• Growth Classics
  • Posts
  • NFR #71 - Premium Subscriptions, AI Takeover & Overworked @ Amazon

NFR #71 - Premium Subscriptions, AI Takeover & Overworked @ Amazon

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

December 07, 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:

📦Amazon will give your overworked delivery driver $5 if you ask Alexa to say thank you “Last year, an Amazon delivery driver said that the high volume of orders during holiday season “makes life hell.” This year, these contracted workers can get a $5 tip if their customer says, “Alexa, thank my driver.” Meanwhile, news also broke today that Amazon is being sued by the DC Attorney General, seeking penalties for allegedly misleading consumers by using tips to cover couriers’ base pay.”

🎥Instagram’s new transparency tools will tell you if your content is ineligible to be recommended “Instagram announced today that it’s introducing new transparency tools so you can see whether your photos and videos are recommended in the app. The social network is expanding its Account Status hub to make it easier for users with professional accounts, like businesses and creators, to understand if their content is eligible to be recommended to non-followers in places like Explore, Reels and Feed Recommendations or if their content violates the company’s Recommendations Guidelines.”

💰As Apple’s App Store expands price points options, RevenueCat rolls out A/B price testing tools “Just a day after Apple announced a revamp of its App Store pricing policy to introduce 700 new price points, subscription platform RevenueCat is rolling out a new feature that will allow developers to A/B test different price points for their app subscriptions. The feature, called “Experiments,” aims to help developers determine the best price points to convert free or trial users to paying customers, retain the customers they have, test prices for different service tiers and more.”

✈️Maergo raises $20M to provide Amazon-style fast and cheap air and ‘middle mile’ services to online retailers “With the holiday shopping season well underway and showing signs that it might not be as sluggish as some predicted, a startup out of Austin, Texas, is announcing funding to build out a new approach to shipping, to help retailers compete against the consumer pull of fast and free Amazon Prime delivery. Maergo — which has designed a platform to manage (and fill) excess capacity on commercial aircraft with parcels, to enable faster and cheaper shipping for the retailers selling those items — has picked up $20 million, a seed round that it’s using to expand its business.”

🛍 As its fashion empire booms, Shein wants an ESG makeover “Shein, the world’s largest fashion ecommerce site, has taken significant steps to ramp up its environmental, social, and governance — or ESG — efforts. But responsible fast fashion sounds like an oxymoron. How can clothes be so cheap, if their designers don’t copy luxury brands and if the factories behind aren’t squeezed out of their margins? Nonetheless, Shein is trying to elevate its business practice to global standards by hiring a clutch of industry veterans. One of the major allegations against the fashion giant is labor exploitation, according to numerous reports including one saying workers are made to toil 75 hours a week. Earlier this week, the fashion ecommerce site said it had committed $15 million to improve the standards of 300 of its partnered factories over the next four years. The fund will focus on making physical enhancements to its suppliers’ factories.”

📈 A data-driven duo just raised roughly $350M to fund seed-stage startups with metrics “Nnamdi Okike and Aaron Holiday trust data over the kind of pattern matching that most VCs swear by. It’s not surprising, given their backgrounds. Before launching their venture firm, 645 Ventures, in 2014, Okike was a principal with the data-driven investment giant Insight Partners. Meanwhile, Holiday, who came directly from DFJ Gotham Ventures, was previously a software engineer at Goldman Sachs.”

🚀 Google Search’s new topic filters make it easier to refine results or expand searches “Google announced today that it’s making it easier for users to drill down on a search and explore related topics. Search currently has a few filters to help you refine and separate your search results between videos, news, images or shopping results. Now, the search giant is going to start showing users a scrollable list of related topics alongside its current filters at the top of the search results page. For example, if you’re searching for dinner ideas, you might see filter topics like “healthy” or “easy” pop up in the new scrollable list. If you tap on one of the filters, it will add it to your search query. You can add or remove topics, which are designated by a + symbol, to quickly zoom in or backtrack on a search.”

“At its annual Lens Fest event, Snap announced that it’s experimenting with a small group of AR creators and developers to build Lenses with digital goods that can be purchased with Snap Tokens. As part of this experiment, users will be able to unlock power-ups, AR items and extra tools within select Lenses.”

“Major privacy complaints targeting the legality of Meta’s core advertising business model in Europe have finally been settled via a dispute resolution mechanism baked into the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The complaints, which date back to May 2018, take aim at the tech giant’s so-called forced consent to continue tracking and targeting users by processing their personal data to build profiles for behavioural advertising, so the outcome could have major ramifications for how Meta operates if regulators order the company to amend its practices.”

🛠 Telegram Premium tops 1 million subscribers “Telegram Premium has amassed more than 1 million subscribers, less than six months after the popular instant messaging app launched the paid offering and began a serious effort to monetize the business. Telegram founder and chief executive Pavel Durov shared the update on his channel Tuesday, calling the milestone “one of the most successful examples of a social media subscription plan ever launched.” The subscription, however, still “represents just a fraction of Telegram’s overall revenue,” he shared in the same update, optimistically hoping that one day Premium will rake in just as much money as ads.”

📈 Top trends:

ChatGPT rockets to 1 million users!

Link to thepost here

Reply to this and let me know what you think about ChatGPT!

“Google has released its annual “Year in Search” report outlining the top searches of 2022 around the world. The report reveals that popular online game Wordle topped the list globally. Searches for the game peaked in February, shortly after it was acquired by The New York Times. The second most searched term of the year was “India vs England” due to the two countries facing off at the Cricket World Cup. The third most searched term was Ukraine.

Ukraine also topped the year’s list of trending news topics. Queen Elizabeth’s passing was the second most trending news topic. The third most popular news topic globally was election results.”

🙉 NFT download:

“Tony Fadell, a well-known Silicon Valley executive known as the father of the iPod, on Tuesday unveiled his latest project - a hardware wallet used to store cryptocurrency offline. Fadell, 53, spent almost a decade at Apple (AAPL.O) under Steve Jobs, where he oversaw the design of the portable music player, and later helped create the company's best-known device, the iPhone. After quitting Apple in 2008, he launched Nest Labs, a smart home-devices company. Nest was later acquired by tech giant Google for $3.2 billion.

Now Fadell has teamed up with Ledger, the French technology firm, to design a new offline cryptocurrency wallet.

Trading crypto requires the use of complex cryptographic keys, which are used to authorise transactions. These keys are typically stored online, for example with an online exchange, which can leave them more susceptible to hacking or theft.

The recent collapse of crypto exchange FTX, which has seen more than $1 billion of customer funds vanish, prompted an unprecedented surge in demand for offline, or "self-custody", services such as Ledger.”

🏆 WTF moment:

Snippet from the article:

“Billy McFarland, the Fyre Festival founder who went to jail for defrauding investors to the tune of $26 million, is back at it again with another venture in the Bahamas. The new venture is called PYRT (a seemingly FYRE-inspired way of saying "pirate"), which he debuted on TikTok in an amusing set of videos.

"PYRT is not a festival. It's not an event. And it's definitely not the metaverse," McFarland says in a recent TikTok pitching the project. "PYRT is a technology I've been working on for the past few years called the VID/R: the virtual immersive decentralized reality."

In reality, PYRT sounds like an amalgamation of all three things…”

🐦 Twitter thread of the week:

Link to the thread here

TL;DR:

  1. Identify an unsolved problem in the market

  2. Begin your research phase

  3. Prioritise the most important features

  4. Build your prototype

  5. Get testing

  6. Get beta testing

  7. Use a lean building approach

  8. Launch

  9. Analyze and improve

  10. Develop and expand

🤝 Hot jobs:

“As a Director, Advertising Product Marketing, You Will

  • Drive business value and revenue growth for Taboola’s Advertising product portfolio by:

    • Harnessing a deep knowledge of our market, customers, and competitive landscape

    • Communicating a differentiated market position that resonates with target customer segments, personas, and use cases

    • Orchestrating impactful go-to-market strategies and activities to support retention of existing customers and the acquisition of new customers

  • Manage and grow a global team of product marketers in an environment of high growth and constant change

  • Drive planning and execution of new Advertiser product launches collaborating with Product Management, Sales, Account Management, Marketing teams as well as the executive team and external resources

  • Develop a deep understanding of Taboola’s complex global sales organization and diverse customer base; deliver specialized go-to-market solutions to complex problems accordingly

  • Collaborate closely with product teams – delivering Voice of Customer feedback and product roadmap insights, developing customer use cases, and analyzing competitive & market trends

  • Understand and support our sales channels; train them on the problems we solve for our buyers and users; develop internal tools and external collateral and teach them how and when to use it

  • Provide product direction, priority, and positioning to Marketing teams for events, campaigns, website content, blog posts, podcasts and videos”

“Working collaboratively with the Head of Analytics, the Analytics Director and the Audience Intelligence Director you’ll explore opportunities for OLIVER to become a driving force in the world of Creative Analytics and Performance Forecasting. You’ll also work directly with key clients, supporting their transformation to smarter analytics

WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING IN YOUR ROLE:

  • Working with the Head of Analytics, build a vision for what Marketing Science will look like at OLIVER and what packaged solutions we can bring to our clients.

  • Facilitate the development of backend dashboarding solutions of the Analytics team by coaching the Senior Analyst on Data Warehousing solutions

  • Develop innovative approaches to data solutions for key clients – leveraging diverse datasets to decode consumer behaviour and gain a deeper understanding of performance and headroom

  • Develop analytical solutions such as predictive modelling, segmentation and NLP / visual analytics to develop new routes to tackling client requirements

  • Define and deliver analytical work across a range of channels including CRM, web, social and SEO.

  • Continually evolve our analytics work, introducing new solutions, techniques and skillsets to the team. Including areas such as automation, creative insight and journey analytics

  • Foster collaboration across our global network of data and performance practitioners, embedding best practice, continued learning and development

  • Champion a data-driven approach at OLIVER and with our clients, setting out the analytics strategy to understand creative and marketing effectiveness and how we optimise activities.

  • Act as an ambassador for data and analytics across the group, showcasing the value it can add to creative, content and experiences.”

“You’ll join the Performance team as a Director and you’ll use your experience as a digital activation specialist to develop integrated performance approaches.

Leveraging digital channels to help our clients deliver their brand and business objectives, and ensure the team works effectively & efficiently both in terms as resource and against our clients business objectives.

You will be responsible for ensuring delivery of performance media against client business objectives, from planning through to reporting. You will make sure budget is optimised across all paid for digital media channels and that your client(s) are developing their digital program(s) via robust testing.

This role will be focused on leading the European Regional Hub team working across the SC Johnson portfolio of exciting and forward facing FMCG brands in the Air Care, Home Cleaning, Pest Control and Lifestyle brand categories.

The London digital hub team plays a critical role not only in full funnel planning & buying across all platforms (Paid Social, Programmatic, Search and Retail media) and close planning collaboration with our local teams (who own their individual brand plan holistic communications’ strategies) and vendors, but also providing Thought Leadership, Education and Best Practice sharing with the client team.

Our Performance Director role is responsible for managing, developing and upskilling a regional team of 7 digital specialist. Beyond SCJ, you will be a leader within the Performance Community, and will have the opportunity to support in new business pitches, team training, and to mentor and support more junior colleagues.”