Welcome to the latest issue of Cuppa, a quick-fire newsletter for internet-first brand builders. Filled with analysis on the art, science and culture of building breakout brands in a digital age, it's quick enough to read over a cuppa. (Or something stronger, if you need it. No judgement). To get it direct to your inbox every other Monday, subscribe here.
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The economics of movie product placements
In 2020, the British clothing and shoe manufacturer Lonsdale generated an estimated $16.5m from its 16+ minutes of screentime in The Gentlemen. Movie product placement is big business, and quite often requires zero spend from brands themselves. Here's how it works.
Production company A24 moves into commerce
Speaking of movies, the production company behind cult-movies Euphoria, Midsommar, Moonlight and Hereditary are moving into beauty. Content x commerce at its finest.
The most creative social content comes out of TikTok
When it comes to boosting creativity on a smaller screen, brands should be hiring Tik Tok creators as consultants to help them produce more entertaining social content. This brilliant TikTok trend that saw an innocent video turn into an elaborate hostage plot is case in point.
SCIENCE
THE 1 THING ALL CONSUMER BRANDS NEED TO SCALE SUCCESSFULLY.
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Dan here. Chief Data Officer at Charlie Oscar. Let's talk frankly about data-driven marketing, moving beyond the buzzwords…
For e-commerce brands to meaningfully use data to power their marketing and ops, they'll need a single customer view. In plain speak, that means having the capability to capture customer behaviour across all marketing platforms, aggregate it, and use it to optimise their marketing and product journey's.
The challenge is that modern digital brands have a growing number of purchase environments (D2C transactions, subscription, Instagram commerce, offline retail) and none of them play nicely together. This creates the frequently spoken about problem of data silos. To make matters more challenging, the standard methods used to combine these data silos are becoming harder with Apple's restriction of mobile device ID's (James digs into this here) and the decay of cookie tracking.
The solution lies in data science. I'll walk you through the kind of growth our in-house data science lab unlocks for our brands, and in doing so, show you that data science is non-negotiable infrastructure for any scale up consumer brand. Get into the case study here.
Successful personalisation at scale is a mix of creative + segmentation
When the pandemic caused an overnight shift in consumer lives and behaviour, snack company Mondelēz International, quickly adapted their messaging to reflect and connect with these changes. Students’ “library lunch” ads, for example, became “Chew quietly. Your computer mic is on.”
Squeezing more conversions out of your product pages
Making the leap from a good product page, to a high-performing product page requires more than beautiful imagery, and witty copy. This piece lays out 9 tried-and-tested techniques for boosting conversion, such as activating live chat, cross-selling, and surfacing social proof.
