• Skip to the good part: Google is piloting a test to expand its search capacity within videos.
• Here’s why e-commerce brands should keep an eye on the growing live shopping trend.
• A new report suggests connected television (CTV), digital audio, and mobile advertising will be big in 2023, while declining consumer trust threatens social media ad spending.
• Twitter has announced Blue for Business, which comes with square profile avatars, verification badges, and linked employee accounts.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year: when Spotify Wrapped goes more viral than Influenza A. Since 2016, Spotify has packaged up your behavioral data and gifted you a snackable, shareable musical reflection of your year. You benefit from some social clout, and Spotify builds serious brand equity. Win-win.

The viral campaign has improved each year, dramatically increasing user engagement and tweet volume. 2022 is record-breaking in impressions, engagements, unique authors, and tweet volume. Within the first three days of its launch, 425,000,000 tweets mentioned Spotify Wrapped.

So, what can we learn from the success of Spotify Wrapped? 

1. Optimize your content for social sharing. It has to be good enough to share on the grid, and you have to make it easy for users to do so.
2. Annual campaigns—which capitalize on a sense of ritual or tradition—have the potential to build major excitement.
3. Be a good sport and create brand-specific spoof content, like Guinness (“You spent 119.5 seconds waiting for your pint to settle”).

Check out the full Spotify Wrapped download over at Sprout Social.

Tool fatigue is real. If you and your team are looking to embrace digital minimalism in the new year, consider ClickUp for an integrated experience of task management, document creation, team communication, goal tracking, and more.

Our favorite feature for marketers is the clean and simple interface for campaign management, asset collaboration, and calendar planning. ClickUp also offers a library of templates, integrations, and automations to get you ready for Q1.

Carney is the agency of designers, developers, and strategists behind The Daily Carnage. If you haven’t noticed, we kind of live and breathe best practices.

You can work with an agency that reads the news. Or you can work with the agency that makes the news. Your move.

Sorry in advance: WhatsApp’s “The Fireworks Within” campaign is a real tear-jerker. The meta-owned global messaging app holds the record for the number of calls and texts sent on New Year’s Eve—and they’re showing us the human relationships behind that metric. The video campaign also features shorter digital content and a partnership with LadBible developed by Ketchum.