Hi there, you might notice the newsletter looks a bit different. That’s because we have made the switch from ConvertKit to Beehiiv. Both are solid tools but Beehiiv has more features that align more to my needs as a creator to be able to serve you better. One of them being the ability to include polls. If you want to check out Beehiiv for your own newsletter you can sign up here.

And on that note…I have a question for you!

Airbnb launches a new marketing campaign in response to New York City's recent crackdown on short-term rental laws.

Airbnb launched a video ad campaign featuring New Yorkers who rely on Airbnb to help afford living in the increasingly expensive city. The ads aim to garner public support and sway officials to ease the stringent rental restrictions.

However, the NYC Mayor's Office of Special Enforcement claims Airbnb's ads misrepresent the law's impacts and are propaganda. They state the law aims to increase affordable long-term housing by stopping illegal hotel activity. The two sides remain at an impasse, with Airbnb defending their hosts' rights while the city enforces against illegal rentals.

Welcome to the NPC era. Has individuality lost its edge?

On TikTok, the most talked about trend of the season is not a dance, sound, or style, it’s a set of mannerisms used by TikTok streamers to emulate non-player characters — NPCs — who robotically repeat pre-programmed phases and movements in exchange for cash gifts.

The NPC streamer phenomenon has been widely analysed, both for its shock value and as a sign of significant shift in the relationship between content creators and audiences. But the non energy of non-player characters isn’t exclusive to a sect of streamers. Doing the least is trending, from the return of normcore in fashion to side character engery offered up as an alternative to main character syndrome.

🔮 Tips & Trends

Why creator influence is primed to grow on heels of Hollywood strikes. [LINK]

How to optimize your products & services for social media search. [LINK]

Looking for some design inspiration? Check out this awesome visual identity library by Rebrand. [LINK]

How NOT to launch on TikTok (even the big dogs are getting it wrong), by Grace Andrews, aka The Social Climber [LINK]

Cameo, a platform that connects celebrities to their fans through their site and their app, has seen a rise of celebrity users amidst the SAG-AFTRA strike. CEO Steven Galanis says over 2,400 celebrities have started or reactivated their accounts since the strike began in July. [LINK]

“Influencers aren’t winning: analyzing the creator economy problem.” Despite influencers being a cornerstone stakeholder within the social media ecosystem, time and time again we’ve seen these creators struggle. [LINK]

Inside Neutrogena’s educational approach to TikTok to win over Gen Z. [LINK]

Stuck on paid ad creative ideas? Check out Aazar Ali Shad’s mega swipe file for “Proven Ad’s Framework Ideas.” [LINK]

Report: SproutSocial surveyed over 1,800 consumers and 900 marketers to uncover their priorities in today’s shifting social media landscape, where the gaps are and how to close them. [LINK]

“Matt Navarra on social media: people aren’t sharing as much.” Social media consultant and analyst Matt Navarra on the shift to private sharing on social media, live commerce and why the metaverse remains a question mark. [LINK]

How Barstool built an empire by swiping sports highlights: a Daily Beast investigation found more than 40 content-swiping Twitter accounts apparently controlled by Barstool—a key to the growth of its massive media empire. [LINK]

The creator economy is evolving, and things are looking good. As people change how and why they use social media, brands are looking to partner with more creators than ever. [LINK]

📡 On Our Radar

118 new emojis should be arriving across our various digital devices over the next year or so. [LINK]

CapCut has added a ‘text-to-image’ AI feature. [LINK]

Global influencer marketing spend expected to hit 34 billion in 2023. Marketers invested over $5.3 billion into macro-influencers and another $4.4 billion into brand ambassadors in 2022, according to market research firm PQ Media. [LINK]

Apple Drops New 'Shot on iPhone' Ad With Olivia Rodrigo. The campaign features snippets of the Grammy winner's music video for 'Get Him Back'. [LINK]

SoundCloud rolls out its clips-focused music discovery feed. [LINK]

🎶 TikTok

TikTok celebrates #TikTok Fashion Month. [LINK]

After many months of testing, TikTok Shop is rolling out to all U.S. users over the next two weeks. As of Tuesday, more than 100,000 creators are making videos and livestreams with shopping buttons, according to TikTok. But creators don’t appear to be sold just yet. [LINK]

TikTok and TBWA unveil new joint whitepaper encouraging businesses to embrace creativity and innovation. [LINK]

Is TikTok the future of television? Streaming companies like Peacock are learning that Gen Z is perfectly happy watching movies and TV shows in small increments on a mobile phone screen. [LINK]

TikTok expands its ‘Creativity Program’ funding initiative to more regions. [LINK]

TikTok plans to disrupt the messaging part of social media, as per new reports. [LINK]

Search results on TikTok now include a snippet and link To Wikipedia. [LINK]

📸 Instagram / Meta

Instagram adds a welcome video option for Broadcast Channels. [LINK]

Instagram is testing a feature to let you share feed posts just with ‘Close Friends’ [LINK]

Instagram tests out Location Tags in Notes. [LINK]

PayPal Partners with Meta to enable donations on Facebook and Instagram in the US, UK, Australia and Canada. [LINK]

Facebook shares new AI Marketing Guide for holidays. [LINK]

Instagram adds following filter in the Reels Tab. [LINK]

☠️ X (Twitter)

Twitter uses don’t want to call it X - inside the platform’s marketing challenge. [LINK]

X caught running unlabeled ads in users’ Following feeds. [LINK]

Bots on X worse than ever according to analysis of 1m tweets during first Republican primary debate. [LINK]

X now lets Premium subscribers hide likes and verify their real IDs. [LINK]

X turns to Google to sell programmatic ads as it struggles to regain ad dollars. [LINK]

🧵 Threads

Threads is under fire for blocking searches related to covid and vaccines as cases rise. [LINK]

Instagram users can now share a Reel or a post directly to Threads. [LINK]

Threads: The inside story of Meta’s newest social app. [LINK]

📹 YouTube

YouTube’s looking to lean further into vertical video, with a test of a new full screen viewing experience for live streams in its mobile app. [LINK]

YouTube starts making the ‘Subscribe’ button glow when creators ask you to subscribe. [LINK]

YouTube begins public testing of ‘Playables’ gaming effort. [LINK]

YouTube pilots longer, less frequent ads on TV app. The platform is also trialling a new ad countdown timer, which is set to replace the 'video will play after ads' message. [LINK]

A comprehensive guide to YouTube Shorts analytics. [LINK]

27 YouTube Shorts ideas to help you go viral. [LINK]

🔗 Linkedin

LinkedIn adds new branded content library, listing all influencer campaigns in the app. [LINK]

20+ LinkedIn profile tips (guaranteed ways to stand out). [LINK]

Luke Shalom’s creator audits to grow his Linkedin account. [LINK]

🍥 Pinterest

Pinterest has its own ad library now that enables you to browse and analyze existing ads on the platform, including those from your competitors. [LINK]

Pinterest’s Gen Z-focused Shuffles app has now inspired a new Pinterest feature. [LINK]

👻 Snapchat

Snapchat now opens Snap Star verification to the public through their website. [LINK]

Learn how to use Snapchat's newest feature for screen sharing on the web interface and iPhone app for digital collaboration. [LINK]

💬 WhatsApp

WhatsApp is working on cross-platform messaging. A new WhatsApp beta contains a clue about how Meta is preparing to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act that will require chat interoperability with other services. [LINK]

WhatsApp is widely rolling out its Telegram-like Channels feature. [LINK]

🤖 AI Boom

Firefly-powered features like Photoshop’s Generative Fill tool are now out of beta. Adobe is also introducing a new bonus scheme to pay its stock contributors for helping to train its AI models. [LINK]

Amazon debuts generative AI tools that helps sellers write product descriptions. [LINK]

Claude AI gets paid version. [LINK]

Slack is building generative AI functionalities. [LINK]

⚒️ Tool Highlight

The tool stack I previously used to run Posture Media included Asana, Google Drive, Slack, and more. It was a lot to manage (not to mention Asana had many limitations), and I decided that I wanted to simplify and improve our systems not only internally, but also externally for our clients.

In order to achieve this, I hired a consultant and made the switch to Notion, a powerful connected workspace. It’s highly customizable so I’m able to create custom structures per department. I’ve become a bit obsessed at making my own templates and seeing what’s possible. 😊 

I highly recommend Notion for the following:

• Project and task management

• Note-taking

• Client portals and communications (bye bye Slack)

• Content management system

• Habit tracker

• and so much more

Learn more and sign up here to become a fellow Notion nerd.

🤳 Brand of the Week

Peet’s Coffee launched their first ever, 360-degree marketing campaign “Coffee for Coffee People,” taking a humorous look at the industry.

The brand’s new creative agency of record, Mischief @ No Fixed Address, is behind the new efforts. The campaign includes six spots, paid social and digital elements as well as out-of-home placement in key markets.

The inspiration according to Jessica Buttimer, VP of Brand Marketing at Peets, comes from the fact that “coffee companies have kind of lost the plot recently in terms of caring about actual coffee. So it felt like rich territory for Peet’s to come out and show our priority is simply coffee, quality coffee.”

This new positioning is based on company research indicating that Americans drink an average of 3.3 cups of coffee per day, which can be more than water intake for many.

🎨 Creative Corner

Is Gwyneth’s viral Seed ad the future of paid social? Let’s discuss.

Last week a TikTok ad run by the probiotic company Seed went viral.

The ad features Gwyneth Paltrow talking about a probiotic capsule that Seed sells when she is suddenly interrupted by her son Moses steaming milk.

The catch is that this wasn’t an ad at all, but was an organic IG Story that Paltrow posted. Seed must have retrospectively reached out to request usage.

People immediately began reposting it, with one video captioning it with “this being an actual ad that this company paid GP actual money for is one of the funniest things I have seen on this app.” The reposted video has almost 300k views.

What’s interesting is that most companies wouldn’t think this was “clean” enough of a take to then retroactively use as an ad, but Seed took the leap knowing how authentic and raw content performs the best on TikTok.

It’s a great example of customizing your strategy to be native to the platform.

It was so good that it went viral, with many tweets and TikToks about it.

And that’s it for this week! Thank you for reading and congrats if you made it to the end! 🥂

Winter Mendelson
Co-Founder, Posture Media
Instagram / Linkedin / Threads / X

​Creative Commerce is written, edited, and published by Posture Media, an independent branding and marketing studio based in Brooklyn. We help startups and SMEs find their voice, stay relevant, and expand market share.

🔮 Nonbinary & QTPOC-owned
🔥 DEI 365 days a year

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