Raffi's Round Up - w/c 2nd Dec 2024
The five best Marketing-related nuggets across my desk this week
Welcome to the latest edition of my weekly Round Up!
Greetings from the train back from our Christmas offsite in Bristol! Here are the five best Marketing-related nuggets that came across my desk this week:
ONE (if you want to see the future of content production, watch this one)
This is a video from a relatively small dental business: it’s shot on a simple setup (iPhone, most probably) with lo-fi editing and almost no bells/whistles in terms of animation. It has got half a million organic views on YouTube and it is being pinged around WhatsApp groups. The money hasn’t gone into glitzy production, it’s gone into creative thinking that delivers a culturally relevant moment around Black Friday.
Big brands: this is how you do it in 2025.
TWO (if you’re looking for the inside track from within the walls of an early stage Marketing department, read this one)
Tom Davies runs Marketing at Yonder - a Series A scale-up in London that’s taking on AmEx in the credit card market. His breakdown of their efforts in 2024 is both insightful and refreshing: it’s rare to see a Marketer be so honest…
One section detailed just how punishing traditional PR is nowadays. As Tom puts it:
“While we’ve been able to secure consistent trade coverage through well-known tech media like Sifted and other publications, we’ve noticed that the impact of this coverage on our brand no longer moves the needle like it did when we first launched. A couple months ago we secured dozens of pieces of coverage on our fundraise with almost no noticeable impact on our brand metrics around that time.”
Yet another data point that the future belongs to individuals not institutions, which means influencers are going to move the needle much more than named publications.
THREE (if you want to geek out about SEO in the age of LLMs, read this one)
Crystal Carter knows her stuff. One point that stood out was the power of brand assets or “entities” in the age of ChatGPT. As she puts it: “This means that entities form a core component of LLM training and that brands with robust entities will have high visibility within LLMs.” Her example with Barbie is particularly compelling.
FOUR (if you love the vibe of Away suitcases, read to this one)
Rachel Karten had a brilliant interview with Alice Chen; who runs Social and Influencer Marketing at Away.
One excerpt worth noting was the perfect articulation of Marketers needing to take more shots on goal:
“The way consumers experience content on social media today in such a nonlinear way gives us a lot of freedom to make social our creative playground. The flip side of that coin means platforms want new, new, new. So we’ve built an internal infrastructure that empowers us to move quickly, react to the cultural climate, and create with intention without taking ourselves too seriously.”
FIVE (if you’re looking for brilliantly simple innovation, read this one)
As NBC explained, there are two critical details “The chain is turning some of its drive-thru locations, including one in Los Angeles, into photo booths. The Live Más Drive-Thru Cams will be available for a limited time, allowing customers to snap a photo of their everyday drive-thru moments. Participants also become eligible to be considered for an appearance in a Taco Bell Super Bowl ad. Taco Bell Rewards members need to open the app and head through the drive-thru. At the end, stop under the the Live Más Drive Thru Cam and scan a QR code. Six photos taken on both sides of the vehicle after a countdown will be emailed to the user's rewards email.”
So not only are they going to be powering their Super Bowl ad with UGC-like content, but they’re hoovering up email for CRM and app downloads for (inevitably) ads their can run on their app. It’s a 3-in-1 bit of genius.
