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You get personalities out of the shop and all that’s left is the retail experience.
You need the crust of the human.
Scale necessitates the removal of personality.
Which means personality becomes a differentiator.
How long until we’re asked to measure return on attention and return on personality? And how will we do it?
via the Weird Studies podcast
Life gets better as you replace transactions with relationships.
-Kevin Kelly
So do brands and customer experiences.
Everything is customer service.
Here is my summary of a 1-Minute summary of a massive social media trends study for 2025.
- Instagram is more than stories & Reels, posts are making a comeback
- LinkedIn is (still) having a moment
- Pinterest is not for videos
- Facebook Reels aren’t dead yet
How much of the resilient consumer spending trend is due to buying before Trump’s Trade War increases prices?
Buying before the promised / threatened tariffs hit.
If a meaningful %, purchase pull forward + lower purchasing power from higher prices could mean a rough year (or more) ahead.
This ad read (not ad, just read) is great.
You can hear the bit of a laugh after the reality TV line and tell the actor had fun with that part, or at least gives us the impression of enjoyment.
It’s filled with personality in a way that doesn’t overshadow the messaging, but makes it memorable.
Jan Swafford:
The ability of a machine to do or outdo something humans do is interesting once at most.
We humans need to see the human doing it
John Haugeland:
the most ordinary conversations are fraught with life and all its meanings
Austin Kleon wrote Show Your Work. Now you must also show your humanity.
The guiding principles for marketing content now are:
Personality + Behind the Scenes + What’s “Boring” to You
If this sounds like influencer style social content to you, you’re right.
via DC
Marketers are privileged indeed to make promises. Why make promises you know you can’t keep?
-Seth Godin
Marketing is a game of promises.
Conversion rates are promise delivery measurements.
Repeat customer rate is a trust barometer.
Puffery is over promising, repeatedly.
These definitions from Robin Sloan are helpful:
An accurate definition of “influencer” is: a virtuoso of a particular internet platform; someone who has learned to use its mechanisms to achieve their own objectives, rather than the other way around.
An accurate definition of an internet “creator” would have to be: someone whose income is determined by a platform’s algorithms.
Aligns with why platforms suddenly started talking about the “creator economy” instead of just influencers.
Give them pleasure—the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.
-Alfred Hitchcock
Isn’t this essentially the premise of painkiller based marketing?
Work can only be universal if it is rooted in a part of its creator which is most privately and particularly himself.
-Tyrone Guthrie
Brands typically try to smooth out the edges—polish everything to a uniform shine. In the post-AI world, it’s the idiosyncrasies that will make for truly winning brands.
Mission, vision, values are pieces of paper that can change with a board meeting.
Personality is actually having something to say and a unique way of saying it. Something that is core to the brand itself and not a committee’s reaction to societal trends.
See: Liquid Death
Doing business on the internet is about convincing people you don’t know that you have something they need or want. Think of a brand as the bridge between the two.
-Jack Butcher
Brands bridge the identity narrative between business and customer.
Brands are bat signals.
Not logos.
I love this. It’s ridiculous. And it works because it’s ridiculous.
It’s so over the top that it’s not a dark pattern or a trick.
It’s also a great way to figure out who your true fans are.
via Harry Dry
The best businesses understand and embed themselves into the lifestyles and self-conceptions of their customers.
When you sell a product, you’re not just selling a product, you’re affirming an identity.
-Greg Isenberg
Identity is a narrative.
The brand-customer relationship happens when the narrative the brand is telling dovetails with the narrative the customer is telling themselves.
This quote from The Daily Upside doesn’t surprise me:
Sales of new homes picked up considerably to end 2024. But sales of old homes are at their slowest pace since 1995.
A big part of the pandemic housing market insanity was older workers buying their forever homes. Locking up the existing inventory at that time and taking a big portion off the potentially liquid market for the near future.
Also, more evidence of The Great Splintering.
In the theatre the audience want to be surprised—but by things they expect.
-Tristan Bernard
And what is social media (and other digital outlets) these days if not a form of theatre?
People want to be surprised by your marketing, but not confused.
The comforting warmth of the familiar wrapped in a new package.
Of course, sometimes a big leap followed by consistency reframes the initial surprise as expectation.
I love a good hierarchy / process workflow for uncovering the core cause of ad performance swings, so this tweet on Google Ads is for me.
We divide Google Ads metrics into 4 levels:
Level 1: CPA, ROAS, Conversions
Level 2: CTR, CR, Clicks, Impressions, CPC
Level 3: Impression share, Quality score, Ad relevance, Landing page experience
Level 4: Keyword, ad copy, device, audience segment, geographic.
ID which level 1 metric is the problem and work down the list of related metrics in 2-4 to determine what you need to change.
In most cases, potential issues fall into 3 main areas:
- Account - ads, ad relevance, landing page.
- Market - competition, keywords, location.
- Website - user experience, mobile optimizations
For bonus points, set up automated alerts to react faster to performance drops.
No rate change from The Fed this month as the committee waits to see what exactly is going to happen with the economy, just like the rest of us.
They acknowledge “Inflation remains somewhat elevated” and probably want to see what form Trump’s Trade War takes.
Proof that the linear marketing funnel is a dinosaur
The average American spends over 3 hours per day on their phone during work. That’s 186 minutes broken down into:
- 46 minutes on social media
- 33 minutes texting or messaging
- 30 minutes listening to podcasts
- 27 minutes streaming video content
- 15 minutes playing mobile games
- 13 minutes shopping online
- 22 minutes on other non-work-related activities
Work-life balance is a work-life blur when it comes to media usage.
Creating a digital ad strategy is a balancing act of:
- What the algorithms will reward on each platform
- What users will respond to
Catering to either one will lead to some success.
Hitting both can lead to much success.
