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How brands are using community rewards platform TYB 

In a story titled “Inside community platform TYB—how brands are engaging with fans and collecting first-party data,” Ad Age’s Gillian Follett writes about brands that have been mining TYB for user-generated content and product ideas. Among them is hair and body brand Ouai. “More than 4,000 consumers recently rushed to join Ouai’s community on TYB—a platform that blends the group chat functionality of messaging apps such as Discord and Geneva with elements of a customer loyalty program,” Follett writes. “That number likely would have been larger if Ouai didn’t limit the window for new members to join the private group to just a few days each month, Laural Simeon, Ouai’s senior director of direct-to-consumer, told Ad Age.”

More details: “Ouai is just one of more than 80 brands currently utilizing TYB to engage with and reward their most loyal consumers,” Follett notes, adding that brands on TYB say “they’re capitalizing on first-party consumer insights from platform conversations. They’re using these insights to guide product development and marketing campaigns, while also utilizing TYB challenges to reward consumers for creating user-generated content that can be repurposed for social media posts and other marketing materials.”

Essential context: “The name, an acronym for ‘try your best,’ was inspired by the mother of Founder and CEO Ty Haney, who often used the phrase during Haney’s childhood, according to TYB Chief Operating Officer Breana Teubner. After launching in 2022, TYB mostly attracted beauty brands. But over the last several months, brands from fashion, wellness, food and beverage have also joined the platform, Teubner said.”

Keep reading here.

Macroeconomic news and data in a nutshell

• “US Jobless Claims Fall to Lowest Since May in Solid Labor Market,” Bloomberg News reports

• “Federal Reserve signals end to inflation fight with a sizable half-point rate cut,” per The Associated Press

• “America’s Inflation Fight Is Ending, but It’s Leaving a Legacy,” from The New York Times

• “Here are 4 ways the Federal Reserve’s big rate cut could change the housing market,” per NPR

Also see: Layoffs and budget cuts

USA Today is winning over Gen Z with its social video strategy

New data from social video analytics firm Tubular Labs shared first with Datacenter Weekly shows that USA Today is winning over Gen Z with its social video strategy across YouTube and Facebook. The details:

• USA Today is the No. 3 media outlet for 13- to 24-year-olds in Tubular’s news & politics category, as measured by unique U.S. video viewers in the age group across YouTube and Facebook. (Inside Edition is No. 1 and ABC News is No. 2.) That makes USA Today the top legacy newspaper brand for young news & politics video viewers on YouTube and Facebook.

• By comparison, USA Today is the No. 20 media outlet in the category across all age ranges.

• USA Today saw a 60% month-over-month increase in unique 13- to 24-year-old viewers in August (the most recent full month measured). Though long-form content, including Vice President Harris’ DNC speech, performed well for the brand, “Short USA Today videos on Facebook leaned into fun, quick watches, such as the German Navy playing Star Wars music, or an ostrich escape in South Dakota,” according to a Tubular spokesperson.

 AI tools that agencies are using

Perplexity is among the AI-driven, data-parsing tools being deployed by agencies, Ad Age’s Ewan Larkin writes in “9 AI tools agencies are embracing right now.”

The details: Perplexity is “a search platform that agencies, including Bandits & Friends and FCB Global, have been using for strategy and research support,” Larkin reports.

Essential context: “The tool quickly pulls and summarizes data, providing fast, relevant answers backed by a wide range of sources—great for strategy and creative sessions,” FCB Global Chief Creative Officer Andrés Ordóñez told Larkin.

Keep reading here.

Just briefly

• “FTC Denounces Social Media And Video Streaming Platforms For ‘Privacy-Invasive’ Data Practices,” per AdExchanger

• “LinkedIn plans to use your data to train its AI. Here’s how to stop it,” from Fast Company

• “Spotify, Meta and others blast EU’s decision-making on AI and data privacy,” from Fortune

• “Disney to Stop Using Slack Following Hack That Exposed Company Data,” The Wall Street Journal reports

The newsletter is brought to you by Ad Age Datacenter, the industry’s most authoritative source of competitive intel and home to the Ad Age Leading National Advertisers, the Ad Age Agency Report: World’s Biggest Agency Companies and other exclusive data-driven reports. Access or subscribe to Ad Age Datacenter at AdAge.com/Datacenter.

Ad Age Datacenter is Bradley Johnson and Joy R. Lee.