A Practical Guide to Conversational Commerce
How buying through chat and messaging works, from WhatsApp catalogs to AI-assisted recommendations, and where it reduces friction versus where it's a gimmick.
The Archive
2022
Common Personalization Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)
Five personalization mistakes still showing up in 2022, from stale post-ATT retargeting data to ignoring visitors who browse the site logged out entirely.
A Practical Guide to Customer Retention
The actual math behind why keeping a customer costs less than winning one, how CAC climbed after Apple's tracking changes and where retention spend pays back.
How Marketing Attribution Changed Digital Marketing in 2022
The year Google set a hard deadline on Universal Analytics, forcing a wholesale rethink of how attribution gets measured.
Building a First-Party Data Strategy Around GA4's Reset
A 2022 build guide for first-party data, written for the calmer window that opened once Google pushed its cookie deadline to 2024 and GA4 forced a data reset.
The State of Web3 Marketing in 2022
Web3 marketing went from Super Bowl NFT ads to a much quieter conversation by late 2022, as Terra, Celsius and Three Arrows Capital collapsed one after another.
The Creator Economy: A Playbook for the Platform-Fund Era
By 2022 platforms had launched their own creator funds. Here's how brands adapted their partnership strategy to that changed landscape.
The Rise of Social Commerce
Social commerce didn't start with Instagram. It started with Chinese platforms years earlier, and that order explains why TikTok Shop is expanding as it is.
The State of the Cookieless Future in 2022
Where third-party cookie deprecation stood in 2022, why Google's timeline kept slipping and what marketers were doing to prepare anyway.
The Rise of Short-Form Video: From Vine to Instagram's Pivot
How short-form video got here: from Vine's six-second loops through Musical.ly's merger into TikTok, to the Reels and Shorts response that defined 2022.
7 TikTok Marketing Strategies That Work
Seven approaches that drove results on TikTok in 2022, from Spark Ads and creator partnerships to treating the platform as a search engine for younger users.
Influencer Marketing Trends Shaping 2022
The specific shifts in influencer marketing during 2022: platform creator funds under fire, BeReal's rise and Reels chasing TikTok.
How Marketing Analytics Changed Digital Marketing in 2022
A year-in-review look at how the forced GA4 migration, disclosed iOS 14.5 revenue losses and the Privacy Sandbox Topics API reshaped analytics in 2022.
The State of Brand Communities in 2022
Why 2022 pushed brands toward owned communities on Discord and elsewhere, as rising ad costs and privacy changes made rented audiences more expensive.
The Rise of Conversational Commerce
How buying and selling moved into chat windows, from Chris Messina's 2015 prediction to WhatsApp catalogs and Messenger bots becoming standard retail tools.
Case Study: Winning With Personalization
An illustrative 2022 scenario of an online course platform that replaced retargeting-dependent growth with onsite personalization from zero-party quiz data.
How Customer Retention Changed Digital Marketing in 2022
Why rising ad costs, inflation and privacy changes pushed marketing budgets away from acquisition and toward keeping existing customers in 2022.
The Rise of Marketing Attribution
How marketing attribution went from a last-click afterthought to one of digital marketing's hardest problems, and what iOS privacy changes broke along the way.
First-Party Data Mistakes After Google's Cookie Delay
Five mistakes businesses kept making with first-party data in 2022, from collecting without a value exchange to assuming the delay eased privacy pressure.
A Practical Guide to Web3 Marketing
What NFTs, token gating and blockchain-based loyalty do differently from a normal rewards program, and how to tell a genuine Web3 mechanic from a cash grab.
A Practical Guide to the Creator Economy
Creators now make money through at least six distinct mechanisms, and most brands only understand one of them. Here's how the whole system works.
A Practical Guide to Social Commerce
A step-by-step path to setting up in-app selling on Instagram and TikTok in 2022, from picking products to fixing fulfillment before it wastes the sale.
Why The Cookieless Future Matters for Your Bottom Line
The financial case for preparing your business for a cookieless web now, from rising acquisition costs to the durable value of owned customer data.
Short-Form Video Strategy in 2022: Beyond the Easy Wins
A 2022 build guide for short-form video, for a landscape where Reels and Shorts had matured, competition had spiked and the easy wins of 2021 were gone.
The State of TikTok Marketing in 2022
TikTok crossed a billion monthly users heading into 2022 and launched TikTok Shop, forcing brands to decide whether it was an experiment or a core channel.