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The best ideas are when you’re like, “we can never do this, we’re going to get in big trouble, this is so wrong.” When you feel that, you’ve got to stay there. That’s where all the interesting stuff happens.
-Chris Beresford-Hill
&
Make sure you always feel like you’re doing something vaguely naughty.
-Jeff Goodby
This is how you push beyond the tried and true.
The imitation game.
The pack.
The goal isn’t the easy “no” that can be dismissed and forgotten.
But the “no” that opens a bunch of yeses that were nos before.
Sacred places are the first places to be destroyed by invaders and iconoclasts, for whom nothing is more offensive than the enemy’s gods.
…
For there are two broad approaches to building: the way of settlement, and the way of disruption.
…
the iconoclast seeks to replace old gods with new, to disenchant the landscape and to mark the place with signs of his defiance.
The playbook for disruptor / insurgent brands.
Find an enemy and replace one of its “gods” with your own.
Make your brand’s ritual a rebellion against settlement.
from The Face of God by Roger Scruton 📚
she found it hard to believe that all living things needed to speak.
Believe, said the bear. Whether you hear them or not, they need it like they need air to breathe.
We are a culture built on oral traditions.
This is why (early) social media took off and titled the axis of marketing and branding.
& why “community” is returning to buzzword status in the cycle
People want to speak.
Are you able to listen?
from The Bear by Andrew Krivak 📚
According to research
headlines featuring common words outperform those with complex phrasing when grabbing readers’ attention.
Outperform meaning higher CTRs and deeper content engagement.
using more common words, a simpler writing style, and more readable text led to more clicks.
Know your audience.
Use their language.
A little trend watching thanks the Gen Alpha’s digital behavior (even though generations are garbage)
the bigger the platform—so athletes, celebrities, big brands, TV commercials—they have less trust in those spokespeople and those formats
&
like their favorite brands to help them learn more about their interests.
(preferences being games and how to videos)
parents of Gen Alphas say their kids have a more mature understanding and knowledge of brands than they did at the same age.
Brand is becoming more important
via emarketer
YouTube Sees Brand Fans Move From Consumers Of Culture To Shaping It
Content creators are the new studios and the Gen Z entertainment paradigm is taking hold in the mainstream.
Spotify for Podcasters has introduced the ability for podcast audiences to leave comments on podcasts
Spotify adding a little YouTube-esque social-adjacent functionality to podcasts.
From the 2024 Women’s NCAA tournament reaching a peak of 24 million viewers at the final game, to the UK’s national Women’s Soccer League receiving a 17% boost in interest between 2023 and 2024 according to Nielsen, fandom for women’s sports is on the rise.
From today’s Ben Evans email:
A few years ago this would have been expensive and time-consuming if it was even possible - soon it will just be a button. This is the natural life cycle of all ‘AI’.
AI is an accelerant.
From MarTech: Steve Ganem, Product Director of Google Analytics, on what’s ahead for GA4
More offline data and more AI
continue to innovate and invest in making it the most effective, holistic and durable analytics solution
Fun trick for ecomm competitor analysis
Landing page research hack.
— Dave Rekuc (@DaveRekuc) April 28, 2023
Go to /sitemap.xml on any Shopify store. That gets you the list of each of the sitemaps on that store.
Go to /sitemap_pages_1.xml to see /pages specifically (often used for LPs). It's like ads library for landing pages except it's comprehensive.
People are addicted to escape
-Abass Wurie
This was said about drugs, but drugs are are just one avenue of escape.
Thanks to Gabe the Bass Player, I’m beginning to see that I think of brands like songs.
Some are transient hits and others classics.
Some are pop sensations, others underground faves, others niche anthems.
There’s usually a song of the summer.
Regardless, a song is the same combination of parts for everyone who hears it. But the way we each hear it is different.
Once it’s all there it will be powerful enough to let the audience think they have it memorized even when they don’t.
The sweet spot is caring deeply about the process while not caring too much about the outcome.
Process over results.
This is key to doing good marketing work.
The process is the same regardless of client or project.
Outcome is largely reliant on the client/project.
Relying on external forces for satisfaction is a recipe for discontent.
The age of multi-media brands is here
findings revealed a strong preference across the board for the addition of sonic to visual logos, and this contributed to the commissioning of a second study to investigate the role of motion synchrony between the mediums. Once more, the results confirmed the power of properly combined branded visuals when matched with audio and synced motion.
Ambient computing will only increase the importance of modular multimedia brand assets.
via amp
Good news:
Fourth of July gas prices are set for a three-year low
Adjusted for inflation, US gas prices are almost exactly where they were in July 2018, according to federal data.
Bad news:
record high: 5% more than last year and 30% higher than in 2019 before the Covid-19 pandemic.
The biggest driver of the pricier supermarket bills will be the cost of meat, which accounts for about half the total cost.
Maybe double up on beans?
When it comes to naming in the branding process, we regularly talk about how a name is an empty vessel and doesn’t need inherent meaning to work. What matters is what you fill the name with.
So I love this post about Good Band Names.
it’s impossible to separate the name from the music…because in real life the music can make any band name a perfectly accepted name.
Pick a name. Any name.
Be far more choosy about your value.
Pinterest will now allow users to create short videos of their curated Pinterest boards, designed to be shared on social media.
Pinterest dubs this type of sharing the “mecore” trend, noting that it has seen a 565% increase in searches related to this activity on its platform annually. Boards titled “mecore” also increased by 255% since last year
Pinterest has fully pivoted away from being a social media platform to being a discovery platform, and is now adding features for off-platform sharing.
It’s a search engine meets bookmarking tool with robust social sharing.
via TechCrunch