🤳 What makes Gen Z tweet? 🦣 WTF is Mastodon?


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Sheertex's first outdoor ads showcase its durability with provocative dual meanings...

Phrases like 'tested on animals' and 'supports climate change' explain the toughness of its tights.

In Sheertex’s “Alarmingly Strong” campaign, a series of images and videos of the brand’s tights being stretched, twisted and jabbed are coupled with attention-grabbing statements that reflect different scenarios showcasing the tights’ resistance to damage. (AdAge)

In this newsletter, you'll find:

🚀 5 major trends in retail and commerce (click here to learn more)

🤳 What makes Gen Z tweet?

🐘 Mastodon: The social app taking over Twitter... should brands jump on?

💸 Advertisers see marketing opportunities amid inflation pricing

together with INSIDER INTELLIGENCE

5 Major Trends in Retail and Ecommerce

Retail and ecommerce have seen tremendous momentum since the pandemic. But as some areas continue to accelerate, for others economic uncertainty has taken its toll. In this free infographic, we look at some of the most influential trends of the year, taken from Insider Intelligence’s 2022 reports and forecasts on mcommerce, retail media, TikTok commerce, Shopify, and more.

👉 Click here to download the full free snapshot to learn more about the key trends of 2022 and what you need to take with you in 2023!

TRENDING

Instagram is updating its web interface to take advantage of large screens. (TechCrunch)

SOCIAL GROWTH

What makes Gen Z tweet?

The most technologically native and arguably the most nostalgic generation yet, us Gen Z youths watch shows like Friends in awe, unable to recollect a time where internet culture didn’t define a part of our friendships and relationships.

Did you that Gen Z account for 33% of all Tweets in the U.S. - more than any other generational segment and that during the first half of this year alone, Gen Z posted more than 2.5 billion Tweets.

Continue reading (4-min. read)

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SOCIAL STRATEGY

Mastodon: The social media app taking on Twitter

As Twitter continues to descend into a general state of chaos and its users jump ship on mass, an unusual victor is emerging — Mastodon.

The German social media site has gained 230,000 users since Musk's acquisition of Twitter, and its growth isn't showing any signs of slowing down.

What Is Mastodon?

Mastodon was founded in 2016 by German software developer Eugen Rochko. Unlike Twitter, Facebook, Reddit or any other popular social media site, Mastodon is a nonprofit, meaning that, ideally, its goal is to benefit the public, rather than shareholders.

Mastodon might look like a Twitter clone at first glance, but the underlying system behind the microblogging platform is far more complex. The service is decentralized (no, not in a blockchain way), describing itself as a “federated network which operates in a similar way to email.”

Should brand jump from Twitter to Mastodon?

Many social network-killers have come and gone over the years. Mastodon’s numbers are tiny and I don’t see that it offers enough to convince the vast majority to switch.

Clearly some feel strongly that they need to leave Twitter. But is Mastodon really the answer? It’s certainly not a place for brands, at least, for now, and feels more akin to Reddit and its subreddit community structure.

Ownership is the first area to explore. Mastodon is a decentralised platform. This means it can’t be bought, sold or owned by any one person or entity.

But it does also mean things can change on a whim, servers can just be closed down. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey is also apparently working on a new decentralised network - BlueSky, so it shows there’s a clear trend here.

People are clearly concerned about Musk’s ownership of Twitter. So, he needs to demonstrate a collaborative nature that keeps the community at the heart of the platform’s development.

This is important for brands, too. Everyone remembers when algorithmic changes caused chaos for existing brand social strategy. Brands need to know that the time, effort and resource they have put into a platform is safe for the future.

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AD BUDGET

Advertisers see marketing opportunities amid inflation pricing

Whisper it, because this unstable economy hasn’t kept anything true for too long, but larger advertisers are seemingly looking at advertising less as a cost, more as an investment.

It doesn’t mean they’re going to spend big during the downturn. Given inflation and supply constraints, it’s just not possible. It also doesn’t mean ad spending is going to be stripped back.

But it does create a quandary: limit spending too much and advertisers risk being left behind at a time when price increases have become easy to make, but inflation still squeezes profits.

It’s neither an entirely good or bad predicament for the ad industry — it’s complicated.

After all, inflation can be a good marketing opportunity to get consumers to pay more for a product they love when they’re braced for price increases. They’re making advertising investments now that they hope will pay off in driving growth.

Advertising is more strategically important than ever because they need to push through larger than expected price hikes on the back of their strong brands. Which means those holding the purse strings at these companies are having to think differently about ad spending.

The real challenge is knowing how much advertising to curb before it starts to have an adverse effect on the business — something Airbnb seems to have figured out (at least for now).

Airbnb: The company has just had its most profitable quarter to date. It raked in $2.9 billion over the period, up 29% from a year earlier. At least part of those gains were due to advertising. A shift from search advertising to brand advertising that started three years ago.

Performance marketing has always been about spending a dollar today to get a dollar back tomorrow, next week, next month or whenever the sales cycle is. Here though, Airbnb is using performance marketing to essentially balance supply and demand, as opposed to purchasing a large amount of customers. This should allow for a “very efficient, “very dynamic” approach to marketing that should “get more efficient” each year.

It’s vital for marketers to build sound profit metrics into campaigns and the successful online businesses are getting more savvy with their ad spend and taking time to understand and implement the broad range of tech innovations available to them, such as automation and AI that enable greater optimisation.

It is important that brands don’t succumb to the temptation to cut back on advertising as a whole because this will result in a loss of brand recognition in the long term, which is hard to claw back.