Sunscreen brand Supergoop has been sending SMS messages with text and email marketing platform Attentive since 2018. At the time, texting felt like a “much more untapped opportunity” for brands, Kim Nguyen, senior director of DTC and CRM at Supergoop, told us.

But the rapid adoption of SMS marketing in the last few years has changed the game, even for brands that have long been using the channel.

“Now SMS actually feels like such a table stakes core marketing channel,” Nguyen said. “How do we make sure that we’re continuing to cut through the noise?”

For brands like Supergoop, texting can come with big benefits. In the last year, the brand has seen 167% growth in subscribers YoY, an 11.5% conversion rate on one-time texts, and a 29x ROI, the company said; around a quarter of the brand’s sales last year came from text and email via last-click attribution, Nguyen said.

Nguyen said she attributes the sales success to Supergoop’s creative style and its audience segmentation tactics on the back end, both of which can allow the brand to break through.

Continue reading here about how Supergoop is looking to cut through the noise.—KH

Fresh off its first full year of profitability, Spotify is aggressively courting advertisers.

At the first Spotify Advance presentation in New York last week, Spotify’s version of an upfronts presentation, the audio streaming giant announced several new offerings aimed at increasing advertising investment, including a broader rollout of its ad exchange, new AI tools, and new tech capabilities.

Perhaps the largest bit of news to come out of the company’s presentation was the official rollout of its ad exchange, which was piloted late last year. The ad exchange, known as Spotify Ad Exchange, or SAX, enables advertisers to buy audio, video, and display ads programmatically; podcast ads are expected to roll out later this quarter, Chloe Wix, global head of product and commercial growth, said during the presentation.

“Automation is table stakes for any ad platform looking to compete today,” Wix said.

SAX, which is available through DSPs including The Trade Desk and Google’s Display & Video 360, will soon be available through other DSPs like Adform, Magnite, and Yahoo DSP. It’s already live in the US, Canada, and several other major markets, and more than 5,000 advertisers have already used the platform, Wix said.

“There is no other channel poised for growth like audio is today,” Will Doherty, SVP of inventory development at The Trade Desk, said during a panel at the event. “It is the single biggest and most important channel for our marketers to invest in so that they can right-size their omnichannel approach.”

Read more here about Spotify’s pitch to advertisers.—JS

To ban, or not to ban? That continues to be the question—but for now, TikTok is sticking around for at least a few more months.

On Friday, President Donald Trump said he would sign an executive order to once again delay enforcement of the divest-or-ban law that was passed by Congress and signed by President Biden last year and upheld by the Supreme Court in January. According to the statement, which he posted to Truth Social, TikTok will continue to be allowed to operate in the US for an additional 75 days as Trump seeks to “close the deal” and sell the app’s US operations to an American owner.

How did we get here again? After TikTok went dark for one strange weekend in January, Trump signed an executive order delaying enforcement of the ban until April 5. For about a month, TikTok and other ByteDance apps were unavailable from US app stores, as Apple and Google sought to comply with the law, but the apps eventually came back in February.

Since then, it seemed like some people either forgot about the looming April deadline or simply didn’t think the ban would actually go into effect. Data from influencer agency Billion Dollar Boy found that while TikTok creators’ post activity decreased in the week leading up to the January deadline, it was 41% higher in the week leading up to the April 5 deadline.

The longer the saga has gone on, the fewer people are rooting for the ban to go through, Pew Research has found:

• Only 34% of Americans were in favor of the ban in March of this year, compared to 50% in March 2023.

Continue reading here.—KH