Do that which doesn’t scale.
Not: what’s your edge.
But instead: what do you do that no reasonable person would choose to do?
via Matt Webb
If you’re Coca-Cola, people aren’t looking for New Coke.
If you’re Jones Soda, people aren’t looking for a Coke clone.
Ohio State is a story when it doesn’t win, not when it lives up to all the advanced billing. The Buckeyes chug along, replacing bastions of NFL talent with a fresh cast, year after year.
Indiana is still a story because we couldn’t have seen this coming. Indiana is a surprise. Indiana is new.
It’s important to remember what your customers want from you.
Attention can be a trap. Especially if people want comfort and familiarity.
via ESPN
Turn the bottleneck into a moment of delight.
If your product must do something then don’t be shy about it. Make a feature out of it. Make the constraint the point of it all.
Friction cannot be dropped to 0.
Instantaneous everything is impossible (for now?).
Instead of trying to hide, downplay, or ignore negatives in your product. How can you add a layer of fun or weird or reflection or absurdity to both acknowledge the friction moment and transform it into something the customer remembers for a positive reason?
via Matt Webb
YouTube’s new Brand Pulse Report seems like it could be really useful.
evaluate your brand presence across YouTube by detecting brand mentions via visuals (brand logos, product shots, etc.) and language (audio, video titles, etc.). So, if a creator uses or mentions your product in passing, we recognize it and capture it.
incorporating metrics that demonstrate how your paid ads on YouTube can lead to more views on organic videos — a previously underreported value for paid media — and how users seeing both your paid and organic videos together leads to searches for your brand.
If you’re in retail / ecomm, this will feel accurate:
We’re in the middle of a weird under-advertised fall Prime Day. But we’re also preparing for BFCM, so it’s an awkward time to scale spend.
Conversion performance is dropping off, but that’s only because people know Black Friday is coming.
Parents are also getting a new toy catalog each week.
Discretionary funds are either going to unplanned Prime Day Expanded Universe purchases or getting earmarked for later holiday shopping.
(UX tip: don’t ship a catalog and not have some items on your site, Amazon.)
via Northbeam
If today’s earlier post wasn’t positive enough for you, the New York Fed also wants to rain on your parade.
September survey says…
households’ inflation expectations increased at the short- and longer-term horizons and were unchanged at the medium-term horizon.
Despite a small rebound in the expected job finding rate, labor market expectations continued to deteriorate with consumers reporting lower expected earnings growth, greater likelihoods of losing jobs, and a higher likelihood of a rise in overall unemployment.
Income-based splintering continues
Luxury shoppers are feeling good
And it’s beginning to look a lot like an expensive holiday season
Prices / inflation are top of mind for almost everyone &
A higher income doesn’t necessarily mean less concern over rising prices.
Best guess: total holiday spend may be relatively stable with past years, but purchase volume will be down.
Basically: less stuff for the same spend.
Coming Soon: AdsGPT?
OpenAI wants to monetize ChatGPT via ads (which isn’t a surprise, just think of the Google Search budgets waiting to be reallocated).
The company recently hired for a “Growth Paid Marketing Platform Engineer” (listing is no longer up) that :
would be responsible for “developing campaign management tools, integrating with major ad platforms, building real-time attribution and reporting pipelines, and enabling experimentation frameworks to optimize our objectives.”
There is currently an open role called Growth - AI Workflows, Martech, Creative Systems that will:
Design and launch AI-powered creative systems (dynamic content generation, automated asset production, experimentation tooling) that enable rapid, personalized campaigns across multiple channels.
&
Build and scale a modern martech stack (data pipelines, automation platforms, experimentation frameworks) that supports sophisticated targeting, measurement, and real-time optimization.
Connecting ad functionality to Instant Checkout is an obvious first step. The trap is building an ad system that looks like the current heavy hitters.
Turning responses into pay-to-play performance PR outputs kills trust.
Plopping Google Search Ads style placements somewhere in the chat pane is lazy and annoying.
Utilizing the unique understanding of a user, content, and intent to create a new paradigm of contextual advertising that provides value and isn’t reliant on hoovering up user data is the opportunity.