☕ This startup offered rest stops (with bathrooms and coffee) for gig workers in exchange for their data.

🔥 Heatmap: The best time to post on YouTube is on Friday from 3 to 4 p.m.

🥫 Amazon is working on a private-label food brand to rival Trader Joe’s.

💄 Meta wants to help influencers make AI chatbots of themselves. 

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Heads up, brand leaders. These are 4 design trends that will come to define 2024 content marketing:

1. Feelin’ surreal. Gen AI has arrived just as people are looking to escape reality and relieve stress, resulting in a taste for visual complexity, surprise, and the bizarre. The stuff of dreams.
2. Retro is still a-go. When the future feels uncertain, we put on our rose-colored glasses and look backward. For the last five years, nostalgia has dominated design—from packaging and web design to full rebrands that reimagine the aesthetic and tech of the 90s and 00s.
3. Lo-fi or leave it. Nearly 10 years after the “pivot to video,” studio-quality content is out. Users respond more to UGC and testimonial content that feels live, unpolished, and authentic.
4. Texted ya. Visual platforms like Instagram and TikTok have seen a rise in text-based storytelling with branded typography. Think: zero-click carousels that adapt how-to articles, listicles, tips, and quotes.

Find out how to leverage these trends from brand experts at StudioID.

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Move over, Bit.ly.

Dub is an open-source link shortener that provides detailed analytics, QR codes, device targeting, geo targeting, link cloaking, and more. The UX is lovely, and the best part is free custom domains on all plans.

Remember that time, in 2001, when MLB Hall of Famer Randy Johnson absolutely obliterated a bird that flew into his pitch? Yeah.

Johnson hasn’t forgotten. In a new campaign for DirecTV, he promotes the brand’s new dish-less service by repurposing satellite dishes into little bird ballparks, complete with “fowl” poles. You can even entire to win one.