Happy Monday.
What a time to be alive. Last week, Anthropic released an AI model it described as “too powerful to release” and then had to… well, reverse it.
Meanwhile, a Caribbean island of 160.000 people scored their first-ever World Cup goal. Oh, and Japanese researchers just began trials for a drug that could let adults regrow real teeth…
Thankfully, our job is only to cover marketing. This is getting almost impossible to follow.
Meta says Christmas prep starts now, Microsoft Ads makes it easier to browse your product catalog
It’s only June, but the retail world runs on its own calendar. In it, “halfway through the year” really means “the holidays are next week.”
Christmas starts now: Meta’s new 34-page holiday marketing guide treats Q4 success as months of groundwork, not a frantic November scramble.
The roadmap breaks down like this:
- Q2: Build your foundation. Identify aligned creator partners and develop briefs.
- Q3: Launch and optimize. Begin creator partnerships and start testing campaigns.
- Q4: Execute at scale. Cash in on the prep work.
Meta claims 85% of global holiday shoppers use its apps weekly, and they spend 1.2x more than the average shopper. On top of that, 78% have bought directly in-app.
The guide leans on three pillars: reels for awareness, creator partnerships for reach, and easy checkout for conversion.
Speaking of cleaning up your setup: Microsoft Ads’ new Product Explorer gives you one searchable view of your whole catalog’s health.
If you’ve ever wrestled a giant product feed, you know the pain of guessing which items are eligible to serve. Product Explorer spotlights that for you.
It surfaces eligibility issues, lets you filter by attributes like SKU, title, GTIN, and product ID, and shows product-level performance for the previous 30 days. Nice.
It should already be live in your account, so go take a look.
B2B buyers want to buy a safe product more than the best product
Turns out closing deals is less Glengarry Glen Ross and more group therapy.
Confidence sells: A new LinkedIn and Bain & Company report shows B2B buying runs on emotion, and logic just shows up later to defend the call.
LinkedIn calls it “Buyability,” a model built on the idea that committees are who you’re really selling to. Clear the emotional bar that lets a committee commit, and you’re in.
A full 40% of deals stall on internal disagreement, not because a rival swooped in. People would rather freeze than gamble on a choice that could backfire at work.
So, how do you become the safe pick? Lean hard into customer advocacy:
- Buyers are 3x more likely to choose a peer-recommended vendor over one promising a better product or lower price.
- They’re 4x more likely to pick a vendor they’ve personally succeeded with before, since a good track record reads like a vote of confidence from their own past self.
Shared working styles and peer endorsements beat rational selling points such as category leadership.
Advocacy from inside a buyer’s own niche reassures most, so show prospects exactly how you’ve delivered for businesses like theirs.
The takeaway: You may have the best product, but you should still sell the safest decision.
Amplify your happy customers, surface those recommendations early, and hand buyers the reassurance they need to say yes.
Good creators. Great products. Underwhelming results.
Most affiliate managers aren’t doing anything wrong – they’re just working without the right signals. When your data lives in three places, you’re not managing a program. You’re managing spreadsheets.
JLab stopped guessing and started scaling. Instead of chasing more creators, they focused on high-intent partnerships and unified everything in one place with Levanta. The impact:
- Affiliate sales tripled in under a year
- 64% of total Amazon sales came from affiliates
- 340,000+ qualified clicks from creators
One platform. Full attribution across Amazon, Shopify, and Walmart.
Qualified brands who book a demo get a free $100 gift card of their choosing.
What is nostalgia marketing and why does it work?
Stranger Things’ marketing strategy brief was essentially “nostalgia.” And hey, it worked, right? Everyone watched it. The first season, at least…
Oskar Duberg says nostalgia is marketing’s most reliable shortcut to trust and recognition.
We agree, with conditions, because a bad throwback ages faster than milk.
Why does nostalgia marketing work? Recognizing an old logo or jingle fires the brain’s reward system.
That small dopamine hit reads as comfort, and comfort, as we know, reads as safety.
Why this matters: Familiarity lowers cognitive load, so wary buyers feel before they analyze. A LEGO 90s re-release sparks joy instantly, and the memory does your selling for you.
Our take: That’s the Y2K revival and lo-fi everything. Film grain and analog textures whisper “you’ve seen this, relax,” which is why turbulence makes nostalgia land hardest.
It helps us connect with others. Nostalgia is both happy and social. Shared memories, even borrowed ones, create instant belonging.
It’s why strangers tag each other under decades-old commercials.
The strongest throwbacks remind people who they were with. Continuity sells, and loneliness is a wildly underrated motivator.
Three filters decide if nostalgia will work in marketing: Fit, freshness, and feeling.
Wrong audience, museum-piece execution, or hollow sentiment, and your throwback turns into cringe.
The bottom line: Pepsi’s 125th-anniversary retro cans honored heritage while looking modern. Coca-Cola reviving “New Coke” for Stranger Things just reminded everyone of its most famous flop.
The nostalgia marketing playbook: Start with the feeling, not the decade. Pick the emotion, whether safety, wonder, or rebellion, then remix it for today.
Small businesses win here. You can’t fake decades of equity, but proximity beats it. An old storefront photo or a returning $5 lunch special feels personal.
Remember, the past is a tool. Nostalgia reconnects emotion, memory, and meaning, three things algorithms still can’t fake.
Use the past to warm up the present, not to move in permanently.
What if doing nothing beat 90% of professional fund managers?
The investment industry sells complexity. Research. Timing. Alpha.
The data tells a different story. Over any 20-year period, a simple world index fund has outperformed more than 90% of professionals. Most investors who try to beat the market end up paying more in fees to underperform it.
The edge isn’t intelligence. It’s patience.
But patience is hard when your portfolio feels abstract. A passive fund is just a ticker on a screen. The thousands of companies inside it, the businesses you actually co-own, stay invisible.
90 Percent fixes that. Every week, it pulls one company at random from the world equity index and tells you what it actually does.
- The Japanese hardware company hiding inside every factory.
- The Indonesian conglomerate that put 280 million people on wheels.
- The Californian salvage yard that quietly became a $32B marketplace.
One company. Every week. Yours to discover.
Big brands chase robots, smart brands chase humans
Are you writing for a person with a coffee in their hand or a robot in a server farm?
Sounds weird, but your answer likely depends on the size of your company.
There is a fascinating split in strategy based on company size.
- Small businesses (1–500 employees) are significantly more focused on people, with 41% targeting users directly compared to only 24% of larger companies.
- Large companies (500+ employees) are prioritizing robots: 43% target traditional search engines and 32% are specifically writing to influence Large Language Models (LLMs).
For small businesses, search engines (35%) and LLMs (21%) remain secondary to direct human engagement.
Large corps are playing the volume and “discoverability” game, trying to win the AI-summary war.
Small businesses are leaning into their advantage: human-to-human connection and personality.
If you’re a small-to-medium business, double down on “opinionated content.”
AI and search engines favor generic “correctness,” but people buy from humans with unique perspectives and shared values.
AI MARKETING: The Deep View gives you the AI context in five minutes a day: what changed, why it matters, and what to watch next. It is built for people who need signal, not another feed to manage. Free, clear, and trusted by 700,000+ readers at Google, Meta, Microsoft, and beyond. Subscribe here. *
TIKTOK: Teaming up with Panini, the platform dropped 144 digital trading cards for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. You unlock them by following, commenting, and hitting milestones. NFTs reborn as an engagement carrot, basically. Expect Meta to study the playbook.
GOOGLE: Bowing to advertiser pushback, the company shifted its automatic DSA-to-AI Max transition from September 2026 to February 2027, sparing your accounts a Q4 headache. Manual upgrade tools arrive soon, though ACA and broad match still move in September.
CREATORS: Hitting a wild new record, MrBeast became the first creator to cross 500M subscribers, livestreaming the moment to 600,000 viewers. His advice is that mastery takes 100,000 hours, not 10,000. Make of that what you will.
TIKTOK: TikTok Shop now bans AI voices, prerecorded audio, and static images from US promotional livestreams and shoppable videos. Selling must happen live, with a real setting, camera movement, and your face on screen. Break the rules, and you risk commission cuts.
*This is a sponsored post.
When young, I am sweet in the sun.
When middle-aged, I make you happy.
When old, I am valued more than ever.
What am I?
You can find the answer here.
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