3 things all brands should keep in mind:

• Don’t mistake interest for trust.

• If you promise to deliver a certain product, deliver it.

• It’s about making people feel heard and supported.

The importance of building consumer trust

And my inflation-fighting interest rate concerns might be materializing:

more worrying is defaults spiking to levels similar to 2008, given the US economy is doing pretty well in other areas, e.g. with unemployment sitting at historic lows.

Cars And Big Houses Are Becoming Unbuyable

Just a reminder that placements through things like audience networks are usually garbage.

GroupM is removing MFAs* from its inclusion lists

*made-for-advertising sites

If you use them, be aware of your optimization. Incentives matter.

Let's start with an aside, the Sounds Profitable podcast is a great listen for concepts communicated clearly in a short period of time.

Making a Podcast People Hate – Sounds Profitable

Tom Webster shows off data from the upcoming study The Podcast Landscape in America and discusses the power of focusing a podcast to a specific audience over generic broad-reaching topics.

Know the Author

A survey of listeners and non-listeners found that The Joe Rogan Experience is the #1 podcast, which isn't surprising—16% of respondents had it in their Top 3.

But what does that % mean? Here's a fun nugget:

They are not small numbers – they reflect a percentage of all the people who have ever listened to a podcast, and even at 1% they would exceed the audience of most non-football TV shows.

 Are you running podcast ads yet?

More important to being hateable, the #2 podcast clocked in at 3%. That's a big gap.

So how does Joe do it? He's hateable. Or...

because Rogan is crystal clear about attracting a very specific audience, even at the exclusion of others.

He "super-serves a core audience."

He knows his core. He caters to it. He doesn't care about you if you're not in it.

Or, as Ian Schrager (another controversial dude) puts it:

“one plus one equals three.” You build something most people will hate, but a few people love – and love enough to tell their friends about.

Or how about Kurt Vonnegut:

“Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”

After all, brands are stories.

Take a stand. Plant a flag. Draw a line.

Be willing to turn people off from the beginning (it will save you money in the long run).

Name brands—the ones you probably think of when you dream of what your brand could be—are aspiration engines. A rallying cry for fans and a lightning rod for haters. They have loyal fans because they're willing to have the haters.

Don't build a brand for everyone. Build a brand for only those that care as much about your thing as you. Make yourself hateable to those that don't.

🔥 Some will walk through fire for you. Some will light your product on fire. 🔥

Here's an extreme example:

TikTok continues its everything app approach to expansion by testing the music-streaming waters.

It’s a natural extension for a platform already seen as an entertainment hub (and core to launching hits these days).

The end of the free money train is going to make watching the growth strategies of Silicon Valley vs. Chinese companies vs. privacy-first upstarts vs. fediverse players even more interesting.

The labor illusion makes us value more highly something that takes more effort.

Why do you have to crack an egg to make cake from a box? Marketing.

Nudge podcast: Does subliminal advertising work?

Turns out the last 12 months wasn’t too bad for agencies, with at least half of those surveyed reported revenue gains and many increasing staffing.

Confidence remains for the coming 12 as well, though staffing optimism is low.

This should be a good sign for economic health moving forward.

A good reminder that LLMs are snapshots of human knowledge and expression as filtered through the internet over the span of just a few years. They aren’t oracles or infallible libraries of all knowledge.

More (Amazon) ads in more places.

Amazon Sponsored Product ads will now appear on Pinterest, Buzzfeed, and more

The more looks like some publishers.

Retail media is crushing right now (just ask eBay) & Amazon is top of the heap. Good way for struggling ad platforms to bring in some more revenue.

Tips & questions from Klaviyo itself.

Goal: 3:1 return on Lifetime Value (LTV): Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio

Post-purchase optimization:

• Personalized confirmation emails
• Transparent order tracking
• Integrate shipping & logistics data with marketing flows (beware unfortunate timing)
• Smash that unboxing experience
• Don’t forget about them after delivery

Keys to personalization:

• What did you learn during acquisition? (Quiz questions, products viewed, etc)
• Is all this data centralized?
• How are you fostering customer community?

Know your numbers—implement strategies that count

• What was CAC last year?
• What promos earlier in the year had the quickest repeat purchase rate?

Own It Black Friday Cyber Monday panel lightning round:

• Give a gift card with purchase of $X
• Email: shorten time between flow events, warm your list up now, & create a segment of purchasers from past 2 BFCMs
• Personalization: match offer to audience desires (either global or segmented)
• Leverage winback features

More from the Own It conference.

How to create an advantage this holiday shopping season (Black Friday/Cyber Monday+):

• Provide value beyond discounts
• Nail the site fundamentals (speed, flow, etc.)
• Personalization via customer data
• Rethink / remix your targeting & segmenting
• Keep it simple & consistent cross-channel
• Figure out email deliverability now
• Bundles! Gifts!
• Build community / focus on community-based elements
• Be thoughtful with post-purchase messaging
• Keep your flows topical

Most of all, don’t be afraid to show some personality.

Prime Day Part 2: Dealectric Boogaloo returns this October

Holiday shopping season is already forecast to start early, but this should guarantee it does.

Consumer spending continues to climb month-over-month.

July marks the fourth straight month of increased consumer spending, as well as the fastest month-over-month increase of the year.

Which is good for recession fears. But the trend within the trend shows the pandemic splintering is still in play.

Underpinning the entire trend: a nearly 2% spike in online shopping.

institutional retail competitors continue to flounder. Home Depot is forecasting its first yearly revenue decline since 2009. Meanwhile, Target is expected to report its first quarterly sales decline in four years

Just 1% of the Nation’s Homes Have Changed Hands This Year, the Lowest Share in at Least a Decade

Is this a positive or negative economic indicator?

And remember, boomers used pandemic stimulus to scoop up their retirement homes and remove themselves from the housing market.

More Own It insights:

Focus on finding the right customers, not as many customers as possible.

Use your email and SMS lists differently. They’ll have overlap and people will notice if everything is the same.

Some interesting takeaways from Jones Road Beauty’s session at the Klaviyo Own It conference:

• Turned off all TikTok spend
• Prefer free gift with purchase to discounts as they feel the latter devalues the brand
• Focus on contribution margin over revenue (profitability is the north star metric)
• Incrementality over attribution