🔥 Meta is opening up Reels trending ads to more advertisers and agencies.

✂️ CapCut adds LinkedIn integration.

🧑‍🔬 Why client anthropologists will lead agency strategy in 2030.

📌 Pinterest launches Shopping Links to deliver retailer data to brands.

🛍️ Data: Holiday shoppers are already expecting fewer discounts this season.

🗑️ YouTube’s AI slop problem might be too big to stop.

💸 Still spending, still nervous: the paradox of Q4 advertising.

🎓 On campuses, GenAI companies brand themselves as academic friends, not foes.

✨Serendipity✨ happens when an experience is enjoyable, unexpected, and inexplicable. It feels almost magical because it resists easy explanation.

For marketers, this means resisting the urge to over-explain or over-engineer the “why” behind product experiences. Instead, the goal is to leave just enough mystery to spark delight.

Serendipity can deepen emotional connection to a brand. The art lies in balancing joy with ambiguity, ensuring the moment feels organic rather than orchestrated.

Here are some tips for unlocking serendipity:

• ✨ Add joy in unlikely contexts. Offer a small surprise in an environment where it doesn’t belong (chocolate at a bank, not a candy store).
• ✨ Embrace unpredictability. Deliver moments of surprise that feel low-probability.
• ✨ Resist over-explaining. Avoid broadcasting that an experience was algorithmically curated or “chosen just for you.” Leave room for mystery.
• ✨ Balance personalization with randomness. Dial down the obviousness of recommendations to let consumers “discover” on their own.
• ✨ Test for context fit. Ensure the moment is not only surprising, but enjoyable and appropriate.

StoryChief is a content ops platform built to streamline how you and your team plan, create, and distribute content.

StoryChief analyzes your content, audience, and competitors in real-time, providing built-in SEO and readability scoring, weekly content audits, and analytics.

Its got a unified calendar for keeping everyone aligned, and it integrates with 100+ platforms, so your articles, posts, and updates can go live across CMSs, newsletters, and social channels in minutes.

This is not your mother’s (or your grandmother’s) Mary Kay.

The cosmetics brand has launched a new campaign, “Miss Conceptions,” to tackle (you guessed it) some misconceptions held by millennials and Gen Z.

In a new series of short-form content headed by a fresh young face, Mary Kay is answering critical questions like “Is Mary Kay still around?” and “What even is Mary Kay?”

Running through December, the campaign transcends TikTok and Instagram to include connected TV and digital OOH, with placements on platforms like Hulu, Disney+, and HBO Max.