Ecommerce

In my artist management course at the Roc Nation School of Music Sports & Entertainment, we explore how the wealthiest artists monetize their fandom. What we consistently find is that those who reach billionaire status do so not just through music consumption but by selling tangible products—whether it's liquor, makeup, apparel, etc. (Taylor Swift being a notable exception, largely due to her record-breaking Eras Tour). When I explain this to my students, I break it down like this: If Rihanna sells her newly released GLOSS BOMB STIX HIGH-SHINE GLOSS STICK for $25 USD and conservatively moves half a million units in a fiscal year, Fenty grosses $12.5 million USD. To match that figure through streaming alone, Rihanna's catalog would need to generate 2.5 billion streams, assuming a per-stream payout of $0.005. Now, consider Beyoncé as she launches her new whisky line, SirDavis, priced at $89 USD—a collaboration with LVMH-owned Moët Hennessy. If she sells, conservatively, 250,000 units in the first year, she'll gross $22.25 million USD. To achieve that same amount through streaming alone, Beyoncé’s catalog would need to amass 4.45 billion streams, again assuming a per-stream payout of $0.005. The key takeaway I emphasize to my students is that selling a product, whether it’s whisky or makeup, often proves far more profitable for an artist. This is why nearly every artist who has crossed into billionaire territory has had a product line that significantly boosted their net worth. Check out this insightful graphic from Trapital's Dan Runcie, featured in his Culture Report, which does a fantastic job explaining this phenomenon.

The Creator Economy is having its Moneyball moment: “There is an epidemic failure within the game to understand what is really happening.” Companies, brands, even presidential campaigns, are miscalculating influence and paying the price. Stop measuring only views and followers: The stark difference between Trump and Harris’s creator/influencer strategy (and their outcomes) has spotlighted that views are not a complete representation of influence. Creators are now like icebergs. Measuring their influence purely by views/followers is as effective as measuring an iceberg by only what you see above water–you’re missing 7/8th's of the story. Start measuring depth: Instead we need to measure influence along two axes, breadth AND depth. Breadth is measured in views and followers. Depth is measured in units like watch time, average revenue per fan (ARPF), and a myriad of other options. Combining these two axes X*Y (or the area) provides a much more accurate representation of a creator’s influence. While both Trump and Harris were effective in gaining earned media via views–only one candidate was simultaneously gaining depth. Parasocial relationships are not measured in breadth, they are measured in depth. In last night’s post election episode of 60 Minutes, Scott Pelley described a “connection, an emotion” that Trump supporters felt they “knew him and he knew us.” That is the definition of a parasocial relationship. That is depth. Measuring breadth AND depth also explains why the two biggest creators right now are live streamers: IShowSpeed and Kai Cenat. Both are able to combine the typical depth of a live streamer with the breadth of a short/long form video creator. The result is two creators at the top of the influence game. Not all views are made the same. Deepen your understanding of influence and you'll see much better results.

80k orders into TikTok Shop, here's what I've been surprised to learn.   1. Samples have only driven 7% of our TikTok Shop sales.   40% of orders come from product card. Of the 60% are driven by videos.   Product card: Customers organically finding our product on TikTok. These orders aren't charged commission. 🤌   Video: Most video sales are from affiliates who already have our product or they show our product image. On samples sent to affiliates, we get a 3 ROAS. Factoring halo sales on Amazon & DTC, it's a 6 ROAS (more in point 3). Half of our revenue from samples are from one affiliate. If you remove them, omni-channel ROAS is closer to a 3.   Product drop video posts from our own account can really work. Without commission owed, we can afford to put ad spend behind them.   2. TikTok Shop sales haven’t driven meaningful Simple Modern TikTok followers.   In the 6 months we sold 80k units on TikTok Shop, Simple Modern's TikTok follower count grew less than the previous 6 months.   Surprising to me considering we've driven 186m product impressions.   3. Over 100% halo effect between Amazon and Website.   When a product has a successful video driving TikTok Shop revenue, the bump on other eComm channels is clear. Typically we see more sales driven by TikTok videos on Amazon + DTC than TikTok Shop.   Customer trust is higher on Amazon and brand's websites.   The real magic is when TikTok videos goose Amazon listing placement permanently.   4. Revenue/video is flat once affiliates have more than 50k followers.   Followers: Revenue/video 0-1K: $13 1k-5k: $25 5k-10k: $40 10k-50k: $75 50+: $100   Affiliates with 50k followers have performed the same as 1m follower accounts. We have not engaged multi-million follower accounts with highly engaged audiences (celebrities).   5. Amazon best sellers don't drive our TikTok Shop business.   Products that have worked have had at least one of these qualities:  - Interesting  - New  - Relevant to culture or season  - Niche cult following (ex: Winnie the Pooh)   Our best sellers in retail typically don't have these qualities. These factors make inventory planning for TikTok Shop challenging.   6. Affiliates asking for 4+ samples are taking advantage of you.   We've sent 51 affiliates 4+ samples. Only one generated a sale.   13% of our total samples have been sent to grifters. 🙃   ************* TikTok Shop is a uniquely valuable channel since it's also a marketing engine.   It has required a different strategy from us and has been fun to learn.   I'd love to read what others have learned in the comments.

I'm convinced that Gen Z verticalized communities are one of the fastest paths to $1M+ in revenue - whether as a side hustle, bootstrapped startup, or venture-backed business. Here's why 👇 🌟 Look at TKS (The Knowledge Society) - charging $489/month + $1k deposit with 4,000+ active students. That's $24M+ annual revenue potential from a program focused on ambitious 13-17 year olds. 🌟 Ali Abdaal's Part-Time YouTuber Academy: 1,500+ students paying $1,499 per cohort = $2.2M+ per cohort teaching creator skills to young audiences. 🌟 Even micro-communities are crushing it - saw a TikToker selling out coffee experiences in her condo repeatedly. Imagine turning that into a $150/year "Serendipitous Society" membership with exclusive tastings, merch, and content. The business model is proven: - Low overhead (mainly community management) - High margins (digital-first with strategic IRL moments) - Sticky revenue (annual memberships) - Network effects (value increases with member quality) We're seeing this explode across verticals: - ZCON (Gen Z conference backed by LinkedIn, Yahoo, Spotify) - Creator Economy NYC (monetizing through brand partnerships) - The PR Habitat (PR professionals) - Her Game Plan (sports) - The Z List (consumer) - Build Clubs (AI) My prediction: By 2025, every profession will have its verticalized community involving Gen Z. Charge $1k/year, get 1,000 members = $1M revenue with minimal overhead. The playbook is simple but execution is key: 1. Pick your niche 2. Curate high-signal members 3. Create exclusive experiences 4. Add brand partnerships 5. Scale thoughtfully I run GenZtea, a global community across 21 countries, and I've never been more bullish on the space as we are partnering with big brands + universities. The opportunity is massive and we're just getting started. Here are some from my market map: Z Fellows (Cory Levy), The Knowledge Society (Hari Mahesh), Creator Economy (Brett Dashevsky), Fabrik (Jaclyn Pascocello & Gwen Wiscount), Whop (Keta Bagashvili), Girls Into VC (Isabella Mandis), Reach (Dylan Huey), STUDENTpreneurs , Build Club (Annie Liao 🇦🇺), Party Ventures (Nia Johnson), BUDDY (Claire Wright), Pie (Gustavo Casas), Swsh (Alexandra Debow), Partiful (Shreya M), AfterWork (Zoya Khan), Posh (Avante Price), Mindot (Natalie Abuchaibe), Monday Girl (Rachel Wong), Sigma Squared Society, Verci (Ami Yoshimura 🍵), Mighty Networks (Gina Bianchini), Changemakers (Yasmin Kahkesh), next play (Ben Lang), The PR Habitat (Damaryan Benton) Who else is building in this space? Drop your community below 👇 #GenZ #Community #StartUp #Future #Innovation #Entrepreneurship P.S. Want the full breakdown of the community landscape + opportunities? Check out my newsletter in the comments (next edition is all about market predictions 2025 with Gen Z lens)

Yesterday, in the flood of mind-blowing, benchmark-setting, GPU-melting AI announcements, it was easy to overlook the quiet little beta announcement coming out of Amazon - one that focuses less on the tech and more on the consumer, asking a question as old as innovation itself: “Cool tech bro, how do you monetize that tho?” Enter: Interest AI. ✨ Amazon’s new LLM-powered assistant, now in beta, lives inside the shopping app. It’s trained not on the open internet - but on YOU. What you’ve browsed, bought, returned, reviewed, streamed at 2 a.m., and forgotten in your cart. Ask it: “What’s a good beginner camera?” Get: “Here’s one based on your budget, your previous purchases, and your mild obsession with aesthetically pleasing home decor.” It doesn’t just answer questions. It answers your questions. Personalized, contextual, and commercial from the jump. But here’s the real play: Interest AI doesn’t just respond to intent - it generates it. It constantly scans Amazon’s massive, ever-expanding catalog to surface new items tied to your passions - travel, fitness, cooking, your cat’s wardrobe. It transforms how you discover, not just how you shop. It's not just a smarter search bar - it's a predictive, personalized discovery engine at scale. Interest AI not sexy. It won’t pass a Bar exam. But it might get you to click “Add to Cart.” And that, of course, is the point. Amazon isn’t chasing AGI. It’s chasing 💰 CLV (customer lifetime value) 💰 . While others build general-purpose LLMs, Amazon builds contextual commerce machines. This could quietly become one of the most monetizable use cases of LLMs we’ve seen to date. And it leans into Amazon’s real edge: first-party data, not foundational models. While the market experiments with AI co-pilots, Amazon just strapped a personalized sales engine to the world's biggest mall.

Testing and piloting AI for sales and marketing can be frustrating. That’s why Jomar Ebalida and I came up with the practical AI roadmap for marketing and GTM ops pros. This roadmap helps you figure out where to start, what to focus on, and how to scale AI initiatives in a way that’s grounded in operational reality. It’s structured in 3 phases: PREP: Evaluate your organization’s current state across data, tools, team skills, and funnel performance. PILOT: Select and test AI use cases based on your actual readiness data. (Diagram shows samples) Avoid guessing by letting the assessment drive decisions. ACTIVATE: Scale the pilots that show promise and embed them into core processes. Here are select projects worth walking through: 🔹 AI Readiness Assessment This project includes evaluating data quality, the state of your CRM, the maturity of your tech stack, and your team’s readiness to work with AI tools. It also includes a bowtie funnel analysis to help identify where your customer journey is breaking down. The outcome is a clear picture of which AI use cases are both valuable and feasible for your team to pursue. 🔹 AI SDR Agent: Outreach and Prospecting This agent is designed to support outbound sales by identifying high-potential accounts, generating personalized outreach messages, and helping SDRs scale without sacrificing relevance. It can help teams boost pipeline without overloading headcount. 🔹 AI QA and Compliance: Brand, Legal, Regulatory This workstream ensures that every piece of AI-generated content or decision logic meets the necessary internal standards. It supports brand consistency, regulatory requirements, and risk mitigation. This process should run in parallel with pilots and activations to ensure safe implementation. 🔹 AI Agents for Ops: QA Checks, Routing, and Campaign Setup This includes AI agents built to handle operational tasks such as verifying UTM links, auto-routing requests, or creating campaign templates. These agents are ideal for improving workflow speed while reducing manual errors and team bottlenecks. At the foundation of all of this is change management. Each phase of the roadmap includes a focus on enablement, training, adoption, metrics, and governance. Tools don’t generate value unless people are set up to use them properly. Which parts resonate with you? What would you change or add? PS: To learn more & access templates, subscribe for free to The Marketing Operations Leader Newsletter on Substack https://lnkd.in/g_3YC7BZ and to Jomar's newsletter at bowtiefunnel(dot)com. #marketing #martech #marketingoperations #ai #gtm

Hey Salespeople: Here is a collection of current use cases for AI in sales & CS: ** GenAI in Sales ** --> Draft messaging for personalized email outreach --> Generate post-call summaries with action items; draft call follow ups --> Provide real-time, in-call guidance (case studies; objection handling; technical answers; competitive response) --> Auto-populate and clean up CRM --> Generate & update competitive battlecards --> Draft RFP responses --> Draft proposals & contracts --> Accelerate legal review & red-lining (incl. risk identification) --> Research accounts --> Research market trends --> Generate engagement triggers (press releases; job postings; industry news; social listening; etc.) --> Conduct role-play --> Enable continuous, customized learning --> Generate customized sales collateral --> Conduct win-loss analysis --> Automate outbound prospecting -->Automate inbound response --> Run product demos --> Coordinate & schedule meetings --> Handle initial customer inquiries (chatbot; voice-bot / avatar) --> Generate questions for deal reviews --> Draft account plans ** Predictive AI in Sales ** --> Score leads & contacts --> Score /segment accounts (new logo) --> Automate cross-sell & upsell recommendations --> Optimize pricing & discounting --> Surface deal gaps / identify at-risk prospects --> Optimize sales engagement cadences (touch type; frequency) --> Optimize territory building (account assignment) --> Streamline forecasting (incl. opportunity probabilities; stage; close date) --> Analyze AE performance --> Optimize sales process --> Optimize resource allocation (incl. capacity planning) --> Automate lead assignment --> A/B test sales messaging --> Priortize sales activities ** GenAI in CS ** --> Analyze customer sentiment --> Provide customer support (chatbot; voice-bot / avatar; email-bot) --> Draft proactive success messaging --> Update & expand knowledge base (incl. tutorials, guides, FAQs, etc.) --> Provide multilingual support --> Analyze customer feedback to inform product development, support, and success strategies --> Summarize customer meetings; draft follow-ups --> Develop customer training content and orchestrate customized training --> Provide real-time, in-call guidance to CSMs and support agents --> Create, distribute, and analyze customer surveys --> Update CRM with customer insights --> Generate personalized onboarding --> Automate customer success touch-points --> Generate customer QBR presentations --> Summarize lengthy or complex support tickets --> Create customer success plans --> Generate interactive troubleshooting guides --> Automate renewal reminders --> Analyze and action CSAT & NPS ** Predictive AI in CS ** --> Predict churn; score customer health; detect usage anomalies, decision maker turnover, etc. --> Analyze CSM and support agent performance --> Optimize CS and support resource allocation --> Prioritize support tickets --> Automate & optimize support ticket routing --> Monitor SLA compliance

Loewe keeps winning on TikTok because they just get “the lore”. The Spanish luxury fashion house has quietly mastered something extremely valuable: authentic cultural integration through strategic partnerships with niche content creators who've built recognizable content formats. The two most recent examples showcase their approach: First there’s @anthonybackup9 who filmed himself literally just standing in front of passing train a bag in a hand and being all melancholic, listening to one of Lorde’s top hits “Buzzcut Season”. This video blew up, as it perfectly captures the nostalgia of this song as Lorde resurfaces in pop culture through her Charli XCX collaboration and upcoming album release. Loewe just asked him to recreate the video, handing him a branded bag and THE tomato bag (that’s a whole story in itself), letting the video speak for itself — no big changes, creative direction. The second example is their collaboration with @antthrowny, who started hammer throwing his boombox while listening to trending pop songs (Sabrina Carpenter’s pLeAsE pLeAsE pLeAsE ᵈᵒⁿᵗ ᵖʳᵒᵛᵉ ⁱᵐ ʳⁱᵍʰᵗ went VIRAL). And again — Loewe didn’t reinvent his content or impose their messaging: they simply integrated their product into his existing, proven format while he wore/threw their pieces naturally. This might be an interesting content formula and cast brands and marketeers could learn from: identify pop culture angles already gaining viral momentum, partner with creators who have cultural relevance (not a follower count!!) and execute product placement that feels native to the platform, creator and format. If you really want to create “authentic” branded content to better engage with potential consumers, this is the way to go. (Plus your marketing dollars might go much further as the cost per collab will likely be much lower than one big celebrity endorsement. (As always, you can find the videos in the comments)

GenZ trusts AI influencers more than humans. That's just the beginning of how AI will rewrite the entire commercial playbook in 2025. 6 trends to watch: 1️⃣ A Brave New SEO World SEO did not die as everyone expected. LLMs with search capabilities are still using things like backlinks and ranking to choose what information to surface. BUT, companies will also have to optimize content for LLM ingestion. Because LLMs don’t use keyword density to determine relevance and instead use high-dimensional semantic representation. To deal with this, Kieran Flanagan, SVP of Marketing at HubSpot, advises: “AI will cannibalize informational content. Keep your organic traffic with unique, research-based content“. 2️⃣ AI bots as brand ambassadors and influencers 46% of GenZers would be more interested in a brand if they used AI influencers (SproutSocial). This trend already started in 2024 (even Coach collaborated with Imma, a virtual Tokyo-based AI influencer), but it will pick up steam in 2025. 3️⃣ AI search will be used to sell you things Sarah Nesheim, Cofounder of Crafted, says: “AI powered search and chat experiences will make it criminally easy to buy something.” Google shopping, Perplexity’s Buy with Pro, TikTok shopping, etc. are all leveraging AI to streamline the path from search to purchase. 4️⃣ AI-Led Growth replaces Product-Led Growth Instead of sales-led or product-led sales motions, welcome to AI-led growth. Companies like 1mind are creating the AI Concierge experience. You'll be able to talk to an AI avatar to figure out whether a product is a fit for you. AI demos and AI sales calls will also become the default b/c they can work 24/7 and without scheduling tetris. 5️⃣ AI Sales Agents will Struggle, but Find their Niche AI for outbound sales will hit avoidance/skepticism in 2025, but they will emerge victorious. We will see an explosion in “microcampaigns” - using AI to curate a hyper-targeted and timely list of buyers based on rich and varied datasets. Yuriy Zaremba, CEO of AISDR predicts: “2025 will be the year of fully AI-automated micro-campaigns.” 6️⃣ The death of monthly subscriptions As AI costs are so unpredictable, we will see an accelerating shift to usage-based pricing, instead of monthly subscriptions. As Kyle Poyar, creator of GrowthUnhinged says: “We're moving away from charging for access to software and toward a model of charging for the work delivered by a combination of software and AI agents.” But companies who do this will need to figure out ways to estimate costs for users - otherwise it'll be a hard sell. In conclusion... 2025's winners won't just build with AI. They'll market with it, sell with it, and price for it. What's your strategy? #ai #technology #startups #2025 #artificialintelligence

Marketing in 2025 is not what you expect. AI and communities are rewriting every rule. The old funnel? It’s fading fast. I see brands using AI to automate, analyze, and predict. Tasks that took days now take seconds. But that’s not the real story. The real shift? People trust people, not ads. Communities drive the conversation. Gen Z is moving from search engines and public feeds to private, AI-powered spaces. Here’s what I’m seeing every day: → AI tools build smarter, faster campaigns → Community feedback shapes product and brand → User-generated content outperforms polished ads → Trust comes from voices, not logos I’ve spent 15+ years in growth marketing. I’ve seen trends come and go. But this is different. AI is not here to steal jobs-it’s here to help you grow. It gives you space to focus on what matters: Strategy. Storytelling. Real connection. If you’re still chasing traffic with old-school SEO and social hacks, you’re playing catch-up. Gartner predicts a 25% drop in search engine volume by 2026. Half of Gen Z will leave traditional social for AI-curated communities. Adapt or get left behind. Here’s how I’m staying ahead: - I use AI for insights, not shortcuts - I build campaigns around community, not clicks - I test, learn, and listen (yes, even to my basset hound 🐶) The future of marketing is personal, fast, and driven by trust. How are you shifting your strategy for 2025? What’s one thing you’re doing to keep up with AI and community-led change? Let’s connect-there’s a lot to learn, and even more to build. 🚀