Social media caps for teens, AI-written subject lines, and the fact that people now search TikTok like Google all collide in this week's chaos as Jay Schwedelson riffs on what actually matters for marketers right now. You will pick up a tiny email tweak that can lift opens, a smarter way to write social posts for search, and a frankly unhinged dose of pop culture takes from Avatar 3 to the return of My Strange Addiction.

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Best Moments:

(00:34) Virginia limits social media scrolling for users under 16 to 60 minutes a day and Jay wonders how platforms, parents, and free speech lawsuits will actually shape what happens next.

(02:04) Jay shares new World Data Research results showing that all lowercase email subject lines can outperform polished AI title-cased subject lines and lift open rates by around 14 percent.

(03:30) Between new Forbes and eMarketer stats, Jay breaks down why social platforms are becoming the primary search engine and why captions, transcripts, and on-screen text now need to be written like search hooks, not clever throwaways.

(05:19) Jay cannot get over Avatar 3 passing a billion dollars at the box office when he does not know a single human who admits to seeing it.

(06:29) The return of My Strange Addiction sends Jay into a horrified recap of car romances, Eiffel Tower marriages, and drywall eating that makes him question both humanity and his own viewing choices.

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Jay Schwedelson: We are back for what's up this week from the do this, not that podcast. This is our super short episode where Breakdown, what's going on in business and marketing and life. And then we still have our other episodes later in the week, so, so what's going on? Well. As the new year rolled out, there have been some new laws related to social media and stuff, and this one is pretty wild.

Jay Schwedelson: Have you heard about this? This is real. This is in Virginia, the state of Virginia, and it kicked off January 1st. Now this is into effect, okay? That social media, scrolling time for users under the age of 16 is now limited to one hour a day in the state of Virginia. This is now in effect, and it's, it's a real deal thing.

Jay Schwedelson: And so basically all the big platforms, you know, Facebook and Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, X, Reddit, all of them, including YouTube, okay? They have to now default to a limit of 60 minutes for users that are 15 years and younger. The big question is, well, what happens if, if you're 15 and you're on, you know, YouTube for 61 minutes?

Jay Schwedelson: Well, a couple things. First off, in order to change the setting, your parent needs to go on there and kind of change the setting. If the platforms don't adhere to this, you know, YouTube or Facebook or whatever, then they could face, uh, civil penalties and look. It's, it's a good start. I think it's gonna be really, really tough to get this thing growing in the right direction.

Jay Schwedelson: Believe it or not, there's already, uh, lawsuits trying to fight its implementation by all these different free speech groups. But this is here, and you know what? I think it, there's gonna be a cascading effect. So that's super interesting. That's, that's actually now rolled out. In the state of Virginia. So other things that are going, this is so random.

Jay Schwedelson: There was some new data out from World Data Research about a tactic that we've been testing that actually works really, really well that, um, is from data from the last 90 days, which is pretty cool. And it's along the lines of this whole idea of that AI stuff makes our marketing content really generic.

Jay Schwedelson: Everyone just scrolls past it. So are there any tactics, tips, little things that you can do? And this one's so small. So when you're sending out your email marketing campaign, you have a subject line, right? So what you want to test, and this is the data, is actually using no capitalization whatsoever, not capitalizing the first letter of the first word.

Jay Schwedelson: Not capitalizing anything in your subject line. Why? Because of course, when you write a normal subject line. It will, you'll have capitalization. But if you use AI to help you write a subject line, it will do title casing often in your subject line, which is when it capitalizes the first letter of each word in your subject line.

Jay Schwedelson: So if you do the reverse of that, and this applies to all marketing, if you do the reverse of what AI would normally give you back, you actually see a boost. So when you have no capitalization at all for a business or consumer. Email marketing subject line. We're seeing that lift email open rates according to World Data Research by about 14%.

Jay Schwedelson: So that's a good AB test to try. Why not? So other thing, new data that's coming out that just came out in the past few weeks from Forbes. Forbes came out with the data. This is pretty wild and there's something we need to do about, from a marketing perspective. 24% of all humans now go to social media as their primary search tool.

Jay Schwedelson: That's pretty wild. An eMarketer at the same time in the last week, came out with data that said over 50% of Gen Z start their product discovery journey on TikTok or Instagram bypassing search engines. Now, what does this mean for us as marketers, whether you're a business marketer or a consumer marketer?

Jay Schwedelson: What we need to understand is what changed in the fourth quarter of this past year was that Google started to. Index content and social media posts, meaning that, um, their Google was actually looking at. The transcripts, the words, the comments in social media, posts on things like TikTok and Instagram and using them in discovery when people are searching.

Jay Schwedelson: And then of course, when you're on TikTok or Instagram or whatever and people are looking for things, it really is now dependent on the words that are in your posts, the words that you're saying on your video posts. If there are captions in your video posts, if there are overlay texts in your video posts that are speaking to the topic that you hope people search for.

Jay Schwedelson: And it's really important now to be much more intentional thinking about. Not being cute or clever in how you're captioning a post on social media or whether or not you are captioning a video post, you need to be doing these things because that is where search is taking place. It is now absolute table stakes to make sure that your social media posts on LinkedIn, on TikTok, on Instagram are really factoring into the algorithm looking to index all the words and comments and things that are going on.

Jay Schwedelson: Alright, let's talk about some nonsense things, pop culture. What is going on? So first of all, I just saw that Avatar three, fire and Ash hit a billion dollars. I don't understand something. Have you, do you know anybody on Earth who's seen this movie? Like, legitimately it hits a billion dollars? Who is seeing avatar three?

Jay Schwedelson: First of all, who cares? I know I'm hate for that. Oh my God. Avatar's the greatest thing of all time. Good for you, but it's amazing to me. This thing hit a billion dollars. I don't know, a single per nobody in my universe have. I said, oh my God, avatar was great. Zero people. I can't even believe this is true.

Jay Schwedelson: This is actually ridiculous. Um, I know Stranger Things finally is in the rear view. Uh, I had to see the end. Uh, I, I actually don't care. I want all that time back. I don't know. I, I, I don't know how I feel about any of it. Who cares? I'm done with Stranger Things. I'm very into. All the reality shows are coming back.

Jay Schwedelson: Uh, I cannot believe that Kyle and Mo from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills look like they're getting back together. Nobody cares about me. This is kind of disturbing to me. Um, that's my own problem. I'll tell you about another problem. I'm gonna get so much trouble for this, but you know what show is coming back.

Jay Schwedelson: It's actually coming back in the next few days, uh, on TLC, but the show, my Strange Addiction. Now, first off, let me just say something. This is not about, you know, alcohol or drug abuse or whatever, and mental health is a big deal. Okay. I am not belittling people that have mental health issues at all, but this show okay.

Jay Schwedelson: Is next level. It is next level. I used to watch all the old episodes. They haven't had new season in a while. So what goes on in this show is when they talk about my strange addictions. They're highlighting people that are addicted to really wild stuff. So I don't know what the New Season's gonna have that's coming out like right now, but I remember, okay, there was this one dude, Nathaniel.

Jay Schwedelson: That was strange. Um, she was, what, uh, what was the word? She was a, an object aile, which is someone that feels deeply and has a connection to like a, a physical structure. I think I have anile to, um, coffee, um, definitely to french fries. Uh, and then there was one. Oh my goodness. I'm gonna get so much trouble.

Jay Schwedelson: Everyone's like, you can't talk about this stuff. Well, here I am. It's not my fault. It was on TLC. What do you want from me? Um, there was a woman who was, I remember the episode was called the Drywall Eater because she would eat drywall every week. She ate like, like many feet worth of drywall. And she loved it.

Jay Schwedelson: I mean, it didn't make me want to go out and try to eat drywall. But anyway, this show is coming back, which is probably the end of humanity. The fact that they brought it back, what does that even say? I don't know what that says about me talking about it. I don't know what I'm talking about. Um, so yeah, that is, that is what's going on.

Jay Schwedelson: So hope you're getting the year off to a great start and uh, I'll check you in the next one later.