💌: Shorts, Fleets, & Saweetie N’ Sour

👋Alright y’all, we’re back with another week of what happened in marketing. The theme of this week seems to be collaborations, crossovers, and creators. I wrote most of this while sitting on my porch as it poured rain (sipping an iced coffee, of course).

Ok, here’s what happened this week:

Social & Creators

• The jump from TikTok to TV is now a thing as Hulu’s “The D’Amelio Show” is set to premier this fall. Charli D’Amelio is the most followed creator on TikTok, and the story centers on the struggle to keep up with fame and success. Catch it starting September 3rd.
• LinkedIn acquired a Jumprope, a video app, this week in an effort to expand tools available to creators.
• TikTok is testing a stories feature. On the same week, Twitter retired their stories feature, Fleets.
• JaQuel Knight, who has choreographed for Beyoncé, Cardi B, and Meg Thee Stallion, became the first person to copyright dance moves in April of this year. Now, JaQuel is teaming up with Logitech to help 10 BIPOC creators copyright their dance moves.
• YouTube launched a fund designed to help creators earn money for creating Shorts (their vertical short-form video format). The fund has a total of $100M in it. Yes, that’s an “m” for “million.” As a note, you can’t qualify if you simply re-upload an existing TikTok or Instagram Reel. They’re seeking original content. It will be interesting to see how this develops.
• YouTube is also testing a premium lite option. It’s less expensive than the current premium plan, with the sole feature being the removal of ads. I would be super interested in this plan, personally.
• McDonald’s continues its collaboration with creators, and next up on the menu is one with Saweetie. It’s called Saweetie N Sour and launches this week on August 9th. These collaborations have been a major success for McD’s who have previously done them with BTS, J Balvin, and Travis Scott. In fact, the Travis Scott collaboration led to an ingredient shortage.
• This week, Facebook made the news for disabling the accounts of a group of NYU researchers that were doing a study on political ads and ad targeting. Facebook claims the team collected data via “unauthorized means.” This headline isn’t really shocking, but what is somewhat alarming is that Facebook also disabled the team’s personal accounts as well.
• Influencers are being sponsored by the government to encourage vaccination. Please take that headline with you back to 2019 and show it to your past self as they stare at you as if you’re even from the same planet.
• This week, Instagram gave an overview of how the ranking algorithm works for Reels. It seems unusual for a social media company to disclose this info, but perhaps this is a reiteration of the thought that the app is no longer just for photo sharing.

Advertising & Websites

• Technical SEO is just as important as the other types we often discuss here (that is, content focused SEO). Here’s a super in-depth article about website architecture, and how to structure a website so that it ranks.
• Corona (the beer brand) partnered with DuoLingo and created a vending machine that only dispensed drinks if you could order correctly in Spanish. If you couldn’t successfully order, you were given a free Duolingo subscription. This is probably the only good thing going in Las Vegas.
• TikTok ran a campaign to remake several iconic commercials to prove that you have to rethink your advertising to fit the platform. “Don’t make ads, make TikToks” is a message that app has been sending to advertisers for some time now.
• Two weeks in a row mentioning out of home advertising and snapchat, and this time it’s in the same update! Snapchat is rolling out ads that encourage you to open snapchat and try out lenses. First up is JFK airport.

For Fun

• Have you ever been rickrolled? If so, you contributed to the video finally making it past one billion views on YouTube. Question is: which link in this update is the actual rickroll, which is the explainer, and which is the news article? There’s only one way to find out, take your chance. 😆
• How Shein became the Chinese apparel maker teens love. Maybe you’ve heard of Shein, maybe you haven’t — but no matter, the live shopping app is big business these days.

That’s it for this week. A few of you asked about the iced coffee experiment from the last issue. It’s one of my favorite ways to make iced coffee, especially if you have a bean that is fruit forward — it almost makes a coffee tea hybrid. Here’s how to make it. Don’t have any fancy coffee gear? Check out Cometeer, it’s my other current way to make iced coffee now (and if you use that link, you get $25 off!).

Thanks as always for reading and sticking with me another week!

-- Forge

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