📰 A Spatial Commerce Breakthrough & More

Today’s edition of The Marketer’s Playbook is brought to you by Shoelace

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SIDE NOTE: I asked, and you answered! Thanks so much to everyone who provided feedback on last week’s poll. The results are in, and the message was clear: The Marketer’s Playbook will remain a once-weekly newsletter!

A SPATIAL COMMERCE BREAKTHROUGH

iSO17 just launched (as you may remember from last week’s edition), and with it comes some cool new features - one of which is allowing Shopify to empower its spatial commerce capabilities. Now, with iOS17, you can 3D scan your products in the real world and use these scans on your Shopify store to allow users to interact with it through augmented reality. Using these scans, customers use their phones and AR to see what the product would look like in the real world. This is probably a bit of a niche product for many companies. However, it’s likely that as this tech grows, so does adoption. This is just the beginning of something very interesting happening in commerce. Check out Harley’s tweet here for the full breakdown of how to make it happen.

CHATGPT REIMAGINED, NEXT WEEK

OpenAI, the parent company of the notorious language model-based chatbot ChatGPT, announced a massive new update coming to the platform next week. In this new update, they are introducing the ability to add photos to conversations for added context, which the chatbox can analyze and use in its responses. Below is a video outlining how this feature works and it’s really quite amazing.

Additionally, they announced a voice feature which allows you to have spoken conversations with ChatGPT. This is a super powerful feature. In the promotional video below, you can hear that the ChatGPT voice is much less robotic than many other alternatives. With every passing day, we inch closer to the reality of the movie Her, and I’m not sure whether that’s a good or bad thing. In the meantime, I’m going to be enjoying this incredible tech. Check out OpenAI’s thread here showcasing the new update.

HOW TO MEASURE CREATIVE TESTING

Creative testing, when done correctly, is a rigorous process that takes a lot of time and money but yields incredible results. Making sure you’re running the best creative possible in your ad accounts is the difference between breaking even and exponentially profitable growth. To help with this, London from HexClad shared their methodology for creative testing, and it’s quite thorough. In his thread below, he breaks down the sheet he uses for tracking, including what columns he uses and why. Check out his tweet here for the full rundown.

A CRASH COURSE IN CONSUMER PSYCHOLOGY

Your audiences are your most valuable asset, and making sure that you’re being effective when gathering information from them is critical (see the Side Notes section where I used an audience survey to determine the newsletter frequency!). On the flip side, doing it incorrectly can send you down a rabbit hole you shouldn’t be down and can have immensely negative effects on your business. To that end, Katelyn has shared some of the biggest mistakes people make when asking their audiences for feedback. Check out her thread here to learn more about how to run better interviews, surveys and more.

• GMAIL IS GETTING EMOJI REACTS: Yes, really. Gmail is currently testing a way to react to emails using emojis. I think I love this, but I’m sure it says something negative about our attention spans.

• COMPUTERS CAN’T GENERATE RANDOM NUMBERS: And that’s why Cloudflare generated random numbers using lava lamps — yes, really. This isn’t exactly ‘marketing’ news, but still very interesting.

• TIKTOK’S NEW CREATIVE ASSISTANT: TikTok just released a new creative AI assistant designed to help with the ad creation process.

• DROPSHIPPERS BEWARE: If you’re running dropshipping ads on X, beware that community notes can now be applied to your ads. In this case, competitors can devalue your ads pretty heavily.

• NEW YOUTUBE SUBSCRIBER ANALYTICS: YouTube adds new analytics features to their platform, including breakdowns on which videos lead to how many subscribers and more.

• THE FTC IS SUING AMAZON: The FTC is suing Amazon for, essentially, destroying a fair market, opportunity for innovation, and more. Here’s a quick video breaking it down.

• OBESITY & DIABETES ARE THE NEW BLACK: Drug manufacturers spent a whopping $500M YTD running ads for obesity and diabetes-related treatments, up 20% YoY.

• TWITTER LOVES POLITICAL MISINFORMATION: Twitter has come under fire recently for secretly removing a tool that allowed users to report political misinformation as elections ramp up. Nothing to see here.

PEET’S COFFEE — DISLOYALTY

Agency: Mischief

Now, I won’t try to understand the financial logistics of actually executing this ad’s promise, so let’s assume that the math checks out. In a world where this makes sense financially, I love this ad. It does a great job of targeting its competitors without explicitly saying you are better than them in any meaningful way, which is a pretty classy way of executing pseudo-conquesting advertising. This ad is short, sweet, and to the point. It communicates all the information you need in a way that is somehow both minimal in visuals yet enough to draw in the click and retain after the hook. I would bet this campaign was effective for Peet’s Coffee, but who knows? I’ve seen great ads crash and burn, and bad ads crush. C’est la vie.

HI-CHEW — CHOOSE DIFFERENT. CHOOSE FUN.

Agency: Gigasavvy

In an effort to “create a dialogue” with younger generations as their core demographic begins to age, Hi-Chew collaborated with the agency Gigasavvy to produce this high-colour, high-fun commercial. While this ad may be fun, I would like to put on record that I really, really do not like ads like this. It just feels so ‘corporate’ — this gif perfectly summarizes how I feel:

To add some colour to this, here’s an excerpt from one of Hi-Chew’s senior brand marketing managers regarding the campaign: “We have seen a lot of similarities between our brand and Gen Z … They all wanted to be part of a community, [but] they also wanted to be unique… We believe that uniqueness is the mutual language where we can build that emotional connection between our brand and Gen Zers.” The way that I read this was: ‘We see that Gen Z likes to be unique, and so do we. We are so alike, kids.’

Anyways, enough ranting. At the end of the day, this ad is beautiful and very well produced. It’s bright, fun, and energetic, and there is no denying great effort was put into producing this. I just wish they didn’t lean so hard into the ‘we’re just like you, teenagers!’ angle. It makes me realize there is a lot to love about where direct-response paid social advertising has landed, and I think that the future of ads exists somewhere between that and this.

While you’re here, let us know how you enjoyed this week’s edition:

Have a great week,
Cory