Weekly Digest #4 September

• Netflix Beer 🍻 Anheuser-Busch InBev and Netflix struck a global multiyear deal to promote brands like Bud Light in the streaming service’s shows, advertise Netflix on limited-edition packs of beer, and more 

• SNAP: Selfie Culture 🤳 Snapchat Android Users Took a Trillion Selfies Last Year. Whereas iPhone users took just over 500 billion. 

• Brilliant Brand Extension 🇬🇧 British institute Greggs opened their first pub, “The Golden Flake Tavern” in Newcastle. Smartest brand extension for a while IMHO.

• AI Mode Control 🗺️ Cloudflare have created “content signals policy” (https://contentsignals.org/), helping website owners to stop Google from using their content in their AI Mode. It would look like Content-Signal: search=yes, ai-train=no

• Walmart’s Soccer Play 🏟️ Walmart partnered with La Liga (The Spanish league) to brand El Clásico across the U.S. and Canada, they are looking to engage with customers when the Spanish giants Barcelona play Real Madrid. The Walmart CMO suggest “This is not just about slapping two logos side by side. This is a true partnership with what we’re building,” 

• ChatGPT Traffic Driver 👀 “Referral traffic from ChatGPT is on the rise. New data shows that, in August, 20% of Walmart’s referral clicks came from ChatGPT, marking a 15% increase from July. Likewise, ChatGPT drove 20% of referral traffic to Etsy, around 15% to Target and 10% to eBay”

• X Algo Pending Change 🫣 “The goal for your X timeline is to get out of the mainstream algo and the political crusades and find your niche. You should be able to post about your interests and have friendly, relevant people chime in. If you’re seeing gas station fight videos, your account is not ramped up yet. We are working everyday to fix this.” - Nikita Bier Head of Product @ X 

  • Elon followed up with “The algorithm will be purely AI by November, with significant progress along the way. We will open source the algorithm every two weeks or so. By November or certainly December, you will be able to adjust your feed dynamically just by asking Grok.” 

• Kim Just Did It 🫂 NikeSKIMs went live yesterday, with seven collections, fronted by Kim &  tennis goat and investor Serena Williams, top sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson, gymnast Jordan Chiles and snowboard sensation Chloe Kim

• YouTube Pro… 📹 YouTube have gone on a PR tour pitching their new services and wanting to build the Stage for Creators, expect YouTube to become more professional and high production

• You Know What’s Cool? 3Billion… 💬 Instagram Hits 3 Billion Users & refocuses on video and doubles down on private messaging. What’s driving the growth? …Apparently, it’s active comments

• TikTok Algorithm Licensing Deal 🇺🇸 The U.S. government and a number of investors have come to an arrangement to license TikTok's recommendation engine (aka algorithm). Here’s a good explainer video

• AI Vibes ⏬ Meta releases Vibes a new AI app (think only AI-created content) - this comes from the multi-million dollar employees

• Social Pod 🎧 Good podcast from Alex Schultz, Meta’s talking about Marketing and the nature of marketing  https://pca.st/nkepe53r  

• Ads GPT? 🎯 ChatGPT is looking for an Ads lead, I wrote about why its a critical part of ChatGPT’s future back in December (better ads not any paid ads)

• Social Is A New Source 📰 Pew Research shows Americans rely on social media apps for news (images via pew below)

• Tactical Guest/Collabs 🧑‍🎤 Music acts are trying to engineer viral moments to justify concert ticket prices by doubling down in bringing out special guests & making this standard in their events

• You Are Training Data 🤖 From November. LinkedIn will be using member info and your activity to train its AI, unless you opt out. 

• Problem Solving 🫨 Anthropic pushed Keep thinking campaign for Claude, pushing There's never been a worse time