End of 2021

If you take off between Christmas & New Years, there’s only 14 days left in 2021!

What sort of things are you thinking about for the new year? If anything, I’m planning ahead on a few breaks, to keep me fresh.

Sorting through the stories the last few months, it’s clear Web3 is going to continue to dominate conversations, with regulatory risk potentially take the wind out of the sails at some point. Advertising has yet to find its role in the newer ecosystem but with scale, always comes ads. As for content, the challenge for teams is creating content meaningfully in these new destinations whilst maintaining quality (and capability within their team).

From us at Nudge, I’d be remiss to not remind you to revisit your measurement plans to align with upcoming activity 🙂

Would love to share readers thoughts or opinions for the year ahead. Just send my way.

• Data journalism is an opportunity for brand publishers.
• Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey resigned this week, to make room for Parag Agrawal to lead. This hints at a more crypto/blockchain/distributed type future for Twitter.
• Congrats to Marketing Brew for reaching 200k subscribers!
• Micro-influencers present macro opportunities.
• How Substack has spawned a new class of newsletter entrepreneurs.
• How Roblox’s virtual brand activations are building a robust creator economy.
• The attention recession.
• TikTok expands creator tipping and video gifts.
• Facebook hands out cash to creators to boost Clubhouse rival.
• Hunger for new subscribers is driving down prices as brands discard acquisition cost models.
• Why Zero-party data is the future of privacy-first advertising.
• Xandr updates content metadata for video, to improve monetization for publishers.
• [Long read] Where the secret weapon behind Food52, Barstool Sports, and Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine is investing next.

Deals/M&A

• BuzzFeed could start trading on the public markets as soon as Dec 6th.
• Chernin Entertainment taps advisors to explore options.
• Optimizely to acquire Welcome (Newscred) to help marketers drive customer experience outcomes.
• Weibo to raise $547m in HK listing.
• Deloitte acquires Madras Global as clients navigate ‘tsunami of content’.

Campaign of the Week

• Nike is partnering with Roblox to create Nikeland. At time of publishing it had had 6.1m visits. And related, Nike is reuniting with Fortnite to launch the cool grey Jordan 11.

• “Marketers need a new plan of action that puts creativity before quantity, audience before engine, and sets connection as the top priority” –Lindsay Tjepkema, CEO, Casted.

Datapoints of note

• [Roblox Nascar experience] Over the course of the 10-day NASCAR event, users visited the Jailbreak experience 24 million times.
• Half of companies outsource content writing but quality is a persistent challenge.

That’s it for this week.