Raffi's Round Up - w/c 28th April 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 after the hottest May 1st on record! Here are the five best Marketing-related nuggets that came across my desk this week:
ONE (if you want to see where AI x E-Commerce is going, read this one)
Per the inside scoop on TestingCatalog:
New code strings in ChatGPT’s public web bundle, “buy_now”, price and shipping fields, product-offer ratings, and a “shopify_checkout_url”, indicate that OpenAI is wiring a native purchase flow into the assistant. The snippet suggests a hand-off to Shopify’s hosted checkout, implying a formal tie-up rather than a generic affiliate link.
For users, the change would let purchases complete inside the chat instead of jumping to external sites, turning ChatGPT into a full-funnel shopping tool. Shopify’s vast merchant base would gain instant distribution to ChatGPT’s audience without extra integration work.
This is where the OpenAI vs Google war really hots up, in my opinion. It’s not just about share of search but CTR to purchase: that’s a space that the Google gang have owned monopolistically for almost 20 years now…
TWO (if you want the most recent report on Gen Z, read this one)
Meta’s new report is a treasure trove of insight but my favourite topic is the outlook on Short Form Video (it seems like we have a new acronym in “SFV”!) — the slide below gives the full picture:
THREE (if you want to see the power of organic community management, read this one)
The ratio of words produced to words consumed on the internet has never been worse: there’s so much GenAI-generated rubbish that you can stand out by going deeply human…
Casey Hill proved exactly that by writing 100 comments (in about 2.5 hours) and generating 284,070 views.
FOUR (if you want to understand how the future belongs to certain types of creativity, read this one)
Andrew shared this piece about the silent crisis in some corners of Marketing, and the move from traditional formats to a new output:
What little creative work remains is “social-first”.
Let me translate that for you: it's content shot on an iPhone, in-store or outside the shop in a grim outlet car park, edited by the same person who filmed it, written by the same person who posted it. Sometimes even starring the person who came up with it.
Obviously this is a sensitive subject… The one aspect that stands out to me is that brands are primarily making more social-first vs big TV ads because that’s what resonates better with younger consumers that are the future heavy buyers of the brand, as well as being less expensive. Change is tough but ultimately it’s driven by market forces (need to do more with less) not inherently evil CMOs, at least most of the time!
FIVE (if you want a deep dive into a legacy brand, read this one)
“Despite being known by 95% of consumers, according to Mondelēz, Chips Ahoy! is only found in 30% of U.S. households.”
This is a great look at how awareness can be milked to drive consumption… Thanks to the folks at FoodDive.
