Who doesn’t love the sound of their coworker’s music blasting from the next cubicle over?

Pre-pandemic, being subjected to a colleague’s music taste was probably a nightmare scenario for most people. But at Wistia, a video-hosting platform for B2B marketers headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that’s still in a predominantly WFH setup, employees voluntarily listen to one another DJ on an internal radio station.

Don’t you forget about me: The station, called WIST Radio, has helped Wistia employees stay connected when IRL happy hours and meetups aren’t always an option, co-founder and CEO Chris Savage told Marketing Brew.

Second time’s the charm

As Wistia employees settled into a WFH routine, Savage discovered that he had a problem. Wistia runs engagement surveys on a quarterly basis, typically clocking high engagement among its employees, Savage explained. But “as the drudgery of remote working continued on,” workers started reporting that they were feeling less connected to their teams, he said.

So Wistia started hosting hackathons to drive ideas about how to keep connected:

• During one hackathon in April 2021, a handful of employees came up with the idea for WIST Radio. The first version garnered some interest, but ran into some technical difficulties that made it hard to DJ. The idea, however, never died.
• During another hackathon in December 2021, a team proposed a solution to the tech issues in the form of a preexisting app called Gramrphone that allows people to record audio and play music from their computers, streaming it directly to a webpage where others can tune in.

Since that process was simplified, WIST Radio has grown to include a couple of regular shows and an active Slack channel where employees talk about the music. “It’s the type of thing that would happen in person organically all the time,” Savage said. “We need more spaces that are remote which are not just [for] work, and this has become one of those spaces for us.”

Come together: As of April, 158 of Wistia’s 180 employees tuned into WIST Radio, up from 55 in the same month last year, when the first version debuted. The average monthly listening time per employee is up from about two minutes to about 29 minutes, the company said.

Read more about WIST Radio here.—AM

These are the kinds of everyday tasks you might find on the official Oddly Satisfying TikTok account, which has almost 3 million followers and more than 35 million likes on its videos.

Others have joined in on the trend, too: #oddlysatisfying has nearly 70 billion views on TikTok.

• These types of videos were the inspiration for home-services marketplace Angi’s latest ad campaign of the same name.
• “At the core of the campaign is the consumer insight that getting work done around your home, all of your home projects, can be extremely overwhelming and stressful,” Angi CMO Dhanusha Sivajee told Marketing Brew.
• Working with Ryan Reynolds’ creative agency, Maximum Effort, the creative team thought about ways to convey a sense of calm—“the core benefit” of its product, Sivajee said. They settled on the “cultural phenomenon” of oddly satisfying ASMR videos, she said.

Click here to watch the ads and read more about how the campaign came together.—AM

Wanting to shop more consciously and actually doing so are two different things. Sure, walking to your nearby family-owned pet store to buy grain-free, locally sourced cat food sounds nice. But clicking that Buy Again button on Amazon to get your usual brand sent straight to your door? Tempting.

Enter Goodbuy, a Boise-based startup trying to bridge the gap between the two. The company “is promising to make it easy to shop consciously online,” Retail Brew’s Andrew Adam Newman writes.

How? When shopping online, its browser extension nudges users towards products from businesses that might be smaller, more diverse, or socially conscious than the usual suspects. Those who use it can customize their preferences, choosing to shop with Black-owned businesses, for instance, or buy American-made products.

• “The issue that we had up until this point was that it was inefficient and laborious to be a conscious shopper,” Cara Oppenheimer, who co-founded Goodbuy with a friend last year, told Retail Brew. “While on the other side, it’s hyper-efficient to be able to go to these mega-retailers and get the gratification you need, but it wasn’t fulfilling—it didn’t feel good.”

By the numbers: Goodbuy says its network encompasses 185,000 small businesses offering more than 19.5 million products, per Retail Brew. Fortin said Goodbuy is on track to hit 50,000 users and direct $1 million in sales to businesses by the end of this year.

Read his full story here.—MS

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Social: Highlights from TikTok, Twitter, Snap, and Meta’s NewFront presentations.

Best practices: This study analyzed 14,000 Snapchat ad campaigns, so you don’t have to.

Graphs: Digiday on how creators can “drive social commerce sales.”

What’s new with NewFronts: This is the first NewFront season without an accredited third-party measurement option, which isn’t exactly ideal for an industry that values accurate numbers. So, how are ad sales chiefs and media buyers approaching this challenge? Read all about it here.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}

Are you one of the 83% of Marketing Brew readers planning to make a career change this year? Be sure to check out our Marketing Brew Job Board for 200+ new job openings!

Today’s featured openings:

• Search Marketing Manager, EMEA at DocuSign
• Brand Manager, Lodge Cast Iron
• Paid Social Manager at Publicis Health media

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Stat: $375 million over 10 years. That’s how much Tom Brady is expected to make for joining Fox Sports as its lead NFL analyst when he (eventually) (no, we mean it) retires.

Read: “Bolt built $11 billion payment business on inflated metrics and eager investors” (The New York Times)

Another read: From Kraft Mac ’n Cheese to Everything Bagel, the Wall Street Journal on “weird ice cream flavors.”

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• How Clara, the ‘Glassdoor for influencers’ app, wants to even the playing field
• Why measurement concerns are clouding the NewFronts
• Podcast ad revenue surpassed $1 billion last year