Two Trillion Tweet

Welcome to the Loop. The financial market has been in an ongoing frenzy after President Trump’s sweeping tariff announcements, and while marketing efforts remain relatively unchanged (for now), a simple tweet heard around the world sent the market into further speculative chaos.

This Week in Digital Marketing

• One Tweet That Moved the US Market by 2 Trillion USD

• OpenAI Countersues Elon, Shopify Prioritizes AI Over Headcount, Midjourney Strikes Back

• The Llama 4 Herd is Released

• and more…

POINT OF CONTACT

Newest Insights on Customer Engagement

📈Two Trillion Tweet: The Journal’s latest analysis of a April 2025 market event underscores a seismic shift in how information travels: a single tweet, devoid of factual backing, triggered a 20% swing in a mid-cap stock within hours. This isn’t isolated — social platforms like X and TikTok have become accelerants for sentiment-driven volatility, where viral narratives (think: speculative AI partnerships or meme-fueled “investment tips”) routinely outpace verified data. People now pivot on emotional triggers (FOMO, outrage, or euphoria) more than substantiated findings.

⚓️Sentimental Anchors: Whether it’s nostalgia, fear of missing out, or tribal loyalty, psychosocial influences cannot be overstated. These emotional levers drive virality, turning unvetted posts into market-moving forces overnight. Brands like GameStop and AMC rode similar waves during the 2021 retail trading frenzy, but today’s landscape is riskier, amplified by AI-generated content and algorithmic echo chambers. Even vague claims, when framed as “community-driven opportunities,” can spark rallies or sell-offs before traditional analysts weigh in. For marketers, this signals both opportunity and peril: campaigns that tap into collective sentiment can gain traction rapidly, but missteps or unverified claims risk backlash or regulatory scrutiny.

🤔New Realities: The redacted tweet has now been proven reasonable, if not prescient, but the issue remains concerning. Social listening tools may help track emerging trends, but only when paired with robust research. Cross-reference viral claims with sales data, sentiment analysis platforms, and third-party audits to separate hype from reality. In 2025, relevance hinges not just on riding trends, but on discerning which ones have substance. Ignore the noise, but never underestimate its force.

THIS WEEK IN THE LOOP

Headlines on Digital Marketing, AI, and More

🤖 OpenAI Countersues: In a scathing lawsuit filed this week, OpenAI argued Musk has a personal vendetta against the company and has “tried every tool available to harm OpenAI.” The billionaire helped found the AI organization in 2015, but left three years later and has since launched a direct competitor, xAI. Last year, he sued the company and its co-founder and CEO, Sam Altman, claiming that it abandoned its founding agreement not to seek profits. He also attempted what OpenAI called a “sham bid” to buy its assets. “Musk could not tolerate seeing such success for an enterprise he had abandoned and declared doomed,” OpenAI’s countersuit said.

🛍️ AI Before Hiring: The bots may soon be coming for your job if that job is enabling online impulse buys, as the CEO of Shopify recently sent out an internal memo that said: “Before asking for more headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI.” CEO Tobi Lütke said that using the tech should be a “fundamental expectation” to boost productivity in daily work. Shopify has already slimmed down its workforce. The company had 8,100 employees at the end of last year, which is 200 people less than the year before—and that’s after it laid off 14% of its workforce in 2022 and 20% in 2023.

🖼️ Midjourney is Back: Almost a year since its last major upgrade, Midjourney is back with V7 Alpha, which was built on an entirely new architecture and, for the first time, lets you generate images just by talking to it. Plus, a new Draft Mode generates images at 10x the speed so you can brainstorm before landing on a final design. This is announcement has been a timely, albeit muted response to last week's mass "ghiblification" of the OpenAI's GPT-4o image generation capabilities. To try Midjourney out, you’ll first need to create a personalization profile here.

TO INFINITY & BEYOND

How Businesses are Scaling Today

🦙Llama 4 Herd: Meta didn’t even bother waiting until Monday. Over the weekend, it unveiled a new family of models, which you can try out in your browser — or on WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. And if you’re developer, you can start building with it here.

Here’s a rundown of each one:

• Scout: Built for efficiency, this one’s capable of running on a single Nvidia chip. It beats open-source rivals like Google’s Gemma 3, making it “the best multimodal model in its class.” And it has an industry-leading 10M-token context window, meaning it can theoretically handle longer documents and conversations.

• Maverick: This one’s ideal for apps that involve both text and images, like a customer support bot that can analyze photo uploads. Plus, it works across 12 languages.

• Behemoth: The most powerful of the bunch, this is the model the others were distilled from. Considered “among the world’s smartest LLMs,” it outperforms GPT-4.5 and Claude 3.7 across STEM-focused benchmarks. But it’s the only one that hasn’t been released to the public yet.

🏃Catching Up: The Information reported last week that the new collection was supposed to come out sooner but failed to meet internal benchmarks — a story we’ve heard repeatedly across the industry. To keep up with the competition, Meta allegedly took cues from China’s DeepSeek, which boosted R1’s efficiency by training different parts of its model to be good at specific tasks.

SPOTLIGHT

CREATE CUSTOM AI VIDEOS WITH AVATARS

🎬The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to use Synthesia's AI video platform to create personalized videos using AI avatars and add them to your emails to increase response rates.

Step-by-step:

1. Create a free Synthesia account, select a template, and add your script and on-screen text to create a basic video.

2. Add personalization variables using double curly brackets in both your script and on-screen text, then convert to a template.

3. Use your template to create individual videos by filling in the variable fields for each recipient.

4. Copy video thumbnails as GIFs directly into your emails and add call-to-action buttons to drive conversions.

💡Pro tip: You can also check out our extensive workshop showing how to create hyper-personalized video messages that drive engagement with Synthesia here. The Rundown University’s paid members will also get a 30% discount on the Creator Plan.

WARP SPEED

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CROSSROADS

Everything Else that’s Happening

STATS

Because We Marketers are Obsessed with Numbers

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