Happy Monday, Creative Business People! 🤳

Ready to start off your week? Here’s what’s happening in the latest creative industry news…

TikTok Trends

• HBO Euphoria - Recasting the Euphoria cast with your team.

• Labrinth & Zendaya - “All For Us” soundtrack - use this sound in your next post

• Encanto soundtrack - use this sound in your next post

TikTok Is Testing a Paid Subscription Model

New concept comes as rival Instagram plans trials of a similar service.

TikTok, the buzzy video-sharing app, said it is testing a paid subscription model, a concept that could allow creators to charge people to view their content. 

The strategy appears to be similar to Instagram, which earlier this week said it was launching trials for its own subscription service. The Meta Platforms Inc. unit said its feature could provide content creators with another way to make money from their followers. 

Together with

Clay

Clay is a beautiful and private home for your relationships, built automatically from your accounts.

With Clay, you build a collection of the people you meet by connecting your email and calendar with social apps, including Twitter and LinkedIn. Clay then populates each person’s entry with all the relevant information you would need to recall for any future meeting — ranging from their work history to latest tweets to the details on how you met and when you last communicated, among other things.

You also can add notes of your own to each entry, click to activate reminders to follow up with certain people and organize entries into groups.

Recruitment In The Metaverse

It is rumoured that that the metaverse will be the successor to the internet as we know it today: a digital twin of our world, encountered in both augmented and virtual interconnected realities as a persistent and synchronous experience. This has an affect on the world of marketing, advertising and creativity. Naturally, many of us are wondering how we can adapt our work to the metaverse and whether it will even be needed or relevant.

Many companies are already working on infiltrating within the metaverse realm to best prevent the problem as well as adapt to the questions surrounding recruitment. Take Korean electronics firm Samsung and motor company Hyundai who both held job fairs in a metaverse program known as ‘Gather Town’ in September, and professional services firm PwC has been experimenting with the technology.

How Can My Brand Make the Most of NFTs?

If you can’t tell, we’re obsessed with NFTs right now. The boom around digital art trade is so interesting and we want in. Well, now’s our time as creative freelancers because while the current hype is mostly focused on digital art, the NFT hype is spreading across other forms of creativity from music to other forms of design. Even tweets are in on it with Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, auctioning his first ever tweet, which at the time of writing had reached a high bid of $2.5m. 

• Assets - branded assets?

• Event NFTs - accessing exclusive offers

• Licensing models - artist could now sell the NFT behind their imagery rather than negotiating a three or five year usage.

• One-offs - depending on your discipline, it may be worth creating one-off experiences and products that only live in the digital world. 

‘Silence, Brand’: How to Avoid Corporate Cringe on Social Media

As consumers beg for authenticity, brands recycle the same stale humour.

Last week, New York-based 20-somethings banded together on TikTok to share their dating horror stories about a guy named Caleb, who apparently designs furniture at West Elm and has a track record of showering women with attention and then ghosting them. And whether viewers believe that the trending topic is an invasion of privacy or justified skewering, there is an overwhelming consensus on social that reactions from brands like Hellmann’s, Ruggable, Daily Harvest and the many other brands that chimed in were self-promotional, awkward and overall cringe-worthy.

Microsoft’s Metaverse Vision Is Becoming Clear— And Makes Sense

The company is a major force in gaming, even without Activision. It also rules productivity. That could be a potent combination in the metaverse.

…Microsoft is unique in being a major force in both gaming and productivity. A 3D virtual business meeting within Microsoft Teams might feel far less strange than one within Meta’s Horizon Workrooms, especially if some of the resources and data you might need for that meeting already reside in Microsoft apps.

Tools

• Descript (sponsored) -Instantly transcribe clips from your podcast or video, add photos, waveforms, progress bars, or animated text—then post to Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, or wherever your audience is.

• Todoist - To-do lists that help you organise your day.

• Agorapulse - Agorapulse lets you take control of your social media. Stay organized, save time, and easily manage your social media with Agorapulse’s inbox, publishing, reporting, monitoring, and team collaboration tools.

✌️ Till next Monday