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Hello Marketing Sharks, I'm here today to ask you to please invest your time and trust in attending Marketingland Festival. The ask is actually not that big but I get so nervous around you. You're my friends and this is our 4th year throwing Marketingland Festival and I live to please you. No. To impress you. Good news is as we've grown our budgets have increased. And it's free to you. But expensive to us. You know what that means. Party tricks!! Ari said I can't get Weezer, but the theme is Y2K so we agreed to revisit on our date night this week. Marketing couple problems. Weezer may not be there. Please join us, dear Marketing Sharks. It's on March 4th, 2027. It's free, but it shouldn't be. But it is, and I really, really will get my feelings hurt if you don't come. As Jennifer Lawrence said when she joined Instagram, if you think bad things about me I'll quit. Love you, thank you, sign up for free and tell your friends. Weezer hates to play to an empty webinar. Was this email forwarded to you? Sponsored by Sprout Social Jay Schwedelson. Lia Haberman. Josh Rangel from Ogilvy. 5 TAKEAWAYS FROM LAST YEAR'S MARKETINGLAND FESTIVALI remember it well. I wore a cow costume and my 3 month old son wore a cow costume and it was Halloween and we were sitting in our little Miami apartment just a couple of cows hanging out with thousands upon thousands of our Marketing Besties. If his 1st word isn't omnichannel I have failed. Let's go back to that time. Please find my 5 biggest lessons from the last time we did this. I hope it convinces you to join us for FREE at the very next Marketingland Festival. I won't dress up as a cow. At least I hope I won't. 1️⃣. Want Better Feedback? Ask for Advice.Dr. Cialdini's Take: "If you ask for someone's opinion, you get a critic. If you change one word and you ask them for their advice, you get a partner, you get a collaborator." You know how brands love talking about co-creation and customer feedback. Survey your customers, get their input, build community. It works. People who help shape your products become more loyal, even when things go wrong. But most brands screw up the ask. They send out "can we get your opinion on this" and suddenly the customer becomes a critic. They step back. They analyze. They find flaws. Change one word to "advice" and everything shifts. Now they're in the boat with you. As Dr. Cialdini put it at Marketingland, people don't sink the boats they're riding in. Takeaway: Go through your surveys, emails, and customer research requests. Find every place you say "opinion" and change it to "advice." Test it in your next customer interview or feedback form. Track whether the quality of responses improves. 2️⃣. Performance Can Drive Growth. Product Gives You a Floor.Stefani's Take: "Product-led models build deeper equity and loyalty and organic demand. With that said, you have something to fall back on. You're not gonna drop yourself off a cliff if your new collection doesn't hit." Stefani runs growth at STAUD, where product was the hero and marketing built demand around intentional product stories. She also ran growth at Savage X Fenty, where performance marketing and funnel velocity were the main levers pulled to unlock scale. Both worked. But they carry different risk profiles. A marketing-led, performance-heavy business can drive faster growth short term. But without strong product resonance underneath it, you risk rising CAC, customer churn, and an endless cycle of media optimization just to stand still. A product-led business has a baseline to fall back on when one campaign or collection underperforms. Takeaway: Audit your current growth model. Are you leaning almost entirely on performance marketing to manufacture demand, or does your product generate organic pull on its own? If it's the former, you don't have a floor. Start investing in the product loyalty and organic demand that gives you something to stand on when a single channel underperforms. 3️⃣. Visibility Isn't About The Algorithm. It's About Picking The Right Doorways.Sophie's Take: "The key isn't to be everywhere. The key is to be strategic about which doors you walk through and how you show up when you do." Sophie grew Pretty Little Marketer to overn600,000 followers starting with a Canva account and 0 experience. Her framework for visibility wasn't spreading across every platform. It was picking the platforms where her ideal audience actually was, then matching content format to that platform's actual strength. She never posts Reels on Instagram, despite everyone telling her video is king. Carousels are what drive her growth on the explore page because the format matches her content's purpose: educational breakdowns people want to save and share. Treating every platform the same instead of playing to its specific strengths is where most visibility strategies quietly fail. Takeaway: List every platform you're currently active on. For each 1, ask: is this content format actually suited to this platform, or am I just copy-pasting the same thing everywhere? Pick 1 platform to go deep on with a format built specifically for how people browse and search there, instead of spreading thin trying to be everywhere equally. 4️⃣. Playing It Safe Has a Price.Nick's Take: "There's a cost to not being bold. Doing something for the sake of doing it and doing it because it won't get you fired is just an inevitable decline for your brand in the long term." Nick helped turn TikTok, Taco Bell, and Hulu into cultural moments. His honest take: a lot of his biggest career wins happened because the brand was in a crisis so severe that doing the same old thing guaranteed failure. That forced boldness. But most brands live in the dangerous middle ground. No crisis forcing bold action, but also no real incentive to take creative risks. So they default to safe, forgettable work that technically won't get anyone fired, but also won't move the business. His filter for whether an idea is bold and brilliant versus just off-brand: does it ladder up to real business objectives, or is it just noise for the sake of noise. Takeaway: Look at your last quarter of campaigns. How many were created because they felt safe and defensible versus because they were the right bet for the brand? Pick 1 upcoming campaign and deliberately push it further than your instinct says is comfortable. Then measure it against actual business objectives, not just engagement. 5️⃣. Your Customer’s Brain Is the Ultimate Algorithm.Richard's Take: "Looking at what are the behavioral science principles that you can draw on, learning from some of the world's best brands that can improve the effectiveness of your marketing." Richard Shotton, author of The Choice Factory and The Illusion of Choice, spent his session breaking down research from his newest book, Hacking the Human Mind. The through line: brands winning right now aren't relying on gut instinct. They're applying tested psychological principles with precision, often with a single word change producing double-digit lifts in performance. That's not a coincidence. It's a repeatable discipline. Takeaway: Pick 1 campaign or piece of messaging you're running right now. Research 1 behavioral science principle (loss aversion, social proof, reciprocity, anything well-documented) and apply it deliberately to that campaign. Test it against your current version. Track the lift. Build a habit of testing psychology, not just creative execution. Sponsored by Vibe.co Lectric eBikes makes the best-selling e-bike in the US. Turns out, their customers were streaming instead. Result: a 5.69 incremental ROAS. Specifics to steal in this case study: IN A MEME  OPEN TABS 🎃: Stock-up time. Did you register, Marketing Shark? Your friend, Daniel | ||||||||
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