💌 Sabbaticals, Writing Tips, & Cheerios

👋 What’s up everyone! I’m back with another week of some of the best stuff I’ve seen around the internet for marketers this week.

• How experiential marketing agencies are bracing for a return to ‘in the flesh’ advertising — I just help with a massive virtual event at my day job this week, and it really got my wheels spinning on what the future of in-person experiences will be like.
• How TikTok decides which songs go viral — There’s no denying that TikTok can catapult a song into the stratosphere. Turns out a lot goes into making that happen. TikTok works with labels to strategize a lot of this stuff. BRB, gotta go practice all my dances now.
• Ok, I promise this isn’t a TikTok newsletter, but what can you do when it’s the dominant platform 😬 — there are some big flexes in this article, but let’s recap. Advertising spending on the platform is up 500% year over year. Users “check Facebook” but “they watch TikTok (flex). People are admitting to watching less streaming, favoring watching more TikTok. Super flex.
• The Global CMO of General Mills is leaving and there are no plans to fill the open role. I don’t know what that says about CMO tenure, but hopefully part of the severance included some Costco-sized boxes of Cheerios.
• Is it time to take a sabbatical? Marketers tend to work a lot, and often late, and often never fully disconnect. Maybe Forgematic will just help marketers plan time off in the future.
• That whole Mark Zuckerberg v. Tim Cook thing? Yeah, this is what companies that are not named Apple were worried about: only 4% of iOS users leave app tracking on. Yikes…how will they ever sell you those sweet, sweet ads now?
• Fifteen writing tips from well-known authors. This is a cool infographic from MarketingProfs with some household name authors. Illustrations are weird, but the tips are gold.
• The Washington Football Team hired a Chief Creative Officer to lead storytelling and content monetization. This interesting for a few reasons: it’s the first NFL team to have such a position. But what’s more interesting is that it signals that every company is thinking media first with their marketing.
• TikTok is testing letting users pay to promote their videos to the "for you" page — Ok, but what does that say about my ego?
• If you’re a digital marketer (aka Growth Marketer) like me, you’ll find this look at how Airbnb tracks and measures growth marketing to be fascinating.
• How to plan a product launch on social media — if you have a side hustle, or you’re creating a new digital product that you want to sell, you’re going to want to check this out.
• This last one is for those of you like me that just like to try a bunch of new apps and tools: 13 of the best chrome extensions for marketing and SEO.

That’s it for this week, I hope you all found this helpful. If you did, please share with your friends! On that note, we are going to start a referral program in the future, but I’m waiting until we hit an important organic subscriber milestone first. 🏄🏽‍♂️

Thanks for reading,

Jordan / Forge