As if streaming wasn’t fragmented enough, audiences now have plenty of social media series to tune into, too.

• Short-form, original series like Brooklyn Coffee Shop, which satirizes café customers, and Bistro Huddy, which portrays a fictional restaurant with all characters played by creator Drew Talbert, are growing in popularity online, and brands seem eager to get in on the action.
• This year, Bratz wrapped Season 2 of its weekly TikTok series Alwayz Bratz, and jewelry brand Alexis Bittar released Season 4 of its social soap opera The Bittarverse.
• Meanwhile, beauty brand Tower 28 hired a writer’s PA from the HBO series The Sex Lives of College Girls to make a sketch comedy series about blush called The Blush Lives of Sensitive Girls.

TV magic: More than a decade ago, Chipotle released a four-part, 30-minute satirical web series called Farmed and Dangerous, and more recently, brands like L’Oréal and Pepsi have attempted to produce their own TV shows (while Zillow is getting front-row treatment in HGTV’s social media-to-TV show Zillow Gone Wild.) But with minutes-long shows geared toward today’s quick scrollers and vertical screens, this seems to be a new era for organic content, where the lines of advertising and entertainment continue to blur.

Bilt, Pretzelized, and Oatly are among the brands experimenting with the format, and we spoke to marketing execs from each one about what they’ve learned from investing in highly produced, sometimes unbranded social content.

Moving in: Whether you know it or not, you may have recently watched content from payments and commerce network Bilt.

Continue reading here.—KH

Google is all in on AI in its search results. For marketers who have long leaned on SEO best practices to show up in front of internet users, the old rules no longer apply.

“The guidelines that people were publishing even a year ago may not be relevant that much longer,” Simon Poulton, EVP of innovation and growth at the agency Tinuiti, told Marketing Brew.

Google users who are served AI-generated overviews at the top of their search results clicked on search-result links significantly less often than users who did not encounter AI summaries, according to a Pew Research Center report released in July.

• This shift, in which Google has essentially cut off search traffic to third-party sites, has been coined “Google Zero” and is upending search and creating some major challenges for brands that have used SEO as a way to drive traffic and maintain engagement.

As a result, SEO marketers find themselves looking to engineer new ways to keep users engaged and revisit what metrics are best in a new era of search.

“The entire industry is going through a relearning process right now,” Poulton said.

Continue reading here.—JS

“LinkedInfluencer” isn’t an official term at LinkedIn HQ, but that could soon change.

The Microsoft-owned networking platform created its first influencer program more than a decade ago, but, as video content has become more popular in recent years, its potential as a creator platform has only grown.

In 2021, LinkedIn added a “creator mode” for analytics and sharing, and in May, it expanded its in-stream video ad program to include the option to place ads against influencer content. At the same time, it launched original shows from known business figures like fashion designer Rebecca Minkoff and Sprinkles bakery founder Candace Nelson.

Even before the expansion, video consumption on LinkedIn was growing. In its latest earnings report, Microsoft reported that time spent watching videos on LinkedIn increased 36%, and the platform’s total revenue increased 7%.

“People are creating more content…People are consuming more of it,” Matt Derella, VP of LinkedIn marketing solutions, told us. “Folks on our platform who have the most credibility around topics that really matter to people are leaning into it, and that’s opening up the opportunity for us now to work with creators in a way that can help them not only drive reach, but build their business.”

As LinkedIn becomes more conducive to creators, it’s opening up the door to new kinds of content and advertisers on the platform—but creators and agency execs say there are still some growing pains when it comes to mastering the LinkedIn algorithm, data-sharing, and monetization options.

Continue reading here.—KH