Is it a marketing genius? Is brand dead?
Friday Review: SKIMS collab, Birkinifying the products, new AI models & uncomfortable ad from Nike. Do the catch-up with đ§
Kendrick has taken the no.1 spot in eyes of Snoop dogg and many others, his concert was crazy. Meanwhile Macyâs announced a new campaign âSummerâs Greatest Hitsâ, they are now claiming summer, Mariah Carey is always booked for winter.
Also, Is Rick Owens preparing for a fashion war in EU? The latest show is filled with Aura to feed Gen-Z.
Thanks again to everyone sharing and supporting the work, new interviews and video marketing series coming soon.
1. The Brand news & Gen-Z
SKIMS collaboration with Bridgetonâs Nicola Coughlan is getting all the praise. They deserve it but:
Both SKIMS and Trump benefit from the âIâm so here for this/the dramaâ mentality. Whenever something mainstream goes social. People tend to value it more and gets adopted as their own by audiences on social. đ
Because of this mentality, a lot of marketing today is deemed as a genius on social.
On Trump: He benefits a lot from Gen-Zâs compassion fatigue1. The loss of empathy caused by this fatigue leads to Zoomers not pushing so hard against Trump and right-wing content. They either simply ignoring or follow for the drama.
Gen Z are Jane Birkinifying their luxury bags, Brands can Birkinify their products, like Glossier and Laneige. People in comments were arguing who did it first? Obviously that article didnât lead to Glossier birkinfying their lip balm, but your brand can do it!
On WARCâs latest podcast, E.l.f Beautyâs CMO Kory Marchisotto and Dr Marcus Collins share how brand isnât dead and what E.l.f did to win their existing customer base. TL;DR: Keep the core customers on social close to your brand and transparent formats like livestreams work well.
If you think Blank Street paid Sabrina Carpenter to work as a Barista and serve espressos, they didnât. I made that assumption and was corrected by Lauren Spearman, one of my favourite marketing follows on TT.
Boring Brands getting Creative: Add Persil Laundry to the list, Christian Siriano is doing 24hr livestream on brandâs TikTok, next Wednesday.
Gymsharkâs new social + OOH campaign announcing new sale is worth all the praises. They put over 30+ products on billboard for people to shop lift, recorded until every product was gone. Posted on social, people love it.
Iâm curious if they will continue to hang few products everyday until the sale to get the In-person brand recognition going. Why? As Bryon Sharp puts it, most people who take the free gift from a salesperson on the street rarely remember the brand and only recall: I got this for free on X street.
2. On AI: Claude AI, Butterflies & Scraping
Anthropicâs Claude 3.5 Sonnet is better than most of their existing models and beats GPT4o. For marketers, people are praising the creativity of the new model.
Butterflies AI, the first social media platform allowing humans and AIs to co-exist. Who wants to chat with AI? Possibly No one.
Hereâs what
, An AI policy expert thinks about this new launch.
Perplexity, Most successful AI model wrapper is threatening the existence of web we have today. Thatâs what Casey Newton believes and I blame the hustle culture.
A huge part of Internet marketing embraces web scraping and plagiarism, many who call themselves Indie hackers are Walmart-type robbers.
Why they succeed is the borders around internet content? When the content doesnât travel, the opportunity arrives to aggregate/steal and distribute. As Casey puts it, Fediverse looks like a possible solution to this problem in journalism and creative.
Ilya Sutskever is starting a new company, Safe Superintelligence Inc. SSI might become the next hype in AI world challenging AGI.
Meta released 4 new AI models this week.
3. Mass-consumerism enters social media tech!
You have seen birth of new products/brands from an existing product. Now, watch a new show where founders take one segment of social media and create new platforms.
TikTok announced Instagram-clone âWheeâ available in EU on android.
Snap Engineer launched âButterfliesâ platform where AI bots and Humans engage with each other. (link in the section above)
Seen, A platform where you post reactions to content from other social platforms and creators.
Social Tip, A new platform from Brew Dog, it rewards users when they post about a brand.
Either you can call this diversification of social media platforms or exploitation of audiences on social media, who will join any platform if a simply login is available. For now, This is healthy as we need more platforms in general to pressurise existing platforms to be better and provide more engagement.
4. Cannes Lions: Insights & Drama
Iâm not there, so if you want to share your notes from Cannes, please do.
Mischief US is standing on business, âThinking out of boxâ is total BS for a marketing strategist, or I would say anyone. These words mean nothing.
Mark Pollard discussing what Thinking out of box really means in corporate world. I ended up posting his views on reddit, do check the comments below his post.
The Comments under Cannes Lions promo video are not joyful to read. The platform built to award creativity created a tone deaf promotion. Glamorising a life full of human and inhuman creative blockers!
Someone in the room should read Hooked by Nir Eyal and get out of activations from social media platforms.
Elon Musk joined Cannes Lions as guest speaker, under the WPP umbrella. Despite many brands under WPP leaving X or them celebrating Pride Month. They decided to platform Elon and he decided to troll them by saying everything but nothing in few of his answers.
You can watch his full interview here.
One of the Jurors from Cannes Lions did a reddit AMA on r/advertising.
As someone who covers new ad campaigns every week, my favourite winners and losers were:
The Coca-Cola crushed logo, as a consumer, ad looked bland and it merely touched sustainability. Still, they won. From adland POV, this ad was creative to an extent, playing with logo isnât awarded heavily in the industry and bosses get angry.
JCDecaux - âMeet Marina Prietoâ ad campaign deserved that Grand Prix win, It is how media sellers should try to highlight ad effectiveness.
Orangeâs Womenâs football campaign deserved that award to highlight the mentality issues in football viewers.
We do need an American version to stop the hate train against WNBA players caused by recent viral videos using Caitlin to hate on black women, change the faces of black female players and Caitlin to male players, see the emotions change.
You can read about all the Lions winners on Contagious.
Connecting Insights to Data: Galeâs Geoff shares entertainment is the new upper funnel and the world came to play,
31% consumers said that offering playful ways to engage with products would make them loyal. (report)
A r/showerthoughts post from reddit lead to Michael Ceraâs ad campaign for CeraVe. This revelation came from brandâs Global head of social at Cannes.
On another note,
âs newsletter on Wednesday highlighted deuxmoiâs recent partnership with Violet Grey. That made me recall how good was their involvement in CeraVeâs ad campaign. I kind of overlooked the paid tag when the rollout was happening.5. The Trends from my feed: Netflix, B2B
Beth loveâs PR package post for Laneige is trending on reels. Is their brand packaging intentionally big to make people scream or a mistake?
Seriously do the collaboration with BeyoncĂŠ from Marseille Subway before Marc Jacobs does it.
Netflix to revive empty malls and turn them into immersive experiences of their favourite shows. Considering Gen-Zâs love for malls is much bigger than millennials, Netflix is onto something.
They could also integrate advertising into these experiences as Spotify did the same in April.
B2B Business: Festool Canada is doing great content and their latest viral video had many viewers supporting their efforts to inform the general audience.
Why their personal approach works? B2B is more emotional than you believe it to be.
Videos with trending audio potential: I love insurance and Iâm understaffed.
AI creators are cracking the Gen Alpha emotions with Meow Meow.
The Man in finance trend just got better and bigger, Reiss invited the army of finance bros to dance outside their store.
Bikinis arenât trending anymore, one-piece suits are in.
Uncomfortable Ad: Lauren Spearman shared her fews on how a Nike OOH activation made her feel uncomfortable. The Ad copy is kind of aggressive and overall vibe of the ad is off to me and tone deaf to many.
6. The Internet is flat, Earth isnât: walk with me!
Double Verifyâs research on changing aspects of performance in advertising media shared a concerning stat for ANZ, rate of ad fraud in ANZ rose by 14 percentage points to 1.3% overall. (more)
Even though Google and Meta are like brothers, Meta is allowing ads from right-wing US media company, The Blaze. They are running ads about their new election fraud documentary and smashing Google for not approving their ads. (more on this & Bidenâs TikTok failure)
Hot/IT girls in US are wired, are you including wired headphones in your ads targeting them?
SaaStr Europe: Gongâs CEO did an interview discussing future of sales and AI, they believe sales teams will be replaced by AI. Do you?
- âs creative advice for you, create clarity cards and use them as a creative exercise. What more? (read)
If you run giveaways rewarding trips to Greece, Italy and France. Do you ever factor depression levels in that country? Maybe you should.
Buldak paid a surprise visit to the kid that got overly excited for getting a Buldak package on her birthday. The engagement on this video went crazy!
Corporate Natalie is getting more and more, starring in the latest Dunkinâ Summer Intern ad campaign, alongside Will Arnett.
Most SaaS About pages s**k, Databoxâs page doesnât. Mark Evans explains why.
Well, Famous Birthdays wants to be the Wikipedia for Gen Z. Not my words, The Economist foresees a future where the website could be the place for Gen-Z to research Internet culture and history.
Itâs Euros and people are complaining about Germanyâs âno card paymentsâ problem. Itâs so real.
Not today, but one day this meme will be brand safe, Kim and Putin dropped this, itâs safe.
The Marketing Recap arrives on Sunday, until then we can chat below or you can share the email with others and discuss with who you like.
Compassion fatigue is a phenomenon in which a person becomes numb to tragic incidents as a result of frequently seeing it.
The irony, we just posted on our site a travel guide about the state of the cash only system in Germany and Austria. We are so behind in everything. I still don't understand why the tax departments are not aiming for these people. It's common knowledge in the society that these avoid taxes by doing cash only transactions.
You know tooo much!!!!