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NFR #69 - Amazonification, Vertical Warehouse & Robotics

5-minute marketing newsletter providing you latest events across eCommerce, NFTs, culture & more every Wednesday morning on Linkedin & sub-stack.

November 16, 2022

Never Fully Read

Joining 1,000 readers from companies such as Klaviyo, Shopify, Recharge, Amazon, HubSpot, BrewDog, IBM and Canva.

Never Fully Read is a 5-minute marketing newsletter providing you latest events across eCommerce, NFTs, culture & more every Wednesday morning on Linkedin & sub-stack.

Newsletter in a flash:

🤖 eCommerce news:

📈 Top Trends:

🐵 NFT download:

👀 WTF Moment:

🐦 Twitter thread of the week:

🤝 Hot jobs:

🤖 eCommerce news:

🎶 YouTube Music and Premium gained 30 million subscribers in just one year “These new numbers indicate that YouTube Music and Premium are growing even faster this year than the last. In last year’s report, YouTube said it added 20 million subscribers across both its services in just one year. Google doesn’t break down its numbers in either report, so it’s not clear what features users are subscribing for and how many subscribers each service has. It also includes those on free trials, which muddies the numbers up even more.”

🛠 Amazon debuts Sparrow, a new bin-picking robot arm “The new arm is a more sophisticated take on the company’s existing robotic arms, adding the ability to pick and place specific objects in bins. The arm’s computer vision and AI are capable of identifying and moving “millions” of items, according to the company. Rather than only picking up the 15 or so different package types, Sparrow is designed to pick up items directly. The variety of size, shape and material presents a number of different challenges for robotics building a system designed to pick at these speeds.”

💰 Ordergroove picks up $100M to grow e-commerce subscriptions as a service “Amazon has mastered the concept of subscriptions in e-commerce. Prime-based memberships, and the ability to set up recurring purchases for everyday items, have been central to how it drums up repeat business, tapping shoppers looking for discounts and more convenience. The concept has caught on fast with other retailers, and as one indication of that, Ordergroove — a startup that has built a “subscription as a service” platform for brands and retailers outside of Amazon to build similar experiences for their sales — is announcing $100 million in funding, underscoring the opportunity ahead.”

🤖 Pickle picks up $26M for its truck unloading robots “Fulfillment has arguably been the hottest robotics category over the past two years, as companies have looked to stay competitive with Amazon, even amid ongoing labour shortages. Still, one of the most important links in the chain remains one of the least addressed. Truck unloading isn’t a particularly easy problem to solve, but Pickle Robot Company is single-mindedly focused on it.”

📦 Attabotics raises another $71M to grow its vertical robotic warehouse solution “Amazon remains the best member of our business development team,” Attabotics founder and CEO Scott Gravelle says with a hint of snark, “as companies go look for alternatives and look for ways to stay competitive. Amazon has been setting customer expectations in North America for years. They’re the benchmark.”

🎥 YouTube Shorts begins testing shopping features and affiliate marketing “The company is starting to introduce shopping features on YouTube Shorts with eligible creators in the United States who are currently piloting the ability to tag products from their stores. Viewers in the United States, India, Brazil, Canada and Australia can see the tags and shop through the Shorts. YouTube says it plans to continue bringing tagging to more creators and countries in the future.”

📈 Payload raises $4.7M for its developer-first headless CMS “To devs, ‘content management system’ is usually a swear word. If an engineer gets assigned a CMS project, it’s less than thrilling. They want to avoid roadblocks, write code and build things they’re proud of — but existing CMSs get in the way of that left and right,” said CEO James Mikrut, who co-founded the company together with Dan Ribbens (COO) and Elliot DeNolf (CTO). “We’re not competing with Webflow or Squarespace — rather, we’re going to give talented engineers a tool they can trust to build critical content infrastructure.”

🚀 Contentstack raises $80M to grow its headless CMS platform for the enterprise “The market for enterprise content management systems (CMS) is steeply growing as the need to organize and manage documents, images and other forms of digital content increases. According to Allied Market Research, the entire CMS sector combined could be worth $53.2 billion by 2030, up from $21.5 billion in 2020.”

⛴ GoFreight raises $23M to become the “Shopify of freight forwarding” “Unicorn Flexport is revolutionizing the world of logistics, serving as a freight forwarder with software that enables customers to manage their shipments. But there are still thousands of smaller freight forwarders, many running on outdated ERP software or spreadsheets. A startup called GoFreight wants to help them compete by providing the “Shopify of freight forwarding,” with backend software that makes their operations run more smoothly, and a frontend that lets them set up a storefront and provide quotes in a few minutes.”

❌ Amazon layoffs 'being prepared' as sales slow - reports “Amazon is preparing to cut thousands of office jobs amid slowing sales and concerns about an economic downturn, according to reports. The reductions could affect roughly 3% of the office staff at the e-commerce giant - or about 10,000 people - US media reported, citing anonymous sources. The cuts are expected to affect divisions such as personal devices and e-commerce.”

📈 Top trends:

“Uber was founded on a strategy of scaling at all costs. As Uber struggled to crack the elusive profitability nut through ride-hailing, it added its food delivery pillar Uber Eats. Now Uber appears to have taken a page out of the Amazon book of customer stickiness to attract new users and get existing customers to spend more money on the platform.

Just as Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant, drives secondary revenue to Amazon every time a customer says, “Alexa, buy more shampoo and conditioner,” so, too, does Uber increase its ride revenue when a customer books an event via Uber’s partnership with Viator and then books an Uber to get them there.”

“The cervix industry has had implants to prevent pregnancy since the late 1960s, but there hasn’t exactly been stiff competition to slow down the fallopian swim team at its source. Contraline claims it is the first major innovation in this space since the vasectomy was performed on a human some 125 years ago. The company calls its product ADAM, and it just raised a wad of cash to continue its trials.

“The first-in-human male contraceptive implant is a major clinical milestone that opens up new possibilities for men who wish to take contraception into their own hands,” said Kevin Eisenfrats, Co-founder and CEO of Contraline. “The patient demand for the ADAM Study has been tremendous, with the entire trial oversubscribing within three weeks of opening enrollment. We are looking forward to advancing ADAM through clinical development and bringing this product to market to transform how people think about contraception.””

Digital Nomad Visa

Source: Google Trends

🙉 NFT download:

Snippet from the article ⬇️ Full article here

“Now, Nike is taking a giant leap with the dot SWOOSH platform. This radical new ecosystem will allow Nike to create new ways of interacting with consumers and provide the building blocks for the future of the company and its digital technology plans.

“This acquisition is another step that accelerates Nike’s digital transformation and allows us to serve athletes and creators at the intersection of sport, creativity, gaming, and culture,” Nike CEO John Donahoe said in a statement.

The team behind Nike .SWOOSH platform is the newly established Nike Virtual Studios. This unique division is a separate entity inside of Nike, whose central goal is to develop the Nike Brand in web3, NFTs, and the metaverse.

Nike Virtual Studios has a unique design team focused solely on creating virtual Nike products. Moreover, the RTFKT team will also help Nike as it expands its web3 presence.

“It will be a place where our community can come in and co-create that future with us,” says Ron Faris, GM of Nike Virtual Studios. “You can collect, trade, and flex Nike virtual products. You can go to IRL events with your token-gated virtual creations.”

🏆 WTF moment:

“Twitter Inc pressed pause on its recently-announced $8 blue check subscription after fake accounts proliferated on the platform – but the decision to suspend paid verification came too late for one pharmaceutical company.

American pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly (LLY) lost billions after the stock plunged on Friday because a fake account, verified with a blue tick, claimed “insulin is free now.” The tweet was sent on Thursday.

According to The Star, the company’s stock dropped 4.37 per cent on Friday - erasing over US $15 billion in market cap – after a fake account impersonating Eli Lilly promised free insulin.”

Link to full article here

🐦 Twitter thread of the week:

Link to the thread in full here 

(A detailed thread which links out to other valuable threads, websites and podcasts)

TL;DR

1/ Experiment mindset wins on paid social

2/ User research where you should get ideas

3/ Leave targeting to Facebook

4/ Don't run retargeting if you don't have a great offer

5/ Spend all your energy on creatives

6/ Try all formats

7/ Message testing first, then creative testing

8/ Your ad can only do so much

9/ Your ads create expectations, fulfill them

10/ Don't do this alone. Always have a community to support.

🤝 Hot jobs:

  • Head of Brand - Heat

    • “HEAT is a shopping platform for the digital generation. Disrupting the fashion industry with innovative, immersive e-commerce experiences, we launched our luxury streetwear mystery box #HEATBOX in 2019 as a solution to reduce waste in the industry – and now we’re ready to do more. Think gamification, AI-driven personalisation and interactive drops you can pay for with crypto.”

  • Head of EMEA Marketing - Notion

    • “Notion is a uniquely international company, with 80% of our users residing outside of the U.S. We’re looking for a seasoned marketing leader to found Notion’s International marketing team and expand the impact of our EMEA region. You’ll partner closely with the EMEA GM to develop our overall International strategy, and work closely with our global Marketing and broader Go-to-Market team to increase awareness, generate demand and build pipelines within the region. You'll be the first person in this type of role, empowered to build the strategy, program and team from the ground up.”

  • Head of Marketing, Europe - Canva

    • “Canva’s International Marketing group is a diverse and distributed team of marketers who drive user growth, brand awareness, and affinity in our 30 priority markets. You’ll partner closely with leads across the International Marketing Group as well as Brand Marketing, PR & Comms, Social & Content, Partnerships, Product Marketing, and Creative to build and implement a comprehensive multi-year strategy for market-specific growth goals across Europe starting with the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain.”