Whoever is doing PR for wolves is doing a great job: 74% of Montana residents now say they are “tolerant” or “very tolerant” of the animal, which is a huge favorability jump from the state’s first wildlife poll in 2012 when only 41% of Montanans were cool with Canis lupus. There is still one crowd they need to win over: Montana’s wolf hunters, 100% of whom said they were “tolerant” or “very tolerant” of wolf hunting.
In today’s email:
TikTok: Shopping center first, social media platform second?
Around the web: Edible prayers, an educational dino, and more.
👇 Listen: Will TikTok’s QVC impression alienate its users?
The Big Idea
When did TikTok turn into a shopping mall?
The video app is starting to look a little less like social media and a little more like QVC.
2024-02-01T00:00:00Z
Sara Friedman
Have you noticed that your TikTok For You page has fewer cute animal videos and way more stuff for sale?
Same — and we miss the puppies. TikTok Shop launched in September, and things haven’t quite been the same since.
It brought with it a dedicated shop tab to the app’s home screen, live shopping, shoppable ads, and creator affiliate programs.
In November, US users spent ~$363m on TikTok Shop purchases, up from $260m in October.
The platform has ~200k merchants and ~100k creators selling through its affiliate program.
And with 150m app users in the US alone, a shop tab on every FYP means a lot of new customers for brands and creators alike.
It’s not all sunshine and rainbows
TikTok Shop’s 2023 losses were estimated to have surpassed $500m. While that might sound bad, it pales in comparison to the $110B+ in sales parent company ByteDance earned in 2023.
This year, TikTok is eyeing brick and mortar, with plans to open studios where creators can livestream and sell products to their followers.
The studios, slated to open in several cities starting with Los Angeles, are modeled after Douyin, a Chinese short-form video app also owned by ByteDance whose ecommerce arm makes $200B a year.
Needless to say…
… not everyone is crazy about the shopping takeover. And TikTok’s growth, while still on the rise, has slowed, with some wondering if the shop is to blame.
For those who aren’t fans, we have bad news: TikTok is testing a feature that would make all posts shoppable using tech that automatically identifies featured objects and directs users to find similar ones in the app’s shop.
With TikTok already going the way of QVC, we can only assume that infomercials are right around the corner — and we’ve been dreaming of that Marvin’s Magic pen set since the ’90s.
Free Resource
Boost your brand by tapping into TikTok
Lookin’ at you, old-timer. And smiling. (Love you.)
But you’re probably scared to make the jump to TikTok. It’s not even the cloud around regulations, it’s the clout implications — we understand.
In such strange digital corners, just take a page from the pros. Our TikTok marketing guide will teach you how to make engaging content and grow your reach with short-form videos.
So withholding: The Federal Reserve knows everyone wants to see interest rate cuts, but it’s not happening yet. Preaching patience, the Fed signaled it’ll hold rates steady until it’s confident that recent inflation decreases are sustainable.
SNIPPETS
Elon Musk’s $55.8B pay package, granted by Tesla’s board in 2018, was voided by a Delaware court. Tesla may appeal the canceled payout.
Universal Music Group is pulling its music from TikTok over a contract dispute. The move would bar TikTok’s 1B+ users from using music by Universal artists like Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, and Rihanna in their videos.
Walmart is making a multimillion-dollar investment to open 150 more US stores over the next five years, adding to its ~4.6k locations nationwide.
TV moves: Allen Media Group, owner of the Weather Channel, is offering $30B to buy Paramount Global and its assets, including CBS, Nickelodeon, MTV, and Paramount+.
Huh: Despite all this talk of Gen Z and their TikTok, CEO Shou Chew said that the average age of US users is 30+ during Wednesday’s Senate hearing on child safety.
Oh: A study of 137 large US companies found that returning to the office doesn’t affect productivity or profitability, and that managers used mandates to “reassert control” and scapegoat employees.
Adidas will attempt to sell its remaining $325m worth of Yeezy inventory. The apparel company had initially considered writing off the goods, which were left over when it cut ties with rapper Ye (AKA Kanye West).
Hot wheels: You wouldn’t expect a school bus startup to raise $140m, but that’s what Zum just did. Zum, whose electric bus fleet already serves 4k+ US schools, plans to add unused energy from its buses’ batteries back into the energy grid.
Don't miss this...
How do fish eggs, memes, and marketing fit together? Check out The Lead to see what marketers can learn from the Gen Z caviar bump.
Watch
Your vegan leather boots may not save the world
The price tag can only go so high on a “pleather” couch. It’s hard to sustain a high-end boutique selling “artificial leather” jackets.
“Vegan leather” goods, on the other hand… Well, now we’re talking. Who wouldn’t gladly spend their last dollar to join the upper echelon of cow-loving trendsters?
The latest episode of our “What’s the Catch?” series digs into the increasingly popular leather alternative that’s got a hold of fashion designers and upholsterers, and asks the big questions:
Is all this “cruelty-free” vegan leather actually doing any good for cows?
How about the environment?
Or, perhaps, is this just a clever marketing ploy to disguise the fact that you’re buying plastic-based products?
Learning more about sustainable fashion seems like it’d be a good look on you.
There are thousands of companies valued at $1B+. How many clues do you need to identify today’s billion-dollar brand?
Clue 1: The Canadian man who started this empire wound up owning 148 newspapers and 138 magazines in his lifetime — and that’s the comparatively boring part of his career: he once sold car parts, washing machines, and radios, and owned an ice-cream cone manufacturer and a North Sea oil exploration company.
Clue 2: Back in 2008, the average college student was spending ~$805-$1.2k annually on textbooks. But you could only be so mad at this company for that — it divested its once-dominant textbook division in 2007.
Clue 3: The company entered the global stage in a big way in 2008, acquiring a legendary British brand known for news scoops (most prominently, it was the first agency to report Abraham Lincoln’s assassination).
👇 Scroll to the bottom for the answer 👇
Why, Though?
Why, though? Apple’s too-expensive gaming console
Apple tried to get into gaming once. It was just too dang expensive.
2024-02-01T00:00:00Z
Juliet Bennett Rylah
Tomorrow, Apple will drop its long-anticipated Vision Pro, a spatial computing headset that starts at ~$3.5k.
For that amount of dough, we hope it doesn’t go the way of another Apple device: the Apple Pippin.
Apple’s great…
… at a lot of stuff, but it’s never quite broken into the $214B+ video game industry.
Macs weren’t designed for games, so studios didn’t develop for them, leaving little incentive for gaming enthusiasts to choose Apple.
As of January 2023, ~96% of Steam players gamed on Windows machines.
The Apple Pippin, released in 1996, was Apple’s attempt to get into console gaming, via a partnership with Japanese toymaker Bandai.
How it worked
Like other consoles, it plugged into a TV, but used a pared-down Apple operating system that made it significantly faster.
Much like the Vision Pro, Apple envisioned the Pippin as an everything machine, offering games, entertainment, and education. It could connect to the internet, support a keyboard and mouse, and came with a wireless controller, perTechRadar.
So why wasn’t it a hit?
Also much like the Vision Pro, it was significantly more expensive than its rivals; Pippin was ~$600 ($1.1k+ today), compared to Nintendo 64 and PlayStation, both ~$300.
Developers were also hesitant to sign on due to a lack of info from a short-staffed Apple team, resulting in only 25 released games and ~42k units sold.
In 1997, a returning Steve Jobs pulled the plug on all Macintosh clones — computers produced by other companies but running Apple software — including Pippin.
But today?
Apple’s spinning many of those same plates across Apple TV, Apple Arcade, macOS Sonoma’s Game Porting Toolkit, and, of course, the Vision Pro.
And consumers may be ready for it this time, with 200k+ Vision Pros sold in the first 10 days of preorders. We’ll find out in the coming weeks.
AROUND THE WEB
🎥 On this day: In 1887, Harvey Wilcox registered Hollywood — a 160-acre community where Wilcox hoped people would live free of alcohol and other vices — with the Los Angeles County Recorder. In 1910, Hollywood became part of LA and its name associated with the burgeoning film industry.
