Amazon Discovers Consequences, Scientists Baffled
Welcome to Friday, futurists.
We’ve spent the last few days in Beantown for K:BOS, Klaviyo’s first event in the city since 2019.
Over two days, the agenda featured a dynamic combination of product-centered announcements and walk-throughs, tactical deep dives with clients, and trend-based discussions about the future of marketing and customer experience. (Expect in-depth coverage of these areas over the next few days.)
I was also invited to drive a fireside chat with Emily Anderson, Global Brand Strategy Lead at TikTok, who broke down the next era of the creator economy and how brands can take a full-funnel approach to their partnerships.
Emily, who has a rich content strategy background at The Atlantic and The Washington Post, shared what we all know and what we recently confirmed with our latest New Modes research: the traditional funnel didn't just collapse, it exploded into a thousand shoppable pieces, each one demanding its own creator, budget, and KPI. Content strategies need to be reworked to enable entertainment, education, and conversion at any time.
Emily (obviously) believes that creators are leading this charge, and outlined a few key takeaways for brand leaders and practitioners in the room:
✨ Brands will need to constantly reimagine and repurpose TikTok user-generated content (UGC) for various channels, including email, advertising, and, yes, even social content for other platforms, to maximize the value of their investments.
📈 Mid-funnel metrics will be the new sweet spot for quantifying the true impact of creator partnerships. Think less basic likes and comments, and more reposts, remixes, and shares.
🤝 Creators will no longer be a component of different marketing strategies and tactics. Instead, “creator strategy” will be its own category, requiring its own unique goals, tactics, and budget.
→ Turn the creator economy into your competitive advantage.
Prime Daze. The FTC has slapped Amazon with a $2.5 billion fine for using “deceptive” tactics to expand its Prime subscriber base. The commission claimed that the Everything Store has tricked millions of consumers into signing up for Prime and made it unnecessarily difficult for them to cancel their memberships.
Our Take: The lawsuit was initially filed in June 2023 under the Biden administration and requires Amazon to pay a $1 billion civil penalty to the FTC and refund $1.5 billion to approximately 35 million customers who were impacted by “unwanted Prime enrollment or deferred cancellation.”
The FTC’s Click to Cancel rule may no longer be in effect, but merchants who use subscriptions as a magnet to retain customers should take note: consumers need to be able to quickly and easily manage their subscriptions. A recent Cargebee survey found that 82% of consumers are more likely to subscribe when cancellation is seamless, while 78% expect options to pause deliveries or swap items.
Sure, Amazon’s fine represents a mere 0.1% of its market cap, but it highlights some very real learnings for the merchant community. For a company that can deliver toilet paper in two hours, its cancellation flow was mysteriously complex.
Disney's Villain Era. Disney+ has added user-generated content to its platform, dipping its toes into lean-back creator economy content for the first time. The first Creators Collection, powered by Pocket.Watch, features content tied to the streaming release of the live-action “Lilo & Stitch.”
Pocket.Watch is a studio that connects kid and family creators to brands, so the content collection includes age-appropriate topics like “how to bake a Stitch cake” and “my entire Lilo & Stitch Funko Pop collection.”
While a new feature like this would typically garner media buzz, it is starkly overshadowed by several weeks of Disney boycotts and subscriber churn. Following ABC’s suspension of Jimmy Kimmel, Google searches for “cancel Disney+” increased by 1,500%, while “boycott Disney” saw a surge of more than 10,000%. Kimmel’s return this week drew 6.2 million viewers, but Disney has continued to see a decline in its stock.
Butter-Smooth Sound, Without the Cholesterol. Bose has launched a limited-edition “Citrus Yellow” color for its SoundLink Plus and is promoting it through influencers using a super vibey packaging concept. The seeding kit features packaging designed to mimic that of a stick of butter, complete with measurement markings.
“It’s Love Island Meets Chiptole.” Mediterranean bowlslop brand Cava has discreetly launched “Bowlmates,” a social-first dating show that tasks two people with building each other Cava bowls based on a series of dating questions. Contestants rank whether they’re “bowlmates” based on whether they like the final creations. Cava is joining the likes of Bob’s Furniture, which created its own unscripted home design show, “Till Decor Do Us Part,” but the format gives us “Chicken Shop Date” and “Hot Ones” vibes.
Algos After Vibes. It has been a busy week for Meta, which has unveiled some new features across its portfolio of apps.
With more than three billion monthly users on Instagram alone, the platform is testing a new way for users to tune their algorithm based on their preferences. They’re not alone. Elon Musk announced earlier this month that X would allow users to modify their algorithm by chatting with Grok by the end of 2025.
Sadly, the Meta announcements didn’t stop there.
Vibes is a new feature in the Meta AI app, offering a TikTok-style feed of AI-generated clips. Users can scroll through an endless series of clips and visual concoctions created by their fellow users, remix said clips to make them their own, or create their own content using AI. Equal parts discovery, curation, and creative ideation, “Vibes” seems to be a honey pot to get more people to engage with Meta’s AI tools, but it looks more like a social media fever dream than a breeding ground for innovation.
Our Take: One feature gives you control; the other removes humans from content creation entirely. Hmm.
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