The weekly Digital Download is out. Get all the Marketing hot news, quick tips, and highlights you need to get you through the week, rolled up into a five-minute read.

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In the News

Hot Off the Press

• Clubhouse Comes to Android After More Than a Year of iOS Exclusivity
  • After more than a year of iOS exclusivity, social audio platform Clubhouse is releasing its Android app. It will be available in beta on Google’s mobile OS today in the US, allowing users to sign up and participate in its audio-only chat rooms. However, Clubhouse says the platform will remain invite-only for now, meaning it’s still not open to just anyone, “as part of the effort to keep the growth measured,” the company said in a statement. Over the summer, the company plans to begin migrating what it says are millions of iOS users who have been waitlisted while the company built the app’s infrastructure.
• Twitter’s New Tip Jar Sparks Privacy Backlash
  • Twitter’s new Tip Jar feature, which enables users to monetize their tweets, has led to immediate privacy issues. Jar launched Thursday, allowing content creators to add a button to their profile that allows others to pay them without leaving Twitter. Journalists, nonprofits and other experts can use the feature as well. Once the service went live, complaints surfaced on social media from Rachel Tobac, CEO of Social Proof Security, who is testing Tip Jar. Tobac said that when a person sends a tip using PayPal, the recipient gets the sender’s physical address.

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• Twitter Is Now Letting Anyone with Over 600 Followers Host a Live Chat on Spaces
  • Twitter announced on Monday that anyone with over 600 followers can now host a live audio conversation on its new chat platform Spaces. The tool works on Twitter for iOS and Android. “When someone you follow starts or speaks in a Space, it’ll appear at the top of your timeline as a purple bubble for as long as it’s live. The company also announced that it plans to open up Ticketed Spaces to a limited group in the coming months as a way for users to earn revenue from their chats.

• Instagram Officially Launches New Captions Sticker for Stories
  • After testing them out over the past few months, Instagram officially launched its new captions sticker in Instagram Stories, providing another way for users to expand the accessibility of their Stories content. When you add the new Captions sticker to captured video, it will auto-generate text captions based on the audio input. The auto-captions won’t be 100 per cent accurate all the time, but users will be able to edit the text, as well as the text color, position and font, to best suit your presentation.

• Instagram Lets People List Their Pronouns on Their Profiles
  • Instagram is making it easier to address people by their defined pronouns. The company announced that it’s allowing people to add up to four pronouns to their profile, which they can then choose to display publicly or only to their followers. (Users under 18 will have this setting turned on by default.) Instagram says people can fill out a form to have a pronoun added, if it’s not already available, or just add it to their bio instead.

• LinkedIn Shares New Insights into Effective B2B Marketing Campaigns [Infographic]
  • When you think of the term ‘B2B marketing’, what color immediately comes to mind? Was it gray? It was gray, right? The very term lacks emotion – it feels boring, bland, sparking a PowerPoint feed of buzzword-riddled campaign examples sliding by inside your head. Do they have to be so… forgettable? That’s the question LinkedIn poses in this new overview of B2B campaigns which it says break the mold and enhance brand connection as a result.

• Scoop: TikTok launching jobs service for Gen Z
  • TikTok is testing a tool for brands to recruit employees. The pilot program is designed to help people find jobs on TikTok and connect with companies looking to find candidates. It’s also meant to help brands use TikTok as a recruitment channel. Users can post a TikTok video resume to the site rather than a traditional resume. The idea is for users to give an elevator pitch or work experience summary via the video in a unique way.

Creativity

Out of the Box

• These Ingenious iPhone Wallpapers Ensure Your Battery Never Dies
  • If dropping battery life freaks you out, then Ben Vessey’s smart iPhone wallpaper trick might help. The wallpaper rotates depending on the battery state. You get to choose a different home and lock screen for healthy battery, low battery, and charging mode. That way, a quick glance at the screen will tell you all you need to know about it. iOS doesn’t offer this kind of iPhone dynamic wallpaper functionality, however. So Vessey took one of the great iOS features that could pull it off, the Shortcuts automation app built into iOS.
• Extra Gum’s Back-to-Normal Ad Is a Euphoric Release
  • The amount of death, economic anxiety, social isolation and political strife that’s occurred over the past 14 months or so is something anyone who’s lived through it will never forget. But change is coming. Life under lockdown will end. Soon. In a two-minute spot, Extra gum imagines a morning when normal returns all at once. A woman receives a text informing her it’s OK to meet in person again. A man shaves his beard. Everyone logs off Zoom. Disheveled people emerge from their homes in disbelief. Couples meet in a park and begin making out. There’s lots of making out. Céline Dion’s power ballad “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” plays throughout.

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• Real-Life, Exhausted Moms Star in Carhartt’s Mother’s Day Ad
  • Motherhood is exhausting. And if you’re a mom who does a manual job, it may be even more so. That’s the message from Carhartt, the workwear and outdoor apparel brand, which pays tribute to those moms who do a “shift that never ends” in a Mother’s Day ad this year. It’s about as far from a traditional, gentle portrayal of motherhood as you can get. The spot, created in-house, was directed Pam Thomas of Community films, who cast real-life laborer moms, such as farmers, welders, electricians, to authentically portray the physical heft, exhaustion and joy of being a working mother.

Tricks of the Trade

Tips and Tricks

• Your Brand Isn’t Your Logo, Blog, Or Instagram Post
  • Your brand isn’t your Instagram post. It’s not your logo or your blog. These are expressions of a brand — how you could potentially bring your brand to life, but it’s not the core of who you are, what you believe in, what you do and why you do it. A successful brand is built by layers. A strong foundation ensures that your messaging and marketing are effective and efficient. But you got a lot of these faux marketers out there telling you to prioritize your socials and hack those algorithms without the foundation. Sort of like wheeling in furniture when the floors and walls haven’t been built and watching that thousand-dollar couch tumble into Hades. You see how this can all go so terribly wrong?

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• Everything You Need to Know About Twitter Spaces, the Clubhouse Rival
  • The question on every marketer’s mind right now: Should I be planning to integrate Spaces into my Twitter marketing strategy? Before answering that question, make sure you have a solid Twitter marketing strategy. Using the newest bells and whistles won’t help if you don’t have a strong foundation, such as having genuine conversations with your followers and knowing your brand voice. Once you’ve got that locked down, here are some thought starters for how your business can use Twitter Spaces.

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