We’re back with another week of the best marketing news! Instead of a longer intro, I’ll keep it short: the holographic stickers are ready to ship out to everyone as a thank you for being an early subscriber. To get yours, just head here and drop in your mailing address. I’m gonna start sending them out later this week.

Ok, on to this week’s edition!

Social Media & Creator Economy

• Pinterest is testing a new “Watch Mode’ which uses vertical video for pin discovery. If that sounds like TikTok to you, it should.
• The VMAs were last week, and MTV and TikTok teamed up for a partnership to showcase trending artists and songs from across TikTok. You can see the categories and winners here.
• Instagram is testing a “Favorites” feature, which let you favorite your…favorite accounts. The idea behind this is to help you prioritize your feed, so that posts from your favorites appear higher up in your feed. Remember when IG just kind of worked that way?
• Lil Huddy is getting a signature meal at Burger King. The fast food X creator trend continues with no signs of slowing down.
• LinkedIn is the latest social media network to invest in creators via an official fund. LinkedIn is investing $25M across 100 U.S.-based creators. If you’re a biz influencer, you should check it out.
• Another week, another Facebook scandal. This time, an investigation uncovered an internal Facebook program that lets VIP users bypass standard moderation protocols. The program is known as XCheck, and the members inside the program all brought heavy traffic to the platform. This basically goes against every public statement they’ve made in recent years about privacy and content moderation. If you have a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, you can view the original investigative report here.
• Whoa, wasn’t expected the next update to be along the same lines. Internal company documents show that Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls and their mental health, even though they downplay the issue in public. To quote one line from the internal document: “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.” Oof.
• On a lighter note, and continuing with our “best times to post” theme — HootSuite determined the best time to post on TikTok. See the report here.
• You might soon be able to tap once and turn your stories in Reels. Instagram really wants us to use Reels, and I guess we think it’s too hard, so they want to make it easier. TikTok pressure hits different.
• Last week, we learned that TikTok > YouTube for US viewing hours. Not taking it lightly, this week YouTube’s Chief Business Officer (how tf is that different from a CEO?) says their revenue is larger than Netflix.
• Back to this edition’s favorite topic: Facebook. This week, the company rolled out a suite of new tools or businesses. One big change: automatic audience targeting expansion. This feature means Facebook will expand your targeting automatically in an effort to lower your cost per conversion. Hopefully, that makes some media buyers’ job easier.

SEO

• It’s not just you. Google search is getting worse. Why? A closed loop system where Google controls 85% of the world’s search engine activity, but at the same time more than 80% of Alphabet’s revenue comes from Google Advertising.
• Google’s core updates used to wreak havoc on website traffic and send every SEO into a panic. It doesn’t seem like these core updates upend our known universe these days, but is that just because we’re used to them? SEMRUSH conducted a study to find out: Are Core Updates Becoming Less Powerful? I won’t spoil this one because it’s worth a read if you’re an SEO.
• Google’s page experience update went live in June, and one study found that Core Web Vitals (aka website performance) have become a measurable ranking factor. The difference in ranking is exactly huge at the moment (3.7 percentage points), but you can bet it will become more important over time.

Brand & Advertising

• We often think of senior citizens negatively when it comes to technology, and it’s time for that to change. Google recently wrote a whole piece on how to reach senior citizens via YouTube. As a side note, This story also reminded me of the Silver Snipers, a senior gaming squad.
• Vans built a skatepark inside the popular game Roblox, in an effort to reach 46 million daily active kids inside the game.
• Airbnb released a new ad campaign this week that was designed to mimic a slideshow, and it wasn’t received well.

Email

• The big news here this week is that Intuit is acquiring Mailchimp for $12B. This proves two things: first, you can build a great business without funding and exit successfully. Second, email is just as important as it ever was, if not more.
• If you’re promoting virtual events, it can be tough to keep the email marketing from feeling stale. Really Good Emails put together this great guide on how to keep your emails for virtual events.

Jobs

There are a few fresh jobs up on the job board, and here are a couple you should know about. Do you have an open job on your team? If so, add it to the board for free.

• Senior Manager, Talent Brand & Marketing @ Coinbase — This role is interesting because you are leading marketing for the talent team at Coinbase. I’m starting to see more of these dedicated talent marketing roles pop up, which is an interesting trend to note.
• Director, Community Management & Content Production @ Ignite Social Media — If you ever wanted to lead a team of creative people at the forefront of consumer brand social media, this is the role for you! Plus, it's located here in beautiful North Carolina.

Just For Fun

• TikTok user @emilyzugay's most recent videos redesigning iconic logos have been setting the internet on fire this week. So much so that big brands like Adobe even joined in the fun. And TikTok changed their logo to her redesign.

That’s all for this week, y’all. Don’t forget to drop your address here for free stickers!

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Forge