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Category: Commentary

Commentary; our thought leadership, newsletter notes and long form pieces.

Dupe brands

Edition #418 Dupe brand launches for lead gen, Swapstack acquired & b2b marketers are disappointed. This week I had a note in Why is this interesting? On Interactive TV, I’ve been enjoying the Bear Grylls experience, where he takes you along on one of his treks and you get to pick what he does at key junctures. Super fun. Prime Video also will soon have ads in the default plan, with Prime Video being… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
September 29, 2023

X

Edition #417 Will X really make the jump to subscriptions for all users? Platformer three years on & Byline secures first partnership. This weeks handbook is for enterprise content marketers, but what sets them apart from regular content marketers? Big company, big problems, more complexity. But they compete in the same market. Or do they? Like the others, simple, practical things to do to help drive performance. Musk shared that he would like to charge all… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
September 22, 2023

Creators

Edition #416 It’s never been easier to make $50,000, content studios & programmatic. Hunter Walk dives into the spicy topic of the creator business, super good, worth a read. It has some great quotable quotes but also speaks to the reality of it. Do give it some time. “I am not saying it’s easy. I’m not saying it’s fair. I’m not saying it’s without tradeoffs. I’m not saying everyone will (or deserves to) succeed. But it has… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
September 15, 2023

Labor Day

Edition #415 Post Labor Day quiet, facial expressions and watch duration on YouTube – and TikTok movie watching. Post Labor Day, yeah this is a quieter week for stories. But hey, we’re all catching up! We dropped the next handbook, this one for publishers doing content partnerships. It’s a bit bigger than the others, but so is the operation, it’s not easy doing high quality content at scale! YouTube’s A/B testing for thumbnails looks like it will… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
September 8, 2023

Agencies forgot

Edition #414 We used to hear about agencies all the time, but no more? Threads partnerships & MrBeast tweets. One of the first agency parties I went to had a snow machine, in summer! It was the last hurrah I guess before the 08 crash. And even then agency folks reminisced of the prior glory days.  I share that because it feels like we don’t hear about agencies anymore. It used to be we heard about them… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
September 1, 2023

Mythbusters

Edition #413 Brand partnerships, Threads meets the open web and a new entrant into adtech? Hint its Sports. A tid bit from the MediaMath sale was that Sports Genius had also bid. A sports data company coming into advertising, or exploring ways to do it. Makes sense. Another in the trend of verticalized solutions. Threads opened up to the web, it feels funny that this was such a demand, but the web/desktop is where a lot… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
August 25, 2023

Zeal

Edition #412 On Disneys zeal for creating too much content, MrBeast & Puck raises $10m. Our thoughts go out to anyone affected by the fires in Maui. This week I answered a few questions for Attention Matters, thanks to Matt for pulling it together. Stories index a bit more towards streaming this week, with the recent earnings. But it is summer so things are a bit quieter for a few more weeks. The Paramount commentary was good,… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
August 11, 2023

Brandformance

Edition #411 TikTok’s brandformance, static posts, Idris Elba and have you seen the Cheech & Chong ads? This week from a train, going through the longest tunnel in Europe – Gotthard Base Tunnel. We’ve had a lot of earnings recently, Alphabet, Meta, Uber. And it seems optimism is up for the second half of the year. At least when it comes to advertising. Uber, now profitable, has expectations of exceeding $1b/year in ad sales in… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
August 4, 2023

Mindshare

Edition #410 Kids versions of sports events, TikTwitter & Alf is making a comeback? First edit from an airport in a while! Last week I mentioned the Twitter thing, where Elon is using attention to measure the success of the app. And also, there was an eMarketer on how if you look at Metas share of attention vs its spend, marketers should be assigning a lot more to Meta! Kind of Mary Meeker vibes. And I… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
July 28, 2023

Barbie

Edition #409 Because isn’t everything Barbie this week? On Threads, will it make it and something from us. Been a couple of weeks between notes – with school ending and then a family break – I am about. In fact from the other side of the pond this week! As always, a lot has happened. Last week I shared a little PDF I created – mainly after enough people asked me about it. It’s called the New Growth… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
July 21, 2023