Everyone loves a benchmark.

A study found…

The average month-on-month growth rate for podcasts is 1.62%

But

podcasts with less than 1,000 monthly downloads are nearly 8% more likely to double their listenership in the span of a year compared to mid-size shows with between 1,000 and 10,000 monthly downloads. Podcasts with over 10,000 monthly downloads are also the most likely to reduce their listenership, as it becomes harder to keep listeners interested.

Know what your goals are. And remember that metrics don’t always perfectly map to them.

And Snap makes 3

Amazon Reaches Deal to Run Shopping Ads on Snap

The end of the free money train means it’s more efficient for these social platforms to partner up when it comes to their shopping ambitions, rather than trying to build their own.

TikTok Shop enters its knockoff phase.

TikTok creators have been pitching apparent knockoffs of products from Apple, Lululemon, and Crocs.

leaning on creators to sell products comes with two big challenges: they’re not always honest and don’t always understand what they’re selling.

This has been my biggest warning to clients for months. Signing up for TikTok Shop feels like signing up to have your product(s) knocked off at some point, whether by others or TikTok directly.

I get it, you wish your e-commerce business were selling the way it did in 2020, when U.S. e-commerce revenue surged 28%, and in 2021, when it surged 22%. But those days are gone, even though they left their mark.

It’s important for marketers & analysts to understand trends & market happenings because businesses don’t operate in vacuums. Sometimes sales are down because everyone’s are.

Data comparisons for the past few years have been messy, and will likely stay that way for a bit. Try to figure out which changes are signs of shifting behaviors & which are on you.

The splintering of social has barely begun.

Before long, we might have a slew of new reading tools, with different ideas about how to display and organize posts. We might have new content moderation systems. We might have an entire industry of algorithms, where people compete not to make the best posts but to show them in the most interesting order. Modern social networks are not a single product but a giant bundle of features, and the next generation of tools might be all about unbundling.

via The Verge

if you turned a browser history — the most neglected piece of the software — into a robust and fully featured machine of its own. It would help you map the path you charted through a web of knowledge, refine those maps, order them, and share them.

There’s going to be an AI assistant that will do this.

I would guess a chat interface for user-driven queries. But can also see a browser extension that annotates or highlights areas of the current page you’re looking at with references to related pieces from your history.

Like a personal knowledge graph with real time node connecting.

IYKYK

☁️

I was introduced to Daniel Dennett's concept of the intentional stance via Seth Godin. It reads like marketing strategy 101 for being customer-centric with your messaging:

Here is how it works: first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then you figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose. Then you figure out what desires it ought to have, on the same considerations, and finally you predict that this rational agent will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs. A little practical reasoning from the chosen set of beliefs and desires will in most instances yield a decision about what the agent ought to do; that is what you predict the agent will do.

I translate this as:

1. Acknowledge the entity you are talking to is both a human being and a rational agent capable of making its own decisions (you're making an appeal—an ask—not coercing or commanding)
2. Determine what (you believe) this entity believes: experiences, values, foundations, local reality, etc.
3. Determine what (you believe) this entity desires: dreams, aspirations, self-talk, role models, etc.
4. Determine what (you believe) this entity will do, given its beliefs, to satisfy its desires: actions, means, consideration set, etc.

With that base you can then craft your messaging.

What is the narrative the entity is telling itself?

How does your brand fit within that narrative?

What is it seeking?

How do you call attention to your solution?

Not ideal

Many car manufacturers are selling car owners’ data to advertisers as a revenue boosting tactic, according to earlier reporting by Recorded Future News. Automakers are exponentially increasing the number of sensors they place in their cars every year with little regulation of the practice.

The OpenAI as platform company era has begun.

GPTs are a new way for anyone to create a tailored version of ChatGPT to be more helpful in their daily life, at specific tasks, at work, or at home—and then share that creation with others.

Anyone can easily build their own GPT—no coding is required. You can make them for yourself, just for your company’s internal use, or for everyone.

GPT Store coming soon. And maybe a phone (a Jony Ive collab)?

The Apple Playbook is in full effect.

The Google Analytics 4 era is upon us, and to do GA4 right you're likely going to need Google Tag Manager.

There are more ways than GTM to GA4, but they work together pretty seamlessly. And GTM reduces the need for a developer, which is one reason I like it (I always feel bad asking a talented programmer to copy-paste this event code snippet just because I can't access the code base).

Google's vision for the GA4 era seems to be:

• GTM is the implementation layer
• GA4 is the intelligence/analysis layer
• Data Studio is the reporting layer.

The simplest way to think about GTM is as an extension of your site's code.

To make events and interactions "visible" to GTM, the information has to exist in the data layer.

A data layer is a JavaScript object that is used to pass information from your website to your Tag Manager container. You can then use that information to populate variables and activate triggers in your tag configurations.

With Tag Manager, there are now two code bases for your site (or app):

• The functional code - what your developers created to make the whole experience happen
• The marketing code - all the stuff we can do in GTM that isn't part of the user's core experience but facilitates most modern web work (social media pixels, Google Tags, event tracking, cookie banners, A/B testing tools, etc.)

GTM is a container for all that code that powers your digital marketing and analytics efforts but doesn't need to be in the core code base (there are some things that need to be added directly despite not being core to the user experience (like A/B testing tools) to avoid creating a bad user experience due to the way GTM handles code injection).

An added layer of data for your marketing and analytics needs.

What happens when I change something?

Edits in Tag Manager are not destructive to historical data. They change how things are handled moving forward (and may cause you headaches if you rename things and forget when you go to do time period comparisons).

An example question I was asked recently:

I am adjusting various triggers based on some new website updates. Will this effectively "erase" the event count of previous tags with the old triggers?

Short answer: nope!

Once an event hits GA4, GTM no longer holds sway over it, it just packages the information that gets sent and processed.

In this example, changing the trigger allows you to adapt/update the event criteria so you can send the same event name into GA4 even if the trigger changes.

How to think about Google Tag Manager:

Tag Manager is a supplementary code base where you can move (most) of your marketing, analytics, and related code to keep your core code base lightweight while giving you, the marketer, more flexibility and control over how your events and code snippets are implemented.

Need a new Meta Pixel event firing for better optimization? It's now just a few clicks away, no developer required.

GTM is an extension of the site code.
GA4 is a destination data is sent to.

Spirit Halloween runs on memes:

Memes of the Spirit Halloween banner taking over vacant department stores and of fake, hilarious costumes have taken the internet by storm every fall since around 2019.
Instead of shunning the memes, the company has embraced them, letting them be what every company wants — free, viral, grassroots marketing.

Luxury is coming out of lockdown:

Consumers are now shopping IRL for brand quality and prestige, setting up the US luxury retail market to exceed $75 billion in sales by the end of 2023.

Luxury shopping is as much about the experience as it is about the purchase, which means digital has a larger gap to close.

the expansion of luxury retail proves brand experience (even in the form of brick-and-mortar shops) still attracts big spenders.

Physical will go increasingly upscale and experiential (think: The Sphere) as digital eats the rest.

AI/AR/VR-powered customization and experiences will be the next gen of luxury.

The biggest challenge a marketer at a big company faces is the specter of industrial short-term thinking. Going along with the bean counters might be the worst marketing mistake you can make. Beans aren’t the point of the organization, they’re a side effect.

Seth