What’s Up THIS WEEK: Emojis in Email? META Replacing Ad Agencies? Blake Lively Movie?

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's up this week from the do this not that podcast presented by marigold this is our short episode or breakdown what's going on this week in business in marketing and life so what's going on so first off meta this week they just had their latest earnings call and of course meta owns instagram and facebook and whatsapp and all that stuff and they shared some serious detail on what advertisers need to know about running ads on their platforms. And it was really eye-opening. Basically, it's all about AI. And if you want your ads to convert right now in any of the meta platforms, they're saying that you need to be using their generative AI ads recommendations tools.

1:20And it's not because they produce this great stuff, in my opinion. It's because Meta is prioritizing as it are created using their generative AI ad tools, right? Because they want more and more people to use them. So first of all, what can you do with their AI generative ad tools? You can auto-generate ad copy, image variation generation. You could upload one image and it can create alternate versions for you. It can remove backgrounds. And in beta right now is this video creation tool as well. Now, why does this all matter? Number one, if you want your ads to perform, great. They're actually saying, Meta is actually saying that they're seeing a 5 % increase in ad conversions for ads are being created utilizing GEM, generative ads recommendation tool on Meta.

2:11So basically, if you use their tools, you're going to see an increase in conversions. But here's the real secret sauce of actually what's going on. So Mark Zuckerberg sat down for an interview this week, and he shared his vision for the future of advertising. And this was on the website, The Verge, and this is an exact quote of what Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook and Meta and all that said. He said this, we're going to get to a point where you're a business. You come to us. You tell us what your objective is. You connect to your bank account. You don't need any creative. You don't need any targeting demographic.

2:47You don't need any measurement except to be able to read the results that we spit out. I think that's going to be huge. I think it's a redefinition of the category of advertising. So basically what he's kind of saying is, listen, we're going to be using AI to kind of upend the entire advertising industry from design, from data, from reporting, from targeting the whole ecosystem. He wants to control that. And he's gaming the system right now by making the ads perform better that are utilizing their AI tools. so this is going to be fun to watch how this all goes down all right what else is going on that's more useful right now so may is a huge month for emojis all right i just lost half of you it is emojis in your subject lines for sure because you have memorial day you have cinco de mayo do you have memorial day i think you do you have mother's day you have all these different things going on and for both business which i know business people business marketers always tune this out, but they shouldn't.

3:48And consumer marketers, emojis are where it's at, especially for the month of May. And everyone's like, yeah, they're being used all over the place. And there's some new data out from subjectline.com. That's just not true. On average, less than 9 % of all promotional emails use an emoji in the subject line. And in the month of May specifically, we actually see when you do use an emoji in the subject line promoting around any of those holidays, consumer brands see a lift of about 14 % in their email open rates and business brands see a lift of about 11 to 12 % in their email open rates. And so you can use all sorts of different emojis, a calendar emoji, a checkmark, a heart, whatever.

4:30But this is a great month to be testing emojis. And one of the other things about emojis that nobody talks about is emojis in the preheader, that second subject line, less than 1 % of marketers actually are putting emojis in their preheader and those are performing incredibly well so if you haven't tested emojis this is the month to do it all right another thing you want to get more annoyed at meta while you're about to did you see this meta ran a test this week of something called movie mate this is real so the other day this past week they ran a test of movie mate which was they partnered up with the company that made the movie Megan, which is this horror movie, because apparently we're halfway to Halloween.

5:14This was their halfway to Halloween event. And they re-released this movie Megan in select movie theaters. And they did a test with this new thing that Meta rolled out called Movie Mate. Movie Mate is a chat bot that encourages people to use their phones while they're watching movies, right? So that way, while you're watching the movie, you are interacting with stuff on your phone that's synced exactly to what's going on in the movie, like trivia and funny things that you could say. And you're basically chatting with people in the movie theater. And basically, Meta has positioned MovieMate as a way to get audiences back in the theaters, because apparently nearly 20 % of all moviegoers, 6 to 17, send text messages and use their phone during the movies, according to the National Research Group.

5:57I think this is complete and total garbage. Nothing is more annoying than seeing that screen light up when you're sitting next to somebody in a movie theater and they're on their phone. The fact that now we're going to be encouraged to use our phones, it is not okay. There needs to be a warning label. This stupid movie is using MovieMate. This stupid movie is not using MovieMate because I am not going to go sit next to somebody that's tapping on their phone the whole time. That is super annoying. So hopefully that doesn't take off. It was a limited test, so we'll see. You know what else I hope doesn't take off?

6:33So, of course, I have to talk about stupid TV and movies and whatever. So, I was with my wife this weekend. We were sitting on the couch. I go, what should we watch? And we saw that the movie, Another Simple Favor, came out. Another Simple Favor is on Amazon Prime. It is the sequel, okay, to the movie with Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively. And Simple Favor was a great movie. Blake Lively, Anna Kendrick. It was a couple years ago. It was a great movie. And if you would have told me back then a sequel was coming out, I'd be like all in. But I just could not bring myself to watch a Blake Lively movie.

7:08Is that terrible? I don't know. I can't do it. You know, put aside all the craziness with her and Justin Baldoni and suing each other and all this stuff. The thing that I couldn't take was when she was out there promoting It Ends With Us. Okay, that was her. It was a movie about domestic violence and stuff. and when she would do interviews, she was promoting her alcohol brand, whatever that was called, Betty Booze or something like that. I don't know. And I'm like, what are we doing? This is a movie about a serious topic. And I'm like, I couldn't do it. I was just like, and so now I was like, I really want to watch the movie, but I didn't watch it because I can't support what's going on.

7:49I can't. Maybe you can. I don't know. Terrible. Speaking of terrible, this last thing, which is why do everything I talk about is totally ridiculous. There is a new food trend on TikTok. Have you seen this ridiculous trend? It is called dinosaur time. Why is every trend so stupid? It is called dinosaur time. It's all over TikTok. And what it is, is it was started by this woman, Amy Garrett. And the idea is you act like a dinosaur when you have to eat your vegetables and stuff. So you, instead of putting like a bunch of like leafy greens or spinach on a plate and eating it, or raw broccoli on a plate and eating it, what you do is you act like a dinosaur.

8:29You take a big handful of vegetables, raw vegetables or salad, and you just grab a handful and you shove it in your mouth, like in one giant amount, and you act like a dinosaur, the way that they would eat, like, you know, big greens or whatever, and it's called dinosaur time, and people are like, it's so great because now we're eating healthy and we're doing whatever. Enough. Can we act? What are we doing? We have a knife and a fork. You put it on a plate. You don't need to act like a dinosaur to eat some broccoli. You don't need TikTok to tell you it's dinosaur time. What is going on? Between MovieMate and Dinosaur Time, I can't do it.

9:04I just need to give up. Anyway, listen, I appreciate you being here. What should you do right now? Well, first of all, don't do Dinosaur Time and don't use MovieMate. If you have not registered for Eventastic, that is our free virtual event. We're almost out of seats for real. It's free and it's virtual. It's the world's largest event about events. If you care about webinars, in-person events, virtual events, public speaking, you name it. You want to go to eventastic. So it's the word event, then A-S-T-I-C dot com. That is free. That is virtual. That's coming up. And yeah, you're awesome. Later.

9:38You 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. and hook us up with a five-star review if this wasn't the worst podcast of all time. Lastly, if you want access to the best virtual marketing events that are also 100 % free, visit guruevents.com so you can hear from the world's top marketers like Damon John, Martha Stewart, and me. Guruevents.com. Check it out.