💌: Wired: TikTok. Tired: Facebook.
I'm sending out the last batch of free stickers this week. If you haven’t already, make sure to drop your address here to get yours! Thanks to everyone who has been tagging me in their posts when they arrive.
On to this week’s featured jobs and the latest news.
Jobs
It was a crazy week for the job board with over 20 jobs added this week! Here are a couple of interesting ones that went up this week. You can see the full board over at the main Forgematic site.
- Email and SMS Coordinator @ La Colombe — Helping run email for a leading coffee brand. Sounds like a dream.
- Social Content Coordinator @ 100 Thieves — Be part of the social team for one of the gaming squad turned lifestyle companies.
Social
- TikTok shares new research into how users respond to ads on the platform.
- TikTok announced they hit 1 billion monthly active users globally, which is up 45% from mid-2020.
- TikTok World was this week, and there are a lot of exciting new features for businesses to take advantage of the app/platform. Three big ones: new solutions for advertising and measuring ad value, TikTok shopping is becoming a reality, and a new creator marketplace for brands to find creators for campaigns. Plus, they announced they’re dropping an official NFT collection with Lil Nas X, Bella Poarch, & more. The drops start this week on October 6th.
- Speaking of TikTok, if you have yet to take the plunge (what are you waiting for, it’s taking over every single edition of the newsletter), here’s a beginner’s guide to get you started.
- Because they don’t want TikTok to win, Facebook launched Reels on Facebook. Sigh.
- If you missed the last couple of editions, we shared bits and pieces of The Facebook Files. Here are the top 3 things you need to know about the reporting by The Wall Street Journal that has kept Facebook scrambling to counter.
- Instagram announced they would be pausing “Instagram Kids”, which was a special version of the Instagram experience designed for people under age 13. It would seem this is a reaction to one of the stories from The Facebook Files, which is how detrimental the app can be for younger people. Facebook hated that report so much they published a point-by-point rebuttal on their website.
- On the topic of Instagram, you might be able to soon have more granular control of who sees your stories. Instagram is now testing a change from “Close Friends” to “Select People.”
- Twitter announced an update to improve video quality on the feed.
- Twitter also now lets users tip each other in Bitcoin, among other payment methods.
- Ok, last Twitter update for this newsletter. The app is now allowing businesses to have Professional Profiles in a pilot program. The new options enabled for this profile enable businesses to add things like location, hours, and contact info.
- Snapchat has paid out over $130M since May to creators that use its Spotlight feature. This was a deviation from the original plan to payout $1M per day. Still, it’s a hefty sum and another signal that we are living in the best time to be a creator on the internet.
- Oh look, a Clubhouse headline: Sponsors don’t like Clubhouse. Creators need sponsorship deals. You see the problem this creates, and here’s a deep dive on it.
Email & SEO Content
- One battle you’re likely always fighting as an email marketer — getting through spam filters. Mailgun put together this guide on staying on the good side of mailbox providers and not ending up in spam.
- And mailerlite put together this guide on email cadence. How many emails should you send per week, month? So, what’s the best cadence? Well, it depends (every marketer’s favorite answer).
- Google added a section to its search documents this week centered around best practices for e-commerce in Google search.
Advertising & Branding
- The NCAA will (finally!!) use “March Madness” branding in all marketing for the women’s NCAA D1 basketball tournament.
- We love a copywriting framework, and although we’ve shared a few good roundups, we can use reminders. Here’s a good thread of 11 frameworks you can use to sell ideas.
- Instagram wrote a new chapter to its brand story with the launch of “Yours To Make.” The campaign’s message is simple: Instagram is all about community.
- Facebook ads have been a raging dumpster fire since the release of iOS 14.5, and iOS 15 is here to make it even crazier. If you still want to give Facebook some of your hard-earned dollars, here are 10 ways to fix your ads that might not be hitting their targets.
- There’s been an uptick in luxury brands using LinkedIn as an advertising platform. Why? Core LinkedIn users have higher incomes than any other platform.
- According to one experiment, people remember print ads better than digital ones. People spend more time looking at print ads, and our pupils dilate more while we do. Hit the link to see the full experiment.
- Google announced they would be moving away from last-click attribution and instead moving toward a data-driven AI model that even distributes credit. Since Google is such a big player in the digital ad world, many people think this could be the last hurrah for last-click.
- Macy’s is currently in a battle with Amazon to keep the tech giant from advertising above its retail space in Herald Square. Macy’s has held the ad space since the 1960s, and apparently the original agreement from that time prevents other retailers from using the space.
Fun
- Browse through this archive of old school video game print ads, if you’re wanting a trip to the past.
- If you still wonder what an NFT is, here’s a great Twitter thread from Morning Brew explaining it all.
- The NYT released a pretty tell-all article about OZY last week, and it set the internet and ad world on fire. There have been countless takes, but here’s the original article. Spoiler alert, it’s a fun tale of fraud, lies, and deceit.
That’s it for this week! 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.
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Thank you again, and see you all next week!
Forge