Meme August: Last Month’s Most Meme-Worthy Digital Marketing News

1. X’s rebranding followed by usership losses

At the end of July, Twitter was rebranded to X — and this month we observe the consequences. According to TechCrunch, X’s weekly active users dropped by 4%, and the app fell four spots down in the Overall app store rankings. 

At the same time, Twitter Lite downloads increased by 350% post-rebranding, which is attributed to users’ confusion. The same goes for social media platforms with a similar premise — the downloads of Bluesky and Mastodon increased by 180% and 15% accordingly.

Wait a minute, something similar happened in the music industry…

2. Amazon underpays influencers

Turns out that Amazon’s questionable profit over laborers’ rights attitude is not just applicable to warehouse workers. The company sent emails to hundreds of influencers asking them for promotional content — and they offered an absurd $25 fee per video. Meanwhile, the average cost for a TikTok video reached $2,741 in 2022, according to the report by IZEA. 

Influencers who agreed to work with Amazon looking at this report like:

3. WordPress started selling 100-year domains

WordPress (by the way, our blog runs on it too!) introduced the 100-year plan. 

The popular content management system offers domains with a century-long registration, multiple automated backups, and submissions to the Internet Archive. According to the company’s blog, this is the best choice for those who want to secure their legacy for successors, may it be one’s family history, or a company’s log of successes and failures.

Well, considering climate change and other crises, bold of them to assume things…

4. Mailchimp announced an email-themed art exhibition

If you’ve been doubting if emails are an art form in itself, Mailchimp already got the answer. This ESP partnered with the Design Museum to create an exhibition Email is Dead. The exhibition will include installations dedicated to the history of emails from the 1970s to the possible future of the medium. It also has interactive art pieces like:

• An “email therapy machine” that offers solutions to real-life situations related to emails.
• An “email time capsule” you can bury for future generations.
• An email personality test that describes what type of email sender you are.

This is what the world of emails looks like, according to Mailchimp:

5. Experian charged by FTC for spamming their customers

This month, the credit reporting agency Experian got punished for being a little too intrusive with their emails. According to the complaint filed by the U. S. District Court, people with free Experian memberships started receiving marketing messages that were masked as transactional notifications and important emails from support — and they had no clear unsubscribing options. The most common spam from Experian was “Confirm your vehicle” notifications — however, according to Gizmodo, customers complained that these “vehicles” were fake, too old, or had nothing to do with their accounts. 

The Federal Trade Commission issued a $650,000 fine and obliged Experian to add a clear and conspicuous opt-out option to their marketing emails.

6. TikTok opens ads in search results for all advertisers

This August, TikTok introduced the Search Ads Toggle feature that allows brands to show ads in user search results. When this feature is active, ads for search results are automatically created using the advertiser’s existing content and shown to users with the “Sponsored” label. Here’s how it works:

For digital marketers, it means there’s a new (and already pretty effective) type of branded content to invest in. And for regular internet users, it means…

7. Coca-Cola released branded NFTs

Just as we thought that the crypto craze was over, Coca-Cola jumped on the bandwagon this August. The brand released their own series of NFT artworks called “Masterpiece”. It’s a series of images where famous paintings like “The Scream” are reimagined by modern artists and drawn on glass Coca-Cola bottles. This is not the first time Coca-Cola invested in Web3 — in 2021, the brand dropped an NFT collection for the charity auction. 

8. People use customer data for romantic advances more often than you think

According to a recent survey by the ICO, almost 1 in 3 adult consumers in the UK had dealt with unwanted romantic contact after giving their personal data to a business. These people received unsolicited texts or emails from staff members who had the access to customers’ phone numbers and email addresses. 

The survey also showed that 66% of people believed that using customer databases as a dating app is morally wrong. 

9. Klaviyo goes to the stock market

Klaviyo, a marketing and email automation company, filed their Form S-1 statement, which is a document required from companies that want to start selling their shares on the stock market for the first time. Why is it a big deal?

Tech companies have had a hard time with initial public offerings for more than a year. For unicorn companies, breaking in the stock market was especially tough. Klaviyo, a fast-growing SaaS business that has reached almost $10 billion in value by now, could be the first example of a winning tech IPO that will inspire other tech startups to go public. This will make the niche more attractive to investors — they’ll actually be able to get the ROI. Also, emails are cool and profitable, did you know that?

10. Google fights AI copyright infringement

Google, in partnership with Universal Music, started discussing the matter of licensing the original voices and melodies for creating AI-generated music. The negotiations started on the onset of the deep fake music trend — fans use custom AI models to make Johnny Cash sing “Barbie Girl” or even create original music with the voices of popular artists.

The talks are at an early stage and imply a development of a paid generative AI tool for fans — at some point. But for now, we’ll be living in the world that looks like this: