👋 What’s up, everyone! Back with the haps on marketing for the week. Obviously, the ongoing story is still the sale and takeover, but I’m sure you’ve heard enough about all that, so we won’t cover it this week. Taps mic 🎶 We don’t talk about Elon no, no, nooooooo 🎶

Just practicing my dad jokes because all signs point to me becoming a dad in the next week 😁 — on that note, I have a few guest authors to help me out with the newsletter over the coming weeks. The format will change week to week, but everyone will be writing about different marketing disciplines, and I’m excited for you all to meet these folks.

Ok, on to the newsletter! 👇

Social Media & The Creator Economy

• Snap announced a new drone called Pixy that will follow you around and capture photos and videos mid-flight. When it’s done, it’ll auto-upload all of it’s content into your Snap Memories. On one hand, this makes capturing content less awkward (you don’t need a tripod, a stranger, a selfie stick, etc.), but does this mean we’ll all be surrounded by little yellow drones soon?
• Competition is inevitable, and thus comparing your brand against others in your space is also inevitable. If you’ve ever wondered how your brand account stands up to others, the team at Later has the answers in their new Instagram Industry Benchmarks report. Fun fact: they analyzed over 63 million posts to prepare the report!
• Speaking of IG—you might soon be able to record 90-second Reels. The company rolls more users into testing, which seems to indicate the feature getting closer to release.
• If you run (or want to run) social media for clients – this proposal template might come in handy for you.
• In one of it’s last earnings reports as a public company, Twitter admitted it “accidentally” over-counted it’s daily active users for the last three years.
• Last week, we shared a story about the latest update of the IG algorithm, and it’s preference for original content. If you found yourself wondering “wtf does that mean and what do I do with that information?”, then HubSpot has this article just for you.
• Love it or hate it, LinkedIn engagement is booming, bringing revenue along with it.
• Speaking of LinkedIn – the company added bio and newsletter subscription features this week for creator accounts and company pages.

Copywriting, Branding & Advertising

• Good advertising creative is nothing without an optimized landing page experience. The team at Meta looked 500 top-performing ad landing pages and put together this list of tips. Number one on the list? Speed: make sure your page loads in 3 seconds or less.
• Google is allowing users to opt out of ad categories that it deems as sensitive. For example, you can opt out of ads about weight loss and dating, plus gambling and more.
• I can’t believe I’m about to type this, but here goes: KFC is teaming up with Proflowers to introduce floral arrangements that include flowers and fried chicken. It’s called the Kentucky Fried Buckquet. What a time to be alive.
• Not to be outdone in the wacky branding category, Tropicana is launching Tropicana Crunch, a cereal designed to be eaten with orange juice instead of milk. Gross.
• If you’ve been on any modern news or publishing site, you’ve likely almost drowned in a sea of display ads. There’s a reason - we’re all being labeled to make it easier for advertisers to target us.
• If you run shopping ads on Google via Merchant Center, you might be interested in these new updates that allow you to pause ads, set availability for backorder and preorder, and more.
• More Google Ads news: Performance max got new features this week that allow you to focus on advertising to new customers.

For Fun

• Job searches can be fun, but interviews are such a pain. This thread details some fantastic questions for marketers to ask during interviews. Save it for the future.
• If you google “play snake” you can play a game of snake right on the search results page. It also works for tic-tac-toe and other games too. S/O Neville for this gem of a search Easter egg.

You made it to the end! Thank you so much for being here for another week.

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