Jay Schwedelson: We are back for What's Up This Week?? from the Do This Not That podcast, and there is a lot going on this week in business and marketing life, so let's jump into it. What happened this past week with Costco is going to affect every business, consumer, and nonprofit marketer on the planet.

Jay Schwedelson: Big, small, doesn't matter. Here's the deal. So Costco just agreed to a $14 million settlement to resolve a class action lawsuit alleging it sent w- residents in the state of Washington, okay, promotional emails with false or misleading subject lines. Now, the law that, uh, this is all coming around is the Washington State Commercial Electronic Mail Act, and here's the deal.

Jay Schwedelson: These are a couple of the subject lines that they used that they ended up having to settle for $14 million. So one of the subject lines was, "Today is the last day to access member-only savings." Another one was, "Hot buys available for five days only." So here's the deal. The allegation was that Costco promoted offers as ending while also allegedly planning to extend those promotions, which, you know, in the world of urgency, everybody sorta does this.

Jay Schwedelson: Uh, maybe they don't do this, but a lot of people, a lot of brands do do this where they're like, "Okay, we're gonna have an offer. It's gonna end on Friday, but then we're gonna extend it two days later." And you do it on the business side, say, "This thing's gonna be downloaded. You could download it by Friday.

Jay Schwedelson: You gotta download it." Oh, and then next week you say, "Actually, it's back. We extended it," whatever. The problem here is, yes, um, if Costco all... went all the way and they fought this in court, would they likely have won? I would say they probably would've won the lawsuit because this is kind of like a marketing tactic.

Jay Schwedelson: Yes, it's misleading a little bit, all that stuff, but this is kind of how urgency has always worked. But the issue now becomes because Costco has settled this, right, what do you think all these lawyers that are out there are gonna do? They're go, "Whoa. Uh, big companies are willing to settle for millions of dollars based on their subject lines and extending offers?

Jay Schwedelson: We should go and see what's out there that we should be focusing on that are, you know, trying to extend offers and all this stuff." So as marketers, what do we need to be thinking about? Of course, you don't wanna be misleading. Nobody wants to be mislead. If you're misleading, you stink, okay? But we have to take it a little bit further now because now we can't just be casual about it.

Jay Schwedelson: You can't just say, "The offer ends tonight," whether you're a business marketer, a consumer marketer, it doesn't matter. You can't invent deadlines, okay, that aren't real. You know, if registration doesn't close on Friday, if early pricing doesn't end on Sunday, if all that's not happening, okay, that's a problem, right?

Jay Schwedelson: So from now on, what we really gotta be thinking about is you can't say, "This is the final day on Friday," and then on Monday that you've extended it. No. Okay? You have to actually start out with, okay- Something that says, "Okay, this offer ends." And then what you wanna do is you wanna c- say, "Due to demand, we've launched a special weekend bonus offer," where it's actually a new offer.

Jay Schwedelson: You're still recognizing that, oh, that ended, and it did so well, but you can't just say, "Hey, we extended the original thing." It's now, this thing was wild, so we decided to make a new offer, and here it is. So we need to say, even on the business side, instead of saying, you know, "Last chance to download," it says, "We're retiring this free download," right?

Jay Schwedelson: And then you come up with a new download or whatever. It seems like semantics. It seems like it's not a big deal, but I am telling you, this is gonna open up the floodgates to looking at urgency in a whole different way. And on some level, yes, it's good, but also, you cannot have in your content calendar right now, okay, you know, you have an event, and it says, "Okay, early bird registration ends today."

Jay Schwedelson: And then on your content calendar, it can't say, right, uh, uh, "Oh, by the way, we're gonna then extend that three days later." That is now trouble, and that is something we have to be aware of and something that we probably aren't even really thinking about too much. Another thing that we're not thinking about too much is what happens in August.

Jay Schwedelson: August is when Q4 gets decided. We are sleeping on this. Everybody thinks Q4 starts in October. It doesn't, okay? Not even a little bit. So first of all, on the consumer side, Gartner has this study that 32%, 32% of consumers start to plan their holiday shopping starting in July, okay? And, uh, if you saw Meta this past week, they just came out with all of their keys to holiday shopping for marketers.

Jay Schwedelson: They came out with it this week. If you are gonna wait until the end of September to get your Q4 stuff going if you're a B2B marketer, or your consumer stuff going, uh, uh, if you're a consumer marketer, it makes no sense. So here are some stats that are wild. On the business-to-business side, companies introducing Q4 messaging in August generate a 24% more marketing qualified pipeline than those companies waiting until September, right?

Jay Schwedelson: So now is when you wanna have your offers going out there. Your Q4 game plan starts here before Q4 gets busy, okay? The last quiet month. This is when people start to think about Q4 right now. The other wild stat, and this is from my Worldata Research Group, that we found is that August webinars positioned around planning, okay, um, generate a 21% more pipeline than those webinars focused on, um, anything that is generic.

Jay Schwedelson: So you don't wanna just teach trends, all right? Uh, you wa- you wanna actually get people prepared. So instead of coming out with something like, you know, Q4 marketing trends, it's build your Q4 pipeline before Labor Day. This is actually what crushes it. So you gotta be thinking about Q4 right now, whether you're a consumer marketer, B2B marketer, it does not matter.

Jay Schwedelson: All right, before we get to the ridiculous portion of this podcast, I wanna let you know that this one is sponsored by Knak. Here's the deal, K-N-A-K. Here's the deal with Knak. I think we could all agree that building one email should not require six meetings, three designers, and someone who still knows HTML.

Jay Schwedelson: That is ridiculous. That is why my team loves Knak. Your marketing team can create amazing enterprise quality emails that are fast, that stay on brand, that get approvals, and everything can be synced. I am telling you, if you've never checked out Knak, just go to Knak, Knak.com/demo, Knak.com/demo. We use it for years now.

Jay Schwedelson: We love it. Check it out. All right, let's get into the ridiculous portion of this podcast since you didn't ask. What am I watching on TV? You didn't ask, but here it is. First off I'm six episodes in, uh, watching Five Star Weekend on Peacock with Jennifer Garner and Regina Hall. This is excellent. Okay? It's this eight-episode thing that's based on Elin, uh, Hilderbrand's book, uh, and it is great.

Jay Schwedelson: I'm giving this two thumbs up. Everybody should be watching Five Star Weekend. I haven't seen Jennifer Garner do anything since 13 Going on 30 and Capital One commercials. She needs to do more stuff because she's very good in this. Um, I saw Odyssey. Okay, how was Odyssey? Odyssey was phenomenal, fantastic.

Jay Schwedelson: Uh, my butt hurt though. It's three hours long. Um, I don't see how they could have made it shorter. I ate all of my popcorn. I would say I literally started to ration. So I looked at my watch and we were one hour in, I was 75% through my popcorn, and I was like, "Jay, you need to eat one piece out of a time, at a time because if you keep at this current pace, you'll be out of popcorn with an hour to go, and then what the hell are you gonna do?"

Jay Schwedelson: So I literally had to ration my pop- This is what I was thinking about while, uh, uh, Matt Damon was trying to do his thing. And the last thing, of course, is Spider-Man came out. I have not seen Spider-Man, and it, I know it broke every record. Here's the problem. There's two people on... two types of people on Earth.

Jay Schwedelson: There are people that go to see Spider-Man that just wanna see a great movie, and that's why the movie did so well. Then there are nerds, losers, dweebs, dorks, geeks like me who wanna see the story moved forward, right? Who wanna see dramatic steps move forward in the, you know, MCU, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, that things happen in the movie that then push the entire universe forward.

Jay Schwedelson: And from everything I understand, this movie doesn't really push things forward. It's just a great movie unto itself. That is frustrating for a nerd like me. So I will see it. Um, I might be seeing it in protest, and everyone should, uh, make fun of me because I would make fun of me. And what else is going on?

Jay Schwedelson: Listen, if you haven't checked out my book, Stupider People Have Done It, all net author proceeds are going to cancer research. If you have read the book, leave it a review on Amazon or anywhere else. It does-- It really helps to circulate it. It is doing well. You all rock, and, uh, have a great week. Later.