Hi CCs,

I can’t believe the year is half over 🤯. If you feel like you’ve been throwing content at the wall and it’s not sticking, it might be a good time for a quiet brand reflection exercise.

Ask yourself: are you really resonating with your target audience? How are your engagement rates across social platforms?

I made a couple of FREE workshops designed to help startup founders and marketers hone in on their target customer.

📝 In case you missed them I want to drop them here:

The Identity Matrix: build clarity on your target audience (and craft a mood board - recommended!)

Brand POV Workshop: a short, but in-depth, exercise that will help you develop clarity on your brand purpose and story. It includes key questions that guide you through creating your own brand manifesto.

Let me know how it goes and don’t hesitate to reply directly to this email with any questions. I love hearing from you.

Let’s get into it!
Winter

🔥 Featured Content

How to scale a brand so fast it feels illegal w/ Caleb Ralston

In this episode, Caleb (the brand strategist behind Gary Vee and Alex Hormozi) unpacks how to build a brand people want to copy, not just follow. He breaks down why your social strategy is broken, how to create content that scales trust, and the exact framework he uses to help brands go from overlooked to undeniable.

How Ellie Carlile turned 30M TikTok views into a 7-figure beauty brand

D2C Diaries sat down with Ellie Carlile, the unstoppable founder behind By Ellie, to discuss the brand born from a personal skin struggle, a £2,000 investment, and a makeshift label operation in her mum’s garage.

Fashion brand Alexis Bittar gets political with upcoming short documentary ‘Reclaim the Flag’ coming July 17th.

Directed by Alexis with an incredible cast of 50 Leaders in the LGBTQ+ Community, they explore the symbolism of the American Flag, identity and ask the question: “How do we Reclaim the American Flag?” by talking to the leaders in this community to explore the history and work through solutions.

🤳 Content Inspo

Secret-filming style TikToks are quietly becoming some of the best-performing paid ads out there. [LINK]
Consider experimenting with a video style where you’re filming someone who is seemingly unaware and is doing something relevant to your life or brand (plus is highly relatable to your audience), with humor-driven text on screen.

Product reveal: start close-up and slowly show the full product. [LINK]
Love this example by Alexander Wang of how a super short video with a minimal setup and captivating visuals can make an impact with a new product launch.

Vlog: visuals with text on screen tell the story (no VO needed). [LINK]
If you don’t have a budget for creators, or you hate the sound of your voice, I think this is an underrated content style to try. Pair beautiful shots with text to share a story. Amazing format for literally anyone to share something you love, what inspires you, etc.

💬 Tip of the day:

📡 On Our Radar

On July 16th, join The Creator Business Summit, where four experts will be breaking down their frameworks for building real, lasting businesses. [LINK]

How our content innovations design their own obsolescence. [LINK]

Luxury brands face global, generational challenges, report says. [LINK]

Unilever acquires Dr. Squatch, valuing brand’s viral marketing to Gen Z men. [LINK]

How ditching Pride now could hurt brands later. [LINK]

How brands can make better use of loyalty data. [LINK]

Google launches Doppl, a new app that lets you visualize how an outfit might look on you. [LINK]

“I ditched my creative agency for AI and, yes, I’m sleeping just fine”. [LINK]

The new rules of brand engagement (according to run clubs). [LINK]

Spotify’s video podcast program draws praise from creators — and skepticism from networks. [LINK]

The era of ‘Woke’ brand activism is over. [LINK]

🎶 TikTok

TikTok launches Bulletin Boards for broadcast messaging from creator and brand profiles (essentially their version of Instagram's Broadcast Channels. [LINK]

TikTok adds countdown bidding for livestream auctions. [LINK]

TikTok looks to Gamify livestream engagement with Fan Clubs. [LINK]

📸 Meta / Instagram

Instagram adds colored backgrounds and emojis to notes. [LINK]

Meta says it fixed an issue that led to erroneous Facebook group suspensions. [LINK]

Meta is offering multimillion-dollar pay for AI researchers, but not $100M ‘signing bonuses’. [LINK]

Facebook is asking to use Meta AI on photos in your camera roll you haven’t yet shared. [LINK]

Meta buys over 1 GW of renewables to power its data centers. [LINK]

Meta in talks to acquire voice-cloning startup Play AI. [LINK]

Meta hires key OpenAI researcher to work on AI reasoning models. [LINK]

🧵Threads

Threads updates custom feeds access. [LINK]

Threads expands spoiler tags to image and video content. [LINK]

Threads expands its hidden words options. [LINK]

🤳 YouTube

YouTube Shorts absolutely dwarf TikTok with 200 times the daily views. [LINK]

YouTube is plugging Veo 3 AI videos directly into Shorts. [LINK]

YouTube’s mobile video editor is coming to iOS. [LINK]

YouTube adds an AI Overviews-like search results carousel. [LINK]

☠️ 𝕏 

X announces new original program from the NFL to boost sports engagement. [LINK]

X bans hashtags in promoted posts. [LINK]

X touts rise in usage after Elon splits with Trump. [LINK]

X adds more sports engagement options to maintain community engagement. [LINK]

🟦 Linkedin

LinkedIn adds video covers for articles and newsletters. [LINK]

LinkedIn adds more AI tools to assist recruiters. [LINK]

🍥 Pinterest

Pinterest shares tips on how to align your pin listings with visual search. [LINK]

👻 Snapchat

Snapchat shares trend insights for marketers to tap into this summer. [LINK]

Snapchat acquires student scheduling app Saturn. [LINK]

Powering the purchase: How emerging trends impact consumer electronics. [LINK]

🤖 AI Boom

Could Cloudflare’s “pay per crawl” save news from AI? [LINK]

Congress might block state AI laws for a decade. Here’s what it means. [LINK]

As job losses loom, Anthropic launches program to track AI’s economic fallout. [LINK]

OpenAI hires team behind AI recommendation startup Crossing Minds. [LINK]

This AI-powered startup studio plans to launch 100,000 companies a year — really. [LINK]

As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue. [LINK]

People use AI for companionship much less than we’re led to believe. [LINK]

Authors call on publishers to limit their use of AI. [LINK]

Anthropic’s Claude AI became a terrible business owner in experiment that got ‘weird’. [LINK]

Winter Mendelson
Co-Founder and Creative Director: Posture Media
Host: deepfeed Podcast

🦇 Let’s connect on Instagram and LinkedIn

P.S. I will probably have typos in the event that my dad is unavailable to proofread. Sorry in advance.

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