Who’s been following the West Elm Caleb saga? 

Us too. And we’re curious: Do you think West Elm Caleb has been good for West Elm’s brand? 

• Yes — so many unpaid mentions!

• No — they’re villains by association!

• Who? That can’t be  his legal name… 

Read on for a quick explainer and our two cents — plus A/B testing tips and influencer marketing stats.

EXPERT Q&A

Should you pay people crypto to opt into your marketing?

Have you ever gotten A/B test results that look statistically significant, but don’t actually boost performance IRL? 

That’s a false discovery, and it’s a pretty common occurrence. 

Up to 25% of test results significant at the 5% level are false discoveries, according to a new paper co-authored by two marketing professors at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Ron Berman and Christophe Van den Bulte. 

Berman came away from the research — based on about 5,000 effects from 2,700 experiments run on Optimizely’s platform in 2014 — with some testing tips for growth marketers. 

He broke three of them down for us below. 

1. Run two-stage A/B tests. 

The best way to avoid false discoveries, according to Berman, is a two-stage A/B test.

Let’s say you’re testing four options on 10,000 people. Instead of showing each version to a quarter of your sample, do this: 

• Step 1: Show each of the four options to 2,000 people. Pick the top performer. 
• Step 2: Show the winner to the final 2,000 people, and compare its performance to whatever’s live on your site. This second stage acts as “a defense against the false discovery,” Berman said.  

The more (unique!) options you try in Step 1, Berman and his co-author found, the more robust your test. 

“The smaller sample per variation makes the statistics worse, but picking the best out of [multiple options] makes it better.”

2. Worry more about small wins than big flops. 

“If you see very, very, very small improvements,” Berman said, “it's potentially just because you're not courageous enough in the experiments you're doing.”

The distribution of the Optimizely data suggested that the vast majority of A/B test results — 70%! — are true nulls. (In other words, A and B don’t perform differently.)

Berman suspects that’s because “people are too afraid” of big flops, so they test tiny tweaks and cut themselves off from big wins. 

3. Keep trying. 

Companies with more A/B testing experience see a lower rate of false discoveries, Berman and his co-author found. 

It’s hard to know why this is — are they testing differently? Hiring differently? — but it means that “experience helps.”

Our takeaway? 

When you’re A/B testing, you can’t avoid false discoveries entirely. But you can minimize the damage they do to performance with two-part tests, big creative swings and persistence.

TWEET TREAT

3 ways West Elm Caleb boosted West Elm’s brand

My Big Fat Greek Wedding star Nia Vardalos isn’t the only one to wonder if West Elm is behind the West Elm Caleb TikTok saga.

ICYMI: A self-proclaimed West Elm furniture designer named Caleb made waves on TikTok and beyond last week for dating casually and unkindly.

West Elm PR hasn’t commented. 

But here are some benefits of association with a serial ghoster and romantic-playlist-recycler facing ”out of hand” vitriol from a “TikTok mob.”

1. It got West Elm a lot of organic interest.

On TikTok, #westelmcaleb has 44M+ views. 

Meanwhile, #westelm has 51M+ views — so West Elm ~2Xed their organic TikTok views since this started on January 11. 

(Searches for “West Elm” also jumped 36% WoW last week, according to Google Trends.)

2. The story drowned out complaints about West Elm’s products. 

Google “West Elm,” and all the top stories are about West Elm Caleb — not the company’s chronic struggles with late, incomplete and damaged deliveries. 

3. West Elm is relevant to Gen Z now.

West Elm tried to reach Gen Z and Millennials last summer, with an influencer program that 50% of Retail Wire readers voted “somewhat unlikely” to succeed. 

We don’t have hard data, but West Elm Caleb has to have boosted Gen Z’s awareness of West Elm. Right?

Our takeaway?

We doubt West Elm funded this, but it has an upside for them in unpaid TikTok views, Gen Z brand awareness and more.

SMALL BITES

Hacker squirrels, cloned pets, and bologna masks…

BarkBox pretended its Twitter was hacked by squirrels — again. 

SEO consolidation alert: SEMrush bought Backlinko, the SEO training platform. 

Oscar Mayer released a bologna face mask that’s “like pop-art,” allegedly. 

Duolingo’s TikTok manager talks strategy (and who’s in the owl suit).

Influencers are cloning their pets for spon. 

As MPP adoption increases, email marketers are feeling the impact.  

Peloton stopped making Pelotons (for now).

FYI: the M&M mascots are about “personalities, [not] gender.”

Some Instagram creators can now offer subscriptions for gated content. 

Does “tu-dum” remind you of a streaming service? That’s sonic branding!

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FROM OUR BLOG

3 marketing trends to watch in 2022

New year, new marketing landscape! As they say. 

To kick off 2022, we surveyed 70 marketers in our network about the marketing trends they see dominating the new year. 

Here are our top three from our 2022 trend report. 

Events marketing in the metaverse

“The metaverse will be the new ‘in-person’ event space,” content strategist Sarah Noel Block told MarketerHire. “It will create an opportunity for people to gather without gathering.” 

Could the next CES take place… in Roblox? 

Social commerce

Social commerce has its skeptics. But it’s huge in China already — and Facebook, Instagram and YouTube have already invested in native stores. 

Top Growth Marketing founder Jack Paxton sees social platforms (and marketers) leaning into social commerce Stateside this year. 

After all, social storefronts “help with data collection, and improve tracking for advertisers and businesses,” Paxton noted. 

“Anti-design”

Visually, pastel, homogeneous “blanding” will get swapped for “anti-design” this year.

Think “graphics that defy conventional design rules - clashing colors, asymmetry, etc.,” Hivemind AI managing partner and marketer Tiffiny Wiley said. 

Read for our full trend forecast — including 12 more trends — over on our blog.

DATA SNACK

Could influencer marketing steal social media marketing’s throne?

Who isn’t using influencer marketing these days? 

Three years ago, a little over half of marketers were using influencer marketing. Now, an estimated 72.5% of marketers work with influencers, according to eMarketer data. 

It’s nearly as widely-adopted as social media marketing. ​

Why influencer marketing is powerful

Simply put, shoppers like influencers (most of the time). 

Around 40% of Millennials say their favorite creators understand them better than their friends, Google found. 

People trust their favorite influencers, too. Gen Z and Millennials trust Instagrammers, TikTokers and YouTube more than politicians, according to YPulse.

Why it’s better *with* social media marketing 

• Social media marketing levels up influencer campaigns. Brands can organically share and, as of 2019, put paid spend behind influencer assets to boost reach. 
• Influencer marketing levels up social media marketing. It encourages new prospects to follow brand accounts — and essentially sign up for paid retargeting. 

Our takeaway? 

Influencer marketing probably won’t beat social media marketing — it’s more likely to join it in a powerful growth loop. 

Long-term, these two types of marketing could become indistinguishable. By 2025, 86% of marketers — nearly as many as have a social media marketing strategy — will have an influencer one.  

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