Mint: “Where once they would lean on social media giant Meta’s Instagram platform, entrepreneurs running early-stage direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands are now supplementing their digital marketing strategies by harnessing other social media platforms, including X and LinkedIn. They are asking for help with fundraising, announcing product launches, running flash sales personally, answering customer complaints, even fighting larger competitors. Consequently, Instagram is slowly losing its status as the go-to channel for performance marketing—click-to-convert ads that push an online user to buy something right away. Instead, ads running on e-commerce and quick commerce platforms are rapidly displacing it. This is taking place at a time when advertising on Meta has become expensive.”
FT: “The zero-sum thinker frames the world in terms of winning and losing, us and them. If one person is to get richer, someone else must get poorer. If China is doing well, then the US must logically be doing badly. Jobs go either to the native born, or to foreigners. In contrast, the centrist dads among us see win-win solutions. Stantcheva and her colleagues at Harvard’s Social Economics Lab have been asking: what sort of person tends to see the world as zero sum? There are some surprising findings. For example, there are few clearer refutations of a zero-sum mindset than a thriving city, in which people flock to be with others, and the social, cultural, educational and financial opportunities that result. Yet Stantcheva’s research found that urban areas are more prone to zero-sum thinking than rural ones, perhaps reflecting our failure to build new homes.”
WaPo: “Negative events feel more psychologically intense than positive ones, thanks to a cognitive tendency called the negativity bias. That’s true even when events are of equal weight. “Very simply, bad is stronger than good. We respond more strongly to things that could hurt or harm us than to things that could benefit us,” said Catherine Norris, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Swarthmore College. Negativity bias is important to human functioning since it helps protect us from harm. But in some individuals, negativity bias can be correlated with stress, depression and anxiety. There are ways to manage negativity bias, experts said, so that it can benefit us.”
WSJ: “In a matter of months, artificial intelligence has begun to change how people search for things online in ways that have alarmed some marketers. Consumers who use traditional search engines like Google and Bing are now greeted atop their search results by AI-generated summaries of the topics at hand. A growing number of consumers now also turn directly to large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT to answer everyday questions or guide their purchases. Both developments have begun to eat away at the clicks and website traffic that marketers have earned over time by spending millions of dollars on search engine optimization, or SEO. They have also created a wave of businesses claiming to specialize in new industry acronyms such as generative engine optimization (GEO), answer engine optimization (AEO) and, of course, artificial intelligence optimization (AIO).”
