☁️ Grande Macchiato Anyone? ☕️

This week was a busy week for me, I am finishing up three conference presentations for conference talks for the end of March and April and had the judging day for The Drum Marketing Awards, some great entries and met some super smart marketing leaders.

👏 Five Must Reads 👏

1. ☕️Starbucks and Ariana Grande are releasing a brand caramel and cinnamon flavoured new drink together - here is a video on how to make it already

2. 💵How Aldi is reshaping the UK supermarket chains and influencing British shopping behavior

3. 🏩AirBnB has just acquired HotelTonight (which is staying independent) - can this boost the demand boutique hotel’s, likely. They are now is peer to peer and now end to end travel company and perfect timing for their proposed IPO.

4. 👸The Queen yes the Queen is now instagramming - don’t slide into her DM’s

5. 🍫IKEA living their brand so much they are releasing a flat pack chocolate bunny 

❤️ Marketing / Growth / Advertising ❤️

No need to click news:Instagram doubling down with branded content ads - in short it’s so brands and influencers are working together more closely, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and their Policy lead was on Joe Rogan podcast to answer policy questions & struggled to be crystal clear but Twitter is rolling out new insights tool for video engagement.

• Facebook are going all in with private messaging with a blog post from Zuck, there are some great thought pieces and reviews, Wired, The Verge and my favourite read of the week from Ben Thompson

• Seth Godin’s gem on email and our slavery to emails received

• Marketing opinion Mark Ritson’s challenges people to think about why Telsa went into brick and mortar 

• Why podcasts are likely the next brand adventure (here is a great podcast by Nike and Michael Johnson)

• Will $100m Luminary be the new shining light in podcasting, the impressive exclusive content suggests so

• Great share from my friend Amrit Gill (connect with him on LinkedIn) around how Graze really embraced DTC 

• Why image only emails are killing you

💵 Business 💵

• How Nike’s founder’s chat with LeBron James led to supporting the Colin Kaepernick campaign

• They (Nike) have also gone all in with League of Legends in China by designing the kits for it 

• The FT has brought The Next Web for it’s brand, event and publication to go into live events

• How Allbirds challenged Nike and Adidas with super comfy trainers 

• Chinese social network YY has brought new player Bigo in one of the largest social acquisitions in recent times

• Is Amazon’s ambitions groceries a mistake? It could be

• Facebook’s trust has never been lower from recent report

🎁Tool of the week - Twimmage - turn tweets into Instagram shares 🎁

🚀 Product 🚀

• Bitcoin summed up

• Instagram is embracing influencers on it’s platform with new ad type - branded content 

• Ultra experimental brand KFC have gone into crowdfunding to see appetite in their ideas from the lab 

• Spotify’s plan to crack audio, specifically podcasts is now really taking shape, first step introducing it’s discovery tech to fix your next podcast to listen to

• Giphy improves their iMessage integrates for custom uploads (I love iMessage’s mini apps and integration especially stickers, there build your own sticker and gif is an absolute 💯of a product update) 

• Sad news from Square, their co-founder lost his battle to addiction

• An absolute must read for any product manager or product lead on status as a service

• Evidence that analysis just the details you have doesn’t work - WW2 example

Creative tweet of the week

🤔Final Thought 🤔

A teacher took the amazing step to record all notifications with noise on from their class, this is particularly scary as the number of notifications when kids are at school is insane and no doubt having a negative impact on them. I believe the phone and OS companies should be doing more to have a mode which reduces this and works on most important notifications. DND mode only goes so far.

Let me know what you think of this week’s must reads by tweeting, emailing or messaging me on LinkedIn.