Be in The Know
📸 Instagram will allow up to 5 hashtags in a reel or post.
🍎 Apple expands App Store search ads to reach high-intent users.
🤖 Gemini can now identify when videos are generated by Google AI.
🥗 How the MAHA movement influenced food and beverage brands in 2025.
🔥 What happens when the ragebait marketing machine runs its course?
📺 YouTube hid the dislike button. Now it’s considering a name change.
Add Some Friction to Discounts
New research shows that requiring slight effort to unlock a discount can make it feel more valuable.
Across multiple studies (Zhang et al., 2025), discounts performed better when customers had to do just a little work to get them.
Why? Well, when a discount is handed over too easily, we process it as a price cut. When it’s earned, we think of it as a win.
Here’s what that “slight effort” can look like:
- Entering a promo code
- Filling out a CAPTCHA
- Answering a single question
Customers feel more entitled to the discount because they did something to get it. And a little action that unlocks meaningful savings makes people feel clever.
How to apply it:
- Pseudo-loading: Add a short “Reducing price…” animation, even if the discount is instant.
- Hold to receive: On mobile, require users to press and hold for a few seconds to unlock a deal.
- Promo codes > auto-discounts: A 15% discount often performs better as a code entered at checkout than as a visible price cut.
Learn more about the research from Nick Kolenda.
Smash or Pass 👍/👎
CNBC had to ditch the rainbow peacock in a rebrand (right).
Sparkle
Sparkle simplifies sales outreach by consolidating your cold email, inboxes, CRM, and deliverability platforms into one place.
There’s built-in email verification, deliverability monitoring, and domain health checks. On the outreach side, it supports personalized cold email and multi-channel workflows, along with analytics.
The built-in CRM covers lead management, deal tracking, and pipeline customization without requiring another system.
This is my house, I have to defend it!
😱 It’s Home Alone’s 35th anniversary.
To celebrate, Disney+ and Hulu rigged a life-size gingerbread house pop-up at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine.
The structure breaks the Guinness World Record for the world’s largest gingerbread house, a title untouched since 2013.
It’s more than 25 feet tall and 58 feet long, and it’s made of 5,700 pounds of flour, over 4,200 eggs, 4,400 gingerbread bricks, and 800 roof tiles, all held together with edible glue and fondant.
Ads from the Past
Coca-Cola, 1962
