Raffi's Round Up - w/c 24th March 2024
The five best Marketing-related nuggets across my desk this week
Welcome to the latest edition of my weekly Round Up!
Greetings from a hectic end to Q1! Here are the five best Marketing-related nuggets that came across my desk this week:
ONE (if you want to see how streaming changed TV economics and incentives, read this one)
Trung Phan is a top-tier writer and his piece on how what we watch is changing… It’s some of the best insight I’ve read on the topic:
However, streaming TV is a different beast. It all looks so good now and the storytelling techniques are perfectly honed to manipulate your emotions with cliffhangers, mysteries and hanging storylines. Perpetual blue balls to keep you coming back. There’s endless content to drive engagement, which is the streaming platform’s #1 priority. It’s all algorithmically served to a person’s specific interests.
And it’s all on-demand!
You feel compelled to keep watching and time washes away.
One final and important difference worth pointing out is how anti-social it is to binge on streaming TV. How many people watch alone on their phones or laptops? All at different speeds and paces.
At least with pre-streaming TV, there was a higher likelihood of a broad shared experience. Whether that was NBC’s “Must-See TV” line-up (Seinfeld, Friends) or ABC’s "Thank God It's Friday" (Full House, Family Matters, Boy Meets World) or HBO's "Golden Age of TV" (that started with Oz, followed by The Sopranos, The Wire, Sex & The City etc.).
TWO (if you want to see AI pushing on, read this one)
There’s been a lot of noise about ChatGPT’s new image creator…
To be honest that’s been around for a while (Adobe had a product ~4 years ago like this) it’s just vastly improved in Open AI’s offering.
What hasn’t been around so long is the ability to search the web via those tools…
Claude just released that functionality (taking on the likes of Perplexity) and it feels much more potentially disruptive to the way we seek and discover information.
THREE (if you want to see how Substack is reimagining influence, read this one)
What came after Instagram? TikTok. And after TikTok? I do think Substack is going gather a lot of steam.
It’s becoming increasingly easy to go down the proverbial rabbit hole of what one is interested in. Per their latest announcement:
For many publishers, landing on one of Substack’s leaderboards has opened the door to new subscribers, unexpected collaborations, and meaningful recognition of their work. Today, we’re expanding leaderboards in the Substack app to drive the discovery of even more voices across the platform.
I can’t imagine it’s going to be long before Influencer Marketing expands to regularly include the folks writing, and producing video/audio on Substack.
FOUR (if you want to see how tastemakers affect the world of fine dining, read this one)
The FT had one of their all-timer pieces which married hard numbers with real world interest… A data-driven look at how restaurant hype happens told through booking records.
It is behind a paywall, but what was remarkable was the financial impact of blogs like Hot Dinners and YouTubers like Topjaw.
FIVE (if you want to see how retail is becoming more experiential, look at this one)
Per WSJ:
“Dick’s Sporting Goods Executive Chairman Ed Stack scanned his chain’s newest concept, a megastore in Victor, N.Y., called House of Sport. It offered more than the usual tennis rackets and football jerseys for sale. The store boasted a rock-climbing wall in one corner, golf simulators in another and an outdoor running track and turf field.
The cavernous space was already twice the size of a traditional Dick’s. But as he walked around, Stack realized some of the apparel and equipment displays were too crowded, the aisles too narrow. He wanted more room to test emerging brands.”
This is how you take on e-commerce: going way beyond a shinier point-of-sale promotion!
