Be in The Know
- TikTok owner ByteDance is getting into the AI chatbot biz.
- Kiss played their final show in this dimension before uploading themselves to the immortal cloud.
- Advertising on X might be working for some select marketers.
- Bath & Body Work’s 10-foot candle was a breath of fresh air during rush hour.
The Popularity Mirage
Jason Keath from SocialFresh calls the popularity mirage “a marketer’s inclination to imitate popular or splashy brands with unrelatable advantages.”
You’ve probably seen the mirage. You wake up to an inbox full of newsletters detailing a marketing stunt that everyone in the office is already talking about. And you think, would it work for us?
Usually, those brands have a few key advantages:
- Powerful resources like more money, brand awareness, celebrity, PR connections
- An established audience or fandom
- A unique business model that affects strategy
For instance, everyone was talking about Barbie in Q3, and rightly so. With a $150 million dollar budget, the top-selling toy in history, and no shortage of celebrity talent, their marketing team wasn’t exactly starting from square one.
Still, we saw a lot of underperforming imitations in the days that followed, because the popularity mirage is hard to resist.
Read Keath’s full blog at SocialFresh.
Smash or Pass
Forget
If you have ADHD or you just struggle with object permanence, Forget might be the productivity tool for you. It’s a timed to-do list that stays on your screen and holds your focus while you tackle one task at a time. You get a progress report at the end of the day, and it rains emojis every time you get something done. Btw, it’s free.
Watch
Cold Roads, Hot Pizza
You can nominate your road to be plowed, courtesy of $500,000 in grants awarded by Domino’s, so you can get pizza delivery no matter the precipitation. It’s a fresh, human-centric campaign from the people who want to make pizza night as frictionless as possible for you, in hopes that you’ll stay loyal.
