Three things we learned from the Super Bowl 2022 & other stories

Super Bowl Halftime Show aka: Millennials, you’re old

What? A superb owl? In case you are not familiar with American culture, here we come with an explanation: the Super Bowl is a concert and a marketing show, with an American football game as a support act. For many the traditional halftime show, a short 15-minutes concert in the middle of the game, is more important than the game itself, and for an artist it’s a badge of honor to perform at it. This year’s show made millennials ecstatic with the biggest celebrities of their teenage years united on stage. Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, Dr. Dre, Mary J. Blige and Snoop Dogg rapped together and paid tribute to 2Pac.?

What’s unusual about the 2022 halftime show? First of all - there is no greater mainstream stage than the one at the Super Bowl, but this year it was hip-hop that took over, the angry, black, contestatory music. If you needed that final nail to the coffin of hip-hop being the music of the underdogs - here it is. But there is one more thing to mention: Millennials first got excited about some young music being played, but after ten seconds the hard truth hit: we are getting old, and the average age on that stage was 50. Time to use an eye cream.

Read more: https://www.bustle.com/life/super-bowl-2022-reminder-millennials-old-nostalgia-halftime-show-commercials

Crypto Bowl: How cryptocurrency advertising enters mainstream?

As we said, the Super Bowl is not only a festival of popular culture, but also of advertising. And this year was special, as the cryptocurrency advertising really got noticed. Noticeably, their main purpose was not to show crypto’s practical use, but to introduce it to the mainstream, focus on the exchange, and create a sense of FOMO - buy now and buy quickly, or you’ll miss out. Three ads were on everybody’s lips:

• FTX with Larry David - in which cryptocurrency was compared to the humanity’s greatest inventions, with an underlying notion, that if you are not buying it now, you are missing out

• Coinbase - which paid $13 million for a QR code just bouncing around the screen, old screensaver style. The QR code was redirecting to a $15 of free Bitcoin, but the offer had a 45 minutes time limit.

• eToro - encouraged newbies to join the crypto investors community, a movement happening here and now. However, it was full of cryptic (no pun intended) references to things like the Dodge or the Bored Ape which the newbies may not be familiar with,

• Crypto.com - The ad with LeBron James can be summed up in two words: be bold. Be bold, because crypto rewards those who are willing to take risks.?

The outcome? Coinbase became the 2nd most downloaded app for iPhones and got 20 million views on its website in one minute (which made the app crash eventually) and FTX gained close to 200k followers on Twitter.?

So here it is: three things that we’ve learned from the 2022 Super Bowl are: crypto and hip hop are mainstream and we, well - we are just old.?

Read more: Fortune.com, The Wall Street Journal

Memory Marketing

Good marketing is all about emotions - that’s a no-brainer. Emotional connection is something that makes the message memorable. In his last piece Ryan O’Grady writes about why it’s worth the effort to record good moments that customers spent with the brand and keep them for later. People are nostalgic, they tend to make up memories, and they like to look at the past with rose-tinted glasses. Brands like Spotify with its yearly Spotify Wrapped campaign, or Pepsi that celebrates 30th anniversary of Crystal Pepsi, know it and use it. If you are looking for a ready-made recipe on how to use memory marketing, you won’t find it here. Each brand needs to work in its own way, but the outcome is definitely worth the effort, and the whole nineties’ nostalgia aesthetic is here for a good reason.?

Read more: AdWeek

Page Experience Update by Google

Google’s main goal is to show users exactly what they are looking for. User’s main goal is to find exactly what they are looking for. Marketer’s goal is to go in between these two with the right content. That’s the simplest definition of SEO. Google keeps updating its criteria of a website that is worth displaying on the top of SERP and in this iteration a new set of requirements has been made public.?

Last time it happened, in August 2021, it was mostly about mobile traffic, and it turned out that most mobile versions of websites were wildly unprepared for this change. This time the very same requirements will be introduced for desktop traffic - we know more or less what’s coming and there is no excuse for not being prepared.?

Pay special attention to Core Web Vitals, a set of metrics that define the key aspects of the user experience, related to loading, interactivity and visual stability of the website, such as LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), FID (First Input Delay), and CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift).

Read more: AdWeek

New CEO of Twitter, Parag Agrawal takes parental leave…

And it makes the headlines. Agrawal, who is 37 years old, became Twitter’s CEO in November as a result of pressure from investors who would like to see Twitter’s rapid growth. In February he decided to take several weeks off to take care of his wife and his newborn son, but assured the company that he would stay in touch with his executive team.?

It surely sets a great example - there are things in life that are more important than growing companies and taking parental leave shouldn’t be seen as something that undermines a career. And it’s a great employer branding for Twitter who offers its employees up to 20 weeks of paid parental leave. In fact, it should be a norm for all parents, both moms and dads, to be allowed time off to get acquainted with their new tiny human.??

At the same time there is this nagging question - Parental leave is sensational enough when it’s taken by a man. What if Twitter’s CEO was a woman? Would she be equally celebrated or seen as a nuisance??

It’s also worth mentioning that the lack of paid parental leave is something that America is infamous for. According to the data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2021) less than a quarter of civilian workers had access to a paid parental leave - and it’s something unthinkable in the rest of the developed world.