I’ve been buying NatureSweet brand tomatoes for years.

They are a great, healthy snack and a quick lunch option when I don’t have time to prepare one or go out for a bite to eat.

They are easy to eat while you’re doing something else (working, reading, etc.) and, of course, they taste great. Who doesn’t like tomatoes?

So I’ve been aware of the company’s clever packaging for some time.

You pull the tab at the top to reveal a hole in the plastic container, pour in some water to rinse the tomatoes, and the water drains from holes in the base of the packaging.

Presto! You’re ready to pop one delicious grape tomato in your mouth after another.

Enter Rocío Cortés

If you flip the tab at the top over, you’ll find a photo of a NatureSweet employee accompanied by a QR code complete with a “Meet Me” call to action.

Until today, that is as far as I got in the NatureSweet product experience (aside from eating the tomatoes, of course).

I always thought this was a clever marketing tactic but it has taken until today for me to actually scan the QR code to find what was on the other side.

You get taken to a landing page that tells the story of Rocío Cortés.

As you can see, we are introduced to Rocío and learn that she is a packer, efficient, optimistic, and hard-working. We also learn that she is studying to earn her high school degree through NatureSweet’s educational programs.

This is a very clever tactic to humanize the company by spotlighting an employee while also shining a light on NatureSweet’s ESG (environgmental, social, and governance) efforts.

This can have the effect of generating more good will and brand loyalty for NatureSweet. While good will and loyalty are outcomes of positive reputation, they are difficult to measure.

Reputational Signals

Scrolling past Rocío’s mini story, we find comments of encouragement and support left by visitors.

Those comments and nature of the language expressed in them are, in and of themselves, a reputational signal that can be interpreted by algorithms as to the nature of NatureSweet’s reputation.

The positive nature of the comments and the volume of those comments are reputation signals. Below the first screen of comments is a “Show More” button.

I kept clicking until I got November, 2022. Given that I’ve known about this QR campaign for several years, I can only imagine how many comments have been left to this point. My eyeball spot check would indicate that on average, there are a couple of comments submitted daily.

The freshness of the comments is another reputational signal that can be mined by algorithms.

As a digital marketer, the metrics I would be paying attention to would be:

• Page visit from the QR code

• Time on page

• Clicks on the Show More button

• Comment submissions from the form at the bottom of the page

Obviously, sales are a powerful reputational signal. I would be fascinated to know what kind of sales lift have been generated as a result of this QR code campaign.

Regardless, this is a great example of a marketing tactic that prompts positive reputational signals.

What I’ve Been Reading

• Reuters - Advertising spend on Twitter Inc dropped by 71% in December, data from an advertising research firm showed, as top advertisers slashed their spending on the social-media platform after Elon Musk's takeover. A signal of advertisers’ attitude toward Twitter’s reputation as a platform.

• Wired - In the past decade, Apple has positioned itself as a privacy-first company. It has butted heads with law enforcement for encrypting people’s phones, messages, and FaceTime calls, and battled Facebook over its creepy ad-tracking practices. But Apple’s business model is also shifting. It is shifting to advertising. I’ve been skeptical about the company’s claims of being the defenders of your privacy all along. The implemetation of opt-in tracking for app store apps was a direct attack on Facebook and Google’s advertising business. From that moment, it was clear Apple was going to enter the ad business.

• Richard Hanania's Newsletter
  - I’m going to argue that everyone is wrong, and the media is actually good and honest. You should be glad it exists, admire those who work in the industry, and hope for its continued influence and success. Scott Alexander recently said that the media very rarely tells explicit lies, a view he got a lot of pushback for. My position is more extreme than his. It’s that while the American media has serious flaws, it is one of the most honest, decent, and fair institutions designed for producing and spreading truth in human history. Like any institution, the press has to be judged according to realistic benchmarks, not simply criticized because it is imperfect or makes mistakes. And if you judge the mainstream media by historical standards, or compare it to anything that competes with it for influence – the right-wing press, popular influencers, social media, foreign sources of news, etc. – the institutions of American journalism come out looking extremely well. While I don't agree with everything in this piece, it is a really solid take on how to judge mainstream media reporting from the perspective of a conservative libertarian.

• Post.news - These trust metrics are the infrastructure for our future Community Moderators. Similar to Wikipedia or Waze, we plan on engaging the Post community to moderate content based on a set of rules. These metrics will help us identify who to trust and on which subjects. Imagine a world where users who, over months or years, have proven themselves to be positive, rule-abiding Post citizens, having greater weight in the algorithmic decisions than a new account that has never posted nor added an image to profile. We want to amplify the good actors and diminish the reach of bad actors, at scale. A nice breakdown of the repuational signals this new social media channel will be using to keep it from devolving into a Twitter cesspool. (Follow me on Post.news)

• NPR - M&M's spokescandies — the cartoon versions of the candies that appear in advertisements — will be paused indefinitely. The move comes after Fox News' Tucker Carlson spent months attacking minor brand changes to some of the characters as "woke." Maya Rudolph, a comedian and actor, will step in in their place. Looking forward to M&M’s Super Bowl commercials!

• Wired - Two years ago, Mary Louis submitted an application to rent an apartment at Granada Highlands in Malden, Massachusetts. She liked that the unit had two full bathrooms and that there was a pool on the premises. But the landlord denied her the apartment, allegedly due to a score assigned to her by a tenant-screening algorithm made by SafeRent.

• Spotify - …each Listening Personality is actually a combination of four binary attributes that each try to measure and describe one aspect of how you listen to music, independent of what music you like. I’ve long been fascinated with the reputational data Spotify has at its disposal, a topic I’ll eventually address in-depth.

Highly Recommend

I caught the movie Don’t Worry Darling on HBO recently and really, really liked it. Clever story, great acting, and subtle cinematography. Watch it.