🔑 Landlords.
TikTok launches managed Shop services and bans AI voices, Google tests collapsible sponsored product labels, how to choose LinkedIn influencers for B2B buyers, and more.
In this issue
Happy Friday.
The internet insists the only path to success is waking at 5AM, meditating, and conquering your inbox before sunrise.
But what if your brain doesn’t clock in until 9PM? If your sharpest ideas arrive with the moon, maybe that’s simply when your genius decided to keep office hours.
Who are we to argue with genius? Oh, and this isn’t based on a true story… maybe?
TikTok wants to run your Shop, pick your voice, and eat YouTube’s lunch
Every platform eventually stops being a tool and starts being a landlord.
TikTok just picked up the keys.
Move over, we’ll drive: TikTok is piloting a managed services program that runs almost your entire Shop: ads, creators, listings, and hundreds of AI videos.
The price? A $10K flat fee plus 10–20% commission. And note it puts TikTok in direct competition with the agencies you may already pay.
TikTok Shop also wants to make everything human: it just banned AI voices from live commerce streams.
If your workflow is text-to-speech over looping footage, that’s now an Account Health Rating liability. Use live human hosts if you don’t want to tank your score.
Worth the hassle? Ask beauty marketers. TikTok Shop is now the UK’s fourth-largest beauty retailer, with sales up 60% and K-beauty searches up 125%.
And the trajectory only points up: WARC projects TikTok will overtake YouTube in ad revenue by 2030, largely because it won the lower-funnel argument.
The rent is going up. The question is whether you can afford not to pay it.
New campaign tools arrive, while your ad spaces shrink
Plenty of give and take in this one…
Search is becoming a one-stop shop: Google rolled out app integrations in AI Mode, so U.S. users can shop, design, or build playlists without ever leaving Search.
Convenient for them, less so for you. That’s less traffic and control landing on your site after the search.
Reach without the guesswork: Video campaign groups are now global, letting you coordinate reach and frequency across multiple YouTube campaigns from a single goal.
The tech giant ties an optimal 2.7 exposures per week to a 19% ROI lift.
Now you see them, now you don’t: Google is testing hide/show sponsored products in Shopping, the same collapsible ad label it brought to search results last year.
Pair this with the AI Mode news and the message is clear: your paid real estate inside Search is shrinking.
Lean harder on creative that earns the click.
Read the fine print: PMax product reporting now spans all networks, so metrics likely jumped on June 15. That’s just a measurement change, not a win.
The pattern: more tools for you, less space for your ads. Plan accordingly.
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 Brazilian company that makes the electric motors inside almost everything that spins.
- The Florida company that sells your airline its spare parts at half the price.
- The Japanese hardware company hiding inside every factory.
One company. Every week. Yours to discover.
How to pick LinkedIn influencers that can get you real buyers
B2B credibility is borrowable, but only if you rent it from the right voice.
Blake Hartford over at InfluencerDB breaks down how to find creators who convert, not just collect followers. Pay attention to these.
1) Fame is a vanity metric. Fit pays the bills: A creator with 8,000 followers can smoke someone with 80,000 if the audience is precise.
On LinkedIn, the “influence” comes from job titles and topic authority. Long sales cycle? Repeated touchpoints from a trusted expert beat one viral moment every time.
2) Start with the audience, not the celebrity: Write down three attributes before you shortlist anyone: role, industry, and seniority. Then add the topic they’re known for.
Aim for 20 profiles so you can afford to be picky.
3) The comment section is the real audit: Likes are noise. A post with 40 thoughtful comments beats one with 800 hollow likes.
Spot-check who’s actually engaging: are they your target roles, or generic profiles from nowhere relevant?
Demand at least one “proof post” where the creator showed real expertise, and the audience responded with specific questions.
Beware of low-quality engagement groups with cheap replies.
4) Price the rights, not just the post: Separate the creative fee—their time to build a credible POV—from add-ons like exclusivity, whitelisting, and usage rights.
Budget tight? Cut rights first, never squeeze the base fee.
Use CPM as a sanity check, then compare it to downstream value. A $2,000 post at 25,000 impressions is an $80 CPM. But if it drives six demo requests, your CPA is $333, and that math might be great for you.
5) Comment management is a deliverable: Ask the creator to reply for 60 minutes after posting. It materially lifts reach and lead quality, so put it in the brief.
The pattern here is simple: pick specificity over size, tie every metric back to revenue, and treat creators like editorial partners rather than billboards.
Do that, and your program stops being a vanity exercise.
How 30k+ social media managers and marketers catch the trends before they’re trending
Have you ever noticed how the social media teams at Netflix, Apple, and Disney seem to stay ahead of social media trends?
It’s not because they have a crystal ball of what’s going to trend or not.
It’s because they’re all hooked on the Geekout newsletter. It reveals the latest social media news, expert insights, and hit videos and memes.
So if you want to join 30k+ other marketers and be “in the know” before things go viral…
Your customers probably feel the need for delivery speed
Waiting a week for a package used to be standard. Now, it feels like an eternity.
Modern shoppers want their products before they’ve even closed the browser tab.
What can we see from this?
- Over 60% of consumers find delivery in under 30 minutes or same-day to be “impressive” features that would directly influence a purchase.
- Nearly 50% feel the same about next-day delivery, but the “too slow” sentiment starts creeping in fast once that window expands beyond 24 hours.
- For close to 50% of shoppers, a one-week window simply doesn’t cut it. Only about 30% find it impressive at all.
- The ability to schedule a specific day and time is a standout feature, with nearly 60% calling it a major purchase influencer.
The Crew’s Take: In a world of instant downloads, physical shipping is the final friction point. Logistics used to be a back-office concern but nowadays it’s a front-facing marketing asset.
If your delivery dates are vague or slow, you’re essentially handing customers to competitors with better supply chains.
But the fix doesn’t have to be radical: highlight your fastest shipping option directly on the product page, and if same-day isn’t possible, offer scheduled delivery.
Giving shoppers a sense of control over when something arrives can be just as powerful as getting it there fast.
AI MARKETING: This daily newsletter condenses the latest and greatest AI developments into a 5-minute read. They read the noise, pull out the signal, and explain what actually matters for work, strategy, and the tools your team is already using. Trusted by 700k+ readers. Subscribe right here.*
AI MARKETING: Google Vids just got two upgrades. Gemini Omni lets you generate and edit clips from plain text prompts, and personal avatars turn a selfie plus voice clip into a digital you that delivers scripted messages. Avatars are 18+ only and limited to certain regions. Will you copy yourself this weekend?
META: Some advertisers are seeing the Audiences section rebuilt around labels, sorting custom audiences into Customers, Engaged, Lookalikes, and Saved. The push is deliberate: value rules that adjust bids by audience only work if you actually label things. Now that labels are unavoidable, expect more adoption and more misuse.
X: Grok is now integrated into Ads Manager, in beta, giving select advertisers an always-on assistant for ad strategy, plus tooltips and in-stream creative ideas. It’s the next step toward the ad endgame: fully automated, agentic campaign building on the platform.
X: Speaking of X, Premium Business subscribers can now Boost organic mentions to turn them into ads. And yes, you can add your link and call to action to drive traffic. So the next time someone praises you on the platform, you can pay to show the world the original.
GOOGLE: The EU is forcing Google to hand rivals the same anonymized search data it uses itself, starting January 2027. Qualifying AI chatbots are eligible too. It could sharpen competing search and AI products, but changing user habits remains the real hurdle.
CHATGPT: Invoca’s first look at AI-referred calls found these leads qualify at 49%, which is about 10 points above average, but convert at a middling 40% once answered. So callers arrive further along, yet the edge vanishes on the call. Volume’s still tiny, so treat it as a small initial signal, not a definitive conclusion.
*This is a sponsored post.
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