The Raffi Report - w/c 9th June 2025
The five best Marketing-related nuggets across my desk this week
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ONE (if you want to see the flaws at the heart of paid media, read this one)
Meta’s Connections Planning Director had an authoritative LinkedIn post explaining the reality of “the secret group controlling most of advertising.”As he put it:
They’re called the MWC.
Minority Who Click.
You might know them by another name:
clicky people.
Just 15% of people clicked on an ad last month (GWI).
Yet 78% of advertisers use a click-based approach (EMARKETER).
TWO (if you want a thoughtful piece on the decline of consumer trust, read this one)
Andy Kessler lays it out pretty starkly in the WSJ:
In 1964, according to Pew Research, 77% of Americans trusted the government to do what is right. Around that time, the Free Speech Movement’s Jack Weinberg coined the phrase, “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” Maybe that was the start of trust’s decline.
Lately, 22% of Americans trust government. Ouch. Lockdowns, social distancing, masks and school closings didn’t help. Neither did the Hunter Biden laptop coverup.
There’s been a lot written (including by me!) on the shift in trust from institutions to individuals, but I’m now tracking that leap on to the “internal” — anecdotally I’ve seen a lot of people use ChatGPT to create a closed loop system where they talk with their personal AI to make decisions, forgoing even the advice or thoughts of their favourite influencer.
In this vein, Vogue had a good piece on whether AI can replace therapists.
THREE (if you want to see what a surging CPG brand looks like, read this one)
I can’t say I’ve ever tried one, but I’m increasingly in the minority when it comes to Nerds Cluster Gummies.
Per FoodDive:
Nerds is on track to hit more than $900 million in sales this year, a more than 1,700% increase from the $50 million in sales the brand was generating when it was first incorporated into Ferrara, which is owned by a Ferrero-affiliated holding company.
Why this story fascinates me is that it bucks the better-for-you narrative which most large-scale CPG groups are wedded to. Pepsi, for instance, have been on an acquisition spree as they seek to pivot the portfolio away from products high in sugar and fat…
But clearly consumers still have appetite for the bad (some might say good!) stuff…
FOUR (if you want to see how AI is affecting search, read this one)
News publishers are seeing the traffic eroded on a near daily basis. Some of the detail in this piece from the WSJ was staggering:
Traffic from organic search to HuffPost’s desktop and mobile websites fell by just over half in the past three years, and by nearly that much at the Washington Post, according to digital market data firm Similarweb.
Business Insider cut about 21% of its staff last month, a move CEO Barbara Peng said was aimed at helping the publication “endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control.” Organic search traffic to its websites declined by 55% between April 2022 and April 2025, according to data from Similarweb.
At a companywide meeting earlier this year, Nicholas Thompson, chief executive of the Atlantic, said the publication should assume traffic from Google would drop toward zero and the company needed to evolve its business model.
The genie is out of the bottle insofar as Discovery has been decentralised… And the rate of change seems set to accelerate if we accept that OpenAI’s own user base is growing at an accelerated rate.
FIVE (if you want to see “money on the mind” by the numbers, take a look at this one)
The mood music we hear from the world of B2C businesses is playing out in the data: the cost of living is starting to really bite and affect purchasing decisions…
