What’s that?

You’re ready for this week’s marketing news? We gotchu.😎

• Google crawl budget best practices have been updated. What’s new? Google wants the same links on mobile and desktop versions of your site. It’s all playing into Google’s movement toward mobile-first indexing.

• OpenAI “treated” us with the launch of its SearchGPT capability on Halloween. It is currently available only to ChatGPT Plus and Team users, as well as SearchGPT waitlist users (like DBE). Here’s an example of how the SearchGPT function SAIRP looks like (see first image) and how its link citations look (see second image). The launch of this function comes earlier than expected and now elevates ChatGPT from a Secondary to a Primary target for SAIO.

• YouTube thumbnails… they’re more important than we could ever know. YouTube professional, Aprilynne Alter, offers extraordinarily insight on the psychology, design, and strategy behind a killer thumbnail. She even says that half the success of the video is attributed to how it’s “packaged” in the thumbnail. Highly informative and entertaining watch!

• What’s just around the corner for marketing in 2025? Here’s EMarketer’s top 5 highlights:
  • Digital platforms will face more regulations.
  • Traditional search will be threatened by retail, social, and GenAI (but as you know from reading, GenAI platforms are a new opportunity for visibility).
  • Retail media is facing growing pains due to the skew of budget toward Amazon and Walmart, as well as the increase of in-store retail media budget.
  • As streaming services create less original shows, people are less inclined to keep subscriptions.
  • Creators will get an influx of watchers as fewer people watch linear TV.

• MarTech offers a look “Beyond the funnel” with a new approach to content marketing. It focuses on target audiences’ problems and challenges as a crucial entry point for lead generation. Written for B2B brands, we think it also applies to B2C and DTC content marketers as well as SEO and SAIO from a keyword/topic perspective.

Thoughts to Take With You… 💞

Daylight’s savings just passed.

Have you ever noticed how it affects people? (Almost) the whole county’s sleep schedules are out of sync at the same time. This can lead to frustrating repercussions even days later.

This is just a reminder that we all might need a bit more patience this week (even with ourselves).

Happy November! 🦃

Natalie

So, this year, we’ve had 3 supermoons in a row with the final one being on the 15th! This means that the moon is closer to Earth, so it appears larger.

This last supermoon is also on the Full Beaver Moon, which is when beavers start to shelter in their lodges. 

I hope you set aside time to enjoy the moon next Friday (and every night)! 🙂

Howdy!

We’ve got 2 weeks’ worth of roundup for you, so grab your favorite beverage and let’s jump in!

• Will AI be facing a content boom/bust situation like the gold rush? An Epoch AI study “projects that tech companies will exhaust the supply of publicly available training data for AI language models by roughly the turn of the decade — sometime between 2026 and 2032.” The potential need for more content may push AI developers to mine sources like emails or text messages (goodbye privacy?). Or lead to partnerships with content sources like Reddit and Wikipedia.

• Siri (and all Apple products) will be getting an AI makeover. They’re calling it “Apple Intelligence.” The new features include enhanced photo editing, custom emoji creation, and other photo and content editing/generation capabilities. ***NOTEWORTHY: Apple integrated ChatGPT from OpenAI to help drive some of these enhancements. Microsoft, as a core investor of OpenAI, stands to benefit from this Apple/OpenAI deal. We’ll keep you posted.

• Perplexity Pages was introduced earlier this month as a form of publishable content threads that are searchable by Google. It seems some of these threads are now starting to show up in Google’s AI Overviews. We agree with this article that these Perplexity results could lead to spammy, black-hat-ish optimization abuses.

• Raise your hand if you’ve ever abandoned a cart because of extra fees. (Okay, I can’t see your hands, but I am sure a good portion of you have.) “Nearly half of US adults abandoned their online shopping cart at checkout because [of] the extra costs (shipping, tax, and fees)” as stated by EMarketer reporting on a Baymond survey. The real question is what can we do as marketers to mitigate these costs?

• Marketing Charts surveyed high-level marketing leaders with this question: “In the next year, what effects do you anticipate AI will have on your organization’s funnel?” Interestingly, improving and scaling lead management variations were mentioned in 3 out of 5 top results. Another one was “optimizing messaging and content.”

• We’ve talked about creative being a true ad differentiator in the past. LG Ad Solutions released data expressing that “49% of customers believe they can distinguish between traditional and AI ads on CTV.” While 30% of respondents stated they would like their ads personalized with AI, 80% believe it should be regulated. We all need to be careful how we step with AI ad/content creation.

Thoughts to Take With You… 💞

Have you ever seen a toddler experience something for the first time? They pick up rocks and sticks in amazement – with consistent wonder of the world unfurling around them. 

What if we applied more of that amazement to our day? 

We could watch planes pass by the sky with astounded awe. We could experience how amazing it is that we can flick a switch and have light flood a room. We could see our jobs from a beginner’s perspective. 

Could uncovering amazement, awe, and wonder make us more aware of and happy with the lives we have?

That’s a wrap – enjoy the rest of the week!

Natalie

Speaking of awe, this is one of my favorite articles. Here’s an excerpt from Outside magazine contributing editor, Florence Williams:

“A heightened awe experience stimulates the vagus nerve, which calms us, and releases a pleasant rush of dopamine and oxytocin, increasing a sense of connection.

It also dramatically shifts which brain networks are firing up. Imaging studies show that awe reduces activation in our self-referential default-mode network. The findings help explain two significant features of a classic awe experience: a relatively diminished sense of self, and a tendency toward altruistic behavior.”

Awe changes the way we think and how we experience, #SoCOOL!