⃛Level Up ↴
Conductor David Robertson has a mixtape he plays for conductors he’s teaching filled with all kinds of music. But this isn’t your classic high school mixtape.
It’s all put together with a maximum of 2.5 seconds. Sometimes they’re even shorter.
Why?
to get them to understand that, whether or not you feel musically sophisticated, the speed with which your brain decides, “Ah, yes, for me. No, not for me,” is very, very quick.
We make taste based decisions incredibly quickly. Not just about music.
don’t know what a mixtape is? Kleon’s got you
Taco Bell gets it 🔔
Their Distinctiveness Rule:
You can change either the taste or the form, but you can’t change the taste and the form.
People want their new to be familiar. They need an on-ramp.
Your thing also has a language. Changing the “taste” and “form” (whatever those are for your thing) is more likely to make it a different thing altogether.
Be different. But make it rhyme.
via Austin Kleon
Speak to someone’s pain and emotional state at the right moment, and you’ll have their attention.
It’s hard to do this if you’re only in it for the money or don’t care about your customers.
via DemandCurve
The modern consumer journey according to DemandCurve:
- They see your ad while doom-scrolling Instagram. They click.
- Something distracts them away from their phone.
- They remember later in the evening (or 3 weeks later) thanks to a Trigger Event.
- They Google your company name.
- They visit your homepage, not the conversion-focused landing page you intended them to hit.
Between screenshots and post save buttons, everything is a bookmarking app now.
Marketing is like gardening. You plant a bunch of seeds and sometimes the best plant comes from the compost heap.
This is the first AI related “breakthrough” I can remember being attributed to Apple
Apple researchers have developed a breakthrough “multi-token prediction” framework that enables large language models to generate text up to 5 times faster while maintaining output quality
Has it finally entered the chat?
via Perplexity
People want to be part of the in crowd, but each person’s in crowd is different.
When one or two friends start talking about something we can probably still get away with ignoring it. But when it’s more than that, our worst fear is being left out and lonely…so we have to check it out. Maybe because we’ll like it too…but definitely so we look smart next time it comes up.
You don’t need to reach everyone, just the ones that will talk about it.
If a session / page view lasts at least 10 seconds, it is an “engaged session” (according to the platforms).
What can you do on your pages that will leave an impression within 10 seconds of loading?
The “science” of marketing is increasingly done in the realm of algorithms. The human side is the “art.”
Even the king of web analytics and data himself, Avinash, is saying it:
Creative contributes between 60% to 70% of the campaign’s success.
Avinash’s Third Law of Marketing Dynamics:
A great Creative can, often, overcome a poor Media Plan.
A great Media Plan cannot overcome a poor Creative.
Got an email from Equifax today with the subject line:
⚠️ Important Update from Equifax ⚠️
It was announcing a new app.
That’s bad marketing. Each touchpoint is a promise, clickbait breaks that promise.
that’s why this podcast got started, actually, was because we wanted to humanize the brand. We’re a research company, so people interacted with us with a website, maybe a salesperson, and we wanted to be like, “There are a bunch of folks back here with brilliant minds and personalities and senses of humor, and we’d love for you to meet them and that to be your gateway, your doorway into the home of EMARKETER”
It works!
I get their emails with the person’s name as the sender, which I recognize from them being on the podcast—a spark of connection.
Infinite content + copycatting + channels everywhere
Is not an equation for connecting the dots—at least when it comes to people paying attention to your brand and messaging.
if you’re telling a different story in multiple places, they might as well just be different companies, completely different stories, because the consumers aren’t going to make the connection by themselves.
-Marcus Johnson
Brands are stories. Your marketing should be like Dickens serials, not Infinite Jest.
Connect the dots for your audience.
Been a minute since I’ve done an attack vector post but it’s time to being it back:
Consumers have incredible bs detectors.
So if you’re not being consistent with your story in multiple places, then they’re not going to believe you.
If you’re showing up and you’re telling me one thing and you’re behaving another way, even if it’s just a few times, it starts to erode that trust.
People don’t believe what you’re doing. Consumers will start to call you out.
Consistency is incredibly important.
What does this look like and feel like every time I’m interacting with my consumer, no matter how small the interaction is?
-Heidi Waldusky
Everything Is Billboards Now
Kieran Flanagan posted on LinkedIn:
SEO isn’t dying. It’s evolving into TV ads.
Everyone sees your Ad, and no one clicks it. AI assistants turn search into a billboard.
To which I added:
Getting a click or a sale isn’t the purpose of each individual ad or touchpoint. It’s about the aggregate impact.
Each exposure is a seed planted in the mind of the audience member. A field of flowers makes a bigger impact than a solitary bloom.
This can be an uncomfortable shift for performance marketers that have been mainlining real-time data and ROAS numbers for years. It’s harder to measure the impact of exposure and reach but we don’t want to stop at counting impressions or mistaking correlation for causation.
But I’ve been giving my Google Ads ecommerce team member a hard time for years that my social ads work with unimpressive ROAS numbers has been driving easy sales to his high performing channel. I put in the work, he reaps the glory. (It is a joke, but the best jokes are rooted in the truth (or complete absurdity, but that’s not relevant here).)
But now even a Google Search isn’t the obvious end point.
Our role as marketers is to tell a story across the channels we operate on for a brand to establish familiarity so that when a customer is about to make a decision we come to mind. Whether that happens via them actively seeking us out or anchoring on our name in a consideration set.
Make an impression. Provide value. Play the long game.
It’s (still) humans all the way down
A disciplined menu structure doesn’t limit user choice, it increases it.
If someone is asking “where do I go next?” / “what do I do next?” during one of your experiences, it’s probably not a great experience.
via Seth Godin
A good search experience gets someone off platform as quickly as possible.
A good social experience keeps them on platform (yeah, this is debatable).
What happens when search tries to keep people on platform?
What happens when social takes on search?
What’s a good LLM experience?
TikTok is betting big on search ads
122 open roles tied to TikTok Search across sales, engineering, and product teams.
The safest marketing budgets are those tied to direct response conversion, which on the internet usually means search.
TikTok Shop muddied the commerce waters for The Clock App, maybe this will unlock some of those budgets for it to collect.
Memes, trends, virality seeking behavior. It all works a lot like making a Hollywood blockbuster: follow the formula.
We’re living through the reign of Template Chic: a global style consensus built on recycling the last thing that worked. Not because people don’t care, but because the industry stopped asking them to.
AI can both accelerate and steer this trend. So…
the best brands resist this erosion. They speak with clarity, even if softly. They don’t design for consensus. They design for conviction. They trust the audience to catch up, or not.