🧐🔎🕵 Welcome, Scanner!
How to scan 101. Plus, what else you can expect to see from us in your inbox.
In this issue:
👀 Define it: scanning, futures and signals
🌎 How signals affect the world of digital marketing
🧠 Other ways to pick Arcade’s brain
Meet your new secret weapon
The digital marketing world moves lightning fast. One day a strategy is running smoothly, the next everyone is scrambling to pivot. It’s not easy, but it’s part of what makes the people who do this work so special.
Our team has always worked hard to stay ahead of marketing trends, but we knew there was more we could do to gain a competitive advantage. Enter: SCAN 👀 CLUB.
SCAN 👀 CLUB has been our secret weapon for over a year now and we’re excited to finally be sharing it. This approach has helped us future-proof our strategies and feel less reactive. It doesn’t allow us to predict everything (wouldn’t that be nice), but it’s helped us level up our work and collaborate more than ever before.
Whether you’re here to learn about scanning, or to get a glimpse into what’s happening at Arcade, this newsletter will have something for you.
Welcome to the club.
What is SCAN 👀 CLUB?
SCAN 👀 CLUB offers another way to look at the world around you. In each edition, we’ll pull “signals” and share how they point to futures.
Um, what?
Let’s back up a step.
A signal is the first sign of something new. A signal can be an unexpected product, a new way of doing things, a technological advancement, a noteworthy event, a significant data point or even an emerging organization.
What matters is that it is:
⏰ Current,
😱 Surprising, or
🗂️ Specific.
Signals have the potential to gain widespread acceptance and popularity. What may seem outlandish or unconventional in the present could become a common part of our lives within a few years. Think: the rise of AI.
We scan (ex: look through a news site) to find signals.
Then we think about what future these signals could create. Aka, how these signals could affect the world of digital marketing.
How do we find signals?
As the world 🌎 of digital marketing evolves, there are more and more places we can turn to understand what might happen next. We can find signals everywhere: in a news article, research study, event invitation, tweet, blog post, TikTok and more.
When we notice a signal we want to ask:
🔍 What's changing?
🤔 Why does it matter?
👉 What could happen next?
The key to spotting signals is to pause and ask questions of the information we are consuming. As our library of signals grows, we start to notice patterns that build our understanding (and confidence!) about what might happen next.
So how does this all work?
Every month, you’ll get your copy of SCAN 👀CLUB right to your inbox. It’s our breakdown of the top signals we’re watching and why they matter. This is the system we’ve used internally to take our work to the next level (and stop feeling so reactive to changes in the industry).
But hey, we aren’t one-dimensional beings 🖖. Expect to also see updates from Arcade and other surprises along the way.
See you soon 👋
NEW: Big Things Podcast
Welcome to Big Things! A weekly show where we talk about the big things happening in marketing, social media, pop culture and sports. You can catch the show every Friday on podcast players and YouTube, and be sure to follow us on Instagram for updates on every episode!
Follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.
Do you have any questions? Let us know!