⃛Level Up ↴
Adobe’s holiday shopping predictions are in:
major discounts this season–up to 30% off listed prices–as retailers compete for consumer dollars
Biggest discount wins?
share of the most expensive goods is set to increase by 19% compared to pre-season trends—driven in large part by competitive discounts
Inflation and price sensitivity who?
I think post-election holiday shopping is gonna pop like a champagne cork.
This.
If you try to be for everyone, you end up being for no one.
Or, as Vonnegut said, “if you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”
We’ve been preparing all our clients for this:
The vast majority of political ad spend happens in the month prior to the election.Bottom of funnel, so to speak. Expect prices to be higher up to Election Day in early November, then drop off sharply, leaving an opening. Take advantage.
After that, consumer spending is expected to skyrocket. Lots of people will be online engaging in discourse. Screentime will be up, which means CPMs will be down and CTRs up. Get on it.
Minimum Viable Website: A Thought Exercise
If your website had to fit entirely on a phone screen—only one page, no scrolling, no links—what would it say?
How would you:
- Tell your story
- Establish your value
- Drive one action (buttons are allowed to trigger forms, checkouts, etc.)
How can you turn visitors into customers with one frame of an Instagram Story?
What is the one core nugget your audience needs to understand to “get” what you do, what the value is?
What are their primary questions / concerns / blocks that you need to address immediately?
What is the one action you want them to take that creates the highest exchange of value between both sides?
Thinking about God promotes greater acceptance of Artificial intelligence (AI)-based recommendations.…when God is salient, people are more willing to consider AI-based recommendations than when God is not salient.…God salience reduces reliance on human recommenders and heightens willingness to consider AI recommendations.
What does this suggest about human psychology and behavior?
Roku announced a self-serve ad platform which include two ad types I want to test:
Action Ads: Marketers can easily generate interactive video overlays on their own, allowing viewers to send themselves a text message while watching their video ad.
Shopify Checkout: For the first time in CTV advertising, Shopify merchants can now launch self-service shoppable ads that allow consumers to check out directly on-screen using their Roku remote.
YouTube confirms advertisers can broadly target your paused screentime: “As we’ve seen both strong advertiser and strong viewer response, we’ve since widely rolled out Pause ads to all advertisers,”
Pause ads for all.
A format I really want to try. And one that I think rewards humor and breaking the 4th wall more than most.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
New toy alert
Generative AI search engine Perplexity said it will launch ads in Q4Perplexity’s new ads will be video ads and sponsored questionsthe platform is emphasizing its capacity to reach educated, high-income professionals who may be in senior leadership at their companies.