Marketverse #3
Exchange evening news for cat videos
January 27, 2023
Exchange evening news for cat videos Tech layoffs, energy crisis, looming recession, war, COVID, and unstable marketing budgets. Among all the doom and gloom spilling out of the mass and social media, I've decided to open our newsletter with something inherently positive: pets. Animals in advertising are well known to be automatic triggers, evoking positive emotions. We all know roaring Leo from the MGM logo, Cheetah Chester, Geico Gecko, polar bears from Coke ads, or Tony The Tiger. In recent years TikTok and Instagram have been real goldmines of pet-related content that sells. Animals + marketing = ♥️. This example reminds us that bad news also has the power to go directly to our limbic system. In this case, though, stimuli trigger other reactions: oh shit, this is important. I need to follow more of this. Doctor's recommendation: balance news with funny cats videos.
Simon Paroszkiewicz, Human Intelligence on Demand
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🇬🇧 High life of pet influencers
The Internet loves cute animals: doggs, kitties, and, most recently - rabbits. This love is being capitalized thanks to the booming pet influencing trend. The pet clothing market itself is worth more than $5.7bn, but animals advertise almost everything. Golden retrievers Hugo and Huxley earn their owner, Ursula Aitchison, more than £100,000 a year in modeling, sponsorship, and advertising deals. “I spend my days driving the boys to photoshoots, creating events and curating content for Instagram posts.”- says Aitchison. The majority of Hugo and Huxley's projects are handled by their agency, Urban Paws. It was founded in 2015 to meet the rising demand for canine models. “There’s an ever-increasing demand for animals in adverts, on TV and for promoting products on social media, which is seeing a huge boom in pet influencers” - says Layla Flaherty, the agency’s founder.
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🇸🇪 Big Tech job cuts: time for Spotify
As the post-pandemic economic outlook deteriorates, Spotify announced that it will reduce its workforce by 6%. "Over the last few months we've made a considerable effort to rein in costs, but it simply hasn't been enough," - said Daniel Ek, CEO. Spotify has invested heavily in its podcast business, which is more appealing to advertisers. However, as the economy was under pressure from swift interest rate increases and the effects of the Russian aggression on Ukraine, businesses reduced their spending on platform advertising, mirroring a trend seen at Meta and Google parent Alphabet. After two years of pandemic-driven growth and aggressive hiring, the tech sector is now experiencing a decline in demand. Because of this, businesses like Google and Microsoft have cut thousands of jobs in recent weeks in preparation for a potential recession. Alphabet, Google’s parent company will say goodbye to 12,000 employees. The total tech job losses in the last year grew to more 200,000.
🇺🇸 Google turns to resellers
Over the course of several years, Google has gotten more and more advertisers to interact with its network of approved resellers. These types of resellers assist media buyers with managing daily ad campaigns that make use of Google's suite of marketing services. “Google [is] trying to get away from actually dealing directly with their client base. (...) I think the goal of Google is that resellers can take on a lot of the back and forth support, queries and ad hoc service requests that, in all honesty, it has never really been that good at. ” says one media-buying executive. In addition to lowering advertising-related overhead costs, this strategy positions tech giant as a SaaS provider, which Wall Street investors are more likely to find attractive than a media services provider.
🇵🇱 Race in European cashierless stores market
The Polish convenience store chain Żabka has set its sights on becoming the largest operator in the world by surpassing current leader Amazon this year after establishing the largest network of cashierless stores in Europe.
Żabka has launched more than 50 autonomous "Nano" stores since opening the first one in Poznan in June 2021. They have appeared in workplaces, athletic facilities, as well as bigger stores like Leroy Merlin and Decathlon. The executive vice president of the Żabka Group, Tomasz Blicharski, says: “We want to be the biggest in the world, we want to beat Amazon. This is our goal for this year.” Amazon, the market leader, operates approximately 70 Amazon Go stores.
🌏 TikTok influences consumer behavior
What does TikTok have to do with TV commercials? It turns out that quite a lot. A well-crafted ad lasting less than 30 seconds was unimaginable 5 years ago, but now advertisers are aiming at 15-second. The popular app has changed how our brains process information and it has had an effect on how consumers view and respond to commercial content. Because viewers can now comprehend ideas more quickly thanks to TikTok's fast feed, marketers can now succeed more with shorter formats. TikTok has also trained users to react and it made them more likely to engage with ads.
🇺🇸 Will Instagram be Instagram again?
Many Instagram users have complained that the platform turns into a video app. The CEO of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, has now admitted that traditional photo posts suffered last year as a result of the platform's lopsided emphasis on videos and Reels. In one of the answers from his weekly Q&A with Instagrammers, he wrote, “I think we were overfocused on video in 2022 and pushed ranking too far and basically showed too many videos and not enough photos.” According to Mosseri, Instagram has since been working in the background to restore a more equitable balance, and internal metrics indicate that it is succeeding.
🇪🇺 European deeptech investors
According to Dealroom data, European investors invested $17 billion in deeptech startups on the continent last year. That's a significant increase from the $11.6 billion and $11.1 billion invested in 2019 and 2020, respectively, even though it's less than the record-breaking $22.8 billion in 2021.Europe’s most active deeptech investors are based (no surprise) in Western Europe. The European Union's European Innovation Council is one of them, having invested in 71 European deep tech startups since January 2022.
🌏 Flexible, but stable
About half of job seekers (45%) wouldn’t accept a job that didn’t offer accommodating hours, according to Randstad’s 2023 Workmonitor report. Additionally, about half of workers (48%) said they’d quit a job if it “prevented them from enjoying their life.” These findings and more are unpacked in the research firm’s report, which paints a picture of worker priorities in markets across the North and South Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia: Employees want stability in their career overall, but flexibility in their day-to-day lives.
🇺🇸 In-office workers have a ‘competitive advantage’
According to a research conducted by American Staffing Association, more than half of respondents in the United States believe that employees who work completely in-office have a "competitive advantage" over fully remote workers in terms of bonuses, promotions, and raises. Most respondents cited the benefits of working in-office, but at the same time 44% told ASA that they would take a pay sacrifice if it meant having "more freedom to work remotely."
Approximately half of workers said they work full-time in an office, with 28% working in a hybrid arrangement and 24% working entirely from home.
🇸🇪 Unusual bar graphs
If 50 people travel in an electric bus, the emission will be 36 times less than if they choose a fossil fuel-burning car. What's the easiest way to illustrate the level of carbon dioxide emissions from different types of vehicles? Västtrafik, a Swedish public transport operator, came up with a simple but very impressive idea: the traditional, boring bar graphs were created... from real cars.
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