August marked the 50th anniversary of hip hop, and if you were lucky enough to attend the epic Hip Hop 50 Live show at Yankee Stadium, you may have noticed that no performer—not Run DMC, Snoop Dogg, Lauryn Hill, Ice Cube, or Lil Kim—rapped about conversion rate optimization.
But if you’ve been dying to hear raps with that retail trade buzzword (CRO for those down with the scene), along with riffs about e-commerce and DTC, you’re in luck. Aidaptive, which uses AI and machine learning to help companies boost sales, has launched a series of rap videos about the gritty world of digital commerce.
Straight outta Cupertino: The videos feature Ding Zheng, who calls himself “The Sales Rapper” and is hired by companies to create promotional rap videos. “You got 99 problems,” Zheng’s website declares. “But creative marketing shouldn’t be one.”
Zheng’s most recent video for Aidaptive, “CRO Anthem, Part II,” rhymes about the day that marks the start of the holiday shopping season.
“Black Friday, ’tis the season, it’s a-lurkin’,” it begins. “But last year, though, something wasn’t working/Prepping early this year to avoid the hurt and/I’m searching for something new to boost our conversion.”
Based in Cupertino in Silicon Valley, Aidaptive was founded in 2022 by Rakesh Yadav, who had spent more than 14 years at Google helping build the machine-learning platforms that power Google Ads and Google Pay.
Rafael Granato, who heads up marketing at Aidaptive, said the idea to make a rap video for the brand was inspired by someone who “learns really well from songs”—his 11-year-old daughter.
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Granato described Aidaptive as a “young brand in the AI space trying to bring a solution to a market that's somewhat saturated,” noting that in “the Shopify ecosystem, you have 8,000 solutions or apps out there.”
The challenge, Granato said, was “how we could come up with a piece of content that would educate and entertain and kind of separate us from everyone else.”
Granato—who collaborated on writing lyrics with Zing and Nick Budincich, Aidaptive’s head of revenue operations—said he’d originally considered doing a video featuring electronic dance music, but decided rap would align better with the e-commerce ethic.
“Rap is more associated with the economy, especially the DTC industry,” Granato said. “It’s dynamic, it’s forceful, it’s full of great entrepreneurs, full of innovators [and] creators.”
Notorious ROI: Aidaptive released its first rap video on August 1 and the second on August 15.
- They collectively have ~140,000 views.
- Aidaptive’s landing page, which features the video, had almost 50% more traffic in August over July, according to Granato.
The next rap video in the series also will focus on CRO but, unlike the previous two that are about Black Friday, will address the holiday shopping weeks that follow it.
“It will be a lot easier for people to remember and engage and learn about what we do if we do it through music instead of doing another explainer video or another piece of content that everyone else is doing,” Granato said.
Or, as Zheng puts it in his later video for Aidaptive, “Checked the competition for ideas and solutions/Losing my mind from multi-touch attribution.”