When Matty Benedetto bought a bag of Swedish Fish from a CVS in Burlington, Vermont, recently, he received a receipt that was longer than his arm. While he was not, to be sure, the first to notice that CVS receipts can be lengthy, what Benedetto did next likely was a first.

He returned to his nearby design studio, re-created a high-resolution digital version of his receipt, and then found a rug manufacturer in China that could reproduce it. About three weeks later, the rug arrived, and he unfurled it in his sprawling 6,400-square-foot studio.

“CVS receipts are always way too long,” Benedetto said in a video he posted to his social media accounts. “So I decided to re-create one of my receipts into a rug that stretches 50 feet long.”

Keep reading here.—AAN

What’s that last letter really stand for? Clicks, conversions, and cash—the holy trinity of performance marketing. If you wanna tap into this legendary trio, you’re gonna need a hand.

Good news: Nift knows a thing or two about DTC.

In fact, Nift drives net new customer acquisition for 12k+ brands, with an average 10% CVR and a CPA up to 50% less than paid social. Huge, game-changing numbers.

Not to mention they can get you 5x new customer growth and 3x better conversion than overpaid social ads. Mm-hmm, it’s time to ditch ineffective channels and embrace superior performance that’ll help you crush those three Cs.

Boost your biz.

The price-raising bonanza of the pandemic-era economy is winding down, and some major retailers are sinking their profits into advertising to recover sales volume.

“Companies are running out of pricing power,” Samuel Rines, economist and managing director of Corbu, told Retail Brew. “Across the board, management teams have said we aren’t going back to the algorithm, which is 2%, maybe 3% price increases.”

While admittedly raising margins for retailers, price increases also pushed many consumers to aggressively trade down to cheaper options, Rines explained. Now, companies are fighting to get those customers back, and advertising is one way to do it.

Rines called the effort “the battle for volume.”

Keep reading here.—AV

Whatever you do, don’t call them “tchotchkes.”

“Or even worse, ‘trinkets,’” Andrew Spellman, chair of the board of the Promotional Products Association International (PPAI), a not-for-profit trade group founded in 1903, told Retail Brew. “We don’t mind ‘swag,’ but right now we’re pushing the nomenclature ‘merch.’ We want ‘merch’ to be the word.”

Still, among the more than 15,000 member companies that comprise the organization, plenty sell the cheap your-logo-here stress balls, pens, and bottle openers cluttering drawers worldwide. But it’s a broad category that also includes coveted brands like Yeti (“Yeti has crushed it within the promotional space,” Spellman said) and Stanley, which may not be products a company gives away by the thousands on a trade show floor, but rather to sales prospects or beloved office managers on Administrative Professionals Day (on April 24).

Spellman has been in the industry for 24 years, first working for International Merchandise Concepts, a distributor representing brands in the channel, then on the brand side at Victorinox, the Swiss Army Knife and backpack company. Currently, he’s VP of corporate markets at Therabody, which is best known for its Theragun massager.

Spellman’s got a message for brands that have yet to dip their toe in the merch pool: Come in. The water’s warm. And companies want promotional products from established brands.

Keep reading here.—AAN

Make it a win-win. Influencers are not often super excited about affiliate-only partnerships—they usually want deeper, meaningful collabs. Fortunately, Partnerize has the scoop on how to make everyone happy. Their new e-book offers a definitive playbook on how to seamlessly combine influencer and affiliate programs. Give it a look.