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The Biden White House is backing a bipartisan bill that could lead to a ban on the hugely popular social media app TikTok in the United States.
The legislation would force ByteDance to sell TikTok if it wants to remain in U.S. app stores.
I wonder how this news will be received post-enshoppification
via Punchbowl News
Finished reading: Head Lopper Volume 1: The Island Or a Plague of Beasts by Andrew Ross MacLean 📚
Is the future of radio TV?
YouTube is the dominant player in podcasts (now with RSS feed ingestion).
The sports podcast network Locked On has turned their content into a 24/7 streaming sports show (YT link), and now has a Fire TV channel.
Big podcasts are basically small TV studios.
I’ve said it before, but here’s someone else saying it:
Boring is the worst thing your brand can be.
via Inc
How do you maximize your ads' ROI?
Better creative.
Creative quality is the primary lever we have left for targeting and the only aspect of advertising truly left within our control as marketers.
The magic doesn’t come from button pressing and knob twisting in an ads dashboard. It comes from great ads that are noticeable, memorable, and cause an emotional response that drives action.
Obsess about your brand’s creative.
via Demand Curve
Stanley is trying to dial back the drops frenzy by borrowing a page from the Taylor Swift playbook and getting people to sign up for the chance purchase a new product when it drops.
What goes into the screening process?
browser signals, location signals, fraud analysis, cohort signals and “assessing basically who looks like a real fan and who is using automation or otherwise to game the system,”
…
A red flag, for example, would be when the system detects that far too many people are entering from one IP address.
A lot of data science to sell an insulated straw cup.
via CNN
Another Podcast’s episode Google Gemini and AI bias unpacks the weights and training data stuff I briefly mentioned yesterday.
Hidden patterns in data and models as bias amplifiers.
Also the excellent quote “the fake is in the caption,” because what is a prompt but a caption for a future image?
I’m a big pedal steel fan, so when Jason Isbell started talking about it on the Broken Record podcast I took note.
The pedals are so small, and they’re so close together, that if you don’t wear the right kind of shoes you’ll accidentally hit more than one pedal at a time. So this is why pedal steel is a true cowboy instrument, because cowboy boots are what you wear in order to be able to hit just one pedal at a time.
Pedal steel (a key country music instrument) also has a learning curve.
What are the pedal steels and cowboy boots of what you’re trying to do? Are you using the right ones?
Finished reading: The Last Horse: Prologue by Aaron Tucker 📚
Finished reading: John Constantine, Hellblazer Vol. 8: Rake at the Gates of Hell by Garth Ennis 📚
The more you know 💫
Ada Lovelace, the daughter of poet Lord Byron, wrote the first algorithm created specifically for a machine.
In the section of a recent The Email Marketing Show episode titled “Don’t make the mistake of offering discounts upfront!”:
You got to really legitimize discounts and bonuses and things like that and you do that by really planting that seed and creating that familiarity.
Don’t introduce people to your brand via sales or promos (unless it’s a major shopping holiday where a sale is expected).
Investment is (slowly) trickling back into ad tech
recent activity is a stark contrast to the conservatism of investors in 2023, with speculation centering upon the AI and CTV sectors.
AI is not a surprise, slap that label on anything and you’ll attract investment right now.
CTV is the heir apparent to the traditional TV advertising throne, even if YouTube and other creator-content based platforms will carve a sizable slice of that pie for themselves.
What happens when the usual forms of human-computer interface get disrupted?
OpenAI is working on AI agents that take over your mouse and keyboard, performing the tasks in real time.
- One would complete complex tasks on your device like creating a spreadsheet from a document of information or filling out your tax forms.
- The second agent would take on web-based tasks like curating data from different sites (similar to Perplexity or Arc Browser), booking flights and hotels, or even building travel itineraries.
The groundwork has been laid, AI could be the accelerant.
via The Future Party
Wendy’s looking to test surge pricing at restaurants
The Amazonification of physical retail.
I’m interested to see how this goes. I don’t think it’ll be received well by consumers. I don’t think people want to be surprised by their burger price while ordering.
This is maybe not the thing to say in a time of inflation when It’s Been 30 Years Since Food Ate Up This Much of Your Income:
We’ve got to reach the consumer where they are, so we’re advertising about cereal for dinner. If you think about the cost of cereal for a family versus what they might otherwise do, that’s going to be much more affordable.
It does not matter if this is factually accurate or not, your consumer’s aren’t pleased that this is where they’re at. And Frosted Flakes don’t exactly align with the surging wellness trend.
after the spike in online shopping ignited by the 2020 Covid quarantine, the e-commerce share of all retail sales had shrunk to less than 15% in the third quarter of 2023. Over the past four years, the e-commerce slice of retail industry revenue has gained by only 0.5%.
But, as this Forbes piece, ecommerce is becoming more and more enmeshed in the full retail ecosystem. It is no longer siloed off.
Apps power in-store shopping. In-store returns trigger on-site purchases. Ecommerce discovery turns into in-store purchases.
Just like most things digital these days, it’s omnichannel.
According to the Dotdash Meredith CEO:
“if you cannot show performance, you are dead.” The evolution of advertising and how people interact with those ads has caused a shift to bottom-up priorities, instead of top-down.