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Test, learn, iterate, repeat. We love building in public, which is why you’ll see some familiar updates to our format here. Appreciate you bearing with us as we figure some stuff out. Growth marketing happening in real time here!

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Today’s Headlines

📈 Amazon’s Q2 2023 online ad revenue grew 22% to 10 billion

🤝 London Stock Exchange & Microsoft agree to 10yr strategic partnership

🛡️ Instagram’s new feature helps protect users from unwanted DMs

👀 X is now showing Communities posts in the For You tab

🌍 Threads is teasing a Europe launch with French & German ads

🎙️ X users can now participate in Spaces via desktop

🔒 Reddit’s added more helpful features to UI for logged-out users

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🛠️ Things Worth Checking Out

🎥 AI VIDEO - Gan.ai helps generate AI-powered personalized videos for brands to boost engagement, conversions & recall. Get a FREE demo here.

🌟 TALENT - Top marketing talent is hard to find. Well, we should say WAS hard to find... With MarketerHire you'll get matched with top 1% marketing talent within a week, here.

🎧 META AI - Meta’s working on creating and open-sourcing their generative AI for audio, AudioCraft, to create realistic audio from text-based user inputs.

💰 ACQUISITION - Social media management platform Sprout Social acquired Tagger Media, an influencer marketing and social intelligence platform, for $140M to expand into the $21.1 billion influencer industry.

🦾 AMAZON AI - Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on the company’s most recent earnings call that “every single one” of their businesses has “multiple generative AI initiatives going right now.” Exciting times!

We’re compiling a list of the Top 100 Marketers in the game, apply here for free!

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Today’s Deep Dive

Marketing outside your own culture/geography? Tread carefully.

📰 TL;DR - Everyone worldwide has been talking about the Barbenheimer craze, the phenomenon of two major blockbuster movies (Barbie and Oppenheimer) hitting theaters back-to-back. Talking leads to memes – one such included a scene from Barbie photoshopped in front of an atomic mushroom cloud. The meme grabbed the attention of the Barbie movie’s official account, to which their social media team replied, “It’s going to be a summer to remember 😘💕”

A seemingly light-hearted reply could not have gone more poorly as viewers and audiences from Japan started seeing the post and its distasteful acknowledgment of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. The negative reply led to the hashtag #NoBarbenheimer trending across Japan with Warner Bros. Japan (Barbie’s producer) even criticizing their U.S. branch for feeding into the Barbenheimer craze.

💡 Insight - It’s easy to think everyone on the internet is on the same page as you, especially when you’re acting quickly as a social media team. Social media doesn’t often leave room for nuance.

That’s not to say these reactions aren’t justified. It’s to say that where you’re coming from is completely different from where I’m coming from and totally different from where someone else is coming from. Our cultural and geographic backgrounds hugely make up how we’ll react to something – it’s often hard to account for all of those differing viewpoints.

Consider whether your content could be seen as polarizing before posting. This can be challenging, but some content is inherently neutral (for example, a sale or details about your business). But if you have to really stop and think about whether something you post could offend someone, probably best not to post or comment at all.

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