Global Digital Marketing & Retail by Alex 140
Goodmorning everyone! Another edition of my newsletter on everything I find interesting. Mostly on Global Marketing & Retail. Go check out this edition.
Goodmorning!! Let’s take a look on what is happening in the world of digital marketing & e-commerce around the globe. Check it out and thank you for reading, liking and subscribing! Really appriciate it!
📰 Dara Denney: Claude & Creative strategist
My favorite ad creator is back with a video showing how to use Claude for creative strategy. Dara shares prompts you can use in Claude Cowork to think more deeply about creative direction, and I’ve already tried a few of them in my day job and they work surprisingly well.
So think about it: as within my current job, these are currently tasks we outsource to an agency, with this we should be perfectly able to do many of those tasks ourselves giving us more insights and better understanding of our customers.
Agency’s values can then switch to for example more on production, rapid iteration, helping companies understand the latest algorithms, and bringing an outside-in perspective.
For your convenience I type the prompts below. Watch the video for the outcome or try yourself:
➡️Persona analysis prompt via public reviews
First ask Claude to extract public reviews from your company to a csv file. Then
From this CSV of reviews, do the following:
Extract 5+ core personas (give each a name that fits their trigger or main problem, age range, and 1-line descriptor). For each, write a 2–3 sentence emotional narrative: what they feared, what they wanted, and what finally made them act.
Pull 2–3 verbatim quotes per persona that signal their core pain point or desire these are potential ad hooks.
Rank the personas for the ones that show up the most. Make another ranking that shows the ones who use the most emotion in their reviews.
End with a demographic summary (50–75 words) identifying the dominant audience segment, shared emotional triggers, and the single biggest unmet desire across all responses. Write as if you’re briefing a media buyer before a campaign launch.
➡️Reels / content analysis prompt
Can you pull the links to the top 5 performing Reels from Jones Road Beauty, Laura Geller, Ilia, and Sarah Creal and do an analysis on the content strategies that are performing best for them and they seem to be doubling down on?
➡️Personal / content creator prompt
Can you do an analysis of everything I posted last week and what performed the best? What should I do less of it?
Can you compile it in HTML with graphs and callouts?
LinkedIn: URL
Instagram: URL
YT: URL
X: URL
TT: URL
➡️Brands/competitors
Can you pull the links to the top 5 performing Reels from Jones Road Beauty, Laura Geller, Ilia, and Sarah Creal and do an analysis on the content strategies that are performing best for them and they seem to be doubling down on?
I’d like the final format to be in a summary, spreadsheet and HTML file with graphics and callouts.
➡️Ad Library analysis prompt
Can you do an analysis on {BRAND} Ad Library? The end report should be an HTML file with proper visual styling, charts, and layout.
[INSERT LINK DIRECTLY TO AD LIBRARY]
The things I am most interested in learning:
Their format breakdown.
The distribution between partnership ads and brand ads. (Partnership ads are the ones with “with” and a creator handle)
Their core messaging strategies that they are repeating.
Who they seem to be targeting as personas, from the pov of their ads only.
A more in depth analysis of the top 10 ads with the most impressions.
A round-up of their longest running ads and a trend summary.
A sense of their creative velocity: how many ads they are uploading, when, and when their last upload was.
I thought this could be helpful. If you are an agency yourself, you can go one step further by creating dedicated MD files per client in Cowork and turning these prompts into repeatable, client specific strategy workflows. Cool isn’t it?
🇰🇷 South Korea: 4.8 milliion people pay with their face
Meanwhile in South Korea: South Korea might become the first country to kill the physical credit card. 4.8 million people already signed up to pay with just their face in only 7 months. No phone. No wallet. No card. Just your face.
Facepay scanners are already installed at 330,000+ retail locations and aims to reach 1 million stores by the end of this year.
“Even taking a card out of my wallet is a hassle,” said Park Eun-ha, a 31-year-old beauty product developer who uses FacePay.
Via Marcel van Oost and /or FT:
More on South Korea in earlier posts of my newsletter including how I shopped in stores withouth any employee!
🇵🇱 Allegro first European marketplace that partners with OpenAI
I’ve sold for previous jobs on Allegro, so I know them a little. Allegro always has been innovative. Things changed fast, I remember. Now Allegro is again a trailblazer in Europe, by being the first European marketplace that partners with OpenAI.
They went live on May 11 as a native app inside ChatGPT. 22 million users can now buy on Allegro through a conversation, not a search bar. So I suggest to keep an eye at it and test it!
For sellers, the ground moves in four places:
Every listing becomes a candidate answer to a customer question, not a result on page one.
Content stops being keyword stuffing. Specs, attributes, return rules, EPR status get read by an agent first.
Fulfilment speed turns into a ranking factor, not a fulfilment metric.
Paid placement inside the AI answer becomes the most fought over inch in European retail.
Interesting to follow all other marketplaces still keep their doors shot for LLM’s. With OpenAI’s advertising coming up, Allegro might be far ahead.
Via Michael Westerweel
If you are interested in selling in CEE and the Balkans, contact Hristo Radichev! Just a tip from me :)
💡Google published a long piece about "Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search
2 weeks ago in the SEO break, I already wrote about “Non commodity content”. Now Google has released one of it’s most extensive official guidances for optimizing for gen AI ever. Basically what I wrote before is still valid, just this guide has more depth/details.
Bottom line: this update reinforces the direction I wrote about earlier: create content that isn’t easily replicated. That means being original, deeply understanding your customers, and delivering real value instead of generic output.
Sharing information about how a piece of content was created can help give your readers more context. If you’re automatically generating content, consider adding information on how your content was created in a way that makes sense for your audience, such as by providing more background information on how automation was used and adding image metadata.
For ecommerce sites, Google Merchant Center has policies for AI-generated content. In particular, AI-generated images must contain metadata using the IPTC DigitalSourceType TrainedAlgorithmicMedia metadata. AI-generated product data such as title and description attributes must be specified separately and labeled as AI-generated.
Details: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide
B2B: Volume vs Quality Marketing
Great infographic from Pierre, so I wanted to share it. It’s highly recognizable, and I think it can be useful for many others too. Pierre’s message is clear: focus matters. Strategy is also about what you choose to say no to.
As Pierre writes
Stop fearing lost opportunities → a real strategy means saying no to most of the market
Analyze your best clients → find who you bring the most results to, build case studies, find more like them
Identify simple tactics → repeat the same messages to the same type of client, don’t reinvent every time
I think this is very true. With tools like Claude COWORK or similar systems, you can identify your best clients, build personas based on past communication, and better understand your niche. Combined with a solid content strategy, this lets you focus more on retargeting and less on paying for cold leads.
Subscribe to Pierre ‘s substack for more content like this.
🇭🇷 When you really want to brand yourself as a low cost airline😂
Right click->save as->image.jpeg
Edit->import file:image.jpeg
File->save as->livery.jpeg
Done!
Or maybe even made in Word or MS Paint😅
🇲🇽 Duolingo Mexico creative local app engagement campaign
This is a nice one! Duolingo -the well known app- in Mexico switched to local advertising. Each “barrio” or neighborhood get’s it’s own OOH advertisement and in addition to that they also integrated (local) social activity. An omnichannel approach, I like it.
Each board is written for one specific neighborhood. La Condesa gets a joke about salsa quality. Polanco gets something else. The copy reads like Duo personally knows you and the colonia you live in.
The first names on the boards (Fer, Laura, Gustavo) aren't real specific people. They picked the most common first name per barrio, so any Fer walking past in La Condesa feels eerily addressed, even though it's statistical, not data-driven personalization.
The campaign also went into the app and socials. Duo follows real users, comments on their posts, adds them to close Friends. The Duolingo brand voice (mildly threatening green owl) was already perfect for this;
Result: 2,000+ DMs per day in those areas from people trying to interact directly with Duo.
When I think about it, I really like this approach. Many apps lose 70-80% of users in week one. Push notification opt-in is below 50% on iOS on average. So the most expensive thing in app marketing right now isn’t the install, it’s the gap between installing and caring. That gap doesn’t close with performance alone, or brand alone. You need both: performance to capture, brand to keep them coming back. And by brand I don’t just mean a mascot or a tone of voice, I also mean constant innovation, communicated as outcomes, not features.
Thanks for reading Crossborder Alex : Global Marketing & E-commerce! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Interested in more? Checkout my archive!
Or use my vibe coded search engine to find content tailored to you