Search the archive

Try Asana for free →

BLACK FRIDAY ARCHIVE

This archive contains over 1,400 historical Black Friday ads and 250,000 message board posts dating back to 2000. It offers insights into promotional patterns, category performance, and consumer sentiment.

QUERY FANOUT GENERATOR

The Query Fan Out Extractor allows you to generate fan-out queries directly from Google's Gemini API based on an inputted prompt. The tool provides actual fan-out queries from Google's own database, which can then be used to optimize for key prompts or keywords.

THE MARKET ENTRY TIMING EQUATION: WHEN BEING EARLY WINS AND WHEN IT KILLS YOU

Pioneers often fail, while early leaders who enter during the growth phase tend to win. The T-Score framework turns timing into a measurable decision by combining market readiness, defensibility, and CAC volatility. Companies with low scores are too early and burn out, mid-range scores rely on perfect execution, and high scores lead to fast-follower dominance with efficient growth. The framework helps founders cut guesswork and validate timing with data.

SUBVERTING THE AUTONOMOUS IMAGE

AI has created autonomous images that operate independently from reality and human creative processes. Drawing on Debord's concept of the Spectacle, these visuals reinforce existing social and economic structures while presenting themselves as unquestionable and complete. The black-box nature of the systems, the speed and scale of production, and the resulting alienation from creation highlight the shift in image autonomy. Techniques now exist to subvert or critically engage with AI, using its mechanisms to expose biases and underlying material and social conditions.

ADOBE'S 2025 HOLIDAY SHOPPING TRENDS

Data highlighting top-line holiday spend, the days with the highest sales, and the growth of mobile shopping.

US PATENT OFFICE SAYS AI CAN MAKE INVENTIONS, BUT YOU WILL GET THE CREDIT

AI tools are treated like any other software, so only humans can be inventors.

NEW YORK STATE LAW TAKES AIM AT PERSONALIZED PRICING

New York now requires companies to disclose when algorithms use personal data to set prices.

AS AI RESHAPES SHOPPING, US RETAILERS TRY TO CHANGE HOW THEY'RE SEEN ONLINE

US retailers see AI agents as a new gateway for holiday shopping and are shifting tactics to appear in AI-driven recommendations. Companies are posting far more content and even creating invisible websites for AI scrapers because ChatGPT referrals to major retailers still account for less than 1% of traffic. Some brands are using influencers, awards, and voice assistant ads to increase the data that AI tools draw from, while others rely on Google's expanding AI shopping features to surface products. Amazon said shoppers using its Rufus agent are 60% more likely to buy products, which signals how valuable AI-guided traffic could become.

THE 5 MEDIA TRENDS I'M THANKFUL FOR

Pay-per-crawl experiments are creating ways for publishers to monetize AI use of their content. Vodcasts and creator-inspired formats are helping publishers reach audiences with more engaging video. Independent, creator-led media is scaling sustainably through subscriptions. Publishers are increasingly embracing marketing, running brand campaigns and paid promotions to highlight their credibility.

AI COPYWRITING WORKFLOW

The key to high-quality AI-generated website copy is a structured workflow rather than a single prompt. Start with a base like a positioning memo and brand voice guide, then feed AI-rich context from customer transcripts to create persona briefs that capture pain points, transformations, and quotes. Use those briefs to craft a website styling guide that mirrors customer language, define page structure and content order, then generate copy with all guardrails attached. Human edits between steps refine it to near-final quality.

WHY YOUR PRODUCT RELEASE EMAILS GET IGNORED

Product release emails fail because users are flooded with announcements. They care about outcomes, not features. To improve opens and adoption, use subject lines that highlight benefits. Keep emails under 30 seconds, show the feature with a GIF or diagram, focus on benefits over features, use one clear CTA, and segment audiences by usage or role. Simple, human language with visual proof and targeted messaging ensures your email drives product use.

IS META EXPANDING CREATIVE TESTING TO 10 ADS?

Meta has quietly expanded its Creative Testing tool to support up to 10 ad variations in a single ad set, doubling the previous limit of five. This change benefits companies with ample creative resources, allowing broader testing within Meta's structured environment. However, the tool still requires new ad creation for testing, which can slow workflows.

13 OF THE BEST SEO BLOGS

This article features 13 SEO blogs that produce operationally relevant insights backed by data and experimentation. Each blog is run by experienced practitioners who actively test AI visibility, traffic attribution, and content ranking factors. Highlights include research into how ChatGPT filters sources by freshness and authority, GA4 attribution models for AI browsers, and how long-tail queries are less affected by declining click-through rates. For brands adjusting to AI-dominated search results, these blogs offer strategic guidance on entity modeling, structured content, and new SERP patterns.

WHY YOUNG PEOPLE MIGHT WANT A CD PLAYER FOR CHRISTMAS

Gen Z is driving renewed interest in physical music formats and is adding CD players to Christmas wishlists as part of a broader search for nostalgia and community. A survey found that 76% of Gen Z shop for records once a month, 80% own a record player, and 84% shop for records in-store. Many young people value physical music because 76% want a tangible copy and 57% prefer the in-store experience. This trend reflects the influence of culture and the desire for belonging, which creates opportunities for product innovation and authentic community engagement.

HOW ADVERTISING SHAPED THANKSGIVING AS WE KNOW IT

The Thanksgiving table as we know it today was largely constructed through deliberate brand positioning rather than historical accuracy. Products like turkey, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie were consolidated into the American holiday experience through nearly a century of advertising in publications such as Good Housekeeping. Brands focused on making these items feel essential, not only by promoting product features but also by associating them with emotional themes like family, gratitude, and tradition.

AI MODELS ARE BECOMING INFLUENCERS

AI models are becoming trusted advisors, not search engines. Last year saw 700 million product conversations, mostly seeking recommendations. Buyers provide context and expect tailored guidance, prompting models to act like influencers who form opinions and recommend the best fit. Opinions are shaped by what models can read, so clarity, specificity, and consistent proof build trust. Brands must understand AI perceptions, identify harmful assumptions, and create content that improves recommendations.

10 PODCAST EPISODES THAT GIVE YOU A REAL CRASH COURSE IN AI MARKETING

Top podcasts include How I AI, Decoding AI for Marketing, and Superhuman AI.

THE DEATH OF THE FOLLOWER COUNT

Follower count no longer serves as a reliable metric for social media performance.

THE ALPHA IS NOT LLM MONITORING

The real value in AI search lies in Agentic SEO tools that produce outcomes, not in LLM monitoring dashboards. Investors put $227 million into AI visibility tracking, but established platforms captured $550 million, and Agentic SEO companies raised only $86 million despite having far stronger operational moats. Most monitoring companies are young and face negative switching costs, while Agentic SEO tools are older, harder to replace, and power a brand's publishing engine. Many monitoring companies are predicted to face down rounds, consolidation, or failure by Q3 2026 because the category is already being commoditized by free or bundled tools.

US RETAIL SALES ROSE LESS THAN FORECAST IN SEPTEMBER AS KEY DATA RETURNS AFTER SHUTDOWN DELAYS

US retail sales rose 0.2% in September, which missed the expected 0.4% and signaled a slowdown from the 0.6% gain in August. Consumers appear resilient but more selective as major retailers reported pressure on lower and middle-income households. Investors now estimate an 85% chance of an interest rate cut in December after the weaker retail and producer price data.

UPDATE THE PUBLISHING DATE ON OLD, HIGH-QUALITY ARTICLES

Updating the publishing date on older high-quality articles can quickly increase their visibility without rewrites, audits, or link building. A 30-minute batch refresh can move 10-40% of articles from low-ranking pages to page one because Google and LLMs favor freshness. This tactic shows which content benefits from a quick update and which requires deeper work.

WHEN IS THE BEST TIME TO SEND EMAILS IN PR? (A STUDY OF 4.5M EMAILS)

8 to 9 AM local time is the most effective window for PR emails because 36% of opens occur during that hour. Monday delivers the strongest performance for both opens and replies across staff journalists and freelancers. Freelancers show steadier engagement during the week but still peak around 8 AM and drop on Friday. US journalists engage most between 9 and 11 AM, and UK journalists peak between 7 and 9 AM, but individual timing still depends on publication and personalization.

Plaid case study.

YOU'RE INVITED TO REWIND ONLINE (WEBINAR)

Pretty Little Marketer is hosting a free virtual webinar where three marketers will share strategies behind massive social growth, TV-to-B2B pivots, and campaigns for the UK's fastest-growing brands. They'll cover why B2B isn't boring, the shift from flatlays to lifestyle content, personal branding as a CV, and predictions for 2026.

LIFECYCLE STRATEGY REVERSE-ENGINEERING PROMPT

This templated prompt lets you reverse-engineer a company's entire lifecycle strategy. It reveals their signals, data, targeted moments, and personalization using a single, carefully crafted input in an LLM.

HOW AMAZON BUILT THE WORLD'S FASTEST GROWING AD BUSINESS

Initially hesitant and disorganized, Amazon slowly invested in ad infrastructure, leaned on relationships with product vendors, and overcame internal conflicts between merchandising and sales. By developing proprietary systems, integrating first-party shopper data, and introducing full-funnel ad capabilities, it built a platform that now generates over $56 billion in annual ad revenue. Key moves included launching search ads, acquiring Twitch, expanding Fire TV, and monetizing Prime Video.

VIDEO STREAMING SERVICES ARE REACHING THE LIMITS OF LOYALTY

UK streaming customers are cycling subscriptions at a much higher rate, which makes loyalty harder to secure. The share of consumers who cycle has reached 21% and 42% are open to it, while 55% of subscriptions come through deals, and deal-driven users churn at a rate of 73%. Netflix's subscriber share has dropped from 76% to 72% and password sharing has risen from 6% to 8%. The research shows that many Prime Video users would cancel if it were unbundled from Prime, and those who would stay expect to pay £5 or less per month, which highlights how fragile platform loyalty has become.

BEYOND THE ALGORITHM: WHY THE BEST MARKETING STILL COMES FROM HUMAN INTUITION

Naked Juice and KeVita, both under PepsiCo, took opposite marketing approaches. Naked Juice spent heavily on measurable channels like display ads and paid social but struggled to generate cultural relevance. KeVita, with a smaller budget, relied on intuition to guide less trackable efforts aligned with lifestyle and conversation. Its campaign felt more alive and delivered better brand awareness and long-term results. Intuition, built from experience, is a strategic advantage when data alone cannot drive bold, brand-defining decisions.

THE JOYS (AND ABSURDITIES) OF AI SLOP

Brands can grab attention with absurd AI content built around a clear idea.

THE MONEY INFLUENCERS ACTUALLY MAKE

A look into how much 26 Boston-area content creators earn from paid posts, UGC, and affiliate links.

7 TIPS TO WIN ON REDDIT

Reddit tactics that focus on remarketing ads, active subreddits, user reviews, and AMAs.

RETAIL CATEGORY STRATEGIES FOR YOUTUBE

Retail content dominates YouTube. Fashion, home, beauty, and consumer electronics generate 688B views across 4.12M channels. Creators drive shopping behavior through reviews, tutorials, and short-form discovery. Viewers are 98% more likely to trust YouTube recommendations than other platforms. Fast-growing trends include practical problem-solving, shop-ertainment, and honest reviews.

HOW BRANDS ARE AIMING TO BUILD ‘ALGORITHMIC TRUST' AHEAD OF AN AI AGENT-POWERED BLACK FRIDAY

Brands are working to build algorithmic trust so AI agents can surface their products during a longer, AI-driven shopping window. Most consumers have used AI tools at least once. 68% report trying tools like ChatGPT, but only 2% use AI to make purchases, which shows a large gap that brands want to close. New tools such as Pulse and Atlas from OpenAI may speed adoption by proactively presenting personalized deals to shoppers. Brands are responding by encoding product data for machine understanding, strengthening verifiable brand values, and improving online reputation so AI agents can confidently recommend their products.

TURN INSULTS YOU GET INTO ADS

Reusing unfair insults can boost brand engagement and ad performance because it makes a brand seem more confident and humorous. Experiments showed that an electronics store increased its CTR by 26.7% when it embraced an insult, and MTV saw a 25% rise in interest, a 70.5% lift in humor, and a 20.2% increase in perceived confidence when it reused criticism. Vitamin Water saw similar gains, including a 67% rise in humor and a 21% rise in confidence. The approach fails when the critic is seen as vulnerable, as perceptions of a brand being a bully can rise by 59.9%.

REDESIGN OF PROTON.AI'S CUSTOMER NEWSLETTER

This post shows how Proton's newsletter moved from plain text to a sports-themed design. It introduced a mascot, used ChatGPT to build the HTML layout, and tested the code in Parcel to confirm it rendered well. The prompt used is shared in the comments.

WORKFLOW DRIVING 23% OF B2B PIPELINE

Bolt.new uncovered 23% of net new B2B pipeline, driven by Freckle.io. They enriched personal email sign-ups from high-potential companies. The workflow imported sign-ups from Snowflake, filtered personal and work emails, enriched contact and company data, scored and prioritized Tier 1 leads, and pushed them to HubSpot with LinkedIn engagement steps. In the first 4 weeks, this generated $1.7M in pipeline, including Fortune 500 deals, and the process has now been expanded to all demo requests.

PROMPT LIKE A MARKETER

This guide gives a structured way to craft AI prompts by focusing on signal context, roles, jobs, formats, and tone. It shows how to use AI across key marketing tasks, offers reusable templates tied to real GTM scenarios, and helps teams turn buyer signals into clear outputs. It aims to sharpen messaging and support smarter use of AI while keeping human judgment central.

AI EMAILS ME CONTENT IDEAS EVERY MORNING

This article explains how to set up a system where ChatGPT sends a daily email with categorized content ideas. The prompt pulls insights from past chats and organizes them into buckets for newsletters, LinkedIn, and email. Anyone can replicate the method by enabling ChatGPT schedules and applying a structured prompt. This reduces context switching and protects ideation from being lost in unstructured notes.

HOW TO DO USER RESEARCH WITHOUT USERS: THE SYNTHETIC USER GUIDE

AI-generated personas give early-stage teams a fast way to clarify who they are building for and what those users care about. Tools like ChatGPT can create realistic, behavior-driven personas that reflect motivations, fears, workflows, and decision triggers without long research cycles. These personas help teams pressure test ideas, refine messaging, simulate interviews, and uncover blind spots before talking to real users. The approach speeds up alignment and improves product decisions while still requiring real user validation later on.

7 ECOMMERCE BLOG EXAMPLES

Ecommerce blogs that win in AI search and convert effectively combine educational content with smart product integration. Garmin ranks in the top AI visibility charts by creating detailed, structured articles that answer user questions while subtly linking to products. Petlibro balances top-of-funnel education with transactional keywords, creating posts cited by AI tools. Thinx builds authority through mission-aligned content on menstrual health and earns high rankings with concise, helpful posts.

ANTHROPIC INTRODUCES CHEAPER, MORE POWERFUL, MORE EFFICIENT OPUS 4.5 MODEL

The update addresses previous limitations where long chats ended abruptly by introducing behind-the-scenes summarization that retains key context.

THE SOCIAL-MEDIA PLATFORM THAT MAKES YOU TELL THE TRUTH

Strava turned fitness tracking into a social competition for over 150 million users.

AMERICANS' SOCIAL MEDIA USE 2025

Instagram now reaches 50% of adults in the US. It has joined YouTube and Facebook as the only social media platforms to achieve majority adoption among Americans. Its growth from 40% in 2021 signals a shift from a younger audience to the mainstream. Other platforms continue to rise, including TikTok at 37% and WhatsApp at 32%.

THE B2C AI MARKETING IMPACT REPORT

Marketers feel a powerful mix of optimism and urgency around AI. 92% view its impact positively. At the same time, many teams still lack the budgets, data activation, and workflows needed to use it effectively. Most organizations need 2-7 days to act on new insights, which slows progress and weakens AI's value. This gap between ambition and execution fuels overconfidence and widens the disconnect between how marketers believe AI performs and how customers actually experience it.

4 EMAIL PRE-HEADER TESTS TO TRY

Pre-header tests worth trying include removing the pre-header entirely for a clean inbox preview, using continuation words like “and”, “but”, or “plus”, adding emojis only in the pre-header, and starting with short parenthetical cues such as “(quick)” or “(don't skip)”. Each tactic can lift open rates, but performance varies. Run structured A/B tests in your ESP to see what resonates with your audience.

GROW REACH WITH THOUGHT-LEADER ADS

When a LinkedIn post gains traction, build momentum instead of stopping at organic reach. Boost the strongest posts as thought-leader ads, then use the new engagement to retarget and run follow-up campaigns that fit your GTM approach. This turns individual posts into a steady growth engine.