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85% of registered voters surveyed trust podcasts more than any other news and information source, including newspapers (print or digital), TV (broadcast or cable), AM/FM radio, and social media.

Audio is the only mass medium that bypasses the eyes, which means it is processed differently by the brain.

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Social Savannah’s top…

Black Friday strategies / hooks for Meta:

  1. Unboxing reaction
  2. Price / discounts & deals

KPI to measure creative performance:

  • Click-to-purchase ratio
  • Hold rate (watch length)
  • Hook rate
  • Spend (aka the algorithm’s love language)
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Another check in the fun fall for marketers checklist:

In light of the progress on inflation and the balance of risks, the Committee decided to lower the target range for the federal funds rate by 1/2 percentage point to 4-3/4 to 5 percent.

Should have another cut coming this year.

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A client wanted some guidance on keywords to use in their social content to help reach their audience. I included this disclaimer / calrification in the deliverable:

From an SEO perspective, the ultimate goal is creating useful content for users / readers. Keywords should support the discoverability of the post / page without detracting from the user’s experience.

From a social perspective, keywords and hashtags are diminishing in important as the contextual matching power of AI is further integrated into the search and discovery engines powering the most popular platforms.

According to Social Media Today, LinkedIn has basically said hashtags aren’t needed anymore. And certainly don’t need to be used if the keyword(s) that would be used as a hashtag already appears natively in the post text. The platform’s search tool is less keyword driven and moving more towards context and query concepts.

AI turbocharges the contextual understanding and targeting of web platforms.

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Meta wants your holiday ad dollars, so it’s rolled out:

  • More prominent promo callouts
  • Expanded reminder ad capabilities
  • Site links for all (these do get used based on my tests)
  • More features to get people taking action at a physical location
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Posts with a lot of comments look to be more heavily weighted when it comes to what shows up in your Threads feed. That’s over re-shares and Likes, with the experiment seemingly suggesting that the Threads algorithm is geared towards incentivizing discussion over everything else.

This makes sense at first glance because commenting is the highest form of public engagement. And engagement is what Meta’s other apps struggle with.

So Meta wants engagement and the algorithms are primed to reward the actions the platform wants.

But this article raises a great point I hadn’t thought about—about what Meta really wants.

ROBOT FOOD!

What better input to train your social platform’s LLM on than public user conversations?

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This list of trajectories for future festivals includes some good potential trajectories for brands too.

  • Lightning Rods for Weak Signals
  • Enablers of Serendipitous Discovery
  • Fostering Connections and Communities Beyond the Filter Bubble

Amplify. Delight. Connect.

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I work with a lot of real estate clients at Blue Ion, so I think a lot about how the market may change and how we can do real estate marketing better (I think the bar is low).

These quotes from Seth Godin related to AI agents have the gears turning.

Real estate (both buying and renting) has been slightly changed by the internet. They’ve made markets a bit more efficient and given buyers more insight. But the choices people make are based on intuition, and data sets are incomplete and have more “I know it when I see it” than we’d expect from such a large and regular transaction.

What happens when the right person finds the right place to live, and the connections have value far beyond building awareness?

…

Creating connections between and among buyers and sellers in dramatically more productive ways is (possibly) around the corner.

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Aim to be effective, but unpredictable. That is, you want to act in a way that AIs have trouble modeling or imitating. That makes you irreplaceable.
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6 seconds is the magic number for all kinds of content these days.

The average site visitor surveyed said they would wait up to eight seconds for a website to load. However, the second most common threshold reported by nearly one-third of respondents dropped down to just three to six seconds.
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A good place to find new customers is by looking for already established things that you are similar to.

Easy. Expected. A good starting place.

There’s a strange thing that happens sometimes where instead of reaching to your right and left for new customers, it can work to reach across to the other side of the table. Connections that are so out there they just might be true.

Unusual. Novel. And more impactful in the long run.

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New toy alert

Generative AI search engine Perplexity said it will launch ads in Q4

Perplexity’s new ads will be video ads and sponsored questions

the platform is emphasizing its capacity to reach educated, high-income professionals who may be in senior leadership at their companies.
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“newstalgia”—a desire for familiarity combined with novelty

Top Gun: Maverick. Twisters. This is driving force of pop culture right now.

Or, said another way:

“take something that feels familiar and put it into a modern context.”

It’s not the 90s that are back. It’s the 90s as reimagined today that’s in.

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Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.

Every interaction your customers have with you accumulates to your brand experience. How does each one fit together to make the whole you want?

As Tom Asacker says, the goal is to “to create an experience that resonates deeply.”

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And so, Swift has put up something of a door: access to her costs fans at least $12.99. Here’s the thing about doors though: while they keep people out, they also keep them in.

Does your brand have a door?

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Citing continued inflation and high interest rates, 33% of consumers say they will spend less this year on holiday shopping than in 2023, per a new report from Bankrate.
Almost half of all those surveyed by Bankrate said they would start shopping for the holidays by Halloween.


I understand the vibe, but I would not be surprised if this completely changes post-election.

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Despite Apple’s long lead, Spotify Technology SA. and Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube have now become the most popular places to listen to podcasts.

A study published last month shows YouTube as the most popular podcast listening platform in the US, with 31% of respondents saying they use it. It’s followed by Spotify at 21% and Apple at 12%.

Through the lens of legacy Apple, the lack of focus on podcasts makes sense, despite basically creating the medium. But ads-and-services Apple has to be missing the potential of being the dominant player in a sector with growing ad and monetization potential.

YouTube, meanwhile, cracked the discovery code for podcasts. A persistent shortcoming of traditional podcasting apps.

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Brands can help combat this general fatigue with campaigns centered around solving a problem in an impactful way, especially focusing on infectious positive energy.

The fatigue mentioned is compassion fatigue, but could as easily be noise / content fatigue.

This feels like a good campaign planning process regardless.

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What?! The goldfish brain is evolving!

Engagement on longer short-form video is increasing across YouTube and TikTok as traditional short-form engagement declines on the trend machine.

users are now seemingly looking to engage with longer videos, not at regular long-form length, but an expanded variation of the short-form trend.
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Google Is A Monopolist? Part 2

Google and the Justice Department are set for a rematch of sorts on Monday when they return to court to argue about Google’s alleged monopolistic behavior over how ads are bought and sold on the internet.