👋 Hi everyone! Back for another week of what’s what in Marketing. I suppose you already know what one of the big topics this week will be, but there’s lots of other news going on as well. Plus, in the future of marketing: the metaverse is already here, living and breathing, just under a different name.

Alright, on to this week’s news!

Social & the creator economy

• There’s no bigger story this week than Facebook’s rebranding to their new name of Meta. This change was in the same vein as Google creating a holding brand called Alphabet, in which Facebook and all of its other tools live under Meta. As we’ve talked about many times before, Mark Zuckerberg wants to be at the forefront of the Metaverse, so the name makes sense. Lots of web3 companies that already have meta in their name are already rethinking their brands. On the flip side of that, many people in web3 believe this signals a big wave that the average person can ride into the future. Either way, it’s been the topic of every media outlet this week. Here are some funny takes from this week, via Buzzfeed.
• Changing your brand name doesn’t alleviate existing problems. Case in point: The Verge posted a new high-level overview of eight things we learned from the Facebook papers. It’s worse than we thought from the last leak of these papers. One new story to rise from this: Apple almost kicked Facebook from all iOS devices due to human trafficking that was facilitated on both FB and IG. SMH.
• Anotha one © DJ Khaled. The Washington Post also uncovered how reaction emojis under posts influenced a post’s rank. Facebook engineers gave extra weight to angry and sad, and less for the original “like” reaction. This, of course, pushed more emotional content into news feeds.
• There is no link in this update. Instead, I’m just wondering why we are still using Facebook? It’s clearly detrimental to society at large, and I wish they would just spin off groups into a separate thing. Oh wait, that’s basically Reddit.
• Speaking of Reddit, the social media giant is getting into the NFT space. Their goal is to build the biggest creator economy on the internet.
• In big creator economy news, FaZe Clan (a famous gaming crew), is going public via a SPAC. What started as a group of gamers playing Call of Duty professionally will now a public company at a $1B valuation. The company will trade under the ticker symbol “FAZE” — what a time to be alive.
• Last week we mentioned Instagram’s new Collab feature was slowly rolling out. Here’s everything you need to know about the new feature, which allows creators to co-author IG feed posts and Reels.
• Two quick Instagram linkies for you: here are 10 stickers that improve IG stories engagement. Plus, Instagram is testing a 60-second stories limit, instead of the current 15 seconds.
• Rounding out IG news for this edition:Instagram made links stories available to all accounts. Previously, you needed at least 10k followers to get the link feature. Personally, I’m excited to try this out this weekend.
• Last week, we learned that PayPal was interested in buying Pinterest. Now, not so much.
• Twitter added the ability to subscribe to a newsletter directly from a Tweet card. This might be the lowest friction way to get new email subscribers since they can subscribe directly from your hot take tweets.

Content and SEO

• The big story this week: Google throttled non-AMP search results, according to some reports. The follow-up to that: Google created the AMP format for its own gain. Oof. If you’re not familiar, modifying your website for AMP leads to faster loading time and landing at the top of search results. Now we know why.
• Internal linking is a great way to show search engines which pages are more important. But how do you know where to place links, and which pages to point to? Well, here’s a great Twitter thread breakdown on the basics of internal links.
• Good content usually starts with some form of writing. SEMRUSH published this great article with 16 tips to become a better writer. BRB, printing it out, so I can read it before I write this each week.

Branding & advertising

• Today is Halloween, which means we’re in the one season of the year when people buy candy corn. Brach’s is the primary seller of this candy, with 86% of the market share. Here’s their marketing strategy.
• Direct response marketing is super hard, and is becoming increasingly important as advertising becomes more difficult over time. Here’s a great guide from Hubspot on how to do direct response marketing effectively.
• As for online advertising, how can you ever be certain where your ads are shown? And how can you make sure they are being shown on the right websites? There’s an entire ecosystem of ad platforms that convert traffic to unlimited ad dollars. It’s a big problem, and Check My Ads is trying to fix it.
• This week, Amazon previewed a way to run product display ads: on Twitch livestreams.
• YouTube’s ad revenue for Q3 was $7.2 billion! I recently bit the bullet and signed up for YouTube premium because the ads were getting unbearable, and now I know why. Fun fact: Spotify’s ad revenue for Q3 was $375 million, mostly thanks to podcasts. Sheesh.

The future of marketing

• Alright, the metaverse is in the news thanks to that one social media company. We keep treating the metaverse like it’s some far off, futuristic thing. But, it’s been here for a hot minute, masquerading as video games. Smart brands are starting to capitalize on these game worlds, and Chipotle is the latest one. This weekend, Chipotle opened a burrito restaurant inside Roblox. But, how does that help in the real world? Well, the first 30K visitors to the in-game restaurant this weekend were able to get a free burrito in real life. Here’s a video breakdown of how it works. When you watch that, the future doesn’t seem so far away, and the metaverse doesn’t seem like such a big concept to wrangle.

Woo! You made it to the end! Thank you so much for reading along this week. If you’re enjoying the newsletter, you can help me grow it by:

• Sharing it with a friend
• Buying me a coffee to keep the writing going. Or, by getting your first box of Cometeer coffee (we both get a discount if you use this link).

Thank you again for being here, and see you all next week!

Forge