Weekend Slices: Coke wants to teach us the alphabet <> NYT's 10 million subscriber goal is within sight <> FB and Twitter set sights on the newsletter game <> Why your company should be experimenting
Coke is launching cans with letters of the alphabet on them in 40 countries in Latin America reports Design Taxi:
“The brand surprises once again and launches single serve packaging with the letters of the alphabet, opening even more possibilities. An initiative that will reach more than 40 countries in Latin America and invites people to express themselves and share messages saying what they are open to in 2021, a year that comes with so many hopes and expectations,” Coca-Cola’s marketing vice-president Javier Meza said.
Unique literacy program, one must say.
The New York Times (NYT) added 627,000 net paid digital subscribers in Q4 2020, taking its total subscribers to 7.5 million. Of that, 6.7 million are digital. From an Axios piece:
The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal have 3 million and 2.46 million digital subscribers respectively, showing how far ahead the NYT is of the competition. What is interesting is the break up of the digital subscribers:
While news added 425,000 subs in the last quarter, cooking, games (crossword is a large chunk) and audio added almost half that number. The need to shift to a digital subscription focus becomes clear when one sees the advertising story. This Poynter piece tells us that print advertising was down 37.9% compared to the fourth quarter of 2019 and digital advertising was off too. Print subscriptions and single-copy sales continue to fall both daily and for Sunday.
Has the pandemic hastened the end of the middle manager? This McKinsey article debates the pros and cons:
There’s something even about the term “middle management” that denigrates the value people bring in leading the assignments of teams, leading a school, leading a plant, leading the learning and development capability within HR. Those are all examples of what some people would call middle management. But they’re vital—much more important than the stereotype that, unfortunately, the middle-management term might conjure.
According to Business Insider, riding on a NYT snippet, Facebook is getting ready to spoil Substack’s lunch.
Facebook's new venture would be attached to the New York-based Facebook Journalism Project, and according to The Times, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is green-lighting the initiative and called for a team of engineers to build the platform.
"We want to do more to support the independent journalists and experts who are building businesses and audiences online," Campbell Brown, vice president for global news partnerships at Facebook told The Times. "We're exploring ways to help them benefit from the news products we've built, like Facebook News and subscriptions, while also building new tools to complement what journalists already find useful."
Twitter announced that it wants to create a better place for writers. And they are hoping to do that with their acquisition of Revue.
To jumpstart our efforts, Twitter has acquired Revue, a service that makes it free and easy for anyone to start and publish editorial newsletters. Revue will accelerate our work to help people stay informed about their interests while giving all types of writers a way to monetize their audience – whether it’s through the one they built at a publication, their website, on Twitter, or elsewhere.
Taco Bell is driving growth through multiple innovations: delivery tie-ups, cantina launches, new menus with established brands, plant based exclusive offerings. Read how it’s staking the claim to be the world’s most innovative franchise.
And riding on the pandemic experience, Indian FMCG companies are gearing up to launch digital first brands, reports Mint.
“The pandemic has led to a shift in the shopping behaviour of consumers with the propensity for online shopping increasing. Targeting this emerging trend, we have already started launching a series of products exclusively for online markets. In the past few months, we have launched several products, especially for e-commerce, such as Dabur Apple Cider Vinegar, a ‘Dabur Baby Range’ with eight products apart from 100% cow ghee, organic honey, Himalayan forest honey. Many more such online-exclusive innovations are in the pipeline," said Mohit Malhotra, chief executive, Dabur India.
Experiments reduce risk, increase chances of success and speeds up go-to-market. This post makes a decent pitch.
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