Pinterest Presents is happening now.

A lot of these “announcements” are kind of old news, but I’m looking forward to trying out quiz ads.

What better way to tailor content to each user than by having them tell you what they want?

Not surprised by these findings at all:

More than three-quarters (77%) of respondents head straight to the search bar when they land on an e-commerce site

84% admit they have left a site because of search issues, including irrelevant results, too many/too few products being displayed, or being directed to out-of-stock items.

Data storytelling is the process of presenting data insights using narration and visualization.

This insight is from the Exploding Topics newsletter. Speaking of insights:

75% of the data companies collect remains unused.

60% of investments in analytics capabilities go to waste because insights aren’t utilized properly.

To pull an Avinash, are analyzing and providing value or just puking data?

Every platform is basically a Shorts platform.

Don’t change the content, change the medium of delivery.

-Vignesh Kumar

Apple Boosts Spending to Develop Conversational AI

The marriage of voice assistants and LLMs is coming.

Siri + Shortcuts + Apple’s GPT is an intriguing combo to think about.

Not far away—or perhaps very far away—depending on who did the measuring

-The Girl in the Tower by Katherine Arden 📚

A metric on its own is meaningless. It’s in context that it takes on meaning. And that context depends on the (data) storyteller.

Update your iOS

Apple released software updates on Thursday to address two zero-day vulnerabilities that researchers said were used to deliver NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware to at least one victim.

An excellent synopsis of what branding can be.

branding as a continuous, progressive process.
One that answers some very simple questions.
Who.
Who informs everything you’ll do.
Your perspective and intention.
Your look, feel, thoughts and behaviors.
Your vision of the future.
Who is your karma.
Because who you choose to focus on, will ultimately define who you become.
What.
What is your laser focus.
Your passion.
Your unique point of view and expertise.
It’s your daring, meaningful and believable value proposition.
The one that attracts your who.
What is your why.
It gets you up in the morning.
How.
How communicates your what, your passionate point of view.
How is the motivating language, stories and experiences you create and share.
How is your art and your voice.
It sets you apart from others who say they do what you do.
Successful branding is simple.
Who, what and how.
Yes, it requires nuance, subtlety and focus.
But it’s simple nonetheless.
What’s hard is the discipline and unwavering belief necessary to pull it off.

Pinterest’s new computer vision-powered body type technology to make search more inclusive

Search and AI (at least for consumer apps) are features now, no longer platforms to build moats around.

It won’t be “one tool to rule them all” but specialized tools for different use cases.

A great listen for illustrating marketing via celebrities.

There are concepts for everything, and I think it is important in any industry to go beyond those fixed concepts. The major companies often don’t want to go there, so I think that’s our role at Kitan Club.

-Daiki Furuya

This episode of The Knowledge Project podcast with Ray Flemings starts off with a hell of a story that transitions into an excellent overview of the procurement difficulty spectrum.

The easiest way to think about what we do is this five-step spectrum, where to the left, things are simple, and to the right, they’re difficult to impossible, so one, two, three, four, five. On the left, anything that you can purchase on a web browser. You want to rent a home to stay in when you go to LA. Well, there’s Airbnb for that. You want to buy a ticket to Coachella, go to Coachella dot com; you’ve got a VIP pass. Number two is hard. These are things where maybe they’re available online, but they’re still difficult for you to get your hands on. So these would be things like booking a private jet. You can book a private jet online, but it’s so confusing and so much brain damage from a booking. Most people use a broker or a travel person to do it. Number three, we call “off market.” So these are things that sellers want to sell, but they never list or make [them] available on a website—artist credentials to go see your favorite band and all sorts of other things that are never on public sale. Category four would be stuff that’s hard—walking on the red carpet at the Met Gala or being on stage with your favorite artist, et cetera, et cetera. Then the fifth category [has] the impossible requests, like the ventilator chase or all of these other sorts of wild and interesting things that we get called on to do.

It's useful to think about where your product, service, or experience falls on this spectrum.

Along with where your customers (and aspirational customers and those your customers aspire to be like) fall along this spectrum.

You may be an ecommerce store with a low-friction checkout, but your customers may be operating at level 4. How do you create a brand story and experience that lends a level 4 (or 5) sheen to your level 1 procurability?

It doesn't matter what your really are, it matters what they think you are.

Wrapping up the sales vs. marketing roadshow with one final podcast (maybe (for now)). This time it's Marketing Against The Grain. The spicy take from the show is above, but let's look at what else they got into.

Here are the quick hits:

• AI is a platform shift
• Software gets easier to create and therefore commoditized
• Marketing matters (see: Liquid Death)
• Marketers are creators, creators disrupt brand
• All creators are marketing first
• Marketing will take over more of the customer journey / experience (powered by AI)
• The marketers are the automators

Let's pull a few quotes (or paraphrases) to dive deeper on some of those bullet points.

About AI:

AI will lead to the ecommercization of most businesses.

The distinction between B2B and B2C will blur and disappear. It's about B2P now: Business to Purchaser.

About commodotization:

As commoditization increases (accelerated by AI), marketing becomes more important.

You differentiate on brand, message, and value messaging instead of core product.

Marketing will take over more of the customer experience.

On the creators bit:

The creator playbook is the future of marketing (they don’t have the same concerns as a public business and can have a schtick).

And, oh yeah, sales and marketing are the same thing:

The marketer doesn’t need to stop at ‘oh, I hand over the lead to sales.’ They can automate the sales outreach. Marketer goes all the way up now to transaction. But they don’t need to stop there. A lot of the support function* can be automated.

But how does this impact the org chart?

Marketing is owning all the one-to-many work. The other teams own specialized, human-work processes.

One functional group leads the one-to-many experiences. One group leads the one-to-one.

It's not sales or marketing. It's sales and marketing.

Consumers don't get to a point in their journey and have to make a choose-your-own-adventure decision between the two. Their journey should be seamless. Structure your processes accordingly.

* Everything is customer service. Starting with this core belief creates the best marketing.

The B2B B2C divide is dead.

It is now B2P: Business to Purchaser.

Another day, another holiday shopping survey

• 38% of Americans plan to start their shopping before Halloween
• 44% before Thanksgiving
• 81% will use reward apps and coupons
• 73% have noticed price increases on target items

What can marketers learn from the Burning Man floods?

Public perception doesn’t matter (to an extent).

Dedicated consumers will keep coming back if you service them, not the masses.

Consumer perception does.

Focus on your consumer’s perception and you’ll actually move the line.