Good morning everyone! A fresh edition of my newsletter. I went to an event again, so I share some slides: useful for marketers (and this time maybe also a bit more IT or agency’s)
🇳🇱 Emerece E-Day: how brands like red bull and mr. beast use YouTube to win attention
Last thursday I visited (just as a couple of years before) Emerce E-day in Amsterdam. Quite a large event with many visitors (and long lines for food). But I had a good time and I want to share this presentation on YouTube optimization. 2 very young guys from Munich (Max Behrens and Dimcha Aiwi) were on stage (they were the last speaker of the day) and normally by then I am already drinking beer, but this time I didn’t and I am glad I did not. Very nice presentation on how powerful YouTube organic can be and their framework to excel in it.
It’s a presentation less about production, more about packaging on winning a click and with that the algorithm. It’s about understanding the viewers.
Many things I already knew but its good to have it all in one presentation, with real use cases.
Some highlights (but check the full slide deck that is linked below)
The framework: click → watch → return. Why would they click, why would they keep watching, and why would they come back?
The thumbnail is the biggest lever: one video went from flatlining to 28.4M views after only a thumbnail change. The video itself stayed exactly the same.
Think about the thumbnail before you shoot: sketch, then a dedicated shoot, then the edit. A thumbnail isn’t a screenshot picked afterwards. It’s its own production step, so plan it into your script and shoot day.
A note on YouTube testing: YouTube’s “test & compare” picks the winner on watch time share, not click-through rate. That protects you against clickbait winning.
A consistent visual style: make every upload recognisable, like Gymshark and Cadillac do, so viewers spot your video before they read the channel name.
Break the pattern of your niche: if every thumbnail in your niche looks the same (e.g. green in Minecraft), use a different colour and you’ll stand out.
The mindset shift: don’t treat YouTube as “how many views can our budget buy”, but as “what’s valuable enough that people click on it by themselves”. Testing and designing thumbnails upfront works at any scale, including small channels.
Your thumbnail lives in a feed, not on its own: it competes with everything around it on the home page. Judge it in that context, not as a standalone image.
Full presentation via my dropbox or via the presenters google drive.
The link to the agency from Max and Dimcha (the presenters): https://overluce.com/
🇳🇱 Emerece E-Day: Ahold Delhaize on how digital business keeps moving
Another presentation on the same event, where I went to, was a presentation from Gerhard van der Bijl, CTO Ahold Delhaize Europe & Indonesia.
More a technical presentation then the other presentations in the event, but I also found it very interesting.
As a large corporate organisation they have, I think a different setup then other large companies have I think.
His model has three parts: one shared “food retail OS,” a set of core apps built once and reused by every brand in the group, and small forward-deployed pods that bring AI capability into a brand and then move on.
Loyalty is the clearest example and he explained that one also in the talk.
The platform and the engineers are shared, while each brand keeps its own loyalty programme on top.
So it’s not directly about centralising all software or tools, there can be differences and that’s ok. But they have specialised “pod’s” that help their (many) brands.
What also I think is cool is that they not only think of external usage of AI apps but also internal. They have a dedicated AH store assistant app for employees. What the AH Steijn app does for customers, the assistant does for staff, helping them answer customer questions on the floor. His broader point was that most agentic AI hype is about reaching customers, but the same approach should reach employees and partners (like also retail media).
He also mentions that the operating model is identical everywhere. Teams are set up the same way in every country, so a scrum master in Belgium knows exactly where they sit relative to a team in the Netherlands. That’s what makes moving people between brands work. Without it, pods would spend months just figuring out the local org.
The “AI marketplace” as he called it, is an internal catalogue of AI tools built by the different brands. I had to think a bit of what he meant with that, but I think it’s this:
Any Ahold Delhaize team in Europe can see what exists, who built it and how it works, so they don’t rebuild it.
Per the slide, 50+ apps are listed, across Albert Heijn, Albert, AB, Delhaize, Mega Image and Maxi.
Van der Bijl was explained that it’s not a real app store yet: you can’t click “install” and have it run in your brand.
Today it’s mainly about discovery and reuse. The longer-term idea is an AI app store on top of their shared food retail OS.
Great presentation!
📹Video SEO to supercharge AIO
Note to myself🎵, This seems interesting to try:
Time to start targeting keywords with videos, not blogs.
Use the GSC GenAI report to take URLs - put into an SEO tool - filter for URLs ranking in AIO - see which queries they rank for Use VidIQ plugin for YT kw research
I believe in it, wrote about it many times. YT (and video visibility in general) is essential in AIO and I think a growth hack opportunity for many.
Full talk here:
Instead of a blog post, make a video. Everyone things blogs are AI generated now
YouTube Autosuggest is in search volume order
Do note that also here they refer to the “stream, scroll, stream, shop” journey, as I wrote earlier about in this edition:⬇️⬇️
Global Digital Marketing & Retail by Alex 158
I read so many nice things this week. I can’t share them all not enough space! But let’s get started:
💳Revolut on advertising in the physical world to build trust
Nice to share something from Revolut again. I like the company, the speed, the innovation, the agility and simply how it works, I use Revolut myself also a lot. Checkout this snippet of an interview with Nik Storonsky below.
I think this is similar to “lightning strike” campaigns (although a bit different because its a bit more localised) that I wrote about earlier.
Checkout the video below:⬇️
What Revolut also does (and this is not in the video above) is in the same airports, where they advertise massively, they have machines where you can get a free revolut card. Great way to measure attribution.
In an earlier newsletter they explain how this works. Checkout the video with “Antoine Le Nel” in edition 65:⬇️⬇️
More on lightning strike model and category building here in edition 78:⬇️⬇️
Global Digital Marketing & Retail by Alex 78
Good morning! It is saturday again and here we go again. Edition 78 already! Enjoy the newsletter topics for everyone again, be sure to checkout the Indian Flipkart “snoring” campaign 🤣.
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