Wednesday, October 9

🌟 Today’s Highlights:

• Snapchat has begun testing two new advertising options

• Threads seems to be building a clone of X’s Communities feature

• Meta is testing new AI editing tools for video ads

• 📊 Stat of the Day: On average, TikTok users 18 to 34 follow more than 3x as many accounts as those age 50 and older. (Source: Pew Research Center)

• 💡 Today’s Insight: Reddit games are a recruitment tool for the U.S. Navy?

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💡 Today’s Insight 💡

Reddit games are a recruitment tool for the U.S. Navy?

🗞 TL;DR - Haven’t seen a campaign quite this creative in awhile. The U.S. Navy launched its new “Sub Reddit Hunt” campaign on the social media site “hiding” five submarines on Reddit and leaving clues that potential recruits can use to track down the submarines. The campaign, crafted by ad agency VML, is intended to attract the “next generation of submariners” and allows Redditors to learn about the Navy.

💡 Insight - The reason this caught my eye is because it’s not what you’d expect out of a recruitment campaign, certainly not for the Navy. Why? Well, upon initial inspection, it lacks any of the usual steps you’d go through to collect prospective recruit info. Users can essentially go through this whole journey and never give you their contact info. But is that a bad thing?

If you’re desperate, maybe not – and apparently, that’s where the U.S. military is right now. According to Gizmodo, all branches of the military have struggled to meet recruitment goals over the past decade, with the Navy being one of the worst performers. It’s complicated to say why, but many have attempted to use video games to drive recruitment (which hasn’t always gone well).

These hidden Easter Egg-type games tend to have a lot of popularity – just think of Google’s snake game or even hidden features like Amazon’s Pets 404 page. So, it’s kinda smart to lean on this curiosity-driven approach. And it’s pretty clever to tie the pun of subreddits and submarine searches together. So, yeah, they might not be getting a giant number of conversions out of this campaign… but those who do follow through the whole game would be pretty high value. I’d say it’s worth a try.

🛠 Things Worth Checking Out 🛠

💡 BFCM STRAT - Lucky for you, I've put together a BFCM Growth Hacking Guide with 5 Hacks every e-commerce brand needs to crush the most important week of the year. If you sell anything online, you need to download the guide RIGHT NOW here →

🧩 LINKEDIN GAMES - Have you played LinkedIn’s games yet? Well, a lot of people are. The puzzle feature launched back in May, and now they’re adding another one to the mix. Tango, a logic image-matching game, launched yesterday.

🎃 SPOOKY SEO - Want to jump into the spooky season but not sure how? Pinterest just dropped its latest Halloween trend report showcasing insights into key Halloween search trends.

⚡️ Today’s Headlines ⚡️

👻 Snapchat has started testing two new ad placements

🤩 Google is hosting a creator summit at GooglePlex next month

💫 Mastodon rolled out revamped notifications, new discovery tools & more

👥 Threads seems to be building a clone of X’s Communities feature

🤖 Meta is bringing AI-edited video ads to Facebook & Instagram

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