Ep. 251- What's Up THIS WEEK:🚫Meaningless Marketing STATS!, Awkward Family Photos, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition Reboot? 🏠👎

0:08Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately. You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwetelson. Let's do this, not that.

0:40we are back for what is up this week from the do this not that podcast presented by marigold this is our super short episode we're a breakdown what's going on this week in marketing and business and in life and then we still have our short ask us anything later in the week in our big tips episode at the end of the week so what's going on well everybody's miserable they're back at work Who are we kidding? But the holidays are unfortunately totally in the rear view now. And one of the things that came out of the holidays, that's my favorite trend that I'm excited exists, is this new thing going on at JCPenney.

1:14Have you seen this? It blew up on TikTok. And now it's kind of like a thing where, you know, you go to JCPenney or I used to go to Sears and you would take those family photo portraits that were horrible and embarrassing. Well, there's been this trend that started on TikTok, which is the awkward photo session at JCPenney specifically. And so people have been going there and taking purposely embarrassing family photos or ridiculous photos with their friends and posting them all over social media. And it's exploded, which I love because anything stupid, I love. And JCPenney doesn't actually even run the studios there.

1:54It's run by this group called Life Touch, which I think got bought by Shutterfly. But now people are going to all the studios. There are over 350 studios all over the country. And on TikTok, it's everywhere. If you look up for the hashtag JC Penney, there's like thousands and thousands of posts. And some of the posts are getting over 10 million views. So I need to take my family, JC Penney, and do a super awkward family photo shoot. I'm very pro anything ridiculous like this. So that's cool. So one of the other things coming out now that the new year starts, one of the things I can't stand is at the start of every new year, there's a flurry of these new marketing stats that flood everything everywhere.

2:35And everybody should realize the majority of marketing stats are total garbage. And they take people down a weird rabbit hole. And let me give you an example. I'm sorry to call people out or whatever, but I don't really care. So I saw this stat that came out from this group called Mail Munch, and it was about email marketing. And they said for 2025, the average email open rate, the percentage of people that open up email across all industries is 21.33%. Wow, that is complete garbage and toilet paper. And it also said that a good email open rate across all industries is 17 to 28%. This is ridiculous.

3:15And these are the types of stats that drive me bananas because what happens is we read them like uh-oh my open rate's only 14 so if the average industry open rate across all industries is 21 i'm not doing well ridiculous it makes no sense first of all you're in a sub industry whatever you're in you have your brand whatever it is your offer is going to be different every time the segment of the database that you're marketing to is different every time the time of the day you're sending out is different who cares what these ridiculous averages are that are out there across all industries. It's meaningless.

3:52The only thing that matters is what your metrics are. And what you want to do is you want to beat yourself. Benchmark yourself. What was your average open rate for your newsletter last year? It was 17 %? Great. Let's try to get it to 22 % this year. What was your average click-through rate for your offer, your promotional emails last year. It was 1 % great. Let's try to get to 1.3 % this year. Benchmark yourselves in all sorts of different buckets, and then you try to beat yourself. Do not look at industry averages across all industries or even the industry average within your industry because it's irrelevant.

4:31What matters is your brand, what you're doing. Anyway, that's my soapbox. What else going on this week? Well, CES is going on. That is the giant consumer electronics show that goes on every year. And this is the show where all the biggest tech companies get together every year and they release their latest and greatest tech. And it's pretty interesting to follow what's going on there because it really does drive really technology and what's going to be going on. And everybody's there. It's a wild scene. I actually went to see, I've been to CES a bunch of times, but the first time I went to CES, I was, I was young and it was a million years ago.

5:09And I'll never forget it because literally the CEOs and founders of like every major tech company are just walking around. And so I was at CES, I was in my twenties. And I remember I was sitting on like this little bench in the exhibit hall. And I was tired because I was trying to like, you know, work the exhibit hall, meet people, whatever. And I was sitting there and some dude just sits down next to me and we start talking. so I go to him I go well what do you do and he goes oh I founded a company called Intuit I was like what and yeah Scott Cook super nice guy we end up hitting it off and credit to him he gave me the time of day I was this young dude and we end up staying in contact we even did a little project together but that's the type of weird vibe that goes on at CES but one of the things coming out of it and if you're a marketer I really think you should go to a site like theverge.com.

6:01It's literally T-H-E verge.com and read about all the different things that all the different technology companies are announcing this week because they cover it really, really well. But I think the biggest thing for marketers really to pay attention to is how all the latest TVs, especially from LG and Samsung, which they're announcing this week, are going to be tied in with AI. They're all going to have AI components within their TVs. And this is really going to lead to an explosion in connected TV marketing. If you ask me what is the one category of marketing that I would try to learn about starting out this year, whether you're a business marketer or a consumer marketer, it would be CTV, connected TV.

6:42They're saying, according to Cager, that the size of the global market size for connected TVs is going to grow from around$9 billion last year to over$17 billion in the next three years. That's for both business and consumer marketing, for connected TV marketing. That's crazy. And it makes sense because with all the streaming services and now connected TVs with AI and your ability to instantly buy from your remote or instantly download a piece of content from your remote, this is where it's at. So I would really look into what's going on in theverge.com to stay up to date on all the connected TV changes that are coming.

7:25now in completely useless information uh that has nothing to do with the brooklyn bridge why do people say people say that the brooklyn i don't even understand but anyway so a new show came out this week or reboot for that matter extreme makeover home edition it just came out on hulu i used to love this show remember that show with ty pennington when they would go to people's homes and they would redo them in a week and it was very touching and it was great and you loved it. Well, they just had a reboot and it came out on Hulu. I was very excited for this. So I tried it. The first episode was terrible, absolutely unwatchable, terrible.

8:02And the reason it was terrible is that instead of going into people's homes now, what they're doing, you know, and they, they would fix the person's home and change it all around. Now they're just building somebody a brand new home in five days, which is not that interesting. it just isn't i don't know why the show stinks anyway what else is coming out this week which i am hyped for is season two of kitchen nightmares i think gordon ramsay is great kitchen nightmares is one of my all-time favorite shows if you've never watched kitchen nightmares it is awesome if you unless you're the person that owns the restaurant they go into these restaurants they shred the restaurants they say you're the biggest doofus alive you don't know what you're doing your restaurant's disgusting your food is disgusting they change it all around and it's fantastic so season two uh premieres this week and then also all the award shows started kicking off i watched the golden globes uh the thing about the award shows is that all i do is judge people like and now the award for the best supporting you know female actor in a whatever and they'll say whoever the five people are and then what i'll do they'll put their faces up in the little squares.

9:11And then what I do is I sit on my couch with my wife. I go, oh, that person looks terrible or that person looks great. Or they'll say whatever show they're from and I'll be like, I've never heard of that show. Why are they nominated? Okay. Or I'll say that show is epically horrible. And by the way, if you win an award like this, do not go up there and ever read anything. That's very boring. And also don't thank a hundred people that nobody knows. That's also very boring. Just go up there and say, listen, this is cool. I'm having fun. Everybody out here is a loser and move on. That's what you say.

9:45All right. These are my rules of the road. I don't know what we just talked about as usual. Listen, we are opening up registration for Eventastic. This is free. This is virtual. The world's largest event about all things, events, in-person events, consumer events, business events, webinars, eventastic.com. This is our brand new event. It's going to be bonkers. Registration opens right now. Check it out. Thanks for being here. Keep it real. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over. Subscribe to make sure you get the latest episode each week for more actionable tips and a little chaos from today's top marketers.

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