brand—and whether or not you should join as a brand or whether you leverage folks at your company—is a make or break situation.
I'm ending here mostly so I don't end up transcribing half the episode, it's worth a listen. They go from here into influencers and marketing as a connective tissue for your organization (~9:10).
But that first part, about bringing groups together, that's sports teams.
That's this:
Kyle Mensing
Next, curiosity! (~14:45)
When all of these buying behaviors and channels and things switch underneath us, the curiosity that I have is what things are remaining as consistent human behaviors—of how we buy things and take chances and how we spread recommendations amongst each other and all of those traditional things that humans have always done—what piece of this remains versus what piece of this gets thrown out in the trash?
That's well-placed curiosity. And we're all about that sort of thing here.
According to Sprout Social:
Nearly three-quarters (74%) of consumers say they’re likely to reach out to a brand on social over the holidays
This is why I wrote:
The true social media use case for brands now is customer service. These are the channels customers want to talk to you via. Your customer support/service/success team should have access to answer comments and messages.