In this episode of Do This, Not That, host Jay Schwedelson provides a quick update on current marketing trends, election-related SMS marketing, and the impact of Apple's iOS 18 update on email marketing. He also shares some personal thoughts on board games and TV shows.

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Best Moments:

(00:58) Election's impact on SMS marketing campaigns

(01:56) Statistics on spam text messages in October

(02:58) Apple's iOS 18 release and its impact on marketing

(04:42) Testing results on iPhone 15 users and email engagement

(06:28) Oprah's list of favorite things and retro board games

(07:24) Jay's thoughts on Scrabble rules

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Foreign welcome to do this not that the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins and pitfalls to avoid. Also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that.

We are back for what's up this week from the do this not that podcast presented by Maral. This is our super short episode where we break down what's going on this week in business and marketing and life.

And then we still have our short Ask Us Anything later in the week and our big tips episode at the end of the week. So what's going on this week? Well, you may have heard, but there's an election going on right now. Super fun times.

Cannot wait for all this to wrap up. But super interesting things related to the election as it ties in with marketing.

I don't know if you've noticed, but we've all been getting inundated with a ton of SMS marketing campaigns. It has been bananas. And the thing that's interesting, tying in this week specifically to SMS marketing.

You know, the text based marketing on our phones and whatnot. Overall marketing campaigns from non political parties, non political action committee messaging, SMS marketing campaigns from regular brands.

Performance is down about 30% in the last 30 days, which makes a lot of sense because we're almost like tuning all of the SMS messaging out right now. And Robo Killer just released some data for the month of October 24th. They just released it now because we're at the beginning of November.

Do you know how many spam text messages were sent out of the United States in the month of October? 19.2 billion spam texts. That's nearly 63 spam texts for every person in the United States. Yeah.

So it's going to be really interesting to see how SMS rebounds after this is all over. One of two things going to happen.

Either SMS marketing is going to become an even bigger deal for general marketing because we're all more accustomed to reacting to these promotions because the political text messaging has been wild, or we're going to be even more turned off to it like we are right now because it was super annoying.

So other things going on this week that I think is really fascinating is so we all know now that Apple released their latest operating system on our phones. IOS 18 was released one week ago right now. And for those of you who don't realize it, if you have an iPhone.

IOS 18 has been a giant update to everything on our phones, our mail app, how we text, there's a lot of AI features, all sorts of stuff. And we did an analysis of what the impact has been on marketing in the last week since iOS 18 got released.

Now, what's interesting is the first question you have to ask yourself, how big of an impact is them releasing this iOS 18 update really have on anything so far? Because it's only been one week.

Well, Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, came out and said iPhone users updating to iOS 18, they updated twice as fast than they did for iOS 17. They're seeing a massive migration really quickly.

So we would then be led to believe that it's going to impact marketing in a big way really quickly, because one of the biggest changes to iOS 18 is all the changes to the mail app, that blue icon where we check our email on our phones.

Now, you may have seen leading into all this, that the big change coming to the mail app is it's going to have buckets, very similar to how Gmail has the promotions tab and all these other tabs.

IOS18, the update on our phones, is now gonna have all these buckets, has a bucket, a primary tab, an updates tab, a promotions tab, where a lot of the email offers are going, and a transactions tab.

So what we did was World data research ran a bunch of tests since Thursday, so just a few days ago, and we ran tests to 200,000 known iPhone 15 users. Now, what does that mean? IPhone 15 is the physical model of the iPhone. So you might have an iPhone 12, an iPhone 14, iPhone 15.

Only those people with an iPhone 15 or higher, okay, like an iPhone 16, the new iPhone, so you have an iPhone 15 or higher, are able to leverage all the new AI functionality and all the improvements to the mail app, where we check our email.

So we did a bunch of campaigns to 200,000 contacts that we know are iPhone 15 users because we wanted to see the impact on engagement that all this bucketing of emails has done. You know, all the fact that now I can bucket emails to go into the promotions tab versus the primary tab, and all this different type of stuff.

So what did we find out in the last few days from this testing?

Well, so far the good news, okay, is that literally there's been no impact click throughs for both business campaigns and consumer campaigns to this audience. We saw no statistically relevant changes in performance. Some campaigns even went up slightly. So what does this all mean?

This means that as of right now, and at least for the foreseeable future.

I wouldn't spend a lot of energy trying to navigate the different tabs and buckets that iOS18 is doing within the Mail app because as of right now, we've not seen any data that causes us a serious level of concern.

Now, as more people migrate to newer phones and this rolls out even more, we're going to continue to check this analysis, but so far so good on the big Mail app update on all of our phones. So what nonsense is going on this week? Well, I saw Oprah came out with her list of her favorite things.

Some people love Oprah, Some people don't love Oprah. I think Oprah's pretty awesome.

But there's no doubt about I don't care who you her list of favorite things that she comes out with every year, which is like the her favorite items to buy for gifts or whatever. It's always awesome. It is an incredible list.

I'm not paid by this company. I don't even know who they are. They just look really cool. And I want to buy this retro Scrabble because I think it's awesome.

But speaking of that, I'm just curious about Scrabble. Like when I play Scrabble with other people, first of all, I'm an idiot. I can't spell anything. I don't know a lot of words.

But so like in my house when we play Scrabble, if you say a word, you have to know what it means. You can't just say, you know, ashma wallah, whatever, and be like, is that a word?

And you're like, I think it's a word if you don't know generally what the definition is. In my house, that don't fly, okay? You have to basically know what it is and then someone could look it up in the dictionary.

If you're wrong, then you can't use that word. I don't understand people that just will allow any words to be used even if they don't know what it means. Anyway, that's my Scrabble soapbox.

So, yeah, what else going on this week? Well, I'm watching Martha on Netflix. It's pretty good. I love Martha Stewart. She's, she's just, she's wild. So it's pretty good.

I'll tell you what show stinks is Disclaimer on Apple tv. It's a seven episode thing with Cate Blanchett, who's great. And I started out, I'm like, oh, this is going to be great.

I was like three episodes in, I'm like, this is great. And then it got really weird and there's only one more episode left. If I wasn't six episodes deep, I would stop watching. I need to know what happens.

But I no longer give this thing a thumbs up. I originally gave it a thumbs up, but disclaimer on Apple. I am now giving a thumbs down. Okay, this was a very important episode.

As always, have fun with the election this week. And yeah, check out our other episodes later in the week and drop me a note@jayshwedelson.com and see you later. You did it. You made it to the end.

Nice. But the party's not over.

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