Raffi's Round Up - w/c 12th May 2024
The five best Marketing-related nuggets across my desk this week
Welcome to the latest edition of my weekly Round Up!
Greetings from London, England! This is a paid edition of The Raffi Report. For £8/$10 a month you’ll get 5 nuggets at week that will keep you at the bleeding edge of the Marketing industry.
ONE (if you’re interested in AI is changing fashion e-commerce, read this one)
This is one of those brilliantly obvious ideas that once you see it, you can’t imagine it not working this way.
Put simply, before this technology, you had to see a random model wearing the outfit you were considering buying, now you can see yourself.
Per the article on TechCrunch, Doji, “which is still in invite-only mode, guides users through the process of taking six selfies and uploading two full-body images to create an avatar. The app takes roughly 30 minutes to create an avatar, then notifies you when the avatar is ready. You can also choose your favourite brands during onboarding to see more items from them in the app.”
There are so many ways you can take this… A la Doordash you have to imagine brands paying for ad-space in-app, but you can also imagine a social lens whereby you see your friends trying on the outfit too, and making recommendations as if you were in the store together.
If you’re a brand, it’s a no-brainer because if you’re a shopper, it elevates your likelihood to purchase and basket size. Improving conversion rates and average basket size in one fell swoop is the holy grail of e-commerce.
TWO (if you want to see two worlds collide in Marketing, read this one)
This week saw the announcement of Shopify’s integration with Roblox, with Fenty operating as the launch partner. Per the read-out,
“Brands and creators can now sell real products inside immersive Roblox experiences. From gameplay to checkout – no exits required. Inside the Fenty Beauty Experience on Roblox, you explore the space, find the product, buy it right there, and it ships to your door.”
For years major brands (take Unilever, for example) have been trying to unlock the stickiness, excitement and ultimately incremental spend that flows through online gaming — the idea now that in-game experiences can seamlessly drive real-world spend must be having CMOs firing up their teams to get a seat at the Roblox x Shopify table.
Who will do best here? It’s all about going mass vs mainstream: what niche fandom or cult topic can your brand be part of, that makes the devoted followers of that space feel like you really understand them. If you go too wide, consumers just feel like you’re in it for the wrong reasons. More on this from me here.
THREE (if you’re thinking about Decentralised Discovery, read this one)
In summary, search is slowly but surely moving away from Google. Yes to LLMs but more broadly (and really, as this is all that’s underneath the LLMs) to places like Reddit, Discord, Pinterest, YouTube etc.
Just staying with the LLMs though…
The folks at MMC had a good piece on “How can I get ChatGPT to recommend my brand?” and so did Jenna Kamal “WTF is GEO? Plus, how to cope with the LLM ranking panic”
That said, if you really want to understand the wider context, you’ll have to pair it with this news around Instacart’s CEO Fidji Simo (who launched the ad product there and at Meta) becoming CEO of OpenAI’s applications…
In other words, ads are coming to OpenAI, and this feels like the big frontier for the migration over. If OpenAI can keep gaining share and roll out ads… Then Google really does have a competitor.
FOUR (if you want to understand what’s going on deep inside AdLand, read this one)
The tectonic plates are shifting… I’ve never seen scrutiny of working vs non-working spend like this as some combination of tariff fears, cost of living and internal efficiency mandates leaves CMOs struggling to push anything forward.
Digiday had a great scoop from a number of people plugged in…
For one, per Kevin John, director of brand management at Pereira O'Dell:
“Big brand awareness campaigns, spots that are going to take away from working dollars, that's a big one that we're seeing, at least for the moment while we work through all of this"
One theory is we may be seeing a drive towards outcome-led payments… This piece on the future of remuneration, again from the fine folks at Digiday, is a worth a read.
My view is that whether it’s law, finance, product or marketing, services are going to be more efficient, with less room to hide wastage (as holdcos have done for decades!) and so prices will invariably have to fall.
FIVE (if you want to pick out your next Marketing-related biography to read, try this one)
David Senra’s site is a treasure trove of summaries — it’s the perfect gateway into picking one that is worth a full read…
Check it out here.
