Hey everyone! It was a busy week in the ad world, with the Super Bowl happening just under a week ago. I’ve only seen a couple of the commercials so far, as I’ve been floating around in the Dominican Republic this past week. Excited to check them out, though!

On to this week’s roundup 👇

Social Media & The Creator Economy

• Looks like IG stories might be getting likes. The new feature, dubbed Private Story Likes, lets you like someone’s story without sending a DM. Instead, the interaction will show up in the viewer sheet.
• Facebook renamed the news feed to “feed.” That’s it. That’s the headline.
• Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has a new set of core values and mission statements.
• One big thing that came about as a result of that last link: Meta employees are now known as “metamates” — yes, that is a real headline.
• Lastly, in Facebook news, the company published a super in-depth report on trends for 2022.
• Koji, one of the many link-in-bio apps, has added the ability to display and mint NFTs directly in their app. Web3 and the creator economy continue to overlap, and Koji appears to be ahead of the other apps for this type of crossover.
• The Winter Olympics have been in full swing for a couple of weeks now. The content is better on TikTok than it is on TV. Bonus: the official olympics account also shared content from NC’s very own Nugget brand.
• Instagram updated its overview of ranking factors for stories, reels, and posts. They went into detail over the summer, but this revision provides a high-level overview.
• The good folks over at Later put together an ultimate guide to video on Instagram. The guide includes overviews of the various formats, specs, and more!

SEO & Content Marketing

• SEO is more than creating killer content. Technical SEO is important too! On that note, here are six common robots.txt issues and how to fix them.
• The team at Zyppy recently published their findings how often Google was rewriting page titles. Now, they’re back with tips to prevent the rewrites from happening in the first place.
• Derek Flint wrote a great thread on solving customer pain points as a way to create your content/blog strategy.

Strategy & Process

• If you’re in B2B marketing, your performance is likely judged by the number of MQLs (marketing qualified leads) that you and your team generate. Here’s why you should move away from that and what to do instead.
• Alex Lieberman, the co-founder of Morning Brew, shared this great Twitter thread on how to grow your following on Twitter (fitting, no?).

Copywriting, Branding & Advertising

• I somewhat watched most of the Super Bowl from the DR this week. As usual, was a bigger fan of the ads than the game. Here’s a rundown from AdWeek on their winners and losers.
• The SquareSpace ad with Zendaya and Andre 3000 was one of my favorites. Here’s a dope thread of how it came to be, from Meklit Gerbre-Mariam, one of the creatives that worked on the spot.
• Walmart made $2.1 Billion from advertising last year. How, Sway?
• You may soon see a website’s domain at the top of their Google Ads. The website is already displayed once, but it seems this may bring about more confidence in clicking on the correct ad. Or something like that.
• Google has announced plans to eliminate cross-site tracking on Android. This is similar to Apple’s App Tracking Transparency update, but altered a bit. The bottom line: ads and tracking on Android devices are likely to take a performance hit.
• The Google Ads editor will soon get access to Performance Max (Google’s latest advertising tech). This is great news for anyone who uses the editor to manage accounts.
• The egg aisle at the supermarket isn’t one you typically think of when you’re looking for great branding. But, that’s all changing now.

For Fun

• Something I wasn’t expecting: “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” (the latest Disney-fueled hit song) remixed in pop punk fashion is surprisingly good.

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