What’s Up THIS WEEK: Cool NEW Subject Line TEST! Gemini AI News! Kardashian update? | Ep. 441

0:00Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast from marketers. We share quick tips, things you can do right now, and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode. We also keep it short, like this intro. Let's check it out. We are back for What's Up This Week from the Do This Not That podcast. This is a super short episode where we break down what's going on in business and marketing and pop culture, and then we still have our other ridiculous episodes the rest of the week. So let's get into it. What's going on? So first off, did you see Target totally screwed something up? oh, so Target, you know, big retail chain, whatever, love Target, Target, whatever you want to call it.

0:38So they had to do layoffs this week, which is terrible, especially around the holiday time, right? They were laying off 1800 employees. And did you hear what happened? Bloomberg reported this, which was so terrible. So they were laying off all these employees via a Zoom call. So everybody dialed into the Zoom call and they were about to announce on the Zoom, like which parts of the company were going to have all the layoffs and who was going to get lay it off or whatever. And then right at that moment, they had a technical glitch and it went to like a black screen or whatever, right at the moment where they were going to say exactly what was going to happen.

1:10And everybody was sitting there like, am I the one being fired? And it lasted for a while. And then the HR people had to just email out to everybody a summary of what the call was about. And that's how you found out if you were let go. Oh my goodness. What a mess of a situation. Not good. So speaking about a marketing tactic that actually is good that came out this week. So subjectline.com released another cool trending email subject line tactic that's working really well right now that maybe you haven't tried because I need to start trying this one, which is putting something important in the subject line in brackets at the end of your subject line.

1:54Forever, a marketing tactic, whether you're a business marketer, consumer marketer, nonprofit, doesn't matter. We've all hopefully been testing using brackets at the start of our subject line, right? But now the tactic of if you use a bracket at the end of your subject line, it's actually lifting email open rates by about 15%. So first off, for everyone out there that's listening, like, wait a minute, I haven't been using brackets at all. And when I say use brackets, so let's say you put the word new, N-E-W in brackets, or just in in brackets, or read this next in brackets. Literally, you put brackets around it, the square brackets, not the circle brackets.

2:31And no, it does not cause you to go to the junk folder, spam folder at all. That's a myth. That's a lie. That's garbage. You could use brackets. And the reason brackets work so well is it kind of directs people's eyeballs to the important thing in your subject line. And that's why a lot of marketers have always put it at the front of their subject line, the start, the first word, the first thing. But if you never tested actually sticking the really important thing at the end of your subject line and putting it in brackets, you got to test that. That seems to be doing really, really well from this new data from subjectline.com.

3:04So that's kind of cool. All right. What else is going on? What else is going on is, so did you see Cash App? You know, that's the app where you could buy stuff, whatever. they did this micro event with sabrina carpenter okay you know the famous pop singer whatever in new york city this week and where they release all this limited edition merchandise and it's all around this collab that they've been doing with sabrina carpenter because sabrina carpenter is very into like you know vintage clothes shopping whatever and they have this thing that they this whole pop-up sabrina's second handle anyway it generated over 30 million social media views and you're like, well, who cares?

3:41What does that have to do with me that Cash App did a collab with Sabrina Carpenter? Really, it's more about this idea. And I think that this is going to be probably one of the biggest trends in marketing going into 2026, which is the idea of creating moments of any kind. Again, it doesn't matter if you're a business marketer, consumer marketer, whatever. You want to have this idea of creating a moment that doesn't last for a long period of time where people want to jump on board because that's what we want. We all want some version of an experience or a moment that's going to disappear and that we can be a part of it in any way.

4:13It could be a small thing, right? It doesn't have to be where you're doing a pop-up collaboration in New York City. So let's say, well, I'm in a boring industry. I'm in, you know, the healthcare technology category and I can't do a Sabrina Carpenter collab. No, you can't. But what could you do? You could do something like the 24-hour, you know, med tech unlock, right where we're launching all of our best content for the year all of our resources all of our reports or whatever and we're launching this 24-hour vault unlock where you'll have access to all of it and then you build up to the launch of this vault unlock for a week or two and then for 24 hours you're like oh my goodness now is the time to jump in on our med tech unlock or whatever you're creating a moment and that's where you can create energy around your brand and then it has to disappear.

5:00We do this a lot. So right now, for example, my guru conference, our big email event, I think this idea of just putting like these Slack communities out there is total garbage because after a few weeks, whatever the industry is or the topic is, nobody goes to the Slack community because it's really, really boring and it dries up. So like what we do is we do pop-up communities. So right now, for example, we just launched our guru conference, 30-day free Slack pop-up community and it's going to disappear in just a few weeks. And we've had a rush. We've had over 500 people join this Slack community in a matter of like 48 hours.

5:41And then the thing's going to disappear. We'll probably get it up to a thousand people or whatever, because for this 30 days, there'll be a lot of energy around it. And that's what you want to think about doing going into 2026. What are the moments that you can create? I don't care how boring your industry is, create these moments. What else is going on? So as marketers, we're looking at the impact of things like ChatGPT and Claude and all the different things on our marketing. Well, we all better be paying attention to Gemini. That's Google's AI tool. Because I thought this from the beginning that Google was ultimately at some point going to win.

6:16But Gemini is really gaining ground in terms of usage as one of the AI tools that's out there. And there's some new data out from similar web. So if you look back 12 months ago, okay, Gemini was getting about 6.4 % of the total web traffic for all the online AI tools. This is from similar web. Now they're at 12.9%. And if you look at ChatGPT, a year ago, they were at 87%. And now they're at 74%. This really does remind me a lot of the original browser wars back in the day when Netscape had like 90%, okay? And then Microsoft Explorer and Chrome were trying to gain share. Now look at it, Chrome just dominates.

7:00So you really want to be looking at how your brand is showing up in Gemini because if you fast forward a year, two years from now, it's going to be a very different story than ChatGPT being the behemoth that it is now. So what is going on in useless information pop culture? Well, there's a show that's coming out that I'm not going to be watching, okay? It's a new show called All's Fair. Now, this is a legal drama. Why am I not watching it? Well, first of all, it looks terrible. It stars, and this is not like a reality show, it stars Naomi Watts and Kim Kardashian as the actresses. Now, in general, I actually like Kim Kardashian a lot.

7:38Maybe a lot of you will give me hate for that. That's fine. Because I think that she goes out there, she got her law degree or whatever, and I know she's over the top and all the things and whatever, but she generally does not seem like a horrible human being. So I'm a fan of Kim Kardashian. But this week, did you see what happened this week? Very, very frustrated by this. So the new season of the Kardashians came out. Am I watching? Of course I am. I have no life. But this was all over the news. In one of the episodes that just came out, Kim Kardashian said that she believes that we didn't land on the moon, that the whole lunar landing back a zillion years ago with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the whole thing, it wasn't real.

8:21And she got her information off of TikTok and that wasn't real. Now, first of all, that's completely ridiculous. That's one of the worst conspiracy theories of all time. I'm not even going to go down the rabbit hole of how incredibly stupid that is. But the problem is, let's say she thought this, okay? And she really did believe it. Okay, fine. You want to believe that? That's a you thing. Whatever. But she reaches 350 million people on her social media platforms. Everybody consumes what she talks about. And now there are a bunch of doofuses out there that see this, that Kim Kardashian, who they respect and like and whatever, are saying it didn't happen.

8:58So now they're like, oh, I don't think it happened either because nobody has their own brain. So I just think that people that have a platform like this need to really be a little bit more careful with amplifying garbage conspiracies, whether they believe them or not, because, yeah, it's not cool. Anyway, that's my rant. I'll probably get some hate for that. I don't care. You want to watch this new TV show? Watch it. Try it. I still like Kim Kardashian, but that wasn't cool. What's going on? Anyway, what's going on with me? I don't know. Listen, I appreciate you being here. Leave this thing review.

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