Mediaboss Marketing

Joce Macdonald is Head of Growth Marketing at ecommerce accelerator Netrush, a company which provides everything from creative services to third party logistics.

I recently sat down with Joce to find out more about her role, her biggest professional achievements, and her predictions for how ecommerce will continue to evolve.

My day job is head of marketing at Netrush, which is a leading ecommerce accelerator that helps brands grow their sales, especially on Amazon.com. We have our hands in everything from supply chain and logistics all the way through media and creative. Of course, no two days are alike, but on most, I have multiple meetings with business unit leaders to support the growth of our platform. I also work with our CEO on strategic initiatives to support our partnership program. On days like this, which are less frequent, I have interviews with publications interested in learning about my personal brand consultancy (Call Me Joce) and my experience in the self-care and ecommerce industries.

Days can be pretty long, but by 6 PM, Im at least winding down with my family. Like most people these days, email and administrative duties can feel endless, but I like to be present for my kids as well.

Its hard to be a successful brand in any year, but 2022 has had the added baggage of a Covid peak and a global supply chain that is still bent and twisted from the past 24 months. But I think the brands that will really shine will have three major priorities straight:

They get the foundation right. Retail dashboards lit up last year with wild variations in supply, demand, advertising, efficiency, and sales. A lot of brands found themselves out of their lanes and putting out fires rather than charting a strategic course. So, this quarter, tuning the system to get these fundamentals right is Job One. Brands will need to make sure they can get products in their customers hands (which was never an issue like it is now) as well as reach them with the right messages. Its definitely time to reset and get back to basics.

They know their customers. Customer understanding will also be critical. In an increasingly omni-platform, cookie-less world, it can seem daunting to understand your digital customers. However, if you want it, the data is there, and you can use it to formulate the right go-to-market strategies for your brand.

They understand and leverage customer lifetime value (CLV). Brand managers today have a diverse set of levers to drive growth, including media, content, social media, influencers, fulfillment, brand protection, and marketplace management. CLV can be the north star in prioritising actions across these limitless possibilities. A CLV focus also helps answer important questions about the balance between acquisition costs and value in a marketing environment that is more expensive than ever. Its important to know the answers to questions such as Am I overspending on lower value customers or Am I focusing enough on high-value customers? Do that, and youll be in a happy place.

There are so many possibilities here. Ill divide them into categories.

Host Defense (full disclosure, a Netrush partner) continues to impress me with their authenticity, innovation and customer loyalty. This mycelium-based supplement brand continues to maintain its market leading position amid a rapid growth of digitally native and other competition. By maintaining an almost magical convergence of health, science, authenticity, sustainability, loyalty and innovation, they are seeing good things happen.

Our industry has been majorly disrupted by the labor market. Its important to remember that people make your organisation thrive, and you have to invest in them, sometimes in creative ways, to succeed.

We will continue to invest in the capabilities that brands need to make a meaningful and valuable connection with their customers. For example, we acquired the automated marketing and optimisation platform Sellozo in 2021, which allows our partners to invest with confidence in Amazon advertising. We are also continuing to extend our platform to help meet brands where they are digitally native, naive, or mature and enable them all to thrive and grow.

Digital Shift Q1 2022 Chapter 1 Retail Trends

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Netrush's Joce Macdonald on the three priorities of successful ecommerce brands - Econsultancy

For some, Twitter is a toxic space, revealing the very worst in humanity. A place where ministers previously espousing fear fokkol bravado reinvent themselves as Mr Fix, who fix little except fixating on social media.

And when they tweet that they have arrived in Ukraine to score cheap likes from their followers, as if that means they would finally fix something, they attack disruptive journalists for having the temerity to question why a public representative in sheltered employment would tweet so tactlessly, against the backdrop of Russias war crimes, the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, and Vladimir Putins trigger-happy fingers threatening nuclear Armageddon.

For others, its a democratic space of information and debate a space where timelines can mostly be tailored to the users wants and where ideas can be challenged and information disseminated.

The platform released its third annual Twitter Trends Report this week, revealing the three biggest movements in conversation: Finance Goes Social, The Great Restoration and Fan-Built Worlds. These were identified after an analysis of billions of tweets between 2019 and 2021.

It examines shifts in finance and the Covid-19 pandemic to the popularity of virtual worlds, revealing ways that marketers can capitalise on these trends.

An idea becomes conversation becomes a seismic cultural shift. And if you want in on whats next, listen to what people on Twitter are saying right now. To help you out, we analysed billions of Tweets over a two-year period to find three must-know trends about to go big, the report says.

From The Great Restoration to Fan-Built Worlds to Finance Goes Social, the talk on Twitter reveals the underlying shifts in power shaping where the world is going.

The statistics and data points in the report are from Pulsar & Canvas8, for the period 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2021, providing a sneak peek into the movements that will drive culture, no matter what business youre in.

Trend 1: The Great Restoration

The Great Restoration is a move among users that is about healing the planet by healing ourselves and rethinking climate change.

Within millions of daily tweets, Twitter says it recognises users are focusing on their personal health while increasingly calling out corporations to take the lead against the planets environmental crisis.

Terms such as restoring and rebalancing had a 64% year-on-year increase, and mentions of greenwashing (marketing spin to mislead consumers that companies products and policies are environmentally friendly) increased by 158%.

It says mass burnout has driven people to reprioritise their wellness over corporate serfdom, giving rise to trends seen at the end of 2021 and early 2022, such as the Mass Resignation in the US, whereas sustainability has become increasingly important.

After decades of big business inaction, consumers are tired of carrying the load. The conversations on Twitter show the pandemic shifting perspectives.

People are focusing on themselves and expect corporations to take the lead against massive planetary challenges, the report says. So, while folks are still talking about veganism and recycling, theyre also getting real about impact and accountability, too.

Personal and planetary health are intertwined, but a better balance of responsibility is needed.

The climate conversation is central to that Restoration, with corporate call-out culture in full swing.

People on Twitter are talking about decarbonisation, emissions and other big issues that put pressure on companies.

People are tired of being the only ones who care and an underlying anti-trust is bubbling over. They need brands to make some real impact, Twitter says.

Trends to watch: The report says people are talking about climate mitigation (instead of the climate fight) more than ever before, as it is a more achievable concept that focuses on slowing down environmental damage.

Theyre also turning to ideas such as planet-friendly wellness solutions and cleaner, greener healthcare, while calling out corporations and holding themselves accountable.

Whats next? Twitter believes the fight for the climate will be kinder.

Looking closer, we see this movement becoming more kind than militant. People want change, but in a holistic way alternative fuels, fighting waste, healing, metaphysics. Theres an ethos of appreciation, instead of obsessing with everything wrong with the world, the planet will restore when we do.

Trend 2: Fan-Built Worlds

Twitter says fans no longer just follow, theyre also calling the shots, making the rules, and creating worlds they want to be part of.

With a 51% decrease in the use of the term stanning [being an overzealous fan], this is an epic shift in power. In thousands of niche communities on Twitter, fans are building and creating collaborating with artists and each other.

Even more game-changing? Shared ownership. Fans having a genuine stake in what theyve made. And getting paid for it.

Twitter noticed a 994% year-on-year increase in mentions of fan tokens and twice as many tweet replies in the fandom.

Fans come to Twitter to talk, the report says. And they are looking at the conversation more purposefully. Theyre tearing down the wall between idol and fan, for more immersive experiences while creating art and ideas for themselves and their communities. People are talking about building complex worlds through cosplay, role-playing games, and virtual marketplaces leaving the superficial in search of real connection.

Trends to watch: New metaverse worlds such as Decentraland, a 3D virtual world browser-based platform, which allows users to buy virtual plots of land as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and The Sandbox, a video game genre with a nonlinear structure that allows players to roam freely, allow fans to spend their time and money in niche virtual destinations with unique avatars, digital fashion drops, and endless expression.

Gaming was first to enter, the report says, and musics coming in fast.

But look out for core aesthetics entire worlds designed around shared passions like flowers or steampunk. Our basic need for belonging has come full circle.

Whats next? Fans will be using their power to create value for themselves and their tribe through currency-driven membership, gamified marketplaces, and NFT collabs connecting across fandoms.

Theyre also lighting up the VR/AR conversation, staking claim in new metaverse communities.

Trend 3: Finance Goes Social

Everyone is getting in on money matters, and theyre having fun, says the report. Communities of experts and ordinary people are freely sharing knowledge for all to see, with tweeting about finance among non-professionals and non-enthusiasts up by 78% year on year and its not only about stock picks.

The finance conversation has become part entertainment, part gaming, unapologetically social, and more open than ever before. With 75% growth, #FinTwit is driving a new cultural dialogue across Twitter.

There were also 17 times more tweets about NFTs than about work from home in 2021. And researchers noted a 492% increase in the use of emojis in finance conversations, with the hottest conversation on Twitter being cryptocurrency.

Topics such as trading and virtual gigs in virtual worlds are also hotting up, while stablecoin (a cryptocurrency), NFT marketplaces, decentralised apps (dApps, digital applications or programs that exist and run on a blockchain), the token economy and decentralised exchanges are growing by more than 242%.

From learning the basics to championing bitcoin and ethereum, folks want to be part of this new frontier But this is just the start. Talk of #DeFi decentralised finance tells us this is part of the larger power-shift away from institutions. And looking closer, we see the next trends already starting to form.

Trends to watch: Ordinary people are becoming more empowered about investing and speaking about entry-level products. Crypto could help the unbanked.

And the fast acclimation to NFTs looks to have people thinking of them like stocks. Then theres the increasing talk about cryptos environmental impact. And overall reliability. So, as this conversation grows, keep an eye on sustainability and trust.

Whats next? Twitter expects to see huge increases in talk about NFTs, decentralised exchanges and ways to put user-empowered communities to work.

Fast-growing conversation suggests the rise of people-centric decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs, organisations represented by rules encoded as transparent computer programs), safer investments powered by stablecoins, and fun, passionate communities entering this space will attract even more everyday people.

With hundreds of millions of tweets sent on Twitter every day, theres a lot more going on Twitter than toxic conversations, memes and jokes. Twitter reflects what people are thinking, doing and feeling, influencing culture in the present and future. For marketers who want to get a sense of what is going on in the minds of their customers, peers and competitors, the Trends Report peels back some of the minds many layers. DM168

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper which is available for R25 at Pick n Pay, Exclusive Books and airport bookstores. For your nearest stockist, please clickhere.

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Internships are a gateway to having a firsthand experience of a formal work structure. The experience not only helps candidates understand about the jobs, it also helps them figure what career path to choose. Right from social media marketing to scientific research internship, heres a list of internships opportunities that are open in Mumbai:

This 3-month internship is open for candidates who wants to learn and grow in a fast-paced startup environment, have great communication skills, are interested in networking and can organise events and coordinate with college. There are 40 openings and the selection would be done via a telephonic/ videocall interview. The stipend will be based on the performance of the candidates. Interested candidates can apply at Internshala.

There are three openings for this post. Selected interns day-to-day responsibilities include handle research and development, work on the quality analysis and work on the process development. Candidates need to apply by May 20 at Internshala. The stipend for the six-month internship will Rs 2500 per month.

Candidates who want to apply for the two-month internship must have an understanding of SaaS products and have the ability to build basic pages like registration, login, etc. Selected interns day-to-day responsibilities include working with other engineers to develop UX design and frontend. It also includes working on jQuery, CSS, and HTML with modern design and UX principle. The hiring for this internship will be online and the company will provide work from home/ deferred joining till current COVID-19 situation improves. The stipend is Rs 5000 per month and candidates can apply at Internshala.

Movieing Moments is looking for a social media executive whose day-to-day responsibilities will include developing and implementing our social media strategy that aligns with our business goals in order to increase our online presence and improve our marketing, increase awareness and develop an enviable corporate image by developing and executing effective communication, generate, edit, publish and share engaging content daily, oversee social media accounts design, stay up-to-date with current technologies and trends in social media, design tools, and applications, handle social media pages of the company, come up with catchy and attractive content for social media and develop a weekly calendar for posts. The selected candidates will get a stipend of Rs 8500 per month.

Read all the Latest News, Breaking News and Assembly Elections Live Updates here.

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From Social Media Marketing to Scientific Research, Internships to Apply in Mumbai - News18

There is currently a skills gap in digital marketing and not enough professionals to fill the jobs that are available.

This means there is already some advantage for those looking to start a career in digital marketing.Here are seven top tips on how to land that first job:

Here are some of the tools you should master to equip yourself for getting your first job in digital marketing:

This will also help you to define target employers, companies and the specific marketing fields that appeal to you. Showing recruiters in your interview that you are knowledgeable about marketplace trends will put you in good stead and single you out from the other applicants.

Learn from marketing leaders. Dedicate time to taking online courses to hone your skills.

It might also be worth looking forlearnershipsorinternshipsat media companies or within marketing departments at larger organisations. This will help you to start building up your commercial experience and networks.

And even if you don't think a job is tailor-made for you, apply for it. You will gain valuable interview experience, which will be useful in your next interview. Always include a personalised cover letter that highlights your qualifications, skills, relevant experience and why you are interested in the job.

And when you do land an interview, remember these few crucial 'don'ts' that can make all the difference to landing the job:

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Seven tips on how to land your first job in digital marketing - Media Update

Have you ever watched a great movie and marveled at the script, only to learn that your companion thought it was terrible? Unlike math or engineering, writing feels subjective, which makes it seem hard to evaluate objectively. But might that intuition be misguided?

Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger is cracking the code on what makes a good story. He and two colleagues Olivier Toubia, marketing professor at Columbia Business School, and Jehoshua Eliashberg, emeritus marketing professor at Wharton devised a way to measure language to determine what makes some narratives more successful than others. They compared movies, TV shows, and academic papers, and the results were published in a study titled, How Quantifying the Shape of Stories Predicts Their Success.

Berger joined Knowledge@Wharton to talk about the study. Listen to the podcast above or read an edited transcript of the conversation below.

Knowledge@Wharton: What inspired this study, and how did you go about measuring something as abstract as language?

Jonah Berger: We are constantly consuming narratives. We are reading books, we are watching movies, we are reading articles online. But were also creating stories. When we make a presentation, when we give a talk, even when we write an email, we are creating content thats like a story. We started to wonder, why are some of these things more successful than others? Some movies are blockbusters and some tank. Some books are bestsellers and others arent. And some written content and online articles are just so engaging we cant put them down, but that doesnt happen for everything. What makes a hit? Why does something succeed while others fail? And can we use language to understand that at a deeper level?

When we make a presentation, when we give a talk, even when we write an email, we are creating content thats like a story.

Knowledge@Wharton: What was the key takeaway?

Berger: I think the key takeaway is theres a science here. Often, we watch movies and think its just some magic, creative process where things gel together and theres no way to understand whether it will succeed or fail. Thats not exactly right. It feels like magic. Certainly, when were watching a great movie or reading a great book, we are caught up in the narrative and dont think about anything else. But theres a science. We can understand the science of stories, of content more generally, by understanding the progression of ideas. By using tools that have recently become available through computational linguistics and natural language processing, we can shed a light on some questions that might otherwise seem impossible to uncover.

Knowledge@Wharton: You measured three things: speed, volume, and circuitousness. Can you explain those and what you found out about them?

Berger: Think about traveling in a car, for example. Sometimes you drive faster, and sometimes you drive slower. What does it mean to drive faster? It means you cover more distance in the same amount of time. In an hour, you go a few extra miles when youre traveling at a greater speed.

Well, it turns out that we can say the same thing about stories, content, or narratives. Think about a story as a set of ideas that are unfurling over time. Maybe theres a wedding, for example, and theres the first scene in a wedding, and theres another scene in a wedding, and theres a scene after that about something else. We can measure the distance between those ideas, how similar or different they are.

Just like a car can go faster or slower in the same amount of time, a narrative, a story, or a piece of content, can go faster or slower as well. It can talk about two things that are very closely related, or it can move from one thing to another thing thats not so much related. You can see this in textbooks, for example. Imagine opening up an Earth science textbook from your high school years, and theres the beginning of a chapter that relates very much to what happens next in the chapter, which relates very much to what happens next in the chapter. If instead, you went from the beginning of one chapter to two or three chapters down, it would obviously be further away because the content is less relevant.

It turns out that there are these neat tools called embeddings that allow us to take text, embed it in a multidimensional space, and measure things like distance. We can take the first chunk of a movie, for example, and the next chunk of the movie, and look at whether theyre closer together or further apart. Are they traveling faster, moving before unrelated ideas, or are they traveling slower, sort of plodding from one idea to the next?

Volume is the same sort of idea, but less moment to moment and more general. If you think about a story, some stories cover a lot of ground. They cover so many different things that arent necessarily related. Other stories are a bit more narrow. They cover a small set of things that are closer together. In addition to measuring the speed, you can also measure the volume. Imagine a story having a set of points. We can take all of those points together and ask, are they closer together or further apart? For example, if someone goes for a 4-mile run, they could have gone four times around a 1-mile track, or they could have gone on one 4-mile loop.

We can understand the science of stories, of content more generally, by understanding the progression of ideas.

Circuitousness is, how direct are the ideas? Are we moving through the shortest path possible through these points, or are we taking a more indirect or circuitous route? If you think about the numbers of a clock on the wall, the fastest way to go through those twelve points would just be to go around the circle, hitting each of them in turn. But you could also go from twelve to six to one to seven to three to nine, and so on. Youd cover the same points, and the volume would be the same. Its still all inside that clock, but it would be a much more indirect route.

Its the same thing with stories, right? Do stories take a very linear path from idea to next idea to next idea, or do they double-back, touching on similar things that theyve touched on before, before moving on to unrelated ones in the future? We measured each of these three things in everything from movies and books as well as television shows and academic papers.

Knowledge@Wharton: What can marketers learn from these findings?

Berger: Whether were a marketer or a leader, whoever we are, we are constantly creating content. We may not think of ourselves as speakers or writers, but we spend a lot of time speaking and a lot of time writing. In fact, almost everything we do on a daily basis involves language either producing it through writing or speaking or consuming it through reading or listening. As marketers, as leaders, as others, these findings really help us think about how to better lay out the content whether that content is a presentation, an argument, a speech in a way that will impact the audience. Should we try to cover a lot of ground or relate the ideas more closely to one another? If were covering the same ground, should we use a very direct path or more of a spiral, where we go back to the same ideas again and again to deepen the understanding around those things?

I think these findings have implications for content engineering. If Im Netflix, for example, and Im trying to figure out which movies to green light, or Im trying to figure out whether a certain book is going to make The New York Times bestseller list, these tools can do that. Indeed, our research shows that we can predict how successful movies and TV shows and academic papers are going to be. But I think these findings also have really useful implications for us. We think about telling stories as something we do for fun, but we are constantly telling stories. We are constantly laying out narratives to explain a set of ideas, and this work has some clear implications for how we should lay out those ideas.

Almost everything we do on a daily basis involves language either producing it through writing or speaking, or consuming it through reading or listening.

Knowledge@Wharton: In this study, you covered specifically movies, television shows, and academic papers. But I am curious about another channel that you did not study, which is social media. Posting on social media has become a very convenient form of mass communication for individuals and brands. What do you think you could apply from this study to social media?

Berger: Academic papers are not the same as TV shows or movies, and thats exactly why we wanted to look at them. Because while we can measure the speed and volume and circuitousness of both movies and academic papers, the features that matter, and the way they matter, are very different. While speed is good for movies and TV shows, its bad for academic papers. While volume is good for academic papers, its bad for TV shows.

To think about your social media question, we need to think about what were hoping the language, the ideas, the arguments were outlining will do. Are we hoping theyll be fun and engaging and interesting and stimulating? Then speed can be good and volume may be bad. In other cases, if were trying to impart knowledge, if were trying to get people to understand something or convince people of something, a different set of those features might be valuable.

Were actually doing some work right now on social media. One question we had is, think about yourself as a brand or an influencer. Not only is there sort of a speed or volume or circuitousness of one piece of content, but you can think about the volume across multiple pieces of content. Today, Im going to post about X. Next week, should I post about something similar or different? Should I post two buckets of things, or should I post one? How should I think about laying out my content strategy to increase the impact of that content? Were taking things like influencers and brands, and calculating things like speed and volume over time across the content they produce to look at how different ways of laying out ideas may be more or less impactful.

Knowledge@Wharton: Is there anything else about this study that is particularly salient for marketers and advertisers?

Berger: Marketers and advertisers are constantly creating content. Whether its ads, whether its content marketing, and as salespeople, were making sales pitches. And these findings have some clear implications for how we should lay out our ideas. For example, when were pitching something, should we jump from benefit to benefit, or should we focus on one thing rather than going into many? In ads, should we try to talk about everything a product can do, or stay a little bit more focused? As marketers think more and more about content marketing across a variety of platforms, I think these findings have some clear implications for improving content marketing, making ads more effective, and helping salespeople sell a bit better.

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The Science of Blockbusters: What Makes a Good Story? - Knowledge@Wharton - Knowledge@Wharton